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

Neal Stephenson is a sci-fi writer (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and new book Termination Shock), former Chief Futurist at Magic Leap and first employee of Blue Origin. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Mizzen+Main: https://mizzenandmain.com and use code LEX to get $35 off – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex and use code Lex25 to get 25% off – Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil – Grammarly: https://grammarly.com/lex to get 20% off premium – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free EPISODE LINKS: Neal’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/nealstephenson Neal’s Website: https://www.nealstephenson.com/ Termination Shock (book): https://amzn.to/3HhmDKi Snow Crash (book): https://amzn.to/3H7yFFW Cryptonomicon (book): https://amzn.to/3C01HDF The Diamond Age (book): https://amzn.to/3wxUF83 Seveneves (book): https://amzn.to/3kkhveg The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1 (book): https://amzn.to/3koMW7n Innovation Starvation (article): https://bit.ly/3mYLSJ2 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (08:34) – WWII and human nature (17:20) – Search engine morality (21:58) – Space exploration (38:59) – Aliens and UFOs (47:21) – SpaceX and Blue Origin (54:43) – Social media (59:11) – Climate change (1:11:00) – Consequences of big ideas (1:15:42) – Virtual reality (1:38:50) – Artificial intelligence (1:53:49) – Cryptocurrency (2:06:26) – Writing, storytelling, and books (2:29:05) – Martial arts (2:38:23) – Final thoughts

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Neil Stephenson, a legendary science fiction writer exploring ideas in mathematics, science, cryptography, money, linguistics, philosophy, and virtual reality. From his early book, Snow Crash, to his new one called Termination Shock. He doesn't just write novels. He worked at the space company Blue Origin for many years, including technically being Blue Origin's first employee. He also was the chief futurist at the virtual reality company Magic Leap. And now, a quick few-second summary of the sponsors. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. First is Mizzena Main, maker of my favorite performance dress shirts.

• 0:45Lex Fridman?

  Second is InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data. Third is Athletic Greens, the all-in-one nutritional drink I drink twice a day. Fourth is Grammarly, a service I use to check spelling, grammar, and readability. And fifth is ExpressVPN, the VPN I've been using for many years. So the choice is fashion, biological data, nutrition, grammar, or privacy. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by a new sponsor,

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  Mizzena Main, the maker of comfortable, stylish dress shirts and other menswear, like pants. I wear their black dress shirts and I love it. It combines comfort and flexibility of athletic wear with the fit and style of a custom dress shirt. It's lightweight, breathable, and moisture-wicking. That is a term I often see on the internet, and I don't think I've ever said that word out loud. But there you have it. It's moisture-wicking. They have a bunch of different styles on their website. As you can imagine, the one I went for and the one I enjoy and the shirts, several shirts that I have of theirs, is just the plain black dress shirt. It's also the one I recommend. It looks badass.

• 2:12Lex Fridman?

  I've worn a lot of black dress shirts, like without a tie, just a little bit more casual. And I could say, hands down, this is the best one that I've ever worn. Right now, if you go to Mizzen and Maine dot com and use promo code Lex, you'll receive $35 off any regular price order of $125 or more. Go to Mizzen and Maine, that's two Z's, M I Z Z E N and Maine dot com, and use our promo code Lex. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data from my body and then from that, make decisions about my health.

• 2:57Lex Fridman?

  They have a bunch of plans, most of which include a blood test that gives you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on. They have algorithms that analyze your blood data, DNA data, and fitness tracker data to provide you with a clear picture of what's going on inside you and to offer you science-backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes. Andrew Huberman talks about these guys quite a bit. Speaking of who, Dr. Huberman will be in town for a few days, probably a couple of weeks in Austin this next week. So we're going to hang out quite a bit, maybe do a podcast. I'm not sure. Just talk as friends, talk about science, talk about life, philosophy, and everything else.

• 3:40Lex Fridman?

  He's truly one of the human beings that inspires me, both because of his brilliance in the space of science and just how authentic he is as a human being. Kind, real. Andrew's the man. Anyway, for a limited time, you can get 25% off the entire InsideTracker store if you go to inside tracker dot com slash Lex. That's inside tracker dot com slash Lex.

• 4:11Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its newly renamed AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It replaces the multivitamin for me. It went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. I drink it twice a day. I drink it early on before any meal and then later on in the day. When I go for a long run outside and it's hot, I enjoy coming back. And before hopping in the shower, I'll put, actually, I'm making Athletic Greens drink, and I'll put it in the freezer. So over a period of like 10, 20 minutes, it gets like nice and cold and refreshing. And just, it's a way to celebrate the run. I love that it gives me this nutritional base, so I don't have to think about stuff

• 4:56Lex Fridman?

  as I do all the fun diets that I do in terms of low carb, in terms of just meat with carnivore. Overall, I love the way it tastes and the way it makes me feel. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up to athleticgreens.com/lex. That's athleticgreens.com/lex.

• 5:17Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Grammarly, a writing assistant tool that checks spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. Grammarly Premium, the version you pay for and the version they hope you sign up for, offers a bunch of extra features. My favorite is the clarity check, which helps detect rambling, overcomplicated chaos that many of us, especially me, can descend to even in this very ad read. In writing, in speech, in life, I enjoy the beauty of simplicity. Neil Stephenson, for this episode actually, elsewhere, talked about how he doesn't like to edit a lot.

• 6:01Lex Fridman?

  He likes to write it well first. I think there's something really powerful to that. I think most writers just kind of get the stuff on the page and do a lot of work in the edit. It really makes me think to consider, maybe you really need to bring your best game on the first draft and do very little editing after. I don't know, but tools like Grammarly surely can help make your first draft and your last draft the best they can possibly be. Grammarly is available on basically any platform and major sites and apps like Gmail and Twitter and so on. Do more than just spell check. Get your point across more effectively with Grammarly Premium. Get 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at grammarly.com/lex.

• 6:47Lex Fridman?

  That's 20% off at grammarly.com/lex.

• 6:51Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. I know you think that when you use incognito mode on Chrome, that the world cannot possibly track all the kinds of weird stuff you do on the internet. But ISPs, in fact, can track that information. They can have access to that data and make decisions based on the things you do on the internet. So a VPN helps protect ISPs from getting that data. That's probably the most important thing to mention. Secondly, if you like watching stuff on the internet, you can change your location with a VPN so that the website thinks you're in Japan,

• 7:33Lex Fridman?

  in Britain, in Germany, in wherever else in the world, which opens up geo-locked shows that are only available to certain locations. Finally, I should mention, I love great design. I love great implementation. ExpressVPN is super fast, works on any device and operating system, including my favorite operating system, Linux. Linux is a beautiful creation of humankind. Anyway, go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to get an extra three months free. That's expressvpn.com/lexpod. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Neil Stephenson.

• 8:35Lex Fridman?

  You write both historical fiction, like World War II in Cryptonomicon, and science fiction, looking both into the past and the future. So let me ask, does history repeat itself? In which way does it repeat itself? In which way does it not?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  I'm afraid it repeats itself a lot. So I think human nature kind of is what it is. And so... We tend to see similar behavior patterns emerging again and again. And so it's it's kind of the exception rather than the rule when something new happens.

• 9:11Lex Fridman?

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

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Well, the standards of living, life expectancy, all that have gotten incredibly better within the last, particularly the last hundred years. I mean, just antibiotics, modern vaccines, electrification, the internet. These are all improvements in most people's standard of living and health and longevity that that exceed anything that was seen before in in human history. So so people are living longer, they're generally healthier and so on. But again, we still see a lot of the same behavior patterns, some of which are not very attractive.

• 10:02Lex Fridman?

  So some of it has to do with the constraints on resources. Presumably with technology, you have less and less constraints on resources. So we get to maybe emphasize the better angels of our nature. And in so doing, does that not potentially fundamentally alter the sort of the experience that we have of life on Earth?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  You know, until the last 10 or so years, I would have taken that view, I think. But, you know, people will find ways to be to be divisive and angry if it scratches a kind of psychological itch that they have got. And we used to look at the Weimar Republic, what happened in the economic collapse of Germany prior to.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  The the rise of Hitler, um, World War Two, uh, and kind of, uh, explain Hitler, at least partially by, um, just the the misery that people were living in at that time.

• 11:08Lex Fridman?

  The economic collapse.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, hyperinflation and unemployment and, um, the the decline in standard of of living. And that sounds like a plausible explanation, but there are economic troubles now for sure. We had the bank collapse in 2008. Um, and there's stagnation in some people's standards of living, but it's hard to explain what we've seen in this country in the last few years, just strictly on the basis of, uh, people are poor and angry and sad. I think they want to be angry.

• 11:43Lex Fridman?

  So without being political in a divisive kind of way, can we talk about the lessons you can draw from World War Two?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 11:53Lex Fridman?

  This singular event in human history, it seems like.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:57Lex Fridman?

  And yet, as you say, history rhymes at the very least.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Being who I am, I tend to focus on the curious technological things that happened in in conjunction with that war. Which may not be where you want to go, but, uh,

• 12:14Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's several things inside to interrupt. So one in crypto nomicon is more like the Alan Turing side of things.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 12:21Lex Fridman?

  And then, and then there's the outside of techno, well, first of all, there's the tools of war.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:28Lex Fridman?

  It's a kind of technology, but then there's just like the human nature, the nature of good and evil.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so one of the things that emerges from uh, from the war and from the, um, the extermination camps is that we were never allowed to have illusions anymore about human nature. So you you have to to learn that lesson to be an educated person and you have to know that that even in a supposedly, you know, enlightened civilized society, people can become monsters quite easily. So that is for sure the big takeaway.

• 13:05Lex Fridman?

  So do you agree with Solzhenitsyn about, uh, what is it, uh? The line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:16Lex Fridman?

  That all of us are capable.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Great line, yeah.

• 13:19Lex Fridman?

  Of evil.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  I read a good chunk of the Gulag Archipelago when I was a teenager. Because my grandfather had it in his house. Because he was one of these Americans who was obsessed with the Soviet Union and the Soviet threat. And wanted people to be aware of some of what had happened. And so, so he had those books lying around and, and, you know, I would, I would read them. And it's a similar kind of parallel story to the, to what happened in, in, in Germany during the war. You know, this creation of this system of camps and, and oppression and, and lots of troubling behavior.

• 14:05Lex Fridman?

  To me, it's a story of how fear and desperation combined with a charismatic leader can lead to, to evil. But it's also a story of bravery, of, of love, of brotherhood and sisterhood and basically survival. You have like Man's Search for Meaning, which is the stories of, the story of a man in a concentration camp. Basically finding beauty in life even under most extreme conditions. So to me, World War II is not necessarily a bleak view of human nature.

• 14:45Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's a little moment of evil that revealed a much bigger good in humanity. So I'm not, I'm not so sure that it leads me to pessimistic view of the world. The fact that somebody like Hitler could happen. The fact that a lot of people could follow Hitler and get excited and maybe even love the hate of the other.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:10Lex Fridman?

  For some moment of time. I think that's, all of us are capable of that. But I think all of us also have a capacity for good. And I think, I don't know what you, what you think, but I think we have a greater desire for good. Then evil and that it seems like that's where technology is very useful as a guide.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Hmm, okay.

• 15:35Lex Fridman?

  As a helping hand.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Okay, can you give me an example, maybe?

• 15:40Lex Fridman?

  So I give you examples of futuristic technologies and I can give you examples of current technologies. Current technologies, uh, knowledge, uh, in the form of very basic knowledge, which is like Wikipedia.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 15:55Lex Fridman?

  And search, the original dream of Google.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:59Lex Fridman?

  That I think is very much a success, which is making the world's information accessible at your fingertips. That kind of technology enables the natural, i- if, if this axiom, this assumption that people want to do good is, is true.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:18Lex Fridman?

  Then letting them discover all of the information out there, false information and true information, all of it. And let them explore, that's going to lead to a, to a better world, to, to better people. Uh, futuristic technologies is, uh, I personally, I might shoot you offline, sort of love artificial intelligence.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 16:39Lex Fridman?

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

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:45Lex Fridman?

  That you can, in the way that this Google searches, but smarter, where you can help send it out and say, this is the direction in which I want to grow, not, uh, authoritarian lecturing down from the algorithm of telling you, this is what, this is how you should grow, but almost, uh, the, the opposite, where you use it as, um, an assistant, a, a servant in your journey towards knowledge.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:14Lex Fridman?

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

• 17:18Speaker 01

  I mean, th- this is the theme of a book I wrote called The Diamond Age, which, you know, talks about a book that essentially does that. And, um, I've been sort of watching people try to come at the, the problem of building that thing, uh, from different directions for, ever since the book came out, basically, um, and so.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Uh, the, uh, and so I, I kinda have a, although I haven't worked on it myself, I do get a sense of the, the level of difficulty in, in realizing that, that, that goal.

• 17:53Lex Fridman?

  So that book is in the nineties. So as Google is coming to be, essentially, uh, not Google, but the search engine, the initial search engines and that, which gave birth to Google essentially in, in contrast.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. That was still in the era of AltaVista and Ask Jeeves and multiple different, uh, search engines. And yeah, I'm pretty sure I had not heard of Google at that point. That would have been 95, 96. And I think the book came out in 94.

• 18:24Lex Fridman?

  And then of course, the social networks followed, which is another form of, um, guidance through the space of information.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, what happens is that these things come along and then people find ways to game them. Um, and so I saw an interesting thread the other day pointing out that, um, you know, uh, 20 years ago, if you had Googled, um, Pythagorean theorem, uh, chances are you would have been taken directly to a page explaining the Pythagorean theorem. If you do it now, you're probably gonna, the top hits are gonna be from somebody who's, who's got an angle, who's got a scheme, right? They're like trying to sell you math tutoring or, you know, they're, um, uh, they're working some kind of marketing plan on you. Um, so

• 19:17Speaker 01

  the, the traditional engines, um, become actually less useful over time for their original educational purpose. That doesn't mean that they can't, it shouldn't be replaced by newer and better ones.

