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Neal Stephenson On AI And What Comes Next
Neal Stephenson says AI's path is uncertain, but competition with China makes slowing its development difficult.
Core Memory · Ashlee Vance
- Neal Stephenson is author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and D: Heavy Water.
The best minutes
- 17:25Uncertainty can make an AI arms race hard to pause6 min
- 1:27:14Education tools should start with teachers’ real needs5 min
- 1:20:32Unproven launch systems struggle to insure payloads2 min
Also worth watching
- 1:05:58Stephenson left Blue Origin when its work shifted to engineering4 min
- 1:14:12A tall tower could double payload mass to orbit6 min
- 55:06Fortnite story worlds can use AI without generating their visuals7 min
- 25:02Tech leaders' investor duties shape their choices3 min
- 47:19Positive science fiction takes more work to imagine3 min
Skip the book-tour logistics, the extended brain-computer-interface and language discussion, and the sword-fighting and selective-technology questions.
Summary · 5 min read
Neal Stephenson is the author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. His new novel, D: Heavy Water, continues a series about the physics developments that led to the Manhattan Project; he also worked on early alternative-launch studies at Blue Origin and is developing Whenere, a project for creating stories in fictional worlds.
Stephenson says AI's arrival surprised him and argues that its progress may eventually flatten, though he cannot rule out continued rapid gains. He sees competition with China as a reason leaders may resist slowing development, comparing that dilemma to the uncertainty that prompted the Manhattan Project; he also says company leaders face investor obligations. He is wary of technologies that bypass the body and names atmospheric carbon and disagreement over what is real as his two main worries. Beyond AI, he discusses hopeful science fiction, the long wait for a Snow Crash adaptation, Whenere, Blue Origin's early years and the challenge of building educational technology that serves more than exceptional students.
Minute by minute
- 1:49D revisits the road to the bomb
Neal Stephenson says D: Heavy Water continues a planned series about physics discoveries in Europe during the 1930s that set up the Manhattan Project. He describes it as an espionage and action story as well as a book about physics, with scientific developments unfolding alongside the rise of Nazi Germany and the start of World War II.
- 8:26AI caught Stephenson off guard
After decades of thinking AI remained software that did not quite work, Stephenson says its recent progress surprised him. He has started using it for tasks other than writing, but expects AI may follow an S-curve rather than rise indefinitely; nuclear weapons are the one technology he cites as an exception to that pattern.
- 15:28AI competition echoes the bomb race
Vance raises whether AI companies now have more computing capacity than the government could build. Stephenson says the choice to slow down or keep going resembles the Manhattan Project dilemma: Allied officials acted on signs that Germany was seeking heavy water and uranium, without knowing how far the German program would get. He sees similar uncertainty in the race with China.
- 24:52Investor duties shape company choices
Stephenson says leaders of growing companies have a fiduciary responsibility to repay investors, and boards can replace them if they fail to pursue that duty. He argues that this pressure can make business decisions take precedence over ethical considerations, while cautioning that people in those roles are not necessarily amoral.
- 28:29BCIs meet embodied limits
Stephenson says brain-computer interfaces can help people with ALS or locked-in syndrome, but he is less drawn to them because words and bodily movement are central to his work and thought. He writes with a fountain pen and wonders what bypassing the body and tongue could mean. He names excess atmospheric carbon and people's inability to agree on what is real as his two biggest worries, and says BCI does not address them for him.
- 40:09Hopeful futures take more work
Stephenson recalls helping create the Hieroglyph anthology to imagine constructive futures, after a challenge to science-fiction writers to inspire engineers. He says dystopian films can rely on damaged versions of familiar places, while positive futures require harder imagining. He points to Star Trek as an example of a fictional world whose creators put effort into envisioning the future.
- 49:54Snow Crash remains unadapted
Stephenson says people have discussed adapting Snow Crash since its publication, but he often thought earlier attempts would have looked dated as computer graphics improved. He says the rights have been with Paramount and Skydance, and that the reason the project has not moved forward remains a mystery to him.
- 55:06Fans can shape fictional worlds
Stephenson says Whenere aims to let fans create stories inside fictional worlds, rather than waiting for Hollywood adaptations that may disappoint them. It uses Unreal Editor for Fortnite to render scenes, while AI can help with scripts or non-player characters. The team was preparing an early playtest using a Pride and Prejudice setting.
- 1:03:18Stephenson left Blue Origin's engineering path
Stephenson says he joined Blue Operations LLC at its inception in 1999 and left at the end of 2006, after the group moved from studying alternative launch concepts to building rockets. He felt his role was less useful in an engineering organization and says the parting was amicable. He also says he proposed tortoises for Blue Origin's coat of arms to signal that the company could work at its own pace.
- 1:13:41A tall tower could aid launches
Stephenson says his early Blue Origin group considered ideas such as centrifuge launch systems and a ramjet accelerator. The concept he still wants someone to build is a tall launch tower: he says launching from higher up could reduce noise and structural demands on a rocket, and his calculations suggested it could put twice as much mass into low Earth orbit for a given configuration.
- 1:20:32Launch insurance favors proven rockets
Stephenson says the commercial market depended on expensive satellites whose owners could lose substantial revenue if a launch was delayed. Because a new launch concept would be difficult to insure, customers had reason to choose a proven provider even if its rocket cost more. He recalls that this made it hard for a radical design to gain commercial traction.
