Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Neal Stephenson, Award-winning science fiction author

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Meet one of Kevin’s favorite sci-fi authors who influenced him as a kid growing up in rural Virginia. Kevin and this award-winning writer talk about metaverse and misinformation, as well as ways to combat climate change - including carbon capture, which Neal believes will be one of the biggest tech projects in human history.  Neal Stephenson  Kevin Scott  Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott  Discover and listen to other Microsoft podcasts.  

I don't know. I think I'm a little bit of a freak, even among writers. I hear other writers talking about self-discipline and writer's block and the struggle. It's not like that for me. I don't mean to be egotistical or anything like that, but at no point in my career have I ever felt as though I were inflicting some kind of discipline on myself. It's just what I like to do. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm your host, Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft. In this podcast, we're going to get behind the tech. We'll talk with some of the people who've made our modern tech world possible and understand what motivated them to create what they did. So join me to maybe learn a little bit about the history of computing and get a few behind-the-scenes insights into what's happening today. Stick around.

Hello and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm Christina Warren, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. And I'm Kevin Scott. And our guest on the show today is Neil Stevenson. Neil is an American writer who's known for his works of speculative fiction. And in his seminal book, Snow Crash, Stevenson actually coined the term metaverse and popularized the term avatar in a computing context. He's one of my favorite authors in this genre.

I'm a massive fan. Yeah, me too. I have been so profoundly influenced by Neal's works. I've read all of his books over and over and over again. The interesting thing to me about Neil is, I think he was especially prescient with Diamond Age, the Snow Crash, and Cryptonomicon, which were books that he wrote 20 years ago-ish.

But his recent books are also just spot on. He has a real knack for thinking deeply about the trends that are shaping the world and then extrapolating just a little bit forward to capture what is about to happen. And I just don't know how he does it. No, I totally agree. I mean, that is what I think is really special about his work

is that it feels both prescient but futuristic. It seems like it's not that far off, but it's just different enough that it seems, you know, it's fantasy. But as time goes on, like you just see like how on the cusp and on the pulse, all of his insights really have been. Yeah, really incredible. All right, well, let's dive into your conversation with Neil. Our guest today is Neal Stephenson. Neal is an American novelist whose books have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, and even baroque.

He explores areas such as mathematics, cryptography, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. Neal also writes nonfiction about technology for publications such as Wired and has worked as an advisor for Blue Origin. He was also chief futurist of Magic Leap for a few years. Neil's works include the novels Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, and Zodiac. Welcome to the show, Neil. It's a pleasure to be here. So before we get into the stuff that you're working on today, I'd really love to start with your interest as a kid and how you got into doing what it is that you do. experience day to day while you're growing up, you think it's normal until you get out into the

wide world and see that it's not. So I grew up in a college town in the Midwest, Ames, Iowa, that is home of a science and engineering centric university. My parents are both engineers, scientist types, and just where I grew up, that was true of the parents of almost all the other kids around me. So that was kind of the air that I was breathing when I was a kid, and it led to typical boyhood interests, you know, wanting to be an astronaut, flying model rockets, model airplanes, tinkering with things, and so on and so forth. So that was my life until I graduated from high school and went to university at the age of 17. And were your parents technical people? Yeah. My paternal grandfather was a physicist. Maternal grandfather, a biochemist. My dad, an electrical engineering professor.

My mother was a chemist who worked as a research assistant in labs, life sciences labs at the university. And various uncles and aunts and so on also had more or less technical professions. Yeah, so that's super interesting that you must have had science and mathematics and engineering and technology just in the air that you were breathing. But did your parents have any opinion about what direction your life should take? Were they pushing you in particular directions or just sort of encouraging curiosity?

I think more just encouraging curiosity. I don't think there was pushing in the sense we normally think of pushy parents. It's more kind of just what is considered normal in a household. You know, when people all around you in your neighborhood and your social circle have got advanced degrees or they're working on PhD dissertations or what have you, that is just kind of ends up seeming to be a typical career path in the same way that if you grew up in a family of carpenters, it would seem completely normal to learn carpentry and get a job as a carpenter. But I didn't ever feel any pressure in the sense that one normally

thinks of that. Yeah, so I think that's a good segue into beginning to talk about your work as an author. You probably get this a lot, especially from computer nerds that you talk with, but your works were extraordinarily influential for me. I read them when I was, you know, at this developing point in my career. And, you know, the thing I think your books did for me was maybe what your environment did for you. So they provided this world where, you know, you had

this vision and it wasn't all bleak, nor was it all optimistic and Pollyanna, but it seemed like real world with real characters, with real struggles and real consequences for the things that they were choosing to do in this environment that they were constrained by in a variety of creative ways. And it has shaped a lot about how I think about what the future could be. Was that your intention when you set out to write these works? Well, when I set out, it was a fairly chaotic and unplanned kind of just sort of lunging randomly into the unknown. So the first book that I wrote came out of nowhere. I was still in college. I was living in a slum apartment in Boston.