• 19:32Lex Fridman?

  First of all, to defend the people with the angle, right? They're trying to find business models.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:39Lex Fridman?

  Fund oftentimes, which is funny, you went with Pythagorean, like you went at math, those greedy bastards.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 19:48Lex Fridman?

  But it's, it's great.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  How can we monetize the Pythagorean theorem?

• 19:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, education, right?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:56Lex Fridman?

  Is to figure out like, people who love math education, for example, love it purely, not purely, but very often love it. For itself, for just teaching math.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:09Lex Fridman?

  But then they start, you know, when coming face to face with, for example, like the YouTube algorithm, they start to try to figure out, okay, how can I make money off of this? The, the primary goal is still that love of education, but they also want to, to make that love of education their full-time job. But I, I see that sort of that dance of humanity with the algorithms as a, it finds this kind of local pocket of optimality, that's, or sub-optimality, whatever.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:41Lex Fridman?

  It's gets stuck in it.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Pocket anyway.

• 20:43Lex Fridman?

  It's a pocket of some sort and, but I see that pocket as way better than what we had before in the eighties, right? Or nineties before the internet. But like, and now we're now, this is, this is also human nature. We start writing very eloquent articles about how this pocket is clearly a pocket, it's not very good, and we can imagine which better lands far beyond. And, but the reality is, is better than before.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:08Lex Fridman?

  And now we're waiting for.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  We have to escape from the local.

• 21:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Minimum.

• 21:12Lex Fridman?

  And you have to wait either for lone geniuses or for some kind of momentum of a group of geniuses that just say enough is enough. I have an idea.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:21Lex Fridman?

  This, this is how we get out. And it's too easy to be sort of, I think, partially because you can get a lot of clicks in your articles, being cynical about being in this pocket and we are forever stuck in this pocket. And then like coming up with this grandiose theory that humanity has finally like is collapsing, stuck forever like a prison in this pocket. But reality, they're just, it's like, it's just clickbait articles and, and books until we, one curious ant comes up with the next pocket.

• 21:53Speaker 01

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

• 21:58Lex Fridman?

  And eventually we'll be, as you've talked about, I mean, we'll be, we'll colonize the solar system and then, uh, we'll, we'll be stuck in the solar system. And then people will say, well, we're screwed when, cause when the sun energy runs out, there's no way to get to the, the next solar system and then, and so on. It goes on until we colonize the entirety of the observable universe.

• 22:20Speaker 01

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

• 22:25Lex Fridman?

  So can you, you mentioned this, can you elaborate why you think? Back to sort of a serious question, why do you think it's hard to get outside of our solar system?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  It's just an energy calcula-- I mean, you can do it slowly, whenever you want. But the idea of getting there in, you know, one lifetime or multiple, a few lifetimes is, requires huge amounts of energy to accelerate. And then, as soon as you get halfway there, you need to expend an equal amount of energy to decelerate, or you'll just go shooting by. And so, that means carrying a lot of energy. And there's, there's ideas like Yuri Milner, I think is still funding the idea to use

• 23:16Speaker 01

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

• 23:27Lex Fridman?

  They never talk about that part.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:28Lex Fridman?

  Like, how do we slow down?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So.

• 23:31Lex Fridman?

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

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you better take some good pictures on your way by. So, and that's great if it happens, I'm not knocking it. But, the amount of energy is, that's needed is just staggering. And there's, there's other issues like, just how do you maintain an ecosystem for that long in isolation? How do you prevent people from going crazy? What happens if you hit something while traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light?

• 24:02Lex Fridman?

  What about it, sort of, some combination of expanding human lifespan, but also just good old fashioned, stable society on a spaceship?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, the generation ship, yeah, yeah.

• 24:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  No, I think that's the only way. It would, it would have to keep going for a long time. And they might get to where they're going and find a shitty solar system. Like, we can try to--

• 24:32Speaker 01

  We could try to do some advanced survey, but I mean, if you get there and all the planets in that solar system are just garbage planets, then it's kind of a big letdown for this like thousand year voyage that you've just been on, right? So, I mean, we have a pretty narrow range of parameters that we need to stay between in order to survive in terms of the gravitational field that we can deal with. So that sets a bound on the size of the planet and what we need in the way of temperature and atmosphere and so on.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  So when you look at all those complications, then basically building sort of exactly the environment we want out of available materials in this solar system starts to look a hell of a lot better. It's hard to make an economic argument, let's say, for making that journey. One of the things I like about the expanse is the fact that the people who are trying to build the starship to go to the other solar system are doing it for religious reasons. I think that's the only reason that you would do it.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Because economically, it just makes more sense to build rotating cylindrical space habitats and make them perfect.

• 26:01Lex Fridman?

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

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:07Lex Fridman?

  Like, why do we go to the moon again?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:10Lex Fridman?

  And do the other things? What has JFK said is because, not because they're easy, but because they're hard? Isn't that kind of a religious reason?

• 26:17Speaker 01

  I knew a veteran of the Apollo program who once said that the Apollo moon landings were communism's greatest achievement.

• 26:28Lex Fridman?

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

• 26:33Speaker 01

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

• 26:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's a struggle for meaning.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:37Lex Fridman?

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

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:43Lex Fridman?

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

• 26:47Speaker 01

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

• 26:53Lex Fridman?

  Well, they people that find meaning in mathematics.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:56Lex Fridman?

  They usually find meaning between the lines, nevertheless, not in the actual uh for like the proving proving some kind of thing.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Fair enough, yeah.

• 27:07Lex Fridman?

  So from a cost perspective, do you actually see a possible future where we're be building these kind of generation ships and just why not launch them one a year?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 27:20Lex Fridman?

  Out like a like wandering ants out into the into the galaxy.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I have nothing against it. It's just, like I said, it's got a the motivation to do it has to come from some kind of spiritual or or kind of non tangible calculus.

• 27:42Lex Fridman?

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

• 27:46Speaker 01

  No, no way.

• 27:47Lex Fridman?

  One of the many fascinating things you've done in your life, you were at the very beginning, you were the person that convinced Jeff Bezos to start a spaceship company, a space company. You were there at Blue Origin for a few years in the beginning, working on alternate propulsion systems and at least according to Wikipedia, alternate business models.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, to go back to the first thing you said, Jeff Bezos is not a guy who required a lot of convincing. He'd been thinking about it since he was five years old and it was an inevitability. But the the idea that that kind of got hatched in 1999 was to just do some advanced scouting work, you know, explore the corners of the the space of possibilities.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And so that's what, uh, that was Blue Operations LLC, which was the precursor to, to Blue Origin. And, um, so it was a small staff of people that, that did that for a few years. And I think it was about 2003, 2004 that, uh, it swung decisively towards the direction it's, it's been following ever since, which is, you know, using basically existing aerospace technologies and models to make chemical fueled rockets, um, for space tourism. Uh, I believe and I continue to believe that the, the fact that we use

• 29:26Speaker 01

  chemical rockets is just an accident of history. It comes out of World War II. So until World War II, rockets are, uh, being built on a small scale by people like Robert Goddard. But then Hitler desperately wants to bomb London, um, but he can't quite reach it. And the Luftwaffe has been kind of neutralized. So he, he decides he's going to lob warheads into it with, with rockets, um, which is a terrible misallocation of resources. It's a terrible idea. But, uh, so it only could have happened in a dictatorship controlled

• 30:05Speaker 01

  by a lunatic. Um, but that's, that's the situation that existed. So they built these rockets. They, you know, that's the V2. Um, and then it's just a, a complete coincidence that that war ends with, um, atomic bombs being developed in a completely separate super weapon program. And so suddenly the, the existence of the bombs creates a demand for rockets that didn't exist before. Cause if you've got atomic bombs, you need a way to deliver them. You can do it with bombers, but, uh, it's a lot better to just hurl them

• 30:47Speaker 01

  to the other side of the world on the top of a rocket. So, um, so suddenly rockets, which had gotten a boost because of Hitler's V2 program, got a much bigger boost during the 50s and 60s.

• 31:02Lex Fridman?

  And it is a complete, you're right. For some reason, never thought of this. It is an accident of history. The nuclear weapons are developed at a similar time. First of all, Nuclear weapons didn't have to be developed at the same time as World War II.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:17Lex Fridman?

  That's an accident in history.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:19Lex Fridman?

  And then the fact that, okay, so then Hitler started using rockets. That's an accident of, okay, that's fascinating. It's a fascinating set of coincidences.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and which is true of a lot of technologies, by the way. By the time these rockets are kind of working, we've got hydrogen bombs that are so big and so devastating that nobody really wants to use them. But it turns out you can fit a capsule with a couple of people in it into the socket on the end of a missile that was made to hold a hydrogen bomb. So we start doing that instead as a proxy for having a war. And

• 32:07Lex Fridman?

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

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:14Lex Fridman?

  It's probably a Russian. Why don't we strap a person to the rocket?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it probably was because they did it first, right? The Russians did it.

• 32:22Lex Fridman?

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

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Could be.

• 32:26Lex Fridman?

  They're a little bit more willing to sacrifice the life of an astronaut or to risk the life of an astronaut.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Could be, yeah, yeah. This is basically the story of how through all of this competition and because of these historical accidents, you know, trillions of R and D dollars and rubles were put into development of chemical rocket technology, which is, you know, now advanced to an incredibly high degree. But there's other ways to make things go really fast, which is all that rockets do. That's all orbit is. It's just going really fast. And because so many nerds are obsessed with space, people have been thinking about alternate schemes for as long as they've been thinking about rockets. And so one of the first things that you, that I learned,

• 33:19Speaker 01

  kind of trying to explore new possibilities,

• 33:24Speaker 01

  was that I could

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Put all of my brain power to work and and be creative as I could and and invent some idea that I thought was new for making things go fast. And I would always find out that some guy in Russia or somewhere had had thought the same idea up 50 years ago and figured out all the math.

• 33:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  You know, and so so at a certain point, you give up on trying to invent completely new ideas and just go poking around trying to find those guys. So there's a number of of ideas that we looked at, you know, some are crazier, some are less crazy. But the direction that that company eventually took was was chemical rockets.

• 34:15Lex Fridman?

  Is there something you can comment on possible ideas? Like, so first of all, like, I mean, like, you could use nuclear, so nuclear propulsion?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's, I mean, you've probably heard of Project Orion, which was the Freeman Dyson and some of his collaborators had a scheme to to power a large space vehicle by detonating atomic bombs behind it. And so one of the other people who was working at Blue Operations during this time was George Dyson, the son of Freeman. And so we knew all about Project Orion. And he found an old film that they'd shot on a beach in La Jolla of a prototype of this that was powered by like lumps of C4. So that was an idea.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  But for a private company, obtaining a large number of atomic bombs was probably out of scope. So it's more of a theoretical thing. There's a

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Conceptually similar approach using lasers that Freeman worked on with Arthur Kantrowitz and some others where you take a pulsed laser and you fire it at a vehicle that has a block of ice on the back and the pulse hits the ice and flashes off a layer of steam that becomes plasma and plasma is opaque because it conducts and so being opaque it then absorbs all of the energy from the laser pulse and gets really hot and just pushes on the back of the block of ice and then you wait a moment for that

• 36:03Speaker 01

  to dissipate and then you do it again. So it would just kind of vibrate its way like it sounds really violent but Freeman said that if you were wearing like rubber soled tennis shoes standing in this vehicle you would just feel a mild vibration. So there your source of energy is on the ground and you're getting higher specific impulse than you could get by burning chemicals. Jordan Kerr and others worked on another laser system, the late Dr. Jordan Kerr, that just would heat up a heat exchanger by converging,

• 36:43Speaker 01

  many converging solid state lasers from the ground. And Kevin Parkin works on a similar scheme that just uses microwaves to do that. We looked at tall towers. I spent a while looking kind of semi-seriously at giant bullwhips.

• 37:04Lex Fridman?

  What's a bullwhip?

• 37:06Speaker 01

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

• 37:11Lex Fridman?

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

• 37:15Speaker 01

  If you think about it, a whip is an incredibly simple, primitive object that can break the speed of sound. So it's unbelievable in a way that for thousands of years, people with no technology have been able to accelerate objects through the speed of sound, just through an architectural trick. Just, just, you know, just the physics of a moving bend of material in a medium can do this. So, um, so that's the thing I still think about from time to time. You can use the same physics to make freestanding loops of chain

• 37:58Speaker 01

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

• 38:08Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's kind of awesome to imagine. So imagine using the same kind of physics of a whip, but have at the end of it, a spaceship.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would detach at the moment of maximum velocity.

• 38:25Lex Fridman?

  Why, why not? Why wouldn't that?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  So part of my motivation in studying that was to ask that, that question. It was, it was more, uh, almost a symbolic way of saying, look, there's all kinds of physics we haven't explored yet. Um, that's, it's no more crazy than the idea of chemical rockets.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  It's just that, uh, more money's gone into chemical rockets, right?

• 38:59Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you, um, a question on propulsion that's a little bit more out there? So I don't know if you've, uh, seen quite a, a lot of recent articles and reports and so on about, uh, EFOs, like the Tic Tac aircraft.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  I keep seeing a lot of chatter about it, but I haven't gone deep into it.

• 39:24Lex Fridman?

  So the DOD released footage filmed by, um, pilots. And there's a lot of reports about objects that moved in ways they haven't seen before. They seem to, uh, defy the laws of physics.

• 39:41Lex Fridman?

