[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org and for more conversations including videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com [Music] I am here today with Neil Stevenson who
is arguably the world's greatest author of speculative fiction and science fiction welcome Neil it's good to be here thanks for having me on your program let me start with some general questions about tech we will get to your new book how will physical surveillance evolve so there's facial surveillance gate surveillance in China it's coming
to many airports what's your vision for this uh when you say physical surveillance you just mean they record your face they know who you are recording while you're wandering around somewhere as opposed to like tapping your phone that kind of thing and if you jwalk they'll find your bank account and you'll get a text message two minutes later right right well I I think you
know it's it's it's just going to be based on what people are willing to tolerate and and put up with I think there's already something of a backlash going on over the use of facial uh recognition in some uh some cities in this country and so I think people just have to kind of be diligent and be aware of of what's happening in that area and
and push back against it is there a positive scenario for its spread for for its spreading right so is it possible it will make China a more Cooperative place a more orderly place and in the longer run they'll be Freer or is that just not in the cards I'm not sure if Cooperative orderly and Freer are sort of compatible Concepts right I mean cooperative and
orderly definitely right I mean it's it's U uh people who are in U in tournament camps are famously cooperative and orderly uh but I mean freedom freedom is a funny funny word it's a hard thing to talk about because um you know to a degree if if this kind of thing cuts down let's say on random crime then it's going to make people effectively Freer especially if you're
if you're a woman or uh some someone who is vulnerable to um to being the victim of of random crime and some kind of surveillance system renders that less likely to happen then effectively you've been granted a freedom that you didn't have before but it's not the kind of statutory Freedom that we tend to talk about when we're talking about politics
and uh and that kind of thing other than satellites which are already quite proven what do you think is the most plausible economic value to space you know it's tough making a a a really solid economic argument for space uh there's a a new book out by Daniel Suarez called Delta V in which he's he's advancing a particular argument which is pretty pretty abstract idea based on how
debt Works um and and what you have to do in order to keep an economy afloat but the uh I think it's a thing that that people need to do because they want to do it as opposed to because there's a sound business AR argument for it do you think socially we're less willing or able to do it psychologically than say in the 1960s well the' 60s was
funny because it was a um it was a cold war propaganda effort on both sides the whole story of how that came about is a really wild story uh that begins with World War II when um when Hitler wants to bomb London but it's too far away so he has to build big Rockets to do it with and so Rockets Advance uh Way Beyond where they they would have advanced had
he not done that and then we grab the technology and suddenly we need it to to drop H bombs on uh the other side of the world so again trillions of dollars of money go into it and then it becomes so dangerous that we can't we can't actually use it for that so instead we use that rocket technology to to compete in the propaganda sphere I once knew a
kind of grizzled old veteran of that 60s Space Program who said that the Apollo moon landings were communism's greatest Triumph so that's how that all happened and it it happened uh way earlier than than any kind of rational economic argument could be made for it uh and I still think it's kind of the case that if we're going to do things in space it's more for kind of psychological
reasons than it is for money reasons if we had a moris colony how politically free you think it would be or would it just be like Perpetual martial law like living on a nuclear submarine I think it would be a lot like living on a nuclear submarine because um you can't it's it's like it being in space is almost like being in an you know an intensive care
unit in a hospital uh in the sense that you're completely dependent on a whole bunch of Machines working in order to to keep you alive and so um a lot of what we associate with with freedom with personal freedom uh becomes sort of too dangerous to uh to to contemplate in that kind of environment is there any hline esque like scenario moon is a
Harsh Mistress where there's a rebellion people break free from the constraints of planet Earth they chart their own institutions it becomes like the settlements in the new world were well the settlements in the new world I don't think are a very good analogy because um they uh it was possible um if you're a if you're a white person in the new
world and you kind of have some basic skills you can go anywhere you want and um a sort of unheralded part of what happened there is that is that when those people got into trouble A lot of times they were helped out by the indigenous peoples who were already there and who knew how to do stuff um and so um none of those things are true in a space Colony kind of environment