I had no money. Spring break rolled around. I couldn't go anywhere. And so I just sat alone on the couch for 10 days and typed and ended up producing a short fantasy novel. It's never been published, never will be. But that kind of made me aware of something I hadn't known before, which is that I'm capable of sitting down and writing a book. And then when I graduated from college, I was stuck at home for a while and wrote a second book and then decided, well, maybe I should actually try to make a go of this. It's not unusual for someone to take a year or two off between undergraduate college and graduate school. So maybe I'll just try this for a while. And if it doesn't work out, grad school would be my default option. So I did that and happened to get lucky with the third book. Very lucky, got connected to

editor and agent in New York who were willing to devote a little bit of time to helping me develop as a writer. And so that was my first published book, The Big You. But it came about in a pretty chaotic way. I had written some excerpts of it and kind of an outline of what I wanted to do and sent that off as a query. And when a positive response finally came back, I realized I needed to write the whole thing.

So I burned all of my vacation time at work and just sat there again for a couple of weeks, just banging this thing out. And what I delivered was a mess. But again, I had an editor, Gary Fiskejohn, who was willing to spend some time going over it and showing me how to clean it up. So all of this, I mean, the picture I'm trying to paint here is that in general, this was just Just total unplanned chaos and hasty improvisation and not any kind of systematic career development. Well, I am sort of curious, like what gave you the courage or confidence or whatever it was to sit down and write those first two things? I mean, did you even have an expectation that anyone was going to read them or was it a thing you were doing for yourself? Had you written things before? I don't think a lot of courage was really involved.

I mean, it was really just me with nothing else to do doing this because it was amusing and kind of interesting. I enjoyed doing it. And obviously, at that point in your life, you're thinking about, wow, could I make a career of this? Is anyone ever going to read it? Might somebody buy it? So that's totally on your mind.

But at that stage, it really feels more like a hobby project or a sort of self-expression. There's no risk that's really being taken. And so I just did it. Having written a book, obviously one that's neither as good as nor as popular as any of the things that you've done, it's just a lot of work. It's a real exercise in self-discipline.

When you have this world of possibilities, you can choose to do anything with your time, to sit down with yourself and a keyboard and try to get your thoughts organized enough to tell a story or describe a set of ideas well enough that somebody else might find some value in them. So I am always fascinated to talk to folks like you who have made writing their profession and try to understand how it is you get from one project to the next. Yeah, I don't know. I think I'm a little bit of a freak, even among writers. I hear other writers talking about self-discipline and writer's block and the struggle. It's not like that for me.

I don't mean to be egotistical or anything like that, but at no point in my career have I ever felt as though I were inflicting some kind of discipline on myself. It's just what I like to do. That's fantastic. So I think one of the really extraordinary things about your books is you've been very prescient. And I think part of it is because trends that have unfolded pretty closely to how you've described them. I mean, and it's sort of consistent. I mean, like, obviously, we've got, you know, companies out now spending tens of billions of dollars building metaverse which is a term you coined

years ago but also in your last book fall i was just struck the first third of that book you know the you know not to spoil anything for anyone but the way that you describe this near future with the internet and misinformation and you know this plausible scenario that you describe this near future with the internet and misinformation and this plausible scenario that you could use to sort of attack the infrastructure of the internet. I read it and I was like, but like how do you get into the headspace or expose yourself to enough information where you can sort of think these thoughts and get as consistently close to the puck as you do well thank you I started writing computer programs when I was 14 years old you know we had a little room in our high school with a modem connection to the mainframe at the university and a teletype. And we would write