  If we consider the aircraft that we have today. And so the reason I asked you that is because it kind of, um, to me, whatever the heck it is, it's inspiring for the possibilities of ideas for propulsion. If it's like, um, secret projects from foreign nations, or it's physical phenomena that we don't yet understand, like ball lightning, all those kinds of things. Or if it is aliens or objects from an alien civilization, I most likely believe if it's an object from an alien civilization, it's gotta be like a really dumb drone that just like got lost.

• 40:23Lex Fridman?

  It's definitely not like the pinnacle of intelligence. It's like some like teenagers, like, uh,

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Science fair experiment.

• 40:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it just flew for a few centuries out and just landed. And then we humans are all like really excited about this. Yeah, this wild thing. I mean, what do you, what do you think about those, um, first of all, like the millions of reports of UFOs, right? There's some psychology there that's deeply cultural. Uh, but also the possibility of aliens having visited Earth.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'd like to see some better pictures. For the reason I mentioned earlier, having to do with the difficulty of traveling between star systems. It's really hard for me to believe it's aliens. Uh, I just can't understand why you would, um, go to all that trouble to transport something across light years and then do what these UFOs are allegedly doing. Like, how is that interesting? How, how does that justify the trip?

• 41:28Lex Fridman?

  So if you travel across, you know, those kinds of distances, you'd make a bigger splash.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  First of all, I would expect that the arrival of these things would be something we'd notice. It's got to decelerate into our solar system unless it got here really, really, really slowly. So I guess that's a possibility and just kind of snuck in.

• 41:55Lex Fridman?

  So we would detect some kind of footprint in terms of energy?

• 41:59Speaker 01

  You would think. So I actually think your idea of a science fair project gone bad, you know, it makes more sense in that it would explain why if these things are alien technologies, they're just kind of hanging around our aircraft carriers for no particular reason, like not trying to communicate.

• 42:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Can you imagine a scenario where aliens have visited Earth or are visiting Earth and we wouldn't notice it at all?

• 42:33Speaker 01

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

• 42:40Lex Fridman?

  Oh, they're trying to conceal themselves. I meant more like they're not trying to conceal themselves, but we're just, our cognitive capabilities are like too limited and we are not thinking big enough. We're looking for little green men. We're looking for things that operate at a time scale that's human-like, you know.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I love thinking about ideas like that. That's great science fiction novel fodder, you know, that the aliens are so different that we simply don't see them.

• 43:13Lex Fridman?

  I mean, is there, you know, in terms of language, do you think it would be difficult, not aliens visiting us, but traveling to other places, to find a common language? You've written about the importance of language in intelligent civilizations. How difficult is the problem to bridge the gap between aliens and humans in terms of language so we're not lost in translation?

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's different takes on that depending on how biologically similar they are to us, you know. I mean, there's a school of thought that says basically...

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Advanced life has to be carbon based for just reasons of chemistry. So right away, if you impose that limitation, then you're you're kind of assuming a something that's starting to be biologically similar to us. So if they're about as big as we are and, you know, they they they kind of move around in in space, you know, in a physical body the way we do, then then there's probably a way to to solve that communication problem. If they're, you know, like beings of pure energy from Star Trek or something like that, then it's a different story.

• 44:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, I love thinking about that kind of stuff, too. I mean, this, you know, consciousness itself may be maybe, I mean, it could be, like you said, beings of pure energy. I think I think of life as just complex systems and the kind of forms those complex systems can take seems to be much larger than the particular biological systems we see here on Earth. I have to ask a Twitter question.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:02Lex Fridman?

  About aliens.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:03Lex Fridman?

  You're ready, this is for Twitter.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  I'm ready.

• 45:05Lex Fridman?

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

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Um.

• 45:13Lex Fridman?

  You could pass. I asked a language question. Can they communicate?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:20Lex Fridman?

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

• 45:25Speaker 01

  So which question am I answering? The sex or the the love?

• 45:29Lex Fridman?

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

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:35Lex Fridman?

  Across intelligent species.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, um, you know, sex can mean a lot of things. So, I mean, uh.

• 45:43Lex Fridman?

  Reproduction, right?

• 45:44Speaker 01

  You know, the the.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  In Star Trek, in classic Star Trek, you had to to really suspend your disbelief to to think that Spock was half Vulcan and half human, right? Because that's just not gonna not gonna work DNA wise. So if by sex you mean reproductive sex, then I would say no unless you unless you go to a panspermia kind of theory, which is that, you know, humans were seeded onto the planet as part of a galactic, you know, program of some of some sort.

• 46:31Lex Fridman?

  And then we're just returning home.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:33Lex Fridman?

  Hanging out with our older relatives.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Distant cousins. Yeah. Yeah. But that that doesn't seem, you know, it doesn't seem seem plausible. We know that we know that humans had sex with Neanderthals, with Denisovans, Denisovans. So you could think of them as aliens that that came from our planet. So that's a kind of data point, I guess. But, you know, if you broaden your definition of sex to mean any kind of gratifying physical interaction, then sure.

• 47:13Lex Fridman?

  Right. Dancing. And that's that's how we get to love.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:18Lex Fridman?

  And love can take many forms.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Love certainly take many forms.

• 47:21Lex Fridman?

  I have to ask you, in terms of space, just looking at where Blue Origin is, looking at where SpaceX is today, and maybe looking out 10, 20 years out from now, are you impressed of what's happening? We just saw William Shatner go up to space.

• 47:39Speaker 01

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

• 47:44Lex Fridman?

  Are you impressed at where things stand today?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I mean SpaceX, in particular, is has done things that are just unbelievable. And Yeah, I don't think anyone was anticipating 20 years ago, let's say, when this all started, just the, uh, the speed with which they'd be able to, um, rack up these incredible achievements. If you've kind of, uh, even seen a little bit of how the sausage is made and, and so the, the, the difficulty of, of doing any kind of space travel, um, what they've achieved is, uh, is just, uh, is, is unbelievable.

• 48:28Lex Fridman?

  What about the, maybe a question about Elon Musk, um, even more than Jeff Bezos. He has a very kind of ambitious vision of, um, this project that we're on as a species.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:43Lex Fridman?

  Of becoming a multiplanetary species and becoming that quickly.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:49Lex Fridman?

  As soon as possible, landing on Mars, colonizing Mars.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:52Lex Fridman?

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

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:00Lex Fridman?

  And second, what do you think about a human being who is so unapologetically ambitious at achieving the impossible, at what a lot of people would say is impossible?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  I think that colonizing Mars is the kind of, of goal that's, uh, it's easily stated. Uh, it's, um, it's catchy. It's, it's, it's the kind of thing that, that can inspire people to get involved in a way that some other programs might not. Um, so I think it's well chosen in that way. Um, I have technical questions about, um, you know, there's, there's a, a problem of perchlorates uh, on the surface of Mars that's, that's going to be big trouble. Um, and there's, there's radiation. So, and this is known, I'm, uh, but, um.

• 49:55Lex Fridman?

  What about business questions? Do you think, cause you mentioned sort of, uh, going outside of the solar system would, would best be done for religious reasons? What about colonizing Mars? Can you spin it into a business proposition?

• 50:11Speaker 01

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

• 50:23Speaker 01

  with stuff we could just dig out of the ground here or grow here. So I don't know if there is a business plan for that or if it's just strictly, we're going to go there and see what happens.

• 50:40Lex Fridman?

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

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Well, there's plenty of people who are sufficiently excited by the colonized Mars vision that they're willing to just go all in on it, even if there's not a business plan behind it.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  So, so I think it's well chosen. It's just, I think it's probably the only, the only approach to take. A lot of the, when, when white people came to this continent and, and started colonizing it, you know, there was not a lot of coherent planning. Like what, what plans they did have turned out to be terrible plans. You know, trying to come up with plans that extend decades into the future is,

• 51:38Speaker 01

  is a waste of time.

• 51:39Lex Fridman?

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

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:51Lex Fridman?

  And just kind of keep going.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you saw it with Shatner and his reaction to the, the flight yesterday. He

• 52:05Speaker 01

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

• 52:11Lex Fridman?

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

• 52:13Speaker 01

  He was trying to express the, talking a lot about the moment where suddenly you kind of rise above the, the thin blue blanket of, of the atmosphere and, and you're up into the, the blackness. And that had a huge impact on him. So he was kind of, I wouldn't say groping for words because he was pretty eloquent, but he was trying to express his feelings about that in, in a way that is, is pretty, pretty gripping to watch.

• 52:47Lex Fridman?

  So you, you've worked on this kind of stuff. We can go back to 10 years ago. You wrote an essay called Innovation Starvation. You worked on this kind of idea since then.

• 53:01Lex Fridman?

  Kind of looking at maybe a little bit cynically about our age today and our unwillingness to take on big, risky projects. So in the face of that, what do you think of people like Elon Musk? Because to me, people like that are inspiring and gives you hope in the face of a more kind of pessimistic perspective of our age.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, he's clearly willing to tackle big, ambitious projects without a lot of kind of soul searching or, or trying to make up his mind, right? It's like.

• 53:46Lex Fridman?

  Just go and do it.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Let's dig tunnels under cities. Go, you know, let's.

• 53:52Lex Fridman?

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

• 53:55Speaker 01

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

• 54:03Speaker 01

  To build things at pace is a lot less than it was. And there's reasons for that. You know, we're more concerned with safety and environmental impacts than than people were when they were building some of the great Publix Works projects of the mid 20th century. But even we're at the point now where even just maintaining the stuff that we've got is such a huge project that we need to put big resources into it and good minds into it, or else we're going to be we're going to be losing things that we take for granted.

• 54:43Lex Fridman?

  Do you think that there's a lot to be done in the digital space? That's we mentioned sort of Wikipedia and knowledge. Don't you think there could be a lot of flourishing in the space of innovation in terms of innovation in the digital space?

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'd like to see that. I think it's where a lot of the brain power went during the last couple of generations. Because people who who might previously have been building rockets or or other kinds of sort of hard technologies ended up instead going into programming, computer science, which is understandable and great. We've got structural problems right now in the way social media works that are pretty severe. And so I certainly hope that we're not 10 years from now that we're not exactly where we are today when it comes to to that stuff. We need to move on.

• 55:43Lex Fridman?

  The beautiful thing about problems is they show you how not to do things.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:49Lex Fridman?

  And they give you give opportunity to new ideas to flourish and to beat out the ideas of the old, which is a dream for me in to see new social media.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:05Lex Fridman?

  That beats out the ways of the old. So I tend to, you perhaps agree that it's not that it's impossible to do social media well.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Oh, not at all. I mean, I listened to your interview with Jaren a couple of weeks ago, and I know Jaren, and we've. You know, we've talked about this and

• 56:22Lex Fridman?

  He went, he went hard on me. He basically said like, it's impossible.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  It's a very nice way. Well, the last time I kind of paid attention to Jaren's thoughts on it, he was thinking in terms of that basically there should be, you know, micro payments, such that if I, by clicking the like button on something, I'm essentially giving

• 56:48Speaker 01

  valuable intellectual property to Facebook or Twitter or whatever. It's not a very large amount of IP, but it's definitely a transfer of information that, that when they aggregate it is beneficial to them. So, and now I, now I do remember that he, on, on his interview with you was talking about what data unions or, yeah.

• 57:14Lex Fridman?

  Those are a lot of interesting ideas, but for me, the biggest disagreement was in the level of cynicism. He has a distrust and cynicism towards people in Silicon Valley being able to do these kinds of things. And I'm really, okay, when you have a large crowd of people that are doing things the wrong way, you should nevertheless maintain optimism because what's important is to find the one person in that room that's going to do things the right way. Cynicism is going to completely silence out the whole room. So he was saying, I've, I've been here a long time.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:52Lex Fridman?

  I, I've known, you know, I, I understand like how these folks work. They think they're gods and they know the right way to do things and they will tell you how to do those things. And that kind of hubris is going to always lead you astray when you are the one who's engineering the algorithms. And there's a lot of deep truth to that because algorithms are powerful and many people, when given power, do not do the best of things. I mean, most, what is it? The old Lincoln line? If you want to test the man's character, give him power.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:32Lex Fridman?

  Yes, but that doesn't mean that some people are not able to handle the power, that some people are not able to come up with good ideas that create better social media.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't interpret Jaren's statements as being entirely cynical and hopeless. I mean, he's definitely raising, you know, issues of concern. But he wouldn't be out, you know, writing the books that he's written and talking about this stuff if he didn't think there was a way.

• 59:00Lex Fridman?

  If he didn't think there was hope, yeah. And part of it, as you probably know with Jaren, he just loves a good argument.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:08Lex Fridman?

  He just loves to have a little bit of fun. Well, I have to ask you about, I mean, we talked about taking all big, bold, risky ideas. So in your new book, Termination Shock, it's set here in Texas.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Part of it is, yeah.

• 59:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Most of it.

• 59:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's a great place to set it. So in it, the main character, T R McCooligan, a Texas billionaire, oil man and truck stop magnate, decides to solve climate change, to take on climate change by himself. So this is an interesting philosophical exploration of how to solve climate change from a perspective that's perhaps different than we've been thinking about.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  I wouldn't use the word solve, but let's say ameliorate.

• 59:53Lex Fridman?

  Ameliorate.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  The temporary effects, but please.

• 59:57Lex Fridman?

  Take on.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:58Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Lex Fridman?

  Process. And, I mean, just like in, in your book, the power of innovation is something that has saved us quite a few times in history. So what role does that play as, in this gradual process?

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Right. So ultimately, we don't solve the problem until we get the CO2 out of the atmosphere. But that is going to take a while. We're still adding more. We haven't even started to, to reduce the amount. So.

• 1:00:45Lex Fridman?

  So there's two possibilities inside to interrupt is reduce the amount that we're putting in the atmosphere and two is removing what we got in the atmosphere.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  We have to do both.