you don't have indigenous people who who know how to to get food and how to get shelter you don't have that ability to just freely uh pick up stakes and and move about now you saw some of the downsides of social media earlier than most people did in seven eyes it's also in your new book fall what's the worst case scenario for how social media evolve and what's the institutional
failure why do many people think they're they're screwing things up I I think we're actually living through the worst case scenario right now so it's kind of like look about you and uh that's what we've got I I think our um civil institutions uh were were founded upon an assumption that that people would be able to agree on what reality is agree
on facts and that they would then make kind of rational good faith decisions based on that they might disagree as to how to interpret those facts or kind of what their political philosophy was but but it was all founded on kind of a shared understanding of of reality and that's now been kind of dissolved out from underneath us and we don't have a
mechanism uh to address that problem but what what's the fundamental problem there is it that decentralized Communications media intrinsically fail because there are too many voices is there something about the particular structure of social media now I think the the the the problem seems to be the uh the fact that it's algorithmically driven and that there
are not humans in the loop making decisions making editorial sort of curatorial decisions about what is going to be disseminated on those networks and so as such it's very easy for people who are acting in bad faith to gain that system and produce whatever kind of depiction of reality best suits them uh and sometimes that may be something that
that drives people uh in a particular D Direction politically um but there's also just a a completely nihilistic let it all burn kind of uh approach that some of these actors are taking which is just to kind of destroy people's faith in any kind of of information and create a a a kind of gridlock in which um nobody can agree on anything so if we go back to the world
of 2006 where there's Google Reader there's plenty of blogs RSS is significant algorithms are much much less important does that work well in your view or is the problem more deeply rooted than that well I think at the end of the day people are not going to um agree on facts unless there's um a reason for them to do so uh so I've been
talking about a uh a really interesting book called a culture of fact by Barbara Shapiro which is a sort of some academic style book that that discusses how the idea of facts kind of entered our minds in the first place because we didn't always have it and eventually uh algorithms or so procedures were developed uh for that would enable people to agree on on what was factual
and um and that had a huge impact on culture and on on the economy and and everything else and now that's as I said going away and the only way to bring it back is first to have a situation where people need and want to to agree on on facts your idea of the smart book which is in Diamond age do you think that will ever happen it will be a primer that
people use and it's online and it will educate them and teach them how to be more disciplined a lot of different people have taken inspiration from the diamond Age and and worked on various aspects of the problem and it's always interesting to talk to them because it's sort of a classic six Blind Men in the elephant thing where you know I hear
from someone who says oh I'm working on something inspired by the diamond age and I ask them what that means to them and it's always a little different sometimes it's how do we physically build something that that could could do what that book does um sometimes it's how do we organize knowledge how do we set up curricula that are adaptable to
the uh the needs of a particular reader so I think it's being it's really not just one technology it's a whole basket of different hardware and software Technologies and um and people are definitely coming at that from from various angles right now what do you think stops it from happening we don't have the tech or just users aren't interested or what what's the constraint
it's it's just kind of um distributed among a large number of of different projects there's not any one big centralized this is it kind of uh version of the thing which um isn't necessarily bad I mean that's a great way for uh for for people to to spawn a lot of ideas and do a lot of decentralized work on a project but but but nothing is NE is pulling it together
into into the primer in your early novels like snow crash Diamond age there a sense that states often have become quite weak do you think in reality the state has ended up staying more powerful for reasons which are surprising or you foresaw that I didn't I certainly didn't for see anything I um uh in snow crash and Diamond age I'm kind of riffing on
uh a way of thinking that uh I saw quite a bit among kind of basically libertarian minded techies during the uh the 80s and the 90s um that was all about um you know getting rid of the the nation state and reducing the power of of nation states and um if that was happening I think it got flipped in the other direction basically by 911 so when something like that happens
it uh immediately creates a desire in a lot of people's minds to return to a more centralized authoritarian nation state kind of uh Arrangement and um that's the trajectory that we've been on ever since one of your very early books was called in the beginning was the command line about software how do you think that's held up uh well I if if you