- 1:23:03A basket protects the sword hand
Stephenson says he now focuses on the basket-hilted broadsword, which protects the user's hand. He turned to it partly after breaking his hands while practicing with longswords, which lack that protection, and says he thinks the weapon is often used incorrectly.
- 1:25:42Education tools must meet classroom needs
Stephenson invokes Kevin Kelly's observation that Amish communities adopt some technologies and reject others, and notes that people make similar choices about messaging apps and children's screen use. On the illustrated primer from The Diamond Age, he says he is trying to understand what teachers actually need and warns that past education-technology initiatives often missed classroom priorities. He distinguishes helping all students from giving an exceptional child a tool, citing Abraham Lincoln's resourceful childhood as an example of a child who might thrive without one.
- 1:32:25Fiction needs technological complexity
Stephenson says a novelist must make a fictional world coherent enough to keep readers engaged. When a story involves technology, he argues, writers need to consider how it could succeed, fail or be misused, how society would respond, and whether its economics make sense. He says those layers of complexity explain why his answers about the future can sound ambivalent.
Published Oct 28, 2026.
Transcript · 1 h 4 m read
Core Memory, hosted by Ashlee Vance, with Neal Stephenson.
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
Everyone wants to know, like, utopia or dystopia? Oh, yeah. Yeah, where are we heading? Do we take our foot off the gas, hit the pause button, China gets it, or, you know, do we keep the pedal to the metal? They may not necessarily be amoral, but they got to do what they got to do. Very well-known tech figures fully think we are living in the singularity. I'm more of an S-curve guy. The two big problems that I'm scared of are too much carbon in the atmosphere and the fact that people cannot agree on what is real. They found a cube of uranium in some guy's garage. He'd built a nuclear fuser in his bedroom using only Claude as his guide.
He'd never built a hardware system before. If anyone should have tons of TV shows and movies based on their work, it's you. The whole AI revolution sort of blindsided me in a lot of ways. is you become an instant expert in whatever you're writing about, and then you walk away from it. Normally this time, I would be doing an introduction, or would have already done an introduction, but our guest today needs no such introduction. I'll embarrass you by saying that. Living legend, one of the greats among us. Neil Stephenson, famous author, sci-fi, author, historical fiction, and some nonfiction. Now, not at least in magazines and whatnot.
And while most, as a fellow author, since most people will be listening now, I think we should get right to the point at the beginning, which is you have a new book out. I do. Do you want to? D. Yeah, D. And whatever you want to tell us about it. I know it's a sequel and I'll let you do it. Yeah, well, it's the second book in a series that'll probably go to three. And it's so the name of the series is Bomb Light. The first book was called Polo Stan. D is continuing the story from pretty much where Polo Stan left off. And this is a story about, the whole series is about developments in physics during the 30s that led up to the Manhattan Project and the bomb.
Read the whole transcript
But it's stuff that I didn't really know about until comparatively recently. Everyone knows kind of the basic story of the Manhattan Project about Oppenheimer and Groves and the other big players in that project. But that stuff all happened. It was all kind of teed up in the mid to late 30s by other things that went on in Europe that I think are equally interesting in a lot of ways. So I decided to write about that. It's not, I mean, I say it's about physics, and it is, but in case that's scaring anyone off, it is also kind of an espionage and action kind of book. because like one of the weirdest things about this part of history is that these incredibly important developments that led to nuclear energy and the bomb just happened by pure coincidence to be going on at exactly the same time as the rise of the Nazis and Hitler's invasion of Poland and the beginning of the Second World War.
so that's merely a coincidence but the fact that those things were happening simultaneously made for a really interesting situation uh fantastic and i'm i'm sure people our audience I'm sure you have many, many readers among our listeners who have been waiting for this book and are excited to grab it. Now, I'm going to go off script, if that's okay, because I figured you have to... I didn't know there was a script. No, there isn't, there isn't really, but, um, and it's, it's really, it's hard to interview someone who's been interviewed so many times and instinctually I put up on X, what should I ask you?
And then everyone wants to know your vision of the future. And I know you don't, yeah, you don't really like, like to do that. What's it like? What's it like being, um, I was curious how you feel about this, the whole book tour exercise. I, it's, it was, it's never my favorite thing to do. I feel like you have to go on autopilots and repeat yourself over and over again. You know, so obviously it's a huge privilege to publish a book at all. And among people who get to publish books, it's a huge privilege to have a book tour. Now you're going to make me look like an asshole. Well, I mean, I have to preface the answer by saying that.
You understand, you know. um but the um i mean i actually don't mind it um i think uh i mean i only have to do it for like two weeks every two or three years right and i could do anything uh and i mean they make it pretty easy it's not there people used to go on these endless book tours for months that were just terrible that's what i was gonna ask you must be different than when you first started writing Because especially even before COVID, it felt like they were slowing down and it felt like COVID almost killed the book tour to some degree. And then I noticed now all my author friends, it's very condensed.
Well, I think they are, yeah, it could be that the author friends you have now are different from the ones you had before. Because I think that, you know, the old school, like driving from city to city with a bunch of books in the trunk of your car style of book tour is something that people used to do kind of to get their career going. And the modern, so publisher-financed and publisher-organized book tour is a whole different animal. And what they're basically trying to do is hit the bookstores that they think are going to give the best numbers and cram as many of those events into, say, a two-week period as is physically possible with airplanes.