• 1:00:56Lex Fridman?

  Right, and those are two different kind of efforts in terms of like what's involved.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Because it stays up there. So I think just last week China announced that they're going to try to level off their CO2 emissions in like 2030. So 2031 they'll only put as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they did in 2030, which is still a lot of CO2. In 2060, they're saying we'll be net zero. So if everyone in the world does that and the PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere by then is say 450 parts per million, it'll stay at 450 parts per million until we take it out. And taking it out is hard. It's a, you know,

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  it's a big, it took us a long time. We had to empty out huge coal mines and oil reservoirs and burn all that stuff. We had to chop down forests and dig up peat bogs in order to create all of that CO2. And so we have to reverse all of those processes somehow in order to remove the CO2 and get it back down, hopefully into the 200 and some parts per million range where it used to be.

• 1:02:17Lex Fridman?

  So how about you get a single Texas billionaire to have a massive gun that blasts huge quantities of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. That's idea number one.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  That's, this is called solar geoengineering and it's a, we know that it's a possibility on a technical level because volcanoes have been doing it forever. So many times in human history, we've seen a volcanic eruption that was followed by a global cooling trend that lasted for a couple of years. And one of these things happened, I think in the 60s or 70s in Indonesia and.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  And the Australians sent a plane up into the stratosphere to take some samples of the plume. And when it came back down, the windscreen of the plane had sort of a deposit on it. So one of the Australian scientists licked it and reported that it was painfully acid. So that was our first kind of clue that what was being injected into the stratosphere was sulfur dioxide. So, and, and so we know, then Pinatubo came along in the nineties and, and did this experiment for us. So we know that sulfur in the, in the stratosphere, it forms little spherical droplets of sulfuric

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  acid after it combines with water and those bounce back, some of the sun's rays and reduce the amount of, of solar energy entering the troposphere, which is where we live. So, so we know that it works and we, we also know that this stuff goes away after a couple of years. So it gradually washes out and so it's not a permanent thing. You have to, the good news, bad news is, um, good news is it's not permanent. So if you don't like what's happening, you can just stop and wait a couple of years and you'll get back to where you started. And the, the bad news, if, if you're in favor of this kind of thing is that you have to

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  keep doing it forever. So, so this guy is one of those, he, he's read these papers. He, he, the T R, the character in the book, he knows all this and all, all people who are familiar with climate science are kind of know this. It's a pretty well-established fact. And so, He just decides he's going to take action unilaterally and do this. And so there's different ways to get the sulfur up there, but because it's Texas, he builds the biggest gun in the world. It's just six barrels pointed straight up and he begins firing shells loaded with sulfur into the stratosphere.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  And so the book is about not so much that as how people react to his doing that, what the political ramifications are around the world. Cause you know, this is a extremely controversial idea and not everyone's on board with it. And even if you are willing to consider using a technological intervention, the fact is that it's going to have different effects on different parts of the world. So some areas may suffer negative, you know, more negatives than positives. And they're not going to be happy.

• 1:05:50Lex Fridman?

  So what do you think? So in his case, in TR's case, he can get around, you know, getting permission from governments. If we were to look at our, us facing, outside of the store, us facing climate change, where do you think the solution will come from? Governments working together or from bold billionaire Texans?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:29Lex Fridman?

  This kind of, sorry, government coordinated, which option one?

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Solar geoengineering.

• 1:06:35Lex Fridman?

  Solar geoengineering. Yeah. From a government, from a, like those are, I want to sort of the distinction. One is the idea, the technological idea you're talking about, but two is like, who comes up with the idea and agrees on it? Governments or individuals?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. If this were to happen, I think it would be either an individual or more likely just a, some government somewhere that just decides it's in their interests to unilaterally do this. And you know, that's not me advocating it. It's just.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  It's so, it would be comparatively so cheap and easy to implement a solar geoengineering scheme that someone is probably going to do it once things get bad enough. But I don't think that governments will, or Western governments, just because they're not, well, we've seen what happened with vaccines, right? So, you know, getting, getting people to take vaccinations or wear masks, you know, has turned out to be incredibly hard, even though it might, it might save those people's lives.

• 1:07:50Lex Fridman?

  See, I blame, that's not Western. That's, I blame failure of leadership there, of leaders being, not coming off as authentic, not being inspiring, uniting, all those kinds of things. I think that's possible. I think it's, it's just that we've gotten, the leaders we have right now.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Aren't the right people.

• 1:08:11Lex Fridman?

  Aren't the right people because we've lived through kind of a long stretch of relatively comfortable times. And it feels like unfortunate, if you just look at history, that hard times make great leaders and easy times make, like bureaucrats that are egotistical and greedy and not very interesting and not very bold.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think that's fair. So, you know, we may be entering one of those interesting times, you know.

• 1:08:39Lex Fridman?

  Of hardship?

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  In the Chinese curse sense, yeah. So, so I could be wrong, but, I mean, there have been some efforts to explore solar geoengineering. There was a, a plan to send up some balloons, high altitude balloons, to take some measurements in Scandinavia that got squashed by objections from people who lived up there, who, who were just opposed to the whole program on, on principle. So, we'll see a lot more of that and it's going to be a hard program to advocate for

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  just because I think people don't quite understand how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere and how far we are from, from even slowing down.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  The rate that we're adding more to say nothing of bringing that number down. We're a long way out from that.

• 1:09:42Lex Fridman?

  Do you see in terms of portfolio of solutions, us becoming a multiplanetary species as part of that, is this also being a motivator for investing some percent of GDP into becoming a multiplanetary species? And what percent should that be, you think?

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  You know, in an indirect way, maybe. I mean, you know what people will say, which is the same argument that has been leveled against space exploration since the Apollo program, which is why don't we solve our problems here on Earth before we spend money going into space? So I've never been a believer in that argument. I think there could be a sense in which the new perspective that could be obtained by thinking about, like if we're thinking about terraforming Mars, changing its atmosphere, making it more amenable

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  to life and survival, you could see that maybe changing people's opinions about terraforming the Earth.

• 1:10:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. There are some dangerous consequences to this particular idea of blasting software of geoengineering. What do you make of sort of big, bold ideas that have, that are a double-edged sword? Are all ideas like this, all big ideas like this, they have, they have the potential to have highly beneficial consequences and a potential to have highly destructive consequences?

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say all. I think, you know, going back to the, what we were talking about earlier, you know, how technology developed in the 50s and 60s, there was a period of time there when people maybe had unrealistic ideas about new technology and weren't sufficiently attentive to the possible downsides. So.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  So we got, and, and there's a reason why, I mean, the, the, there's, you know, in, in the mid 20th century, we saw, you know, antibiotics, we saw the polio vaccine, we saw, um, just simple things like refrigerators in the home, you know, um, my, my grandmother, to her dying day, called the refrigerator the ice box, because when she grew up, it was a box with ice in it. So you see all that change, and it's largely for the benefit of people. And so if somebody comes along and says, hey, we're going to build nuclear

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  reactors to, to make energy, or, um, here's a new, um, chemical called DDT that's going to kill, uh, mosquitoes, then, um, it's easy to, uh, to just buy into that and not be alert to the possible downsides. And of course, we know that, um, the, the way that those early reactors were built, and the way that the, the supply chain, uh, was built to, to, to create the fuel, um, and deal with the, the waste, um, was, was poorly thought out. And, uh, and, and we're still dealing with the, uh, the, the resulting problems

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  at places like Hanford in, in the state of Washington. And we know that, uh, DDT, although it did kill a lot of insects, um, also had terrible effects on bird populations. Um, so the, the kind of backlash that happened in the seventies that is still kind of going on is, is to sort of assume that everything is a double edged sword, and always to look for, that, you know, we have to absolutely convince ourselves that the, the downside, uh, isn't going to come back and, and bite us, uh, before we can adopt any new technology.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's, it's funny, depending on the technology, people are a little bit too terrified of certain technologies, like artificial intelligence is one. My sense is...

• 1:14:14Lex Fridman?

  That the things that they're afraid of aren't the things that are likely going to happen in terms of negative things. It's probably impossible to predict exactly the unintended negative consequences. But what's also interesting is for AI as an example, not, people don't think enough about the positive things. I mean, the same is true with social media. It's very popular now, for some reason, to talk about all the negative effects of social media. We've immediately forgotten how incredible it is to connect across the world. There's a, there's a deep loneliness within all of us who long to

• 1:14:54Lex Fridman?

  connect. And social media, at least in part, enables that, even in its current state. And all the negative things we see with social media currently are also in part just revealing the basics of human nature. It didn't make us worse. It's just, it's bringing it to the surface. And step one of solving a problem is bringing it to the surface. The fact that we are divisive, there's a division, the fact that there, we're easily angered and upset and all of that, the witch hunts, all those kinds of things. That's human nature. And it just reveals that, allowing us to now work on it, it's therapy. And so that's another example of a technology that's just, we're not considering the positive effects

• 1:15:39Lex Fridman?

  now and in the future enough of. I have to ask about, there's a million things I can ask you about, but virtual reality, I gotta ask you. You've thought about virtual reality, mixed reality, quite a bit. What are the interesting trajectories you see for the proliferation of virtual reality or mixed reality?

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was, I was at Magically for, what, five years?

• 1:16:10Lex Fridman?

  With the best title of all time?

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks. Chief futurist?

• 1:16:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I sort of had a little squad of people in Seattle doing what you might call content R and D. So we're trying to make content for AR, but.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Because it's such a new medium, there's it's more of an engineering R and D project almost than a than a creative project. So it was fascinating to see everything that goes into making an AR system that runs. So AR, an AR device, if it's really going to do AR, needs to be running SLAM in real time. And that alone is a big.

• 1:17:03Lex Fridman?

  So for people who don't know, first of all, virtual reality is creating an almost fully artificial world and putting you inside it. Augmented reality, AR, is taking the real world and putting top on top, putting stuff on top of that real world. And when you say SLAM, that means in real time, the device needs to be able to sense, accurately detect everything about that world sufficiently to be able to reconstruct it, the 3D structure of it, so you can put stuff on top of it. And doing that in real time, presumably not just real time, but in the way that's creates a pleasant experience for the human perception

• 1:17:47Lex Fridman?

  system is, yeah, that's a, that's an engineering project.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, well said. And it's just one of the things that the system has to do. It's also tracking your eyes, so it knows what you're looking at, how far away what you're looking at is. It's, it's performing all those functions. And it's got to keep doing that without, you know, burning up the CPU or depleting the battery unreasonably fast. And that's, that's just. Table stakes, it's just the basic functions of the the operating system. And then any content that you want to add has to sit on top of that.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  It's got to be rendered by the optics at a sufficiently low latency that it looks real and you don't get sick. So it's an amazing thing and you know magically shipped a device that can do that in 2019. And they're about to ship the ML2. But I don't know any more about that than anyone else because I don't work there anymore.

• 1:19:02Lex Fridman?

  Well, does it still, to some degree boil down to a killer app? A content question? Like you said, it's kind of a wide open space. Nobody knows exactly what's going to be the compelling thing.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:16Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Well, there's a base layer of engineering that you have to have no matter what. But you're certainly right that people, like in the early days of video games, put up with kind of low frame rate and what we would now call crappy graphics because they were having so much fun playing Doom or whatever.

• 1:19:47Lex Fridman?

  Even Tetris.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, so for sure that's true. And so, you know, I was working on consumer facing content. There was a great team in Wellington, New Zealand that made a game called Dr. Grobrot's Invaders that that realized the potential of AR gaming in a way that I don't think anything else has before or since.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  And so that was definitely the strategy until, what, April 2020, which is when the company decided to pivot to commercial industrial applications instead. So, and.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  You know, I haven't seen their financial projections, but I assume they had good reasons for making that strategic decision. It just means that it's no longer necessarily targeted at just end users who want to play a game or be entertained, but it's, you know.

• 1:21:08Lex Fridman?

  That, to me, from a sort of a dreamer futurist perspective is heartbreaking because I don't know necessarily from in the VR space, but I see this kind of thing with robotics, where to me, the future of robotics is consumer facing. And a lot of great roboticists, Boston Dynamics and companies like that are focused on sort of industrial applications.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39Lex Fridman?

  Because for financial business reasons.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I can see the parallels for sure. You know, we'll see. It was a fun project. You know, we worked on an app, for example, called Baby Goats, which just populated your room with baby goats.

• 1:21:59Lex Fridman?

  That seems like a killer app right there.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Well, we thought highly of the idea, for sure.

• 1:22:04Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  So, but because of the slam, the system knew, for example, here's a table, here's a little end table, we know the heights, we know how high our animated baby goat can jump. And so our engineers had to build a system for converting the slam primitives into game engine objects that the game, the AIs in the game could navigate around. So, and that ended up shipping as more of a dev kit or a sort of how to, a sample app

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  than as a finished consumer facing.

• 1:22:51Lex Fridman?

  You mean the baby goat AI?

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. That seems to me like a world. I can entertain myself for hours, just every day coming home to see baby goats.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was an ambient kind of, it's not, it's not a thing that you would sit there and play like a video.

• 1:23:12Lex Fridman?

  Just life.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:14Lex Fridman?

  But now there's baby goats. I mean, what's the purpose of having dogs and cats?

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:19Lex Fridman?

  In your life, exactly. It's kind of ambient.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:22Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

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

• 1:23:30Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, so we worked on that and a bigger project that was more of a storytelling and a fictional universe. The hardware is worth a look. There's still a belief, I just saw it this morning looking at Twitter, that the Magic Leap never shipped anything. Uh, but they've been, since 2019, you can go to their website and buy one of these devices anytime you want to spend the money.

• 1:24:02Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:24:09Lex Fridman?

  What do you think, looking out 50 years from now, what wins? Virtual reality, augmented reality, or physical reality?