keep in mind when it was written I think it's it's held up okay um that you know it's it's a lot of what's in there is somewhat perishable so for example I talk about an operating system called BOS which uh isn't really a player anymore um so um so in that sense parts of it are dated um but it's good for what it is what will people wear in the future say 100 years
from now will clothing evolve at all I think clothing is pretty highly evolved right I mean if you look at yeah At Any Garment like uh you know say a a shirt you know I was ironing a shirt today in my hotel room and um you know it is freaking complicated object uh we take it for granted but you think about uh the the fabric the way the seams are are
laid out yeah and that's just one example of course but you take any you know shirts shoes any kind of uh specific item of clothing you want to talk about once you sort of take take it apart and uh and look at all the little decisions and innovations that have gone into it it's it's obvious that uh that people have been optimizing this thing
for hundreds or thousands of years um so I mean new materials come along that um that enable people to do new kinds of things with clothing um but um overall I don't think that a lot is going to change is there anything you would want smart clothing to do for you that say a better iPad could not the the thing about clothing you know is that you change your clothes all the time right
and so um if uh uh if you're if you become dependent on a particular technology that's built into your shirt uh that's great as long as you're wearing that shirt but then as soon as you change to a different shirt you don't have it and so what are you going to do are you going to you know make sure that every single one of your shirts um has that same technology
buildt into it um it seems easier to have it separate from the clothing that you wear so that uh you don't have to think about all those complications how bullish are you on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies do they have some kind of killer application or are they a novelty so far it seems like uh they're kind of a a bit of a solution
in search of a of a problem I I think that the non monetary applications of distributed ledgers seem um to be more interesting than um than just making money uh when people um want to talk to me about a new cryptocurrency uh I I tend not to be super interested in continuing that conversation but when they want to talk to me about using distributed ledgers to
enable some other kind of uh of of initiative then um then then frequently it can get very interesting indeed um and I just had a conversation last night with a friend of mine here who's looking at a uh a really cool possible new uh application of distributed ledgers whether that distributed Ledger is based on blockchain uh I think is a separate question um is
blockchain seems to be a pretty complicated and expensive way of doing that here's a reader question and I quote are you in part or in whole Satoshi Nakamoto no and uh the I saw that that article last week on this topic and I realized that the the guy who's writing it is largely just goofing um I I hope nobody takes it seriously it's it's flattering ing that uh anyone
imagines um I've got the mathematical knowhow needed to make something like blockchain but um I think if you look at how that system works it requires a very high degree of of cryptographic knowledge and coding skill um that um is is beyond my abilities certainly yeah I I definitely do not have the lifestyle of a person who um who has that much
money now you're Neil Stevenson what is the fundamental unique ability you have that maybe others do not well I think it starts with storytelling and um the ability to to uh to tell stories in in pros and then um the particular angle that I bring to that is um uh having some a background in kind of science math engineering that um enables me to write stories that
are kind of driven by those kinds of ideas uh and that can take advantage of of inherently interesting things that I stumble across in those areas how did you train yourself to learn storytelling I think that it's a um that part of it begins with with empathy because in order to uh to tell tell somebody a thing you need to know and understand
what it's like to not already know that thing which seems kind of obvious but a little bit of a tangent here uh I for a while uh my my kid was you on a soccer team and we had a group of parents who would organize the you know going to the these different soccer games all over the the city each one in a different field and so these different parents
would would write emails this is kind of before mapping systems were were good so parents would take turns writing emails telling you how to get to the soccer field and the range of of skill was amazing uh you would get people who couldn't just couldn't do it couldn't dis make a very simple description of how to go from point A to point B and
others who wrote These amazing uh almost like little short stories about it so I started thinking about it then and thinking that the thing that distinguished the people who were good at it was that they they could they were capable of putting themselves in the shoes of somebody who didn't know how to find that field and imagining you know in what it would be like to to try to
navigate that route um and those people were good at it so I think that storytelling does begin with that kind of of empathy and then um there's more uh related skills that you can pick up over time by practice just having to do with how you organize words on a page how you edit how you paste things and so on it seems we've entered an age of permanent