programs in BASIC on paper tape and run them over the phone. I continued writing programs in college. And after college, as soon as I could afford a computer, I got one, a Mac, the 1984 Toaster Mac, and learned how to write code on that. So I wasn't doing it quite at a professional level, but enough to sort of get it and to understand how programming works. And if writing hadn't worked out for me, probably the most likely career path would have been that I would have ended up writing code somewhere in a tech company. At the time that I wrote Snow Crash, I had been trying to sort of combine some of my interests by collaborating on a project to create a graphic

novel where we were going to use some image processing to generate some of the imagery. I was writing code on a color Mac, I think it was the Macintosh 2, to do that. So that brought me kind of a little bit up to speed with the technology and the terminology of three-dimensional computer graphics and how all that stuff worked. So that project didn't move forward, but I was able to take some of what I'd written for it, some of the characters and the ideas,

and fold them into an original novel, Snow Crash. And so that book is kind of steeped in the technical knowledge that I had at the time as a result of working on all that graphics stuff. And then from there on, I guess, with some of the other books, it becomes just a matter of trying to follow current developments in different technologies. Like in the Diamond Age, you know, it's largely about molecular nanotechnology, which is not something I ever did, obviously. it was easy enough to read the available literature about how it might work and get some ideas regarding that and so on and so forth with Cryptonomicon and some of the other books. I do think you have a very high hit rate. Is part of that who you talk to? I mean, I'm guessing as your novels became more successful,

it's a little bit easier maybe to talk to experts. But I guess because of your upbringing, you also had access to experts just through academia. How important is that? Yeah, it's more accessing literature, be it online or on paper, than talking to experts. There's a lag that happens where when you're writing the book, people don't know who you are necessarily. And then after the book comes out, they want to talk to you. So for example, in the case of the Baroque cycle, I was doing all of the research for London and the early Royal Society from available literature, not from people in London who have connections to that city and to its history, who, had I known them before when I was writing the book, would have been incredibly valuable resources for me.

But by the time they knew of me and I knew of them, it was kind of too late. It's still a great pleasure and honor to know them and talk to them, but it's not going to affect what's in the book at that point. So that happens very consistently with all of my books. It's just kind of an inevitable thing. And there have been some cases where it was possible for me to kind of get ahead of that curve a little bit. So in the case of Seveneves, for example, by virtue of having previously worked at Blue Origin, I knew enough people in the space industry that I was able to reach out to companies like Planetary Resources and Tethers Unlimited here in Seattle and

get some direct input early enough in the process that it actually helped shape what appeared in the book. But that's the exception rather than the rule. Super interesting. So let's talk about today, like how it seems to me at least that life is imitating art in a certain sense that many of the things that you talked about in some of your earlier books and even in your more recent books are unfolding pretty closely to the way that you describe them in the books. So maybe let's talk a little bit about metaverse, which is obviously a thing that is going to see a lot of change over the next handful of years just because there's so many people inspired enough to invest a lot of their time and energy and capital in this space. What's your rough take on where things are headed?

Well, metaverse, avatar, terms like that have been bouncing around the technical world for a long time now, but more as a kind of in-crowd kind of terminology. And what's happened in the last year or so is that that's kind of broken out into public discourse as a marketing term, as a sort of catch-all term, to mean a lot of things. And so I think kind of the most general thing I can say about it is just that we're bumping up against the limits of what can really

be done with flat displays. So when I look at just the displays that are around me here at my workspace, they're spectacular. They're gigantic screens that are showing images in incredibly high resolution they show movies that you know full resolution full sound quality i've got a tv which is middle of the row i mean it's not a super special tv but you know it's capable of showing movies that are as finely resolved as my eyes can detect like if we added more pixels to my TV set, it would be interesting technically, but I wouldn't be able to see the difference. So beyond a certain point,

that kind of technology can't really get any better. And I think that people who are in the business of selling hardware and the associated software and operating systems to the general public need a place to go. They need a next thing that they can use to drive their businesses forward. And so metaverse is kind of a catch-all term now for stuff that people want you to buy a few years from now. And by process of elimination, it's got to be something beyond screens.