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  What wins?

• 1:24:23Lex Fridman?

  Meaning like what's, uh,

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Lex Fridman?

  What do people of, that have financial resources enjoy spending most of their time in?

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  Hmm. I've always been a fan of, of, of AR, and it's kind of an easy answer, because if you, if you're wearing an AR device, you put a bag over your head, it becomes a VR device, you know, it just, if you block out the, what's really there, then all you're seeing is, is a VR.

• 1:24:55Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Lex Fridman?

  With VR, you can go into fantastical worlds.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  True, true. So there are still issues in, in those fantastical worlds with, um,

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  With motion sickness, right? So if your body is experiencing acceleration, your inner ear, that differs from what your eye thinks it's seeing, then you'll get sick, unless you're a very unusual person. So it doesn't mean you can't do it. It's just, it's a constraint that VR designers have to learn to work with.

• 1:25:44Lex Fridman?

  So do you think it's possible that in the future, we're living mostly in a virtual reality world? Like, we become more and more detached from physical reality?

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  For entertainment, maybe, for certain applications. I'm personally more, I mean, we have to make a distinction between what I would personally find interesting and, you know, what might win in the market. So maybe some people, maybe lots of people, would like to spend a huge amount of time in VR. I'm personally more interested in enhancing the experience that I have of the physical world, because the physical world's pretty cool, right? There's a lot, lot to be said for, for moving around in the real world.

• 1:26:34Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you, for you personally,

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36Lex Fridman?

  to try to play devil's advocate or to try to construct, to imagine a VR world where you and Neil Stevens want to stay?

• 1:26:51Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:57Lex Fridman?

  But like, literally, it's just more enriching. In the same way, like, there's a glimmer in your eye when you said you enjoy the physical world. Like double up on that glimmer for the for the for the virtual reality. Can you imagine such a world?

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  Well, like I'll give maybe an example that's a bridge, which is that I've been I like making things. So I like working in a machine shop and and and making objects with 3D printers or machines or whatever. And so I've had to learn how to get good at using a CAD program. You know, there's many to choose from. I use one called Fusion 360. And I can spend hours in that trying to create, imagine and create the things I want to create. And it's

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  it's not virtual reality exactly, but that whole time, I'm, you know, my whole field of view is occupied by by this monitor that's showing me a window into a three dimensional space. I'm rotating things around. I'm I'm I'm imagining things. I'm making things. And so that is, you know, pretty close to to to being in virtual reality.

• 1:28:22Lex Fridman?

  Does that thing have to exist for you to experience true joy? Can you stay in Fusion 360 the whole time? Do you have to 3D print it and touch it?

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's my game. That's that's what I'm up to. But, you know, it happens that if you're building a virtual environment, if you're making a game level or creating a virtual set for a film or TV production, the thing that you're designing in the program may never physically exist. And in fact, it's preferable that it doesn't because the whole point of that is to is to to make imaginary things that that you couldn't couldn't build otherwise. So I think lots of people spend a good chunk of their working hours in something that's pretty close to to VR. It's just that currently the output

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:29:30Lex Fridman?

  There's all kinds of interfaces. For example, I enjoy listening to podcasts or audiobooks. Let's say actually podcasts, because there's intimate human connection in a podcast. It's one way, but you get to learn about the person you're listening to. And that's a real connection. And that's just audio.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:47Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  True.

• 1:29:49Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

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

• 1:30:02Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Lex Fridman?

  There's not even a visual component. It's just audio, but they're as real. Like if I was on a desert island, like my imagination, like this thing works pretty good in terms of imagination, like that it creates a very beautiful world with a, with just audio. So, I, I mean,

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Or even just reading books.

• 1:30:33Lex Fridman?

  Just read.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:34Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. Reading books.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:36Lex Fridman?

  Even more so with reading books, because there, there's certain mediums which stimulate the imagination more.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:30:44Lex Fridman?

  The, yeah, the, when, when you present less, the imagination works more.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:30:49Lex Fridman?

  And that can create really enriching experiences. So, I mean, to me, the question is, can you do some of the amazing things that make life amazing in virtual worlds? It seems to me the answer there is obviously yes. Even if I, like you, am attached to a lot of stuff in the physical world, I think I can very readily imagine

• 1:31:15Lex Fridman?

  coming up with some of the same magical experiences in the virtual world, where you make friends and you can fall in love, where the source of love in your life

• 1:31:28Lex Fridman?

  Is to a much greater degree inside of a virtual world. And like, and then love means fulfillment, that means happiness, that's the thing you look forward to. And not some kind of dopamine rush type of love, but like long, long lasting like.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:45Lex Fridman?

  Friendship.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It just depends on, on what is there in the way of, of applications, the content and can it feed you those things, can it give you, like in my example of, of using the CAD program, uh, it gives me the ability to do something I enjoy, uh, which is making, imagining things and making things in a particular way.

• 1:32:09Lex Fridman?

  But can we psychoanalyze you for a second?

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:32:12Lex Fridman?

  What exactly do you enjoy? Is there some component of you building the thing where you get to at least a little bit share with others? Like, is there a human in the loop outside of you in that picture?

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  Will anyone ever see it?

• 1:32:31Lex Fridman?

  Right. That my, like, there's a source of your enjoyment, because I would argue that perhaps it, when like the, the turtles all the way down, when you get to the bottom turtle, it has to do with other, sharing with other humans.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:46Lex Fridman?

  And if you can then put those humans inside the VR world, then, then you start to, then, then you can, okay, for example, you could do it in the physical world, the, the, the 3D printing, you share it in, in, in the virtual world, then that's where the source of happiness is.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  I think, at least speaking for myself, I'm always thinking in terms of an audience. And, um, at some level, I feel like I'm, I'm doing this for someone or communicating to someone, even if there's not a specific someone in mind. It could just be an abstract, theoretical someone. Um, and like another app I spend a lot of time in is Mathematica. Okay.

• 1:33:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  When I do.

• 1:33:32Lex Fridman?

  A credible app.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And when I do a Mathematica notebook, if I'm trying to figure something out, I spend a lot of time typing, just, my stuff is just huge blocks of, of text, just me thinking out loud, and then some graphs and calculations and stuff. Because to me, um, that act of, of explaining things and commenting, um,

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Helps me understand what I'm doing.

• 1:33:58Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I mean, most of this stuff, nobody will ever see, and yet, I'm creating it as if there were an audience that might read this stuff. Because I have to, that's a necessary constraint that helps me do a better job.

• 1:34:21Lex Fridman?

  What's the, this might be tricky question to answer. What's comes to mind as a particularly beautiful thing that you're proud of that you create inside Mathematica? Visualization wise, or something that just comes to memory, if it's possible to retrieve?

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  So, the, the thing I've spent the most amount of time on is I got obsessed a long time ago, was trying to tile the globe with hexagons.

• 1:34:53Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:34:55Lex Fridman?

  An actual globe?

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Well, any spherical.

• 1:34:58Lex Fridman?

  Any spherical, okay.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  Object, yeah, but, but with an eye towards putting it on the earth. And so, and have it be recursive. So, you can have hexagons within hexagons, which is hard because, and probably a bad idea, because you can't tile a hexagon with smaller hexagons. They don't, they stick out.

• 1:35:22Lex Fridman?

  Got it. So they're, oh, they stick out. So there's, can you do some kind of fractal hexagon situation?

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, so it's that, and people who, who know me are always, now, now make fun of me for this. So they'll send me, if they, if they see a picture with hexagons in it, they'll like, send me a link, you know, to, to, to make fun of me. So as some.

• 1:35:48Lex Fridman?

  One of those people, Roger Penrose, or?

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  I, I think Roger's a little above my, my level.

• 1:35:56Lex Fridman?

  Was using to put hexagons as well, and tiling.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, so I did a lot of that, and I thought, you know, it was pretty cool. But there's some, like, surprisingly intractable problems that keep coming up, like.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  You've always got to have some pentagons. Like if you start with an icosahedron, which is equilateral triangles, which is a logical place to start. You can cover those with hexagons, but every vertex where where the the triangles come together is a pentagon, has to be a pentagon.

• 1:36:38Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:42Lex Fridman?

  Cool. How'd you figure that out? Is that a known fact?

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:47Lex Fridman?

  It's an obvious thing. Got it.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so you can't make that go away. So, any system that you come up with to do this has got to have this exceptions built into it for, for those 12. You could have quintillions of, of hexagons, but you've still got to have 12 pentagons somewhere. So, so I've blown a hell of a lot of time on, on that over the years.

• 1:37:18Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think Uber did it because someone, one of my friends who who, who knows of my, my interest in this and who likes to, to give me a hard time, sent me a link, this is a couple of years ago, to some code base that I think came out of Uber where they had done this. You know, you break, break down the whole surface of the earth into, into little hexagons. So, that was a real knife through the heart. But I'll probably come back to it someday.

• 1:38:05Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I'm interested in all kinds of tiling, but I'm not. I know my limitations, like as a, as a math guy. So hexagons are about my speed. You know?

• 1:38:25Lex Fridman?

  Just sufficient amount of complexity.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, but no, tiling is a really interesting problem, both two and three dimensional. Tiling problems are fascinating and they're one of those ancient puzzles that has

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  attracted brainiacs for, for centuries.

• 1:38:50Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you a little bit about AI.

• 1:38:54Lex Fridman?

  What are some likely interesting trajectories for the proliferation of AI in society over the next couple of decades? Do you think about this kind of stuff?

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  I do not think about it a lot because it's a deep topic and I'm not, I don't consider myself super well informed about it. And AI seems to be a term that is applied to a lot of different things. So I've messed around just a tiny little bit with, with neural nets with, what's it called? PCA, Principal Component Analysis. So I guess I tend to think in terms of sort of granular bottom up

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  ideas rather than big picture, top down.

• 1:39:41Lex Fridman?

  Oh God, so like very specific algorithms, like how are they going to? What problem are they, are they going to solve in society such that, that has like a lot of big ripple effects? See, I, I mean, we could talk a, a particular successful AI systems and success defined in different ways of recent years. So one is language models with GPT three.

• 1:40:06Lex Fridman?

  Most importantly, they're self-supervised, meaning they don't require much supervision from humans, which means they can learn by just reading a huge amount of content created by humans. So read the internet and from that be able to generate text and do all kinds of things like that. It's possible they have a big enough neural network, it's going to be able to. Have conversations with humans based on just reading human language. That's an interesting idea. To me, the very interesting idea that people don't think about it as AI, because they're kind of dumb currently, is actual embodied robots. So robotics, like Boston Dynamics, have downstairs and upstairs legged robots.

• 1:40:53Lex Fridman?

  You know, the currently Boston Dynamics robots and most legged robots, most robots, period, are pretty dumb. This is, most of the challenges have to do with the actual, first of all, the engineering of making the thing work, getting a sensor suite that allows you to do, it's the same thing as with Magic Leap, that base layer of like,

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  Where is it, stuff?

• 1:41:15Lex Fridman?

  Where am I?

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:17Lex Fridman?

  And what, what am I looking at?

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  But even that is hard.

• 1:41:34Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's hard, but the thing that I think people don't, in, in the robotics space, explore enough, is the human robot interaction part of the, of the picture, which is how it makes humans feel, how robots make humans feel. And I think that's going to have a very significant impact in, in the near future in society, which is, the more you integrate AI systems of whatever form into society where humans are

• 1:42:08Lex Fridman?

  in contact with them regularly. So that could be embodied robotics, or that could be social media algorithms. I think that has a very significant impact. And people often think like, AI needs to be super smart to have an impact. I think it needs to be super integrated with society to have an impact. And more and more that's happening, even if they're dumb.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, the, I mean, a lot of my exposure to robots is, is that I'm

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Associated with a combat robotics team and I've been to a few battle bots competitions. And that's not like in a lot of ways, that's pretty far from the kind of robotics you're talking about because the these robots are remote controlled. They're not autonomous. And so they're, they're pretty simple, but it's interesting to watch people's emotional reactions to different robots. So there was one that was in the last year's season, the 2020 season called Rusty, that was just a like put together out of spare parts and

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  it looked kind of cute. And it became this huge crowd favorite because you could see it was made of like salad bowls and, you know, random pieces of hardware that this guy had like scavenged from his farm. And so immediately people kind of fell in love with this one particular robot. Whereas they might, other robots might be like the bad guy in a, in a, if you think of professional wrestling, you know, the heel and the baby face. So people do, for reasons that are hard to understand, form these emotional reactions.

• 1:43:58Lex Fridman?

  We form narratives in the same way we do when we meet human beings would tell stories about these objects and they can be intelligent and they can be biological or they could be in almost, almost close to inanimate objects.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Lex Fridman?

  And that to me is kind of fascinating. And if robots choose to lean into that, it creates an interesting world.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  If they start using feedback loops to make themselves cuter?

• 1:44:26Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I was, wasn't meaning it in a, but you're right. Humans, based on feedback, will change their appearance.

• 1:44:40Lex Fridman?

  Yes. I do this on Instagram all the time. How do I look cuter? That's the fundamental question I ask myself.

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So why wouldn't, why wouldn't a robot want to, it's like, oh, wow, people. People really don't like the, you know, quad mount machine gun, you know, on top of my turret. Maybe I should get rid of that and that would, you know, people would feel more at ease.

• 1:45:01Lex Fridman?

  Or lean into it, be proud of it.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:04Lex Fridman?

  Uh, like, uh, you won't take my gun, whatever the saying is. From my, uh, dead cold hands.

• 1:45:13Lex Fridman?