Yeah. And so because, you know, what you want to do is is jack up the sales figures for those those key stores. And that's partly about, you know, hopefully you get a position, a better position on the bestseller list, which leads to knock on effects. And even if you don't, it's a way of making friends with the people who run those bookstores. you know it's it's not a high paying job a lot of times it's not you know um uh it's uh uh one i think one of the perks if you're a person who works in a bookstore runs a bookstore is being able to to do an event right so it's kind of win-win yeah uh they love it i live in mountain view and andy weir used to live there and for a moment in time he will not compare myself to Andy Weir but we we had cornered the market on Mars and and yeah and the um the bookstore loved it yeah I've done I've done two events on two occasions when he came to Seattle I was got to be the interlocutor who talked to him yeah oh yeah that's perfect third place Books. Yeah, it was, it was, it was fun. I mean, there's, there's, you know, there's, I feel bad, because I know people will throw similar questions at you. But then there's some things where I feel like I have to, I have to ask you this stuff. And I'm going to be doesn't matter, just turn my brain off. I'm going to be indulgent. And, and ask and ask these things. Yeah, I mean, look, so many, I feel like I've spent my entire career pretty much covering. So I tend to cover things that are like at the very
edge of what's just becoming possible and and the yeah the sort of you know not I mean a little bit crazy like real ideas but at the at the fringe end of science and technology and and quite often it's things that you predicted would happen and or um people who were inspired by your books and ideas who then went off to make them real and then clearly we're living in this peculiar moment where AI is, um, lighting up in some sort of fashion. And yeah, I mean, I, I've got, got you here. I just couldn't be more, um, curious about what you make about this particular moment in time. Well, yeah, well that's pretty broad. I'll see what I can do with that. Yeah. I mean, um, uh, you know, for me, the whole AI, you know, revolution sort of blindsided me in a lot of ways. I mean, I've obviously been aware for decades that there was this thing called artificial intelligence and people were working on it, you know, and until pretty recently, it seemed like it was just software, you know, and AI was always used to refer to something that we haven't quite got working yet. And that's clearly no longer the case. And so after decades of kind of um i guess downplaying it a little bit i've been a little slow to uh to to realize that
you know something something's happening now um so i have you know kind of belatedly come to it started using it i mean that's sort of amusing yeah i know yeah um but i mean the when you're writing books, like one thing that people may not realize is that, um, um, you become an instant expert in whatever you're writing about and, uh, and then you walk away from it. Um, and so, um, and so, um, people tend to assume I know a lot of things about stuff that I, I stopped paying attention to like 30 years ago because I finished the book and I'm like, okay, you know, what am I going to uh what i'm going to write about next so um um so anyway i mean um the uh i think i'm kind of up to speed on it now as much as you can be without actually working at a at an ai lab and i've been using it um quite a bit not not for writing but for other stuff but i mean the you know there's people who are i guess perhaps more um fully directly associated with something like the singularity like ray kurzweil though you explore these themes in in your book but there's guys i hang out with well i mean this is you know it's not like i'm in some private company here i mean they very well-known tech figures fully think we are living in the singularity
right now or or whatever the beginning of the the takeoff i mean is do you have any I mean, I'm more of an S-curve guy, so the only example I can really think of where it didn't tail off at some point become an S-curve. was nuclear weapons. Okay, so that was a case where it went from, you know, people in labs doing little tabletop experiments to hydrogen bombs in like 15 years. And so that was a case where there never was really a ceiling that it tapered off to. The Russians end up building the Tsar Bomba, which is like 50 megatons, and basically figured out that you could go on making them bigger all you want, but beyond a certain size, all it does is punch a hole in the atmosphere and vent out into space.
So there wasn't a technical ceiling on how big you could make a bomb. But other than that, you know, most technologies do at some point hit some kind of natural limitation. And so what seemed like an exponential curve at a certain point ends up being an S-curve. So I assume that AI is one of those. I could be wrong. I mean, it's a weird moment because it feels like what we've done so far is extremely brute force, vacuuming up all these words, kind of getting, I don't know if lucky is the right word, but having some things like transformers come out that unlock these new powers on this stuff. And then it's not at all clear to me, even though they're clearly getting better and better.
There is something about this that still feels very almost rudimentary and early days to me. And like we could sort of hit a wall. But when you talk to the people at OpenAI and Cloud or in Anthropic, you know, they argue something very different that it is totally clear to them that this just keeps going. Keeps going. Computers we put in. Okay. I mean, they know more than I do. You're so bellow about all this. I thought this would be like sort of a profound moment of sorts maybe. Well, all I can do is play with it. Yeah. Play with what's publicly available, you know, see how it might be interesting or useful to me.
So I think right now the steepness of the curve feels very palpable to a lot of people because there's whole swaths of the economy where people are looking at this and saying, okay, I think my job is becoming obsolete, right? Or at least it's going to get radically transformed now. And so I think that adds a strong sense of anxiety and crisis to what's going on because it's obviously showing the potential to disrupt a lot of people's lives and careers. So I think that adds to a sense that, you know, kind of something explosive is going on. um but um again i just don't have enough knowledge of of my own knowledge to um to to know where it might end up and there there's other themes that you've written about that seem to be taking place among these ai companies or at least to me you have a it looks to me a moment in time when corporations are clearly quite a bit more powerful than the government in a lot of ways You have whatever the number is you want to put on it, four or five of these giant labs.