It's got to be stereoscopic or better displays, AR, VR. And then with that hardware, there has to be huge jumps forward in the capabilities of the software and the operating systems that drive pixels and sound into that hardware. Yeah, I mean, the curious thing for me is, I totally agree with you that metaverse is an interestingly vague marketing term. And the vagueness lets people project all sorts of expectation and belief into a thing. And I don't know that I really understand

whether a particular thing is a metaverse and something else isn't. The way that I've been thinking about metaverses in general, largely influenced by your work, is they seem to me, generally speaking, to be or need to be sufficiently convincing, immersive experiences that in some way sort of blur the classical boundary between digital and physical worlds. And, you know, like there are a lot of things that maybe my definition is wrong, but there are a lot of things that satisfy that definition. So I look at my kids who really love Minecraft and Roblox and these sort of 3D worlds that get projected onto a 2D screen.

They almost exclusively play them on a tablet, which is a small 2D screen, but they are completely and utterly immersed. They are convinced that what's happening in this world is real. There's interaction. They build things. There's a form of commerce that happens in them. Do you think it's even useful to try to define what a metaverse is now? Or we just sort of have to iteratively discover what the world wants them to be? Well, I mean, that's up to the individual,

what it is that they're looking for. I'm not a fan of tablets personally, but some people obviously are. So that works for you, great. Otherwise, maybe you're looking for some other hardware platform to work on. But I would say that kind of a common thread is the idea of multiplayer,

that you're interacting in real time with other people who are in the same virtual space, even though they're physically not where you are. And I think another element that implicitly or explicitly is included in how people think about the metaverse is that it's not all one app. It's not all one game that, like, if you play Halo or World of Warcraft, you're in a three-dimensional space running around. You can encounter other people. But it still feels like a game, not a metaverse, because it's a kind of hermetically sealed IP in a way. Whereas

when people talk about a metaverse, they're frequently talking about something where there's the possibility for different applications to kind of bump up against each other and interact with each other in a predictable and agreed-on way. I'm so fascinated by this topic in general. There are a couple of questions I'd love to ask you. One, and I don't know whether this is the hard or the easy question, is what role do you think AI plays as these metaverses become more prevalent? Well, AI is another term that can mean a lot of different things. And so it kind of depends.

I mean, there's an old joke that as soon as AI works, people start calling it software. And so AI is always kind of the next thing down the road, even though AIs of various kinds have found their way into practical use sort of all over the place. So it can mean a lot of different things. In games, it means sort of any behaviors on the part of non-player characters or even the environment that in some way create an illusion of responsiveness. And so its usage in games is pretty loose and pretty forgiving. A technical researcher might have a different point of view on what that means.

One of the things that you described in Fall in fall is this fictional collapse of the Internet and the information networks of that world. Because of information overload and this bifurcation of belief systems, there's this shaky notion of objective reality. You've got half of the population who believes a set of things that are unilaterally opposed to what the other half believes. And that in one half of the population, like you imagine that you would have to have some sort of mediating agent that helps you interpret all of the information that's flying at you. So, like, you don't go onto the internet, like, someone or something goes on the

internet on your behalf to, like, help you get through all of the truck to, like, real information. Do you think that that is a thing that, you know, either for Metaverse or, like, the larger information ecosystem that we're going to have to have in the future? I don't know if that particular system is the answer. I mean, what's described in Fall is the notion that you would have an editor and the more money you have, the more affluent you are, the better an editor you can afford.

And poor people don't have any editors and so they're just exposed to complete, unfiltered garbage. And then that has the effect of making them poorer in the long run. So that's more of a, I think, kind of a fictionalized depiction of where we are now. I guess my current thinking on this is that it's all driven by the incentives that you personally experience in your day-to-day life. well, fact from fiction is valuable to you, then you'll be more discriminating in how you interpret information that comes in off the internet. But if it doesn't matter, or if you've got some sort

of positive incentive to believe in garbage, then you're going to believe garbage. Nobody makes that choice. Well, few people make that choice because they're altruistic seekers of truth. They choose what they're going to believe and how they're going to get information based on the social and economic incentives that they are faced with. Do you think that's true even of scientists? scientists. I mean, one of the, and like maybe, maybe again, it's all about incentives and social context. But like one of the fascinating things to me about how we've tried to pursue science, not always to the highest standards since the Enlightenment is like you just sort of have a structural system that encourages people to propose ideas in a rigorous way and for other people to attack those ideas in an equally

rigorous way so that you can get closer and closer to some kind of understanding of what might be reliably true versus false. Yeah, I think that's a good description of how it's supposed to work. Yeah, and so obviously it doesn't work like that always. We can sort of see, we can see at various points in time that goal getting perverted by politics or by what individual people are trying to accomplish that has nothing

to do with truth-seeking. But do you think it's better for the world to have more of these sort of institutional things where the vector is towards reliable truth versus not, or that you only narrowly need it, like you said, in these sort of professions where there are real consequences for believing BS? Yeah, I mean, this is, I'm a big fan of an American philosopher named Charles Sanders Peirce, who wrote a piece in 1877 about how people believe things. It's called The fixation of belief. And I won't try to explicate the whole thing here, but kind of the gist of it is that the majority of people sort of believe what they're told to believe.