secular Innovation starvation why did that happen I think there are a lot of institutional barriers that have Arisen a lot of it I think is seems to be well-intentioned but somebody was pointing out to me uh a little while back that the Golden Gate Bridge was built in a shockingly brief period of time time compared to almost anything that that we try to build today so uh
another good example would be the the the Hoover Dam uh which went up in in no time uh it was it was it also killed a lot of people and so um as we um become more cautious about not killing people let's say during a a given project and and not not creating other bad side effects that slows things down pretty radically and and there are
institutional systems in place now most places to um to sort of limit those kinds of bad side effects uh so it's kind of a mixed bag if someone says well tying everyone together with smartphones that you can Google to any piece of information you know within seconds that that was a big project it's quite new we succeeded at it rather spectacularly it
was not actually Innovation starvation what's your response you're sort of talking about a project that I worked on a couple years ago called hieroglyph which was all about this topic and um I guess my general stance on it is that yeah when it comes to uh networks computers and so on the the amount of innovation has been unbelievable it's just been spectacular um and it's because there's
so little friction when you want to innovate in those areas um you can if you know what you're doing you you can sit down and you can write some code um you can you can achieve great things just on your own or just with a small team and um and then the cost of of shipping that manufacturing and shipping is basically zero uh because bits are free so innovation in those areas is
definitely uh amazing but I think it's had the side effect that if you are a kind of innovation minded person and you want to do something new uh you always end up kind of uh finding your way sooner or later into so implementing whatever it is in software and if you can't do it in software then things slow to a a crawl comparatively and you've
got to be ready for a lot of uh frustration and and obstacles will the arrival of some future general purpose technology fix that say robots or is that just how the world will be forever the well we have to make innovation in the physical sphere um into um into something that we're good at and I I think that is happening I mean I have uh I personally enjoy
working with uh kind of modern maker Technologies like 3D printers and other uh let's call them um physical technologies that have been greatly enhanced and sped up by um by mixing software into the tool chain so that is uh is definitely going on but um it seems to me sometimes that hobbyists people who do things who build things um
because they're passionate about it can get a lot done in a hurry but that as soon as uh you start to involve um capital and uh profit and loss statements and so on that again uh the the rate of progress can slow down quite a bit just because people are are so concerned about so patents and protecting IP uh you know how do we turn a profit from this how do we get create
shareholder value given your focus on Puritans in the buroke cycle do you think Christianity was a fundamental driver of the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution and that's why it occurred in Northwestern Europe or not one of the things that um that comes up in the books you're talking about is the existence of certain kind of out
communities that were um weirdly over represented among people who who who created new economic systems opened up new trade routes and so on so I'm talking about hugos and who were the Protestants and France who suffered a lot of Oppression talking about the the Puritans uh in England who were not part of the established church uh and so uh
also came in for a lot of Oppression Armenians Jews uh pares uh various other sort of minority communities that um precisely because of their uh their Outsider minority status um were forced to kind of form long range networks and um and sort of go about things in an unconventional Innovative way so the uh I guess my answer is is sort of cautiously yes but maybe not in the way
uh you're thinking it's not the big established churches that necessarily led to this um but it's the uh and it's not Christianity per se because not all of these people were were Christians um but it's um it's the circumstances that uh that made it possible for these weird sort of Outsider groups to to find footholds uh in various uh niches and
and do new things why why did God knock down the Tower of Babble and if we build a very very tall building today will he do the same again uh I don't think so the uh it could fall over for a number of reasons um but uh probably not because God knocks it down um the uh although there's only one way to find out I think we should totally build that that Tower I have to use this
opportunity to to quote um Dana Boyd who she's researcher Microsoft research um and I was corresponding with her last week and she she made the point that um the um when snow crash talks specifically about the Tower of Babel myth and that Dana was saying that a lot a lot of people who started tech companies um kind of were inspired and wanted to build
something like the metaverse uh in snow crash but it turns out that instead they built the Tower of Babel they they created a situation in which um we're unable to talk to each other here's another reader question and I quote the major Stevenson Trope seems to me to be the single person or small group that is wise to techer science overcoming large