They're run by figures that at the moment all seem to kind of hate each other and are chasing. I mean, it's almost... It always reminds me of Lord of the Rings. They're all sort of chasing the ring, but they're deeply afraid of the ring at the same time. And I mean, so that part could be comical at times. But, you know, this is something I've been writing about for a long time, which was even back when Tesla started building a nationwide charging network and then SpaceX, with its success, with its rockets, you could just tell that companies were doing things that governments used to do and doing them much like the government seems almost incapable of doing things like this now and then then you reach this point where these ai companies they they have so much more computing capacity even if the i think if the u.s government wanted to build data centers of the scale that these companies are i'm not sure that it could oh that it could yeah yeah and so you know you end up in this this spot where um if this technology even remotely lives up to its billing the companies are in charge with something very powerful um yeah you know this is a very long-winded way i i don't even know how much you pay attention to this stuff but um clearly one group of a large group of people
think these tech companies are evil all five of these people running these these labs are to be questioned um do you do you come down one side or the other on any of this i mean uh it they um
“you have no further info then the only thing you can do at that point is launch the manhattan project.”
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When we were talking about China, how much do you pay attention to what's going on in China at the moment from a tech and science standpoint? Tech and science. I mean, I don't have any great insights that... Go beyond, you know, what another reasonably well-informed person would know. I don't have a lot of contact there. I don't visit there. So I don't know if I can be super interesting about that. No, I find it fascinating. I have become quite convinced that they will be leading our technological future. Oh, yeah. There's all kinds of evidence to support that. Yeah, and I didn't know if you'd played out in your head maybe what that looks like at all.
How much do you follow the brain-computer interface stuff that's going on? I, you know, have... I've known a couple people who've gotten involved in that stuff. I don't... I mean, it's obviously great for, you know, if you've got ALS, let's say, you know or locked in syndrome or something like that um so um so that's wonderful um i don't i'm my whole life and career everything that makes me happy is about words it's about translating concepts into words and then words back into concepts okay so um so the interface of letters on a page is what I like. It's where I'm happy. I've never felt any particular desire to have something different. So I've tended, I guess, not to pay super close attention to that stuff, just because I don't see how it's applicable to my, to my life. It's so different that I would have, that I was picturing in my head. I just thought you'd be like obsessed with all this, all the stuff and where it was at i mean it's still it's still a little too abstract for me i guess um so um if i could look at specific examples of what people are doing with it then maybe it would be more uh something i could react to um but um i i think we are embodied creatures and i think that um uh bypassing the body um i just don't understand it you know i mean from
i write with a fountain pen on paper yeah you know um the the the full engagement of the body not just the abstract stuff up here but you know the motor cortex and down the arm to the hand uh that is all part of thinking to me it's not it's not that there's thinking which is this separate thing up here and then there this this chunk of meat attached to it that's kind of dumb and stupid it's all you know we're all one big kind of brainified you know creature so uh i mean i guess it's an interesting thought experiment to think about bypassing the body but um i can't get any real traction on it myself i read you i read you talking about this and how you write i it was envious when i was younger in my teenage years always had the notebook and was writing short stories and things like that but my handwriting is so bad that i could barely read it then and i couldn't read your own hand i mean like you know that's pretty bad no i mean like okay but i wouldn't want to write an entire book and then have to transcribe what i've done and and i but i like that that sensation you're talking about i do miss that i feel like i am totally a different um i think quite differently writing than i do just speaking what's coming out of my like when i think about oh what would it be like if you had a
bci and you could just yeah think out the thoughts i think i would do really quite poorly because there is something about this um this movement and this this process of of how the words get shaped that feels so natural i think so i mean I got really interested in—here's a weird, like, side—I think it's a related but weird thing. So I started watching a lot of WNBA, and so I've watched a lot of video of Caitlin Clark, and she does something that Michael Jordan used to do, which is that basically if you're on the opposing team and you see their tongue come out, you know something bad is about to happen to you.
So it's the moments of maximum concentration when they're about to do some amazing thing, athletic feat, that suddenly the tongue is sticking out and then they do the amazing thing. And then sometimes after it's done, the tongue comes out again when they're sort of exulting in a dunk or an amazing shot or a great pass or whatever. And so I was kind of thinking about the whole tongue thing because it was a Michael Jordan thing, and you see it with some other great athletes. And I was thinking, why would you do that? There's got to be a reason, right? Right. So, you know, your brain at that moment fully engaged in, you know, taking in this whole sensory world around you and your your every muscle in your body kind of working in concert to to to carry out a three dimensional plan.
You know, what's the point of sticking your tongue out? And I don't know the answer, but there must be a reason. And, you know, one thing that occurs to me is that, you know, your tongue is, I don't know if it never touches the spinal cord. I don't know if there's nerves that go straight from your brain to your tongue without going through your spinal cord or if it's just very, very high up in the spinal cord. But, you know, maybe that's part of it. And kind of to the earlier point about BCIs, the, you know, the human tongue does amazing stuff when you think about speech. I mean, it's this multivalent tool. We use it to eat, obviously. But we also use it in speech. And speech is, you know, one of the things that differentiates us from like primates or lower, you know, other higher primates.
um so um you know what are the this is a question for you know people who study evolution and neurology but what is the um you know what's the evolutionary pathway where um we uh where early humans who kind of repurposed this basically food swallowing machine right to to make sounds to speak in a way that I think led to led to us very rapidly lapping all of the other animals in the world in terms of our brain size and our brain complexity so that's one of the things that I it's not really a clear a clear train of thought or a clear conclusion, but... But when I think about brain-computer interfaces, I'm like, well, what's the—are we going to bypass the tongue, you know?