And people of that mindset don't know what to make of the scientific method because they're fixated on authority. And so, like a classic example of this is, I saw some debate online a few weeks ago about John Locke, one of the, you know, founders of the whole kind of enlightenment worldview, who had written some stuff about africans that no one believes no one no sane person believes today but uh but it was fairly commonplace for people back then to have beliefs that today we know are wrong and so someone was was pointing to this as evidence that the lock and by extension the whole Enlightenment project was wrong, top to bottom, because they were viewing the whole conversation through basically an authoritarian lens or the lens

of someone who follows what Peirce would call the method of authority. And so in that worldview, if you can discredit a particular authority, then you've successfully discredited everything downstream of that authority. we respect is not any one particular exponent of this, not any one particular person or authority or any point of view that people believed in the past, but rather the process, the ongoing process that enables us to recover from mistakes and pick and choose what we think is currently supported by facts and evidence and logic. So that's just a difference in mindset between followers of the method of authority versus followers of what Peirce would call fallibilism, which is simply accepting the fact that you might be wrong. And so you need some kind of system for figuring out whether you're wrong. Yeah, that's super interesting.

One of the things that I think about a lot is whether we have chosen it as deliberately as we might have wanted to or not, we have a fairly, actually not fairly, it's just an outrageously complex society built on layers and layers and layers of abstraction, where just in a technical world, things have to be able to compose in predictable ways with one another in order for you

to be able to deal with the next level of complexity that you're building the world on top of. And so you have to have something like the scientific method to at least get the, you know, the interfaces between all of these things that have to compose right. Because, like, there is no appeal to authority. You can't just, and I think we're sort of learning that in a bunch of our, like the global economy, for instance. You can't just wish that the global supply chain

might do a particular set of things. It's very complicated. And one of the things that I think about a lot, and I don't know if this is even a reasonable framing for things, but we live in this world of this crazy stacking of complex abstractions. And we all depend on each other and the composition of those abstractions in incredibly complicated ways. And I think we underestimate how valuable it is to have a stable equilibrium where all of those things can continue to develop. And the development just happens to accrue mostly to public good.

And so I just sort of worry a lot. And I love your take on this because I think you've written about this in your books of whether you think that we have the right incentives for people in their day-to-day lives who aren't looking at this incredibly complicated global picture. No one can because you can't fit all of the details into any human brain. But do you think we have the incentive set right where each of us can go out and do what we do well and have that ladder up into a stable,

prosperous world order? I think by definition among affluent, educated people, you know, people who work for tech companies or banks or whatever, in the rich people economy that exists, albeit in a kind of ad hoc, you know, somewhat chaotic way. And that's almost tautology to say that because yeah if you are plugged into that and you get it you understand it you're you're on the road to being a rich person or at least a comfortable person but um you know on the other side again there's a pretty large

number of people who essentially can believe whatever they want to and not be aware that they're in a bubble and not really, it doesn't affect their fate one way or the other. So you get, in extreme cases, you get people just believing stuff that looks objectively crazy and wrong. Yeah, the interesting thing to me, for probably the entire course of human history, and certainly this has been true since the Enlightenment, you've had these rational systems existing alongside irrational ones. And there's at least been enough of a detente between the two systems where we can make forward progress together.

And I just wonder, and I think for me, it seems super hard to imagine how you get every person to behave perfectly rationally. One of my recent guests was Steven Pinker, who just wrote a really great book about rationality. And I think everybody should read the book and sort of use the tools that he outlines in the book to try to get yourself to behave more rationally. But in some sense, and he even says that if you're reading a book about thinking by Steven Pinker, there's probably some self-selection already happening. Yeah. I mean, part of what I so appreciate in the work that you produce is like you, in your science fiction, you're not asking people to go through all of these cognitive tricks that Steven is in his book to be able to process the world that you're perceiving. You are asking people to be inspired by things, to let their imaginations free about what could be good and bad.