  I mean, their, their personality, adding personality such that you can start to heal. You can start to weave narratives. I think that's a fascinating place where

• 1:45:25Lex Fridman?

  there's this feedback loop, like you said, where AI, when it's, especially when it's embodied, puts a mirror to ourselves. Just like other humans are, are close friends. They kind of teach us about ourselves. We teach each other and through that process grow close. And to me, it's so fascinating to, um,

• 1:45:53Lex Fridman?

  to expand the space of deep, meaningful interactions beyond just humans. That, uh, that's the opportunity I see with, with robots and with AI systems. And that's why I don't like, my biggest problem, social media algorithms is the lack of transparency. It's not the existence of the algorithms. It's, uh, well, there's this many things. One is the data. Data should be controlled by the individual, by people.

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:22Lex Fridman?

  Themselves. So, uh, but also the lack of transparency and how the algorithms work.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  And change your perception of what's real. Yeah.

• 1:46:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  In hidden ways. Yeah.

• 1:46:33Lex Fridman?

  In hidden ways.

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:34Lex Fridman?

  Like you should be aware, just like when you take, I don't know, if, if you take psychedelics, you should be aware that you took the psychedelics. It shouldn't be a surprise.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:43Lex Fridman?

  And second, you should, I mean, uh, become a student and a scholar and there should be research done, there should be open conversation about how your perception has changed and you, and then you are, become your own guide in this world of altered perception, because arguably none of it is real. You get to choose the flavor of real.

• 1:47:09Lex Fridman?

  I mean, this is something you explore, uh, quite a bit. Do you, um, yourself think that there is?

• 1:47:19Lex Fridman?

  A bottom to it where there is reality. There's a base layer of reality that physics can explore and our human perceptions sort of layer stuff. Is there, is there, let's go to Plato. Is there such a thing as truth?

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  I lean towards the Platonic view of things. So I believe that mathematical objects have a reality that it's not all made up by, by human minds. And I don't know where that reality comes from. I can't explain it, but, but I do think that mathematical objects are discovered and not invented.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  And he's a, you know, 20th century phenomenologist and he's writing in the, he's writing at the same time as, as scientists are starting to understand atoms and, and becoming aware that, that when we look at this table, it's really just a slab of almost entirely vacuum. And there's a very sparse arrangement of tiny, tiny little particles there occupying that space that interact with each other in such a way that our brains perceive this object.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  So that's kind of, kind of the beginnings of phenomenology.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  And, and his stuff is pretty hard to.

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  Hard to read. You really have to take it in small bites and go a little bit at a time. But he's trying to come to grips with these, with these kinds of questions.

• 1:49:24Lex Fridman?

  How did you come to grips with it?

• 1:49:27Lex Fridman?

  Like, why, why does this table feel solid?

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, we're an evolved system that there's, we have biological advantages in, in knowing where solid objects are. So we've got this system in our head that, that integrates our perceptions into this coherent view of things. That, one of the take homes that I, I like from Husserl is the idea of intersubjectivity and the idea that a fundamental requirement for us to stay sane is for us to share our perceptions and have them ratified by other, they don't even have to be people, but, that,

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  you know, a prisoner in solitary confinement might domesticate a mouse or even insects because they perceive the same things that the prisoner perceives. And, and so convince, convince him that he's not just hallucinating.

• 1:50:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a, establish a consensus.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:37Lex Fridman?

  But see, that doesn't mean it's, any of it is real. You just establish a consensus. It, it could be very, very distant from something that, something that's real in, in engineering sense of real, like you could build it using physics.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  But I think that, you know, valuable application for an AI robot would be just to do nothing except that. It just, so.

• 1:51:10Lex Fridman?

  Consensus.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  It just sits there.

• 1:51:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  And if, if you hear a door slam, you might turn to, to see what it is. If the robot, at the same time, turns to, to look at the door slam, it's ratifying your perception.

• 1:51:26Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:51:36Lex Fridman?

  You both hear the same music?

• 1:51:39Lex Fridman?

  And others don't. I mean, it's not what I mean.

• 1:51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:43Lex Fridman?

  That's by love, I mean depth of human connection.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:47Lex Fridman?

  Like it that's or not.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  You arrive at similar reactions without having to to explicitly communicate it.

• 1:51:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:57Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, but no, I've.

• 1:52:05Lex Fridman?

  Or scary sounds.

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  I can think of. So an example of this is, you know,

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  when I went to college, you know, we'd be sitting at the cafeteria, you know, a bunch of people, you know, eating our dinner together that we had just met, let's say, you know. So a bunch of new people in your life and and someone might make a funny remark or a not so funny remark or something would happen. And you might then at that moment make eye contact with someone you didn't know at the other end of the table. And in that moment, you would realize this person is reacting, this person heard what I heard. They're reacting the way I reacted.

• 1:52:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Nobody else appears to get the joke or to understand what just happened. But random stranger down there and I, we have this connection.

• 1:53:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  And then you build on that. So then the next time something happens, you automatically look at your new friend and they look back at you. And before you know it, you know, you're you're hanging out together.

• 1:53:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:53:26Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:33Lex Fridman?

  At some level.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Lex Fridman?

  There's no reason why you and a toaster can't have that. I'm just saying.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  Does this smell burn to you?

• 1:53:45Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  I think it's burnt.

• 1:53:47Lex Fridman?

  If a toaster could just say that to you.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:51Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:54:01Lex Fridman?

  Bitcoin white paper came out in 2008.

• 1:54:06Lex Fridman?

  So I have to kind of ask, from you looking at this layout of what's been happening in cryptocurrency, the evolution of this technology, how has it rolled out differently than you could have imagined? And in two ways, one, the technology itself, and two, the human side of things, the human stories of the hackers and the financial folks and the powerful and the powerless, the human side of things.

• 1:54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, Cryptonomicon is pre Bitcoin, it's pre Satoshi, it's pre blockchain, as you point out. So at that point, I was kind of reacting to what I was seeing among people like the Bay Area Cypher punks. In Berkeley, there was some, there was a branch here in Austin as well. And a lot of their thinking was so based on the idea that you would have to have a physical region of the earth that was free of government interference.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  You couldn't achieve that freedom by purely mathematical means on the network. You actually had to have, you know, a room somewhere with servers in it that, that a government couldn't come and meddle with. And so a lot of ideation happened around that view of things, that there were efforts to figure out jurisdictions where this might work. There was a lot of interest for a while in Anguilla, which is a Caribbean island that had some unusual jurisdictional properties. There was Sealand, Sealand, which is a platform in the North Sea. And so there was a lot of effort that went into finding these physical locations

• 1:56:05Speaker 01

  that, that were deemed kind of safe. And that all... Goes away with blockchain. It's no longer necessary. And so that really changes the picture in a lot of ways because you no longer have, I mean, from a novelist's point of view, the old system was a lot more fun to work with because it gives you a situation where hackers are wandering around in strange parts of the world, you know, trying to set up server rooms. So that's a great storytelling thing.

• 1:56:41Lex Fridman?

  There's still a little bit of that, right? In the modern world, but it's just there's several server rooms as opposed to one centralized one.

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And there is the, like, the new wrinkle is the need to do a lot of computation and to keep your, your, your GPUs from melting down. So people building things in Iceland or, or in shipping containers on the bottom of the ocean or whatever. So.

• 1:57:09Lex Fridman?

  But there's still governments involved and there's, there's still, from a novelist's perspective, interesting dynamics. What is big governments like China and more sort of renegade governments from all over the world trying to contend with this idea of what to do in terms of control and power over these kinds of centers that do the mining of the, of the cryptocurrency.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're in a stage now that kind of goes beyond the initial, like, there's, the stuff I was describing in Cryptonomacon had a little bit of air about it of the underpants gnomes in that, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna build this system and then we'll make money somehow. But the intermediate step was, was left out. And that is, I, I think we're now sort of into that phase of the thing where the, where Bitcoin, you know, blockchain exists. People know how it works. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exist. People are using them.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  And it's sort of like, okay, what now? You know, where does this all lead? So.

• 1:58:24Lex Fridman?

  Do you have a sense of where it all leads? Like, is it, is it possible that the set of technology kind of continues to have?

• 1:58:34Lex Fridman?

  Transformational effects on not just sort of finance, but who gets to have power in this world? So the decentralization of power.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, big questions, right? So I guess there's a little bit of the cynic in me thinking that as soon as it becomes important enough, the existing banks and people in power are gonna sort of control it. I guess an easy answer is that maybe it won't be a big change in the end.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

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

• 1:59:16Lex Fridman?

  There's a technological aspect to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that make it a little easier to pull along the utopian thread.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:31Lex Fridman?

  Because it's harder for governments to control Bitcoin. I mean, they have much fewer options. They can ban, they can make it illegal. It's more difficult.

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:43Lex Fridman?

  So technology here is on the side of the powerless, the voiceless, which is a very interesting idea. Of course, yes, it does have a utopian feel to it, but we have been making progress throughout human history. Maybe this is what progress looks like. There will be the powerful and the greedy and the bureaucrats that take advantage of it, skim off the top kind of thing. But maybe this does give more power to people that haven't had power before, in a good way, like distributing power and enabling sort of more greater resistance to sort of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, that kind of thing.

• 2:00:26Lex Fridman?

  And also enabling all kinds of technologies built on top of it. Ultimately, when you digitize money,

• 2:00:36Lex Fridman?

  you know, money is a kind of speech, or it's a kind of like mechanism of...

• 2:00:43Lex Fridman?

  How humans interact. And if you make that digital, more and more of the world moves to the digital space. And then you could have the, then you can finally fully live in that virtual reality with the toaster.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. In a lot of ways, I think in that realm of technology, that the money per se is one of the less interesting things you can do with it. So I think, you know, cryptographically enforceable contracts and organizations built on those. That seems to me like it's got more potential for change just because we do already have money. And although it's an old system, it's been digitized to a large extent by, you know, the stripes and the credit card companies of the world.

• 2:01:33Lex Fridman?

  And I also love the idea of like connecting two, connecting two smart contracts, connecting data. Sort of making it more formal. It's like Mathematica, more structured, the integration of data, of weather data, of all kinds of data about the, the, the stuff in the world. So they can make contracts between people that in, that's grounded in data. And that's actually getting closer to something like truth. Because then you can make agreements based on actual data versus kind of perceptions of data.

• 2:02:13Lex Fridman?

  And if you can formalize, like distribute the power of who gets to tell the story.

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:19Lex Fridman?

  That, that's an interesting kind of resistance.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:23Lex Fridman?

  Again, the powerful in the space of narrative.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, David Brin has been saying for a while that the only way to settle arguments with, you know, across the political divide is to, to make bets. So people can say, you know, the election was stolen or, you know, whatever controversial position they're, they're taking. And they'll keep saying it until you. You wager real money on it. So maybe there's something there. If you could kind of turn that into a, put a user interface on that.

• 2:03:07Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03:16Lex Fridman?

  Will Dogecoin take over the world? Twitter question.

• 2:03:19Speaker 01

  You know, I don't, I don't follow the different coins that much. So I don't, I mean, I hear about Dogecoin and I, you know, I've kind of followed the story of it.

• 2:03:29Lex Fridman?

  So the interesting aspect of Dogecoin is it, so in contrast to like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are these serious implementations of cryptocurrency that seek to solve some of the problems that we're talking about with smart contracts and resist the banks and all those kinds of things. Dogecoin operates more in the space of memes and humor while still doing some of the similar things. And it presents to the world sort of a question of whether memes, whether humor,

• 2:04:09Lex Fridman?

  whether narrative will go a long way in the future. Like much farther than some kind of boring, old grounded technologies. Whether we'll be playing in the space of fun. Like, once we built a base of comfort and stability and like a robust system where everyone has shelter, everyone has food and the basic needs covered, are we going to then operate in the space of fun? That's, that's why I think about Dogecoin, because it seems like fun. Spreads faster than anything else.

• 2:04:53Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:57Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

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

• 2:05:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And that's what Doshcoin represents. So there's like, so Bitcoin represents like financial, like s- serious financial instruments.

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:17Lex Fridman?

  And then Doshcoin represents fun.

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:05:19Lex Fridman?

  And it's interesting to watch the battle go on on the internet to see which wins. This is also like an open question to me of what is the internet? Because fun seems to prevail on the internet. And is that a fundamental property of the internet moving forward when you look 100 years out? Or is this a temporary thing that was true at the birth of the internet? And it's just true for a couple of decades until it fades away and and the adults take over and become serious again?

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think the adults took over initially. And then it was later on that people started using it for fun, frivolous, things like memes. And that's, I think that's pretty much unstoppable. You know?

• 2:06:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  Because even people who are very serious, you know, enjoy sending around a funny picture or something that amuses them.

• 2:06:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I, I personally think, we spoke about World War II. I think memes will save the world and prevent all future wars. You've been handwriting your work for the past 20 years since writing the Baroque cycle. What are the pros and cons of handwriting versus typing?

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  For me, I started it as an experiment when I started the Baroque cycle because I had noticed that if I, sometimes if I was stuck, having a hard time getting started, if I just picked up a pen and started writing, it was easy to, to go. So I just decided to keep with that. If it got in my way, I didn't like it. I could always just go back to the word processor and be fine. So, but I never, that never happened. So there's a certain security that comes from knowing that it's ink on paper and there's no operating system crash or software failure that can obliterate it.

• 2:07:16Speaker 01

  There's um, um, I, it's a slower output technique. And so um, a sentence or a paragraph spends a longer time in the buffer up here before it gets committed to paper, whereas I can type really fast. And so I can slam things out before I've really thought them through. So I think the first draft quality ends up being higher.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  And then editing, first draft of editing is just faster because um, instead of like trying to move the cursor around or whatever, uh, or you know, hitting the backspace key, I can just draw a line through a word or a sentence or just around a whole paragraph and exit out.

• 2:08:06Speaker 01

  And in doing so, I very quickly created an edit, but I've also left behind a record of what the text was prior to the edit.