And, you know, what does that mean for an embodied creature to not have to use that weird, complicated muscle anymore? Yeah, okay. So I've spent a lot of time on the BCI. I've been filming a Neuralink documentary and hanging out with the patients. And like you said, I mean, if you have ALS or you're paralyzed, I mean, it's quite obvious what we do. Then I try to play it forward in my head and I'm like, what superpower would I be sort of wanting from this? I mean, you know, we're already at the point where if I wanted to be controlling a robotic arm or something like that with my mind, I basically could be.
or if I had a prosthetic or an extra arm, I could. It's like, I don't know if I would want that. We can't really put information in yet in any, like, meaningful way, although, you know, the thought of just, like, in The Matrix downloading Kung Fu or Spanish or something like that seems appealing. My favorite is the one that I, like, feel on some sort of visceral level, and I don't know if it would be good or bad, is more of like the arrival style where the aliens are communicating with this symbol and it's, I do feel like our words are limited and that like if I go to a concert and I'm it's like hitting me in this euphoric way and you almost want to share that with the person next to you as you express it I don't really have a mechanism to convey to them what I'm feeling in my body and head and I have this You'd have to go home and write poetry Yeah, but even that, it's almost that burst of chemicals and energy and stuff.
And I wonder, I do sometimes wonder if we could get somewhere like that with BCI. But maybe that's horrible. I don't know if we all want to experience each other that way. Well, and then it becomes, if it's just a bunch of bits, then it's repeatable. And so you could just sit there like the monkey hitting the lever. uh, you know, uh, hitting your pleasure centers over and over again, um, to, uh, to inhabit this kind of fake euphoric, uh, imaginary world. So, and, and I'll, uh, I'll like veer off this line of questioning, but you know, okay. So I'm here, I'm covering BCI stuff. I'm covering artificial wombs. Um, you know, everything does, there is this weird class of, especially in biotech things that are right on the edge of becoming possible now um as i stated i mean i tend to get excited about these things obviously other people can see them in quite dystopian points of view um and so usually you there's nothing there's no there's nothing about this particular moment in 2026 that's making you tilt utopian or dystopian one way more i just like this moment feels a little unnerving and different and I mean so if I've got ALS then the biggest problem in my life is that and if a BCI helps with that then BCI is solving a huge problem
it's really important okay so that's great for me the two big problems that I'm scared of are too much carbon in the atmosphere and the fact that people cannot agree on what is real okay and so any uh technology or it doesn't have to be a technology but you know any anything of any action of any kind that addresses those problems really interesting to me i'm all over it okay okay but but if it's not like bci i don't see how it solves any problems that i'm currently having yeah you know i think you wrote an essay i think it was 2011-ish in wired about the struggle to come up with new big ideas and if i remember right i mean there was at least part of it that was things have become so specialized um you know you have to be so knowledgeable about this minutiae in your field that it was kind of hard to think maybe broad enough and be able to push things forward.
There was more to it than that. And when you wrote that, I think in just a couple years earlier, this guy Jonathan Huebner, who was in the Navy, he'd written this quite a paper that a lot of people had paid attention to, which is he'd gone through all the patent record and was trying to argue that similar thing, that we just weren't having these big, world-changing breakthroughs anymore. We'd kind of gone to the edges of the tree of invention. And so I was thinking, I paid a lot of attention to that essay, and then I noticed that yours was nearish in time, and I was thinking back to that moment in time.
And, you know, a lot of it, clearly now if you look, like AI would be something that is quite different, at least you know there were hints of of it back in 2011 but nothing like we have now no and then there's things like a ton of fusion startups now there's people doing some interesting things in space although i don't know if it's it's like would be revolution in some ways but in other ways not um yeah i was just kind of curious it's been i would think 15 years since you wrote that are we are we do you still feel the same way well the um i think that came out of uh that's I totally got the date wrong.
No, no, that sounds about right. I had, I don't know if it was in Wired, though, but I had been on a panel discussion with Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State, and he was sort of jokingly saying, you know, we've got all this technology and, you know, we're ready to go. you know we're ambitious uh and you science fiction writers are letting down the side because all you do is write kind of sad dystopian garbage that you know depicts a future we don't want to live in so why don't you you know shape up and write uh write some futures that are worthy of being made real you know and kind of go back to your uh your uh your your uh you know be more productive members of the society basically by inspiring engineers to do to do cool things and so out of that came a uh a book that was about then uh i mean i did write a piece about it um uh but uh we uh i worked with uh uh the the arizona state people we brought out a novel an anthology of science fiction stories called hieroglyph that was um you know meant to depict more kind of uh positive futures and um so my contribution to that was um a story about making a tall tower which was kind of the one um you know of all the alternative space launch
technologies that we looked at in the early years of blue that was the one that kind of stuck with me is hey you know this is actually worth doing um just for the non-space nerds were blue origin blue origin yeah at the time it was it was blue operations llc but then it it became blue origin so um The, uh, uh, so, so anyway, I mean, there's, there's, uh, this is a common, uh, theme. I've, I've heard this from a lot of people, even within the last few months, I've heard multiple times from people in the tech world, investors, um, mostly investors who are kind of like hey you know uh you know is there any way we can foster the uh the writing of you know science fiction that's inspiring and it makes people want to go out and build build cool things again i hear this all the time yeah yeah yeah yeah no it's uh i was actually i was gonna ask you about this very thing yeah yeah so i'm um i i just three weeks ago um was it uh one of the judges on a SpaceX, not SpaceX, XPRIZE competition to make films about that presented technology and particularly AI in a somewhat more encouraging light.