I think that plays an incredibly important role in getting the rational and the irrational systems to have some kind of harmony with one another. So I don't know what you think about what we could do. Do we need more inspirational fiction? Do we need, what can we do to get things more balanced than they are right now? Because I think about this a lot. I'm sure you do as well.

It's hard to ignore how out of whack things are. Yeah, I mean, for a while there was sort of a detente, as you put it, between the scientific rational world and big established churches, like the Church of England, for example. And it wasn't always perfect. There was always some trouble along the blurry edges of things. But you can kind of see this negotiation process take place over time as, you know, Darwin says, oh, you know, evolution is a thing and the world is really old. And so, after some pushback and some grumbling, eventually the church comes around

to the view that, yeah, okay, the biblical account in Genesis is metaphorical. You know, the world is more than 6,000 years old. And so, there's this kind of progressive movement of the boundary between rational and irrational that takes place kind of slowly over centuries. But it only works if you've got, you know, in the case of, let's say, England, you've got an established church. And there's other churches as well and other faiths. But there's kind of one dominant church. And the people who run that church go to the same universities with the physics professors and they know each other. And so they're able to kind of maintain this, what you call a detente.

That's not where we are now. Now kind of social media allows anyone to start the equivalent of a church. And so there's no way to establish kind of fixed boundary lines like that. And people try to munch the ball together into a movement like QAnon, and it kind of is there for a while and then sort of frays and falls apart. People go off and join other groups. So I don't know what that future looks like in the situation we've got now where there is no Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope or what have you to lay down the official theology. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about. Like, yeah, how destabilize this, let's call it, 250-year equilibrium that we've had. Like, you know, maybe it isn't as destabilized as we think it is,

but if it is, it's an interesting thing to think about how we get to the next stable equilibrium. And I think it's a mix of technology and having some big problems that we're all going to go solve together, which need a mix of the rational and irrational. And when I say irrational, I'm not being pejorative,

because I suspect both you and I, I know me at least, I have all sorts of irrational crap. No, you're using it as a shorthand for something else. I get it. Yeah, I mean, I was with you until COVID. You're using it as a shorthand for something else. I get it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was with you until COVID. They heard on social media that vaccines were bad and refused to change their beliefs when people are dying all around them.

And indeed, they're sick and literally on their deathbed. It really has shaken me up a little bit because one wants to believe in a kind of sad but satisfying version of that story where when people bump up against mortality and see friends and family dying or see that they might die, they finally sort of come to their senses. But that has not happened. So I think it goes pretty deep. And I don't know how we get out of that as long as social media continues to operate the way it operates today. Yeah, the one counterpoint I would offer, and like, it's sort of funny, like I was hoping you were going to cheer me up, but like, let me try to cheer you up. Yeah, I think all of what you just said is like it's very discouraging.

It's incredibly dispiriting. But it's the same thing that happened in the Spanish flu. Like I've read a whole bunch of the historical documents around. So I live in the Bay Area. Like I've read a bunch of the documents about how the public processed the Spanish blue in San Francisco and the masking mandates and the public health orders and whatnot. And it's very, very similar to what's going on right now. Just parenthetically, if you haven't read it, you should read Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. Yeah. Because it's just hilariously on point, like paragraph after paragraph,

it's just straight out of early days of COVID, you know, 2020. Yeah. F. Scott Fitzgerald had some really interesting letters that he wrote at the time. At the beginning of the pandemic, I read all of this stuff and I'm like, wow, we've learned nothing. And at the end of the pandemic, I was like, wow, we did the same things back then. And we've had a whole century of the most unbelievable progress that the human race ever had following that. So I don't believe necessarily that the pandemic and how we processed it is an indication that we're in some sort of... Is anything new?

Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's as hopeful as I can get because usually I'm the one who's the pessimist. I'd like to know, you know, like what was the messaging that ordinary people heard, you know, back in those days when they went to church? Were the sermons, did people talk about this and suggest that they wear masks? Or were they the equivalent of anti-vaxxers at the time? Were the anti-vaxxers respected members of society? Or how did that whole picture look?