• 2:08:13Lex Fridman?

  Of course, you know, all the digital versions have those quote unquote features, but their experience is different.

• 2:08:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:22Lex Fridman?

  Is there a romance to just the physical?

• 2:08:29Lex Fridman?

  You know, the touch of the pen to the paper, doing what has been done for centuries?

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  I think there is, I think there is a, uh, just the simplicity of it and not having any intermediary technology beyond the, the pen and the paper, uh, is just very simple and clean. Um, and um, um, so I've got a bunch of fountain pens. I, I, I started buying fancy paper from Italy a few years ago because uh, I, I thought I would be more conservative with it, you know, but it still doesn't, it, it's still a trivial expenditure, so it doesn't really alter my, my habits very much.

• 2:09:15Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:21Lex Fridman?

  I use Emacs, obviously the superior editor.

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:09:26Lex Fridman?

  You, uh, let me just ask the ridiculous futuristic question, because Emacs has been around forever.

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:09:32Lex Fridman?

  Do you think in 100 years, we will still have Emacs and Vim?

• 2:09:40Lex Fridman?

  Or like, pick a, let's say 50, 100 years.

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, whenever you're doing anything in Linux, you're spending a lot of time editing little config files and scripts and stuff. And you need to be able to pop in and out of editing those things. And it needs to work, like even if the windowing GUI is dead and all you've got is like a command line, to get out of that problem, you might need to enter an editor and alter a file. So I think on that level, there will always have to be sort of very simple. Well, Emacs isn't very simple, but you know what I mean.

• 2:10:28Speaker 01

  There have to be basic editors that you can use from either the command line or a GUI just for administering systems. Now, how widespread they'll be, you know, there's a certain amount of, what's the story of the, there's the American folk tale of the, the guy who, the hammer guy who drives the railroad spikes, John Henry, trying to keep up with the steam hammer. And eventually the steam hammer wins because he can't drive the spikes fast enough. So there's a sense in which, you know, Microsoft, like,

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  who knows how much they've invested in code, you know, Visual Studio to, you know, or Apple with Xcode. So they've put huge amounts of money into enhancing their IDEs. And Emacs, in theory, can duplicate all of those features

• 2:11:34Speaker 01

  by, you know, if you just have enough Linux hackers writing Emacs list macros.

• 2:11:41Speaker 01

  But, you know, at some point, it's going to be hard to maintain that level of, to keep up feature for feature.

• 2:11:54Lex Fridman?

  The interesting thing about Emacs just has lasted a long time.

• 2:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:59Lex Fridman?

  And I think you've talked about that there's a certain, like, there's certain fads.

• 2:12:06Lex Fridman?

  Certainly in the software engineering space. And it's interesting to think about technologies that sort of last for a very long time. And just kind of being in the, what is it? How do they get by? It's like the cockroaches of software or the bacteria of software or something. Like this base thing that nobody, everybody just became reliant on. And they just outlast everything else and slowly, slowly adjust with the times with a little bit of a delay, with a little bit of customization by individuals, kind of that.

• 2:12:48Lex Fridman?

  But they're always there in the shadows and they outlast everybody else. And I wonder if that's, that might be the story for a lot of technologies, especially in the software space.

• 2:12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, shell scripts, you know, all that stuff. You can't run the modern world without a bunch of shell scripts, you know, booting up machines and, and running things. So it's, that is going to be a hard thing to replace.

• 2:13:16Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  For when I, when I want to print it out, yeah, I just have some simple macros that I use. But then I have to, the publisher put their foot down and they, they want it in Word format now. So years ago, I wrote some macros to convert. And this time, what did I do?

• 2:13:43Lex Fridman?

  Copy paste?

• 2:13:44Speaker 01

  No, I, I use sort of regular expressions. So I was to do italics in, you know, you, you put it in curly brackets and you do backslash I T and then you type what you want to type. And that's how you get italics in tech. So you can create a regular expression that'll look for some text between curly brackets preceded by backslash I T. And then instead.

• 2:14:14Speaker 01

  Convert that to italics and Word will do that.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

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

• 2:14:24Lex Fridman?

  Can do regular expressions.

• 2:14:25Speaker 01

  Is is just regups.

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:28Lex Fridman?

  It's funny that you did that.

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:30Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:14:37Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so.

• 2:14:44Lex Fridman?

  It's a fascinating process.

• 2:14:45Speaker 01

  Works fine for me, yeah. And it keeps you from messing around with formatting.

• 2:14:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  Like, oh, what if I put this chapter heading, you know, in, you know, a sans serif font? You know, it's it's just classic wanking. And so you the

• 2:15:04Speaker 01

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

• 2:15:07Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:15:12Speaker 01

  The power of of good yarns, good narratives to um pull people in is is incredible. And I think my sort of amateur theory is that it's an evolutionary development that if you're um, you know, a cave person sitting around a fire in the Rift Valley a million years ago.

• 2:15:40Speaker 01

  If you can tell the story of how you escaped from the hyenas. Or how Uncle Bob, you know, didn't escape from the hyenas. And if if the people listening to you can take that in and they can build that scenario in their heads, like a kind of virtual reality and see what you're describing, then you've just conferred an incredibly important advantage on the people who've heard that story.

• 2:16:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:11Speaker 01

  Right? And so they know a bunch of stuff now about how to stay alive that they could not have learned in any other way. I mean, animals who don't have speech, though, they might warn each other. They might make a sound that says, danger, danger. But, but as far as we know, they can't tell more complicated stories.

• 2:16:37Lex Fridman?

  So it's a part of us, yeah. The collective intelligence seems to be one of the key characteristics of Homo sapiens. The ability to share ideas and hold ideas together in our minds. And storytelling is the fundamental aspect of that. Maybe even language itself is more fundamental.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:57Lex Fridman?

  Because the language is required to do the storytelling. Or maybe they evolved together.

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  Maybe they co-evolve, yeah. So I think that you've got to work with that. And I think sometimes it seems like in kind of literary circles that having a lot of plot is a little bit frowned upon as it's pulpy or it's exploitative. But for me, I don't have any compunctions whatsoever about that. I like stories that are grabby and fun and exciting to read. And once you've got one of those going, once you've got a good yarn going, that people will enjoy reading, then you're free to do whatever you want in the frame of that story. But if you don't have that, then you got nothing.

• 2:17:48Lex Fridman?

  What about having like, which you do technological scientific rigor, like to the accuracy as much as possible? How does that add to the, to Bob telling the story? Or telling the story about Bob around the campfire?

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  Well, the main thing that it does is present little details that you might not have come up with on your own. So if you're just sitting there freely imagining things.

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  You, uh, you, your, your brain probably isn't going to serve up the wealth of details and the resulting complications and surprises that real, that the real world is constantly presenting us with. And so, um, in my case, if I'm, um, trying to write a story about, you know, some, that involves some technology like a rocket or orbital maneuvers or whatever, then delving into those details eventually is going to turn up some weird, unexpected, you know, thing that, uh, gives me material to work with, but also subliminally readers

• 2:18:59Speaker 01

  who see that are, are gonna be drawn in more, uh, because it's, they're going to, uh, to, to find that, um, oh, I didn't see that coming, you know, you know, it's got some of the complexity and surprise value of the real world.

• 2:19:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it does something, um, Alex Garland, director who did, uh, who wrote, uh, directed Ex Machina. I, I think about AI movies and the more care you take in making it accurate, the more compelling the story becomes somehow. I'm not, I'm not sure what that is. Uh, maybe because it becomes more real to the people writing the story. Maybe it just makes you a better writer.

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  The key to any storytelling is getting the, the readers to suspend their, their disbelief. And there's all kinds of triggers and little tells that can break that.

• 2:19:56Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:19:57Speaker 01

  And once it's broken, it's really hard to, to get it back. Uh, you know, a lot of times that's the end. Somebody will just close the book and not pick it up.

• 2:20:08Lex Fridman?

  I gotta ask you, you've answered this question, but I gotta ask you. The most impossible question for an author to answer, but which Neal Stephenson book should one read first?

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  So when people ask me that, I usually ask them what they like to read, right? Because, I mean, there's, the best known one is probably Snow Crash, but that's a cyberpunk novel that's at the same time making fun of cyberpunk. So it's kind of got some layers to it that might not seem so funny if you don't have that, if you don't get the joke, right? So there's, I've written, as you point out, I've written historical novels. Some people like those, some people prefer those. So if that's what you like, then Cryptonomicon or The Baroque Cycle is where you would start.

• 2:21:04Speaker 01

  If you like sort of techno thrillers that are set in a modern day setting, but aren't science fictiony per se, then Reemdi is one of those. And Termination Shock is definitely one of those.

• 2:21:22Speaker 01

  So it just depends on, on what people like.

• 2:21:28Lex Fridman?

  What, when people a long time ago recommend I read Snow Crash, they said, it's Neal Stephenson light.

• 2:21:39Lex Fridman?

  It's the, like, if you don't want to be overwhelmed by the depth, like the rigor of a book, like, that's a good, that's a good introduction to the man.

• 2:21:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:21:49Lex Fridman?

  So essentially, you broke it down by topics, but if you wanted to read all of them, what's a good introduction to the, to the man? Because obviously, these worlds are very different.

• 2:22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:02Lex Fridman?

  The philosophies are very different.

• 2:22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:04Lex Fridman?

  What's a good introduction to the human?

• 2:22:09Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:22:14Speaker 01

  Maybe Seven Eves, because it's got big themes. It's, you know, it's about heavy, heavy things happening to the human race.

• 2:22:25Speaker 01

  Uh, but hopefully the story is told through a cast of characters that uh people can relate to, you know, and it moves along. Uh, so uh it it does go kind of deep eventually on how rockets work and orbital mechanics and all that stuff, but um people were able to get through it anyway, or some people just skip over that. It's fine, you know?

• 2:22:52Lex Fridman?

  As an author, let me ask you, what books had a big impact on your life that you've read? Is there any that jump to mind that you learned from as a writer, as a philosopher, as a mathematician, as an engineer?

• 2:23:07Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. This is one of these questions where I always blank out and then when I'm walking out the door, I'll I'll remember 12 of them.

• 2:23:16Lex Fridman?

  So this is a random selection that doesn't represent the top?

• 2:23:19Speaker 01

  The top ones. Um, well, I mentioned, you know, Gulag Archipelago. That's kind of a hefty and dark, but.

• 2:23:27Lex Fridman?

  And that has a personal connection as well?

• 2:23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, just, yeah, cuz.

• 2:23:31Lex Fridman?

  It's like where you found the book too.

• 2:23:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:23:33Lex Fridman?

  The part, the time in your life, where you found it.

• 2:23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:36Lex Fridman?

  Who recommended it? That's also part of the story.

• 2:23:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's definitely that. There's, you know, I I circle back to Moby Dick a lot.

• 2:23:45Speaker 01

  Because we read it in a uh, a really great English class I had in high school and I came in with an oppositional stance because I thought that the teacher was going to try to talk me into having all kinds of highfalutin ideas about allegory and what does this mean and what's the symbolism? And it turned out that uh,

• 2:24:10Speaker 01

  it turned out to be a lot more interesting and satisfying than that.

• 2:24:14Lex Fridman?

  What was the first powerful book you remember reading that like? Convince you that this form could have depth?

• 2:24:23Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:24:24Lex Fridman?

  Was it Moby Dick? Was it like in high school?

• 2:24:27Speaker 01

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

• 2:24:32Speaker 01

  I mean, I used to read a lot of classics comics. When I was, I don't know if you've seen these. It's a whole series of comic books. That um, it was viral. You could uh, in the, in the back of each comic book was an order form. You could check some boxes and fill out your address and mail it in and more would show up. And but it was like, they would do the Count of Monte Cristo, you know, Moby Dick. You know, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robinson Crusoe, you know, all this sort of classic books. Were they had put into comic book form.

• 2:25:11Lex Fridman?

  That's amazing.

• 2:25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Reading Moby Dick, if you're nine years old, is a tall order. There, there's some very complicated sentences in there.

• 2:25:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:21Speaker 01

  And a lot of digressions. But if you're just looking at the comic books, it's like, holy shit, look at that whale. You know?

• 2:25:29Speaker 01

  And um.

• 2:25:30Lex Fridman?

  And ultimately, the power of the story doesn't need the complicated words.

• 2:25:36Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So you could get kind of a grounding in a lot of classic works of literature without actually reading them, which is, you know. It's great when you're nine years old. So, so I read a lot of that stuff. Uh, for sure. The annotated Sherlock Holmes.

• 2:25:58Lex Fridman?

  You, you mentioned David Doch too as an inspiration for some of your work. I mean, you, you've obviously didn't like really a lot of research for the books you, you do. Roger Penrose. What, uh, do you remember a book that made you want to become a writer? Or a moment that made you become?

• 2:26:15Speaker 01

  I think like the.

• 2:26:19Speaker 01

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

• 2:26:25Speaker 01

  one of my friends came to school one day, he was wearing leather shoes, like dress shoes. And I hated dress shoes because mine never fit. And so they were uncomfortable. I couldn't run. You know, they were cold. It was Iowa. So I kind of said,

• 2:26:45Speaker 01

  I remember very clearly thinking, okay, I don't like where this is going. Like, does this mean that next year, all of the kids are going to be wearing leather shoes?

• 2:27:00Speaker 01

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

• 2:27:04Speaker 01

  So that was like the first time I thought about trying to find such a job, you know, being a writer. And then, and then I just read a lot of just classic science fiction short stories and started, you know, trying to write some of my own. And they were just classic young adult stories like by Heinlein. And the other classic names that you think of, but the Heinlein ones stuck, have stuck with me in a way that the others didn't.

• 2:27:33Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:27:43Speaker 01

  Uh, greatest.

• 2:27:46Lex Fridman?