Go ahead. Do you feel like you at all have a... Okay, so I've been through this exercise. when when uh after chat gbt came out there were a bunch of people in silica valley who kind of got together it wasn't like a cloak and dagger thing but it was a little under the radar and it was like can we get people don't know what's coming yeah we see what's coming yeah we don't want to scare them and we're pretty optimistic about what's happening we need to very quickly make some science fiction mass media that's on netflix or somewhere where enough people will see it that people can when was this this is like this is probably 2024 okay um it's it's possible it's all yeah spilled over and spilled out in some ways or a little parallel evolution or something yeah it was co-sponsored by google 100 zeros okay so mine's a little different but but um okay the and you know and so i'm sitting here in these conversations it's like i sort of get the spirit of it almost all good science fiction is tends to have things going wrong in some way for the most part i think um it's fair to say and then you know so you're sort of in this battle of well you can't just write some uh everything is wonderful thing but they and they the tech
people tend to struggle with that and and then um struggle quite badly and then and then you know it's not all clear to me like like someone like you um you know you write about these futures were things to go wrong, but you're clearly very interested in technology. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't know. So that is something that appeals to you on some level is that you do think you can. Well, I'm happy to, um, to help, you know, foster that stuff. You know, it's a little side project or series of little side projects that doesn't, you know, I mean, it could have some kind of constructive effect. Uh, it could, you know, maybe help some, some writers or filmmakers you know get get some traction somewhere and um and you know like you say a lot of uh a lot of people are in the tech world uh are are keen on the idea so um you know clearly
“you do have to, um, to, to, to do some pretty hard imagining.”
his name is cayman hodges he's an enormous fan of yours okay it is his life's ambition to uh see a snow crash made it's a movie he has an idea where um i'll read it to you i don't know if he expressed it as uh okay i have a question i have a um you know he he wants to adapt it exactly how hollywood would have treated it in 1992 when the book came out pretend it's a lost wow unfinished artifact that got shelved before release blair witch style marketing um and i you
know that i was looking through all your works and you've addressed this before but my god i mean if anyone should have tons of tv shows and movies based on their work it's you you seem like me to have in a much bigger way to have been caught in some kind of the typical hollywood option writes hell where things get started and don't get finished and they just get it's crazy to me though i mean is this this must be frustrating well first of all to your friends can we have the rights to snow crash to your friend's point um uh there was actually i mean i've been watching people uh think about adapting snow crash since it came out yeah okay and um at every stage along the way i've kind of said boy it's a good thing that they never made that movie in 1995 or 2000 or 2005 because because just a few years later the the computer graphics had gotten so much better sure so i remember having um that had gotten so much better that it would it would look dated okay in the way that like the original tron looks yeah looks dated today so i had a um you know during one of these during one phase of This conversation, one of these guys had the idea to use HDR photography. Instead of rendering the metaverse, we're using computer graphics, just shoot it straight, but then manipulate the film to kind of send you a message that this is actually generated by computer graphics, right?
and um so that was the the first point when um people began to think okay the graphics are so good that in this future world you know it's just going to look like photography and now of course we're to the point where it simply would look like photography you wouldn't be able to tell it apart from uh uh from from something that really happened unless there was some other visual cue like something that was physically impossible you know in in the scene so um so so i just found that an interesting uh reflection from the the the message you just read um because um you know you could kind of flip that on its back and um go ahead and make it using 1995 right you know doom yeah i think that's his that's what he wants yeah yeah that'd be funny that is it still tied up it is it is yeah you're you're i mean you started blue origin with jeff bezos he i assume you guys are still friendly i mean he owns an entire yeah media organization well the um it's at it's at a different media organization has been for for a long time um So it's been at Paramount and Paramount slash Skydance for a long time.
So they just write you a check every year? That was true for a while, and then they just bought it. Okay. So at some point, they're like, we have to stop writing the Inlet check every year. I mean, like, honestly, tell me to fuck off if I'm just going too far. But, like, there's no way in hell Jeff must want to make at least some handful of things you've written. Well, I think they did have Seven Eves for a bit. The – I think they might have had Snow Crash. No, they didn't. But he, you know, he delegates those kinds of decisions to the people who run those organizations. That's stupid. I think so.
so um um but uh yeah i mean it's uh it's it's a mystery um it's a tragedy is what it is well yeah i mean it's you know it's given me i think some kind of some some insights and some some thoughts about the nature of that business how it works how it doesn't work um so when you've got You've got this story. Is it Wen-Air? Wen-Air, yeah.
“There's a bunch of ways that AI can be kind of efficiently used, I think, that don't take creative agency away from the creator.”
i didn't know if he was kind of behind this or helping he's not well i'll say that epic overall has been incredibly helpful okay so um uh they um um they've been they've been great um but they're um uh you know they're they're they're they're very scrupulous uh people i think and that comes from the top it comes from tim and you know so um I think when they see, you know, if there's something that we need that has general utility for their developers, you know, a lot of developers might want, then, you know, then we can have a conversation about that. But they're also very even-handed about not privileging one developer over another.