Yeah, I'm guessing it's super complicated. My mother lives in rural central Virginia and is Southern Baptist and devout believer. And she's a 70-something-year-old little southern church lady, right? But she is also triple-vaxxed and defends her health perimeter fiercely. And she tells me these stories about her church community of these little old ladies, and there are a bunch of folks who are like her, and there are a bunch of folks who are not like her. And they get a little frustrated with one another, but they figured out how to have a detente of some sort.

That actually gives me hope, a lot of hope. We are almost out of time and I had a couple more questions I'd like to ask you. One is, by virtue of your job, like writing speculative fiction or writing these stories about futures that might be, you seem to always be thinking about what's next. So what are you excited by, inspired by? What do you think might be the interesting set of next things that are either good or bad that we should be thinking about right now. Well, it does seem like the kind of thing that I should have an opinion about, right?

But my mind doesn't kind of work that way. I'm still kind of reeling from COVID and trying to make sense of it all. So I guess I'm super curious to see whether the current crisis is the beginning of just a longer and deeper overall downturn, or is it something that we bounce back from in a creative and positive way? So I don't claim to have any particular insight with the 2016 election and some other things that surprised me like COVID. I'm kind of stepping back a little bit from any attempt to claim I know what's going to happen next because clearly I don't. Oh, I don't know. You seem to always have. Maybe what we need to do... I think a big one to watch

and sort of a longer term kind of mega trend is carbon capture. I mean, Termination Shock is about solar geoengineering, which is kind of a temporary band-aid approach, but I'm super curious to see how that

plays out over the next couple decades. Yeah, totally agree with you there. I'm super curious to see how that plays out over the next couple of decades. Yeah, totally agree with you there. And I think the thing that we're seeing right now is there are some really powerful tools coming online that help with that problem. One of the things that we've been tracking for three or four years now is if you pick up an issue of science or nature in a given week, with greater frequency, you see people across a whole bunch of scientific disciplines using machine learning in places where they would have just used combinatorial optimization or numerical optimization in the past to solve a problem like airfoil design or protein structure prediction or pick your thing. And at least for these

numerical optimization problems in physics, we don't believe that there's anything wrong with the differential equations that describe the physical systems. But the way that you use the differential equations to actually simulate something just requires a lot of trade-offs. So they don't have closed form analytical solutions, obviously, because they're all non-linear and all kinds of wonky. So when you get into simulation space, you're making trade-offs about physical scale or time scale or like available computation or whatnot.

And people are really now, like I think it's going to really take off this year, are using machine learning to learn something about the structure of these problem spaces that can dramatically accelerate the performance of the simulation or optimization. So there are things that are already being published in conferences where we can send you this paper like a group at Caltech. They invented a thing that they call a neural operator for

solving the Navier-Stokes flow equations for computational fluid dynamics. They didn't get a 10 percent speed up or a factor of two speed up in performance without losing accuracy, they got a thousand times speed up. Wow. So I think when you see things where your improvements come by orders of magnitude, huge new things

become possible. And we're seeing this generalized fairly well across a whole bunch of problems. And so you think about carbon capture and you need to design new catalysts and new materials and whatnot. It's exactly the sort of thing where, you know, if you can get a million X speed up on classical methods, like it's great. Yeah. I mean, once you get on the inside of the inside of current research, it can be incredibly exciting. And but it's kind of fragmented into a lot of different areas, right? So you really have to be on top of things, on top of a particular area to understand and appreciate some of the advantages of what's going on. Yeah.

Well, you know, the thing that I did after 2016 is I stopped spending any time at all on social media. And I renewed my subscription to science and nature. I was like, yeah, I'm only going to consume information that is long form, preferably peer-reviewed or produced with high editorial standards. Because I was spending an inordinate amount of time consuming information that was the food equivalent of junk. Like I wasn't learning anything. I wasn't, you know, it wasn't helping me be better at anything.

And I think, you know, in that sense, you read science and nature every week. And even through the course of the pandemic, it's really inspiring. Like we're making a lot of progress. Like the quality of the work is crazy good. That's my hope. Yeah, no, that's one of the oddities of our time, right? Is that that sort of thing is going on and we're like creating mRNA vaccines in no time, you know, and saving millions of lives. So, and that is all coexisting with people who think that it's a hoax or that the vaccines have microchips, you know, in them. So, it's an interesting picture to be sure. Yeah. So, one final question before I let you go. I ask this of everyone.