tech-based adversaries who are blind to their vulnerabilities from the hero of zodiac to the rating team and anathem with many others in between what is his theory of why large organizations are so bad at managing the low-level Tech or is it just a literary device that does not hold true in practice I think it's it's largely the latter it's a great literary
device um uh it's it's hard to write uh compelling story about a giant organization but it's a lot easier to write one about a small group where you've got different personalities uh interacting with each other and you get to know them as as individuals um so you know I think actual real world examples of that happening are somewhat few and
far between in the middle of all these conversations we have a segment overrated versus underrated I'll toss out some nominations you give us your response you're free to pass okay but the first one is Li nits as a philosopher I have to say underrated on the whole mostly because of the backlash that he got from people like voler who didn't get him and uh and and K who kind
of took him down so I I think he's uh he's enjoyed a Resurgence more recently but definitely uh underrated uh in the the couple of centuries after he died but given that today there seems to be no coherent theory of quantum gravity uh is it possible that his core hypothesis of windus monads his whole cosmology could it in some way turn out to just be
correct well there are physicists who are who are working on ideas kind of that that are inspired by that it's um it's not an idea that he reduced to a mathematical theory in the way Newton did with with his and so it's so you have to sort of question whether uh whether it's really a theory at all or just sort of a cool idea uh that could lead to a theory but um you I guess time
will tell survivalists overrated or underrated and there's plenty in America plenty in the Pacific Northwest right yeah it depends on what aspect of them we're we're rating here um I mean the uh you know I I know some and they they definitely uh have got a wide range of of skills above and beyond just shooting things with with guns um so um I don't
necessarily agree with their overall take on just about anything the Charles Dickens novel blee house um I would say underrated cuz it's got uh just crazy random stuff in it that you almost can't believe that you're reading it like there's a a case of of uh spontaneous combustion in it there's a character who like with no warning just uh dies from
spontaneous combustion no explanation it it just happens is Dickens an influence on you oh yeah yeah no he's totally an influence as a proos stylist and as uh someone who's I mean we think of Victorian novels as a kind of stodgy old school um way of writing but uh he was kind of all over the map in terms of of nutty random things that he would put
into his books the science fiction writer Olaf Stapleton underrated or overrated pass the novels of Robert heinan are they still readable today or are they simply of their time well they're certainly of their time but I find that of all of the science fiction writers uh that I read when I was a kid his stuff has stayed with me more than
others because he had this knack for um capturing little moments little human interactions and and images that uh that produced really Vivid memories in my head that are still with me Morse code overrated or underrated currently underrated I guess cuz people aren't really using it much but uh very important in its time which ideas or which areas of life do you feel
right now are not sufficiently thought about not enough pondered people have a hard hard time even pretty fairly educated smart people have a really hard time with statistical thinking and and probability and so there's any number of well I mean a classic example is global climate change where um people have a hard time distinguishing between climate and
weather but that's just one example of of a a really common thing which is that uh there are a lot of of of things that really the only uh rational way to think about them is to think about them in terms of statistics um but that just doesn't come naturally to people why are so many people so lonely today as David Brooks often suggests we have the internet there's more people than ever
before more people live in cities or populous suburbs yet yeah well I I guess I'm not convinced necessarily that that they are more lonely than they were before um I mean that might be true it sounds plausible but I don't know that for a fact um definitely uh more traditional societies you're you're you're kind of living together in in
more crowded places with with family and community which is all well and good if you happen to like those people and they're they're they treat you well uh there's uh many cases in which that doesn't happen and so um if that's the the situation you're in then being able to live alone uh may be a big Improvement when a society becomes more secular as has been
happening what replaces religion for the average person if anything superhero movies and are those good superhero movies uh well they're not all good but they uh I you know seriously think that pop culture Lord of the Rings uh is is um Neil Stevenson perhaps well I don't know about I don't know about him but the the Lord of the Rings that whole
world has has become something approaching a secular religion uh for a lot of people not it's not that they literally so some kind of literally believe it uh but even those who don't um draw from it a lot of the same lessons and Inspirations that uh say a devout Christian might uh might draw from reading the Bible now in your new book fall or Dodge in hell what do you see is