Okay. Yeah, yeah. I'm keeping an eye on time. I do want to get to a little bit of a rapid-fire round for people who sent in things. But before we do that, there were just kind of like two last things that I really wanted to be indulgent on. I know you've talked about your time at Blue Origin before. Just to give people some context, I think you were basically employee number one or with Jeff. And the idea in the early days was to explore quite different ideas of what we could do in space. we know how to make liquid fueled rockets and there's really not that much you can do to tweak their design um and so it was kind of like what else what else could we do that would be a bit more adventurous and and what comes next this is not meant to be mean or anything like that i just i i've written books about all this stuff and it was such a nice chance to talk to you about this But, you know, so you're you're.
At that, I think for about six years, Blue Origin eventually gets going. I've seen you say that you left when things got a bit more conventional after all. And then, you know, Blue, I mean, I admire, especially where they're at now, but when you compare them to SpaceX, I mean, it looks like one company was almost standing still for about 18 years while the other was developing for rocket families and learning how to land rockets and dominating satellites and taking over the entire space industry. and blue is um you know still trying to prove that it could even deliver satellites to space and and all that so i mean is that you know is that painful is that obviously you haven't been there on like a day-to-day basis for these 20 years i i've always been blue's the only space company i really haven't spent time at in part because it was quite secretive jeff is the only kind of tech billionaire type i've never really hung out with just i've always worked somewhere where somebody else covered Amazon and never had that chance.
And so, I don't know. Blue's the one place I don't know much about. From an outsider, it's frustrating, you know, to have all those resources and then get stuck for such a long time. Although, you know, they really are seeming to kind of come on strong now. But yeah, I mean, so what's your, I guess my question is twofold. It's like, I don't know if you have an emotional attachment to Blue still and sort of how do you feel about how it's done. And then second, and I've heard you say you're impressed of SpaceX, but I'd be curious, like, sort of how impressed, given that context of you were looking at doing things quite different.
And so they've done some different things, but then some that aren't that radical. Well, I mean, for starters, I'm very impressed with SpaceX. I mean, you just, you know, you can't not be, if you know anything at all about rockets and space uh so that's easy that's an easy one the um
“i feel like i could walk away for 20 years and i wouldn't be missed you know”
I mean, Blue Origin, they might get the moon.
They might get the moon, but they have a lot of work to do still on that. Although it seems like suddenly in the last few months, Elon is getting interested in the moon. Well, he is because that's where there's money and Trump is the government's turning its eye there. I mean, Elon was always, we're going to do Mars and not the moon. The moon is just, you're just wasting time if that's where you go. But clearly, you know, I think there's things to be gained now and all the stuff is expensive. It's interesting that Blue Origin is taking outside money for the first time. Raising money, yeah. Well, Rob Meyerson, who was the CEO of Blue Origin for a long time, and Gary Lai, who was a very senior engineer there that I used to work with, have started a startup called Interlune, which is going to mine helium-3 on the moon's surface.
It's pretty close to me in Seattle. i saw this and you guys you got stoke space up there which is interesting and yeah washington still has a couple interesting things i saw you when you first came in you peeked at my little rocket yeah i can't help it which is so that's skyroot so that's an indian private rocket company they went to orbit on their first try like two or three months ago which basically never yeah that's they made it to orbit and they put a satellite in the right spot although the it's a i mean it's technically a four-stage rocket. It's really three stages with solid rocket fuel. So they went a little bit easier. And the four stage is kind of a kick stage and it wasn't clear if they're stage. It wasn't.
Totally clear how clean their stage separation was on a couple things, but you know what they built that for? I think, I think they, so they started, I think in 2018 at the time, commercial space was illegal in India, but they started anyway. So they started designing and then around 2022, 2023, the Indian government made commercial space legal. And so these guys had a rocket that was, that was coming ready. And, um, I think they did it. I think they built that whole thing for $60 million, which I don't think has ever been done for less than a billion. Where did they launch from? From Sri Harikota.
It's an island off the east coast of India. It's the same place where the Indian government, ISRO, launches the PSLV and all its rockets. I've been there for a launch. It's amazing. It's right by Chennai, which is a little bit north. There must be some great sights there. It's unbelievable. so when i went i got to stay on the island and there are monkeys crawling all over the rocket there's cows at the launch site it's full-on jungle and uh it was amazing yeah i i uh i know um a couple people who've been to the baikonur site yeah and apparently that's also pretty rural yeah yes yeah the launch sites is one of my favorite things to do because they're always in the weirdest places like french kiana yeah you're in i think it's in the bottom five of the poorest countries in the world and then all of a sudden there's this huge european rocket launch site i've been to uh alaska ukraine um new zealand rocket lab is oh yeah one of the most beautiful yeah i'm sure they have a spectacular yeah so yeah when you were looking at these different concepts i mean the only ones that i know that are quite radical today are spin launch with sort of the centrifuge type system where you're going to throw something to space and i don't know if
you've seen long shot we did a video on them they're making like a 10 kilometer long space gun more or less um obviously not human rated this is all yeah satellites um but it it sort of pushes a projectile along this tube and accelerates it with, with, with gas. Is there anything that you
“for a given kind of rocket configuration, you could get twice as much mass into LEO.”
I think India is actually, so from the moment the government made commercial space legal, which is roughly 2023 till now, now there are 500 space startups in India. Wow. There's probably around like eight rocket startups, three to four of which I would say are sort of legit and have a chance um and um not hugely radical ideas that are different yet but we'll
“come up with the coolest new idea imaginable and it would never go anywhere commercially because it would be uninsurable.”
over if you want okay i just want to be i want to be careful and i want to um anyway people tweeted these in so i'm not responsible for what comes out you know okay next there's quite a bit of interest in your interest in sword fighting i will i'll let you pick um one which i think is is extreme was your 20 favorite swords and the other was ask about sword fighting techniques anything you want to tell the people about swords currently i mean i assume they mean 20 your favorite types of swords yeah sorry i don't know what i said but that's correct yeah i don't You know, there's, I have in the last probably 10 years have focused entirely on kind of niche sword type, which is the basket hilded broadsword.