You obviously love your day job. I mean, it sounds like you don't suffer for your writing, that it's a thing you enjoy doing. But I'm curious, outside of that, what are things that you do for fun? I like building things. I like making physical objects. It might be packing together a little Arduino circuit or machining something or 3D printing something.

And so I have kind of a bunch of projects running in parallel at any given time in that vein. And by design, not trying to have them be economically viable. I'm not trying to patent anything or create IP. In an economic sense, I'm just following my nose and working with like-minded people on making cool stuff. What sorts of things do you machine? Well, I've got a vertical machining center,

a CNC machining center, and a lathe. I've got two different 3D printers, various other things that I have access to. What VMC did you buy? A Haas VF3. Nice. Yeah, I've got a little Datron Neo, which is only suitable for non-ferrous materials.

Yeah, I've also got a Shapico that's maybe similar to what you're talking about. Yeah. Wood and aluminum plastic. But yeah, I've got a few. I mean, you spend a certain amount of time just maintaining the tools themselves. I've always been interested in the weird physics of long skinny whips and chains, which dates back to things I was studying 20 years ago. So I'm playing with some of that. I'm playing with some

ideas in the area of carbon capture and just some artistic kind of hobby projects. That is so super cool. Yeah. I mean, if you ever need to subcontract out any of your stuff, like I would be happy to try to help. Good to know. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for the offer. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. And like, thank you for doing what you do. You've been a real inspiration to me over the years. And I hope to be reading Neil Stevenson books in the future until I'm an old ass man. I hope to be writing them that long. So thanks for your kind words. I enjoyed the conversation. Awesome. Thank you.

Well, that was Kevin's conversation with Neil Stevenson. So what a great conversation, first of all. It was really great hearing the two of you talk about different things. And I was actually kind of interested in the conversation you were having about the metaverse and I guess some of the unknowns and the opportunities about what that term even means, I guess, in our current context. Yeah. He is obviously one of the people to talk to about the metaverse because I think he's been so insightful and predicting what it might be and at the same time inspiring a bunch of people who are working on metaverse right now to do what they're doing. So he's got this sort of inspire influence thing happening simultaneously. But I think one of the things that was really interesting for me to hear him say about the metaverse is that he doesn't believe that it's one monolithic thing and that

metaverses may and probably will take a whole bunch of different forms. To me, that's the exciting thing. It's like, we're either at or right on the cusp of the technology for building these things being good enough for them to become ubiquitous. And the way that they're going to become really good is a bunch of developers and a bunch of creatives taking all of these technological components and making something great. No, I totally agree. I had the same thought. I really liked that he was saying he doesn't think

it's going to be just one thing because then I think that's important. I think that when we look at what these future things will be, like, you know, in my lifetime, I think that the most important thing that has happened has been the World Wide Web. And again, as you said, that was a bunch of different people, a bunch of different technologists and artists and people coming together to build new things. But it wasn't just one idea. It wasn't just one concept. It could go in a bunch of different directions. And I think having those possibilities and having that ability to, I guess, kind of evolve is exciting. And that is what I think why so many people are excited about the metaverse, whatever it might be. Yeah. And I think the thing that we all should

remember is that every platform and technology ecosystem that has ever emerged has become great because you have this plurality of people creating on top of it. It's never about like one thing and one group's rules about the thing. Like it has to be open enough where everybody can get involved and help to shape it into like this rich, interesting direction. And like that, that I think is, it's important to remember and it's exciting to think about. No, I think that's a great point. I mean, if anything,

I think you could almost make the argument that if you don't have that plurality, as you say, then it's not going to take off. It's not going to be successful because as you point out, it's only been those things where we've had everybody

kind of working together and kind of doing their own things and building off of one another that you actually have something that really matters and can really change the world. Yeah, totally agree. Even if a thing doesn't have the plurality of participation and influence and it takes off, it probably isn't going to be as great as it could be if it did. So I'm really excited about what the next handful of years is going to bring.

I am too. And I'm also excited to see what future Neal Stephenson books will look like and what insights he will have for us going forward. Yeah, for sure. Like I said there at the end, I hope I'm reading Neal Stephenson's books until I'm a very old man. Same. I mean, an old woman, but I'm right there with you because his work is incredible and he continues to do great work. All right. Well, that is all the time that we have today. Thank you to Neil Stevenson for sharing his time and insights with us. If you have anything that you'd like to share with us, please email us anytime at behindthetech at microsoft.com.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.