the implicit Theology of that book the uh well it's it's a uh it's it's based on the the the question of is the could it be the case that the world we live in is a digital simulation which is something that that people have have pondered and um what happens in the book is that a uh a new digital simulation is created as a sort of digital afterlife for people to
live in and it raises the question of you know is it Turtles all the way down are we uh living in a digital simulation and creating our own digital simulations inside of it and if so you know how how deep does that stack go what happens when these people begin these dead people begin to create a virtual world to live in in the afterlife is that they end up
recapitulating a lot of the myths and the Legends and uh the religious tropes that um that they sort of dimly remember from this world so that it it gets to the question of you know do we have a psychological need for those things such that when they're taken away from us we have to kind of rebuild them out from scratch what do you think of the basian
argument that we probably are in fact living in a simulation that if every society of a sufficiently advanced level creates a large number of simulations and you work back using the basian calculus then we're probably in one we're more likely simulated than a future simulator or maybe we're both but at least we are in a simulation well I'm
not sure if it makes a difference right I mean we're we're definitely here e either way s uh so it's it's a it's definitely an interesting notion and it's um in a way it's the the jumping off point for fall or Dodge in hell I also uh drew a lot of uh of ideas from uh a book by David Deutsch called the fabric of reality uh which talks about a
number of things but one of the things he talks about is um how much comp shoting power would be needed to simulate the universe that we see around us to a full level of fidelity such that we never see glitches we never see anything that's imperfectly rendered and he sort of heads in the direction of saying that it would take the entire universe to do that that's in essence
like the medieval cosmological argument that we're all a simulation in the mind of God and that is the universe and it's all devoted to a kind of calculation of what we are ontologically so and necessarily so yeah so um it's a it's it's that kind of recast in a more physics-based computer science-based mold and if you were somehow convinced that was true or thought it very likely
to be true would it change anything in your behavior um I don't know I I I think it uh a lot of this kind of philosophizing can just have the effect of of pulling you back zooming out from the day-to-day particulars of your life uh and thinking about things in a more detached um let's say maybe calmer frame of mind what's your favorite poem by
John Milton well Paradise Lost is the uh the basis really for fall or Dodge in hell and so um that's the uh I mean that's that's the big one it's almost seems weird to call it just a poem because it's it's a book length poem uh but it is a poem and he was a really interesting cat uh John Milton uh had a very strange life um and produced a
really strange and and interesting poem do you agree that Satan has all the best lines in the poem and that he's a pretty sympathetic character well that's what makes the uh Paradise loss so interesting is that Milton was a a sincere uh Christian and yet um when you read the thing uh Satan and the other fallen angels are highly relatable I mean they they talk and act and are
motivated um by by uh considerations that we all kind of can can recognize and sympathize with uh and the good guys God and Jesus and so on um up in heaven are kind of boring as they would be I mean how do you you know Jesus doesn't even seem that important in the book yeah for an English Christian of that time right I mean he hasn't been born
yet so it's a very strange it's thousands of years in the future that Jesus is going to become Jesus in you know he's he's a Son of God who hangs out in heaven and and we kind of know spoiler alert that uh who he's going to end up being but uh in Paradise Lost he he doesn't have a lot to do Samuel Johnson once said that when you read Paradise Lost there is no man who wishes
it were longer than it is basically he was happy when it finished even if you think it's a great work with Johnson yeah I think that's a fair a fair statement uh you know it's work I mean it's not it's not just a a sort of beach read by any stretch of the imagination you have to kind of you know beads of sweat pop out on your forehead as you
make your way through this thing uh because you've got a um you know to really get it you've got to appreciate all of the uh the beautiful language that he's uh he's using and it is beautiful but you know you've got to read the thing line by line now both philanthropy and the idea of being frozen or held in suspended animation or or themes in the book is it a problem if
there's a future world where you saved some assets you simply you know freeze yourself in some manner turn off for 400 years and you wake up and you're a megat trillionaire is that a sustainable equilibrium if a lot of people are doing it or is it just a wonderful thing we all get to be Mega trilon yeah yeah why not why not just do that right and um yeah just take a little
time out and uh wake up and and be rich uh the um um well I mean it gets to the the the question of excess wealth in general and you know what is it good for so there's you know we're hearing now what we've all kind of suspected which is that wealthy individuals and corporations have have amassed just enormous amounts of cash that in a lot of cases