  I'm loving torturing you right now.

• 2:27:47Speaker 01

  Greatest ever non Stevenson. Do we include fantasy? There just have to be science fiction.

• 2:27:54Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting fantasy. Hmm.

• 2:27:59Lex Fridman?

  I did not expect that twist.

• 2:28:01Speaker 01

  Well, in a weird way, they're lumped together in people's minds, right? So.

• 2:28:05Lex Fridman?

  They are, but there's also a boundary somehow.

• 2:28:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:10Lex Fridman?

  I'm not sure what that is exactly.

• 2:28:11Speaker 01

  Nobody is. It's a mystery. So I mean, if we do include it, then it's easily the Lord of the Rings. But I mean, greatness is an interesting quality to try to define.

• 2:28:28Speaker 01

  And for me, a lot of the the fun and the joy of such books is is not in what you'd call greatness, but just storytelling. So I was always a big fan of Have Space Suit, We'll Travel, which is a Heinlein young adult book. It's just it's just a fun, good read.

• 2:28:47Lex Fridman?

  So so fun is a big component. Greatness is overrated.

• 2:28:53Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know it's overrated, but it's just, you know, it's it might be underdefined, put it that way. So.

• 2:29:02Lex Fridman?

  Have Space Suit, We'll Travel. Now I definitely have to read that one.

• 2:29:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:05Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Iowa. I was there a couple of times. I got to spend quite a bit of time with Dan Gable, with Tom Brands, who are wrestlers. Was is it now wrestling, martial arts, part of your life, any part of your form formation of who you are as a human being?

• 2:29:26Speaker 01

  I think so. In a it was a late. It was a late thing for me, but growing up in Ames, Dan Gable was a few years older than me. And so sometimes we would go to the arena at the university and watch wrestling meets. And and this was before his Olympic career. So everyone knew he was the star of that team, and that he was the best. But people didn't yet know that he was the greatest of all time.

• 2:29:58Lex Fridman?

  Gee, you saw Gable. So that was part. It's it's funny. It feels like a small world that you would be in the same space as Dan Gable.

• 2:30:07Speaker 01

  Well, from 100 feet away, a little dot on the mat, trouncing his opponents, him and him and Chris Taylor. So the other star was this 400 pound plus guy named Chris Taylor, who also went to the Olympics. So yeah, people, you know, he was he was a no, he was an athletic hero. And wrestling is.

• 2:30:32Speaker 01

  There's certain states like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Iowa, where wrestling is the sport. Because those are states of small towns. And so if you're a small town, if you're like Dan Gable, and you have to be on a football team with 20 other guys who are not Dan Gable, then no matter how good you are, your team might, might suck. But if in a solo thing, you can, you can go to the Olympics. So we did a lot of wrestling in our gym classes in school and I didn't like it. And I think partly it's just that it was so, so competitive and the people

• 2:31:12Speaker 01

  who were, who cared about it, really cared about it a lot, you know, and so it was, it was pretty tough. I didn't think I had the right body type. But then when I was, after college, I was in Iowa City for a few years when he was coaching the, the wrestling team there. And he, he won like nine championships out of 10 years, you know, during that, during that time. So he was both the greatest individual wrestler of all time and like the greatest team coach. So I've never met him, but we've, he's kind of been like in my sphere of awareness since I was, you know, kind of my whole life.

• 2:31:56Speaker 01

  And people would always tell stories about him, like, I think he got arrested once for some kind of, I don't know, minor offense in Ames. And so he just basically stayed up all night. He was in this cage in the jail. He just stayed up all night doing pull-ups.

• 2:32:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, sounds about right.

• 2:32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh, so, yeah.

• 2:32:21Lex Fridman?

  So has that been, I mean, Iowa is such an interesting place in the world. And wrestling is just part of that story.

• 2:32:30Lex Fridman?

  Is that somewhere in there? Does that resonate deeply with who you are?

• 2:32:36Speaker 01

  It was a formative, yeah, thing for me, growing up there, for sure. It's just a, you know, at least it used to be a very orderly place, high social capital, very minimal class differences. So like, you'd have some people who would drive a Cadillac instead of a Chevy, but that was it. Those were the rich people, right? So, and a college town is always a different environment. Like, you know, Austin has some of this.

• 2:33:14Speaker 01

  So it was a pretty kind of utopian, other than the weather and a few other things, environment to grow up in. The martial art I ended up doing is sword stuff, which is interesting because it uses a different feedback loop. So when you're, if you're grappling,

• 2:33:35Speaker 01

  everything is through sense of touch. And your sense of touch is very old and simple, right? Like earthworms don't even have eyes, but they can tell when they're being touched, right? So it's very fast.

• 2:33:52Speaker 01

  And with, with a standoff art like boxing or some kinds of sword fighting, you're, you're not touching the other person most of the time. Your, your visual system is doing something way more, it's doing slam

• 2:34:11Speaker 01

  and trying to figure out what the other person is up to. And so that always felt more my speed. So in Olympic-style fencing, you're, it doesn't start really until you're crossing blades with the other person. And now you're back to wrestling. You're feeling what they're doing, and it's all about that. But some of the older sword arts don't engage the blade that way. You standoff at range and then you make cutting attacks. And And, uh, and so, so those are all processed visually.

• 2:34:53Speaker 01

  And I, I think I'm more of a slow thinker. So it works for me better.

• 2:35:00Lex Fridman?

  I mean, the same, it has the same, the artistry and the beauty of boxing. I suppose, just like you said, is like, there's no, there's no contact and it's all processed visually. And I'm sure there's a dance of its own.

• 2:35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:12Lex Fridman?

  Uh, that, that depends on the characteristic of a sword involved.

• 2:35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is a set of, of stances and, and, uh, basic reactions that you try to learn that are thought to be defensible, um, and, and safe or safer. And so it tends to be a series of short engagements where you'll, you'll close in, you'll try out your, your idea and it works or it doesn't. Then you, you back off again.

• 2:35:42Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting to think about like human history because martial arts, okay, that's a thing, but in terms of sword fighting, just the full range of humans that existed who mastered sword fighting or sought the mastery of sword fighting. Just imagine the thousands of people who, the heights they have achieved. Cause the stakes are so incredibly high.

• 2:36:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:10Lex Fridman?

  To be good.

• 2:36:11Speaker 01

  And it's the richest, most powerful people in, in those societies, spending whatever it takes to get the best gear and the best training. Cause you're right, everything depends on it.

• 2:36:25Lex Fridman?

  And it's still life and death. I mean, that, that's fascinating. Uh, that, that's fascinating. We perhaps have lost that forever with greater weapons. I mean, the artistry of sword fighting, when it's life and death and you go into war, you have the Miyamoto Masashis of the world, right? The. I don't know, there's a there's a poetry to that, that there's a mastery to that, that I don't know if we could achieve with any other kind of martial art.

• 2:36:57Speaker 01

  Well, the one of the good, you were talking earlier about the the the good effects of the internet, social media that we sometimes overlook and and one of those is that there were all these isolated people around the world who were interested in this, who found each other and kind of created a network of of people who help each other learn these things. So that doesn't mean that anyone is is up to the level of that you're talking about yet, but but it is happening and

• 2:37:31Speaker 01

  and so there's a a a large number of old treatises, old written documents that have been dug up from libraries and and people have been going over these and translating them from old dialects of Italian and German to make sense of them and and learning how to do these techniques with different different weapons.

• 2:37:58Speaker 01

  Actually, there's a guy here in Austin named Damon Stith who does African, historical African martial arts. Also martial arts of of enslaved Africans who

• 2:38:12Speaker 01

  would learn machete fighting techniques in the Caribbean, South America. He's probably within a mile of us.

• 2:38:19Lex Fridman?

  That's awesome.

• 2:38:20Speaker 01

  Amazing guy.

• 2:38:21Lex Fridman?

  I'm gonna look him up.

• 2:38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38:23Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you for advice? Can you give advice for young people, high school, college, you know, undergrads? Thinking about their career, thinking about life, how to live a life they can be proud of. You think quite a bit about like what it's required to be innovative in this world. You think quite a bit about the future. So if somebody wanted to be a person that makes a big impact in the future, what advice would you give them?

• 2:38:54Speaker 01

  I think a big part of it is finding the thing that you will do.

• 2:39:01Speaker 01

  Happily and I don't want to say obsessively because that sounds like maybe it's pathological. But, but if you can find a thing that you'll, you know, you'll sit down, you'll start doing it and hours later, you kind of snap out of it. Where did the time go?

• 2:39:19Speaker 01

  Then that's a really key discovery for anyone to make about themselves when they're young. Because if you don't have that, it's hard to, to figure out where you should put your energies, you know? And as you might have the best intentions, you might say, I, you know, I want world peace or whatever. But at, at the end of the day, what really matters is how do you spend your time? And, and are you spending it in a way that's productive? And because it doesn't matter how smart you are or well intentioned you are unless you've figured that out.

• 2:40:05Lex Fridman?

  And so finding that thing in which you can sort of, you're naturally lose yourself in. See, the thing is, at least for me, there's a lot of things like that, but I first have to overcome the initial hump of really sucking at that thing. Like, the fun starts a little bit after the first hump of really sucking. And then you could suck just regularly.

• 2:40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:30Lex Fridman?

  So often, oftentimes, people can give up too early, I think. I mean, that's true with mathematics for me, it's, for a lot of people, is if you just give it a chance to struggle. If, if you give yourself time to struggle, you'll find a way, you'll find the thing within that thing that you can lose track of time with.

• 2:40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a key detail that, that's an important thing to add to, to what I said, which is that this might not happen the first time you do a thing. Maybe it will. But you might have to climb that learning curve. And if there's pressures in your life that are making you feel bad about that. Then it might prevent you from from getting where you need to be.

• 2:41:21Speaker 01

  So there's some complexity there that make can make this kind of non-obvious. But that's what that's why we need, you know, good teachers.

• 2:41:35Speaker 01

  You know, another beneficial thing of the internet is YouTube and being able to learn things, how to do things on YouTube. The dude who made the YouTube video doesn't care how many times you hit pause and rewind.

• 2:41:53Speaker 01

  They're never gonna like roll their eyes and and be impatient with you.

• 2:42:00Lex Fridman?

  And sometimes spending a huge amount of time on one video or one book, like making that the thing you just spend a huge amount of time on rereading, rereading, or rewatching, rewatching. That that somehow really solidifies your love for that thing. And like the depth of understanding you start to gain, and it's okay to stay with that. I used to think like, there's all these books out there. So like, I need to keep reading or keep reading. But then I realized, I think it was somewhere in college,

• 2:42:38Lex Fridman?

  where you could just spend your whole life with a single textbook. There's nothing that textbook.

• 2:42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:45Lex Fridman?

  To really, really stay.

• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  Miesner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation, you know, is is one of those. Or another one is The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose, which is incredibly deep, and it starts with like, two plus two equals four. And at the end, you're at the boundaries of of physics. It's an amazing, amazing book.

• 2:43:09Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you the big ridiculous question.

• 2:43:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:43:11Lex Fridman?

  Since you've pondered some big ridiculous questions in your work, what's the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life?

• 2:43:20Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:43:20Lex Fridman?

  Human life?

• 2:43:22Speaker 01

  Well, as far as I know, we're unique in the the universe. There's no evidence that there's anything else in the universe that's as complicated as what's between our ears. Might be, you can't rule it out, but.

• 2:43:39Speaker 01

  So we appear to be pretty special. And so it's got to have something to do with that. And one of the reasons I like David Deutsch, in particular, his book, The Beginning of Infinity, is that he talks about the power of explanations and the fact that most civilizations are static, that they've got a set of dogmas that they arrive at somehow. And they just pass those on from one generation to the next, and nothing changes. But that huge changes have happened when people sort of follow, whatever you want to call it,

• 2:44:23Speaker 01

  the scientific method or enlightenment. There's different ways of thinking about it, but basically explanatory, it's about the power of explanations and being able to figure out why things are the way they are. And that has created changes in our thinking, in our way of life over the last few centuries that are explosive compared to anything that came before. And David sort of verges on classifying this as like a force of nature in its potential transformative power. If we keep going, you know, we could, you know,

• 2:45:07Speaker 01

  if we figure out how to colonize the universe, like you were talking about earlier, how to spread to other star systems, then it is effectively a force of nature.

• 2:45:20Lex Fridman?

  This kind of drive to understand more and more and more, deeper and deeper and deeper, and to engineer stuff so that we can understand even more.

• 2:45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's the, well, it's the old, the universe created us to understand itself. Maybe that's the whole purpose.

• 2:45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:40Lex Fridman?

  It is an interesting, peculiar side effect of the way we've been created is we seem to be conscious beings. We seem to have little egos. We seem to be born and die pretty quickly. There's a bunch of drama. We're all within ourselves, pretty unique. And we fall in love and start wars and there's hate and all the full interesting dynamic of it. So it's not just about the individual people. Yeah. Somehow like the concert that we played together. Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. So. That's kind of interesting. There's a lot of peculiar aspects of that, that I wonder if they're fundamental or just quirks of evolution. Whether it's, whether it's death,

• 2:46:23Lex Fridman?

  whether it's love, whether all those things. I wonder if they're, from an engineering perspective, when we're trying to create that intelligent toaster that listens for the, for the slam door and the smell of burning toast, whether that toaster, it should be afraid of death and should fall in love just like we do. Neil, you're a fascinating human being. You've impacted the lives of millions of people. Thank you. It's a huge honor that you would spend your valuable time with me today. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming down to beautiful, hot Texas. And thank you for talking today.

• 2:47:06Lex Fridman?

  It was a pleasure. I'm glad I came and did it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Neil Stephenson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Neil Stephenson himself in his novel, Snow Crash. The world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places. Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.