And that is a, it's not done by a lot of people these days, which is funny because it's, I think it's the long. longest lived sword category that was in actual use, in the West anyway, because, you know, we know it was in use in the 1500s and, you know, it was in active military use until basically the First World War. But it's a single-handed sword where the hand is completely protected by a basket. And there were versions of it that existed in Italy called the Schiavone and in Germany, but it's mostly associated with, um, English and Scottish, uh, military. And, um, so I, I did a video about it. It's, uh, um, it's, it's, uh, viewed as being kind of a weirdly heavy, uh, weapon for a single-handed user. But, um, I, I think that that's because people are doing it wrong. So, um, so, uh, so that's the thing that I do. I started doing it partly because, um, I got tired of having my hands broken, uh, working with, with long swords, which don't have hand protection. Um, and partly because it's a historical, um, era that I'm kind of interested in. So that's the, uh, the particular style that I practice. It's based on mostly on the work of a guy named george silver who was a contemporary of queen elizabeth and all of those guys um
and um um and is a uh a well-known and somewhat controversial figure in the world of historical european martial arts okay okay this question comes from one of my favorite readers i don't know if it's answerable okay we'll see we'll soon find out what are the mystics of america i mean I mean, the mystics, they kind of choose which technology they want to adopt and bring into their society, right? I mean, sort of inspired by the Amish. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, so this is an idea that is from Kevin Kelly, who kind of pointed out a long time ago that the Amish don't reject all technology. They use rollerblades.
They just reject specific technologies. And so, I mean, you see it all the time now if you're trying to communicate with people because you've got people who use Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, you know, plain old SMS messages, email. and so that's a very common and kind of trivial example of people deciding which technology they're going to use and not going to use but clearly there's people now who are being super fastidious about ai you know i refuse to use ai there's a huge debate over should we allow allow students in classrooms to have screens, or children in any circumstance to have access to screens. So you can kind of see examples of it all over the place. So the screens, I assume you've
“I'm trying to pay attention to what teachers actually want.”
um okay um i'll leave you with this last one i mean i was going down this road before there's just a million things i mean this must be so frustrating because people see you as some kind of oracle i mean talking to you has been different than i thought it would be in some ways like i thought you would be a total um latest and greatest tech obsessive across all these fronts i i can just tell now i mean you're you're just super thoughtful you research things you must you have this unique ability to like conjure these worlds and futures in your head but it must be frustrating i'm sure people turn to you all the time hoping for you to tell us what the future will be like but it is well it's all on here everyone wants to know like utopia or dystopia oh yeah yeah where are we heading well look the well so what you're seeing is essentially uh a storyteller or a novelist method to thinking about these things because, you know, the first duty of a storyteller is, or a novelist, is to keep people turning the page. And so you've got to try to put them into an immersive world, a fictional world that is coherent and makes sense.
And there's all kinds of signals that you can inadvertently send to the reader that they may not even be fully conscious of them, but it's they'll immediately kind of say, oh, wait a second, that doesn't make sense. Or I don't know why that character did that. This seems kind of simplistic. And they closed the book and they put it down. so um um you know and this goes to what i was saying earlier about hollywood adaptations you know what makes them succeed or fail so um if you're going to write a fictional scenario that involves technology you need to um embrace the full complexity of that technology how it can go bad how it can succeed and also the the how would a society interact with that technology and um you know what would happen when people misused it or used it in really unexpected creative ways um and um you also have to think about the you know what's the business plan you know uh it how how would it make sense economically for a given fictional technology to actually be rolled out and put to use. Um, and so, uh, if you do all those things and you do a good job of it, then the reader reading the book will say, okay, yeah, that kind of adds up, you know, this rings true to me. Um, and if you don't, uh, again, they'll, they'll get a sense that it's
false and they won't like the results. So, um, so I think what you're seeing, uh, you know, know if you see me as as being ambivalent or kind of complicated in my my some of my responses it's me the novelist brain um trying to uh constantly ask the question of you know how could we tell stories here that have that complexity and subtlety about them yeah no which is fair and i wish the world was wired a bit more like that um you know like i can't thank you enough honestly i don't I don't want to embarrass you or anything, but it's like an honor of a lifetime to talk to somebody who's... First of all, just prolific and wonderful at writing and it was really like shaped the world in ways that I don't think I really, it's rare to run into.
So please definitely buy the book. That's the most important thing. I knew I should get it first because I knew we were going to get distracted a little bit, but please buy the book. And, yeah, no, just a highlight of the year. Thank you. Well, good. It's been fun. I've enjoyed talking to you and looking at your cool rocket models and, you know. Are those Tesla batteries? Are those whatever they are? They are lithium ion batteries, but they got made in a laboratory in Tennessee. We try to, we collect these artifacts as we go around. Of course. That's my face built by some robots in Los Angeles.
And yeah, we just keep adding as we go Cool, okay Great, it's been fun Thank you, man, thank you so much And good luck with the rest of the tour Thanks The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance And or Kylie Robison Or both of us together It is produced by me and David Nicholson Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland and the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brext for all your support and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you and we'll see you again.