is just sitting around not doing anything because you can only spend money so fast right so beyond a certain point uh having more of it doesn't really change your life you can't even if you want to give it all away you need to do that in a a thoughtful and competent uh you know an accountable way and that means you got to find people uh that you can trust to to handle that
responsibility and there aren't enough of those people but maybe the privilege of the future will be the wealthy become sleepers and they become far wealthier someone still has to keep on working for the rate of return on their assets to be positive yeah but that would be the new split in society a bit like wells's you know morlocks the people living above
and below the Earth but it would be sleepers versus nons sleepers and the nons sleepers would always be wanting to rebel and the sleepers would have to set up something to control them before they went asleep right yeah there's a there's definitely room for a sort of like Kafkaesque novel there about someone who's working as a an accountant for uh
uh you know an asset manager for a bunch of dead people uh and um and that's their whole uh existence but there was a similar um question that was raised uh a few months ago I saw um someone a bunch of of these super wealthy people had um had started thinking about um how to make preparations for um you know the the fall of civilization how do we you
know we can build bunkers we can you know stockpile supplies and weapons and kind of set up a survivalist um kind of uh system uh to to live in um but at the end of the day we have to have people uh to help we have to have soldiers you know uh we need we need Manpower and how do you um if you're that rich person how do you make sure that they don't just
take all your stuff and it's a uh it's not an obvious there's not an obvious answer to that are there any of your fictional worlds you actually would want to live in well I I didn't find it fascinating to go back to um to the uh the era of the the Baroque cycle just because so much was going on there uh you know I'd want to definitely take all my
vaccinations um and bring some antibiotics with me if I could but that would be a really cool world to see but if your first choice is to go back to this world of extreme poverty does that mean that you too are a kind of dystopian writer in a way that you've said other people have created dystopias dystopia is an interesting idea because a lot of times what science fiction
writers are really doing is writing a kind of metaphorical story about the present and so um uh I I think that the the we're in a dystopia now in a lot of ways I mean there's a lot of things have gotten better but uh what's happening politically right now what's happening socially is definitely trending in a dystopian way so uh that's what we
should be I think concerned about right now what's the thing that's getting worst socially the uh just the fragmentation the thing we talked about earlier the people uh no longer having a common basis to uh to to have conversations with each other but is that kind of fragmentation bad if we can run a society on less consensus because it somehow is more robust say we all get
transfers from a central Authority we don't want to knock over the apple cart and then we each go our own merry ways and we talk to people who are in our Niche but otherwise there's no common conversation like on network TV does that have to be so bad uh well I guess we're going to find out cuz that's where we're going and so you know it is an odd
thing that we've seen the the normal uh expectations and standards of uh how how the the Constitutional system of checks and balances is supposed to work that's completely the wheels have just come off in the last couple of years and um and no one uh in a position of power seems to be capable or willing to do anything about it and yet day-to-day life seems
to go on without any obvious change you can read that as we're in the Calm before the storm and it's all going to just collapse pretty soon or you know maybe maybe this is how things are now that that DC is just a kind of Sideshow and it doesn't matter now you grew up in Ames Iowa is that correct that's correct when it comes to the midwestern college
town has that itself become dystopia so some critics charge well they're engines of inequality they're more racially segregated than they used to be college towns or is the midwestern college town a dream that's still pretty much alive and well I think it's uh as close to a a utopian society as I'm aware of actually happening I mean I mean it's definitely
uh it's a it's fair to say that uh the the the racial balance doesn't reflect that of the the country as a whole but there's um uh it's it's more racially diverse than the surrounding uh Country Side let's say when I was growing up there um it was a a very flat income distribution I mean there were a few people that uh were considered to be wealthy because they drove uh
Cadillacs um instead of Chevrolets uh and maybe sometimes they would go to Colorado and go skiing um so that was extreme wealth um where I where I grew up and uh the uh emphasis on education was uh sort of transformative of that whole kind of culture in those in those towns uh everything's pretty simple everything's uh cheap everything's easy
in a lot of ways and um and a lot of those towns still have those characteristics now for final segment we turn to what I call the Neil Stevenson production function your life how you got to be what you are how did partaking in construction work help your writing by taking my mind off of writing for several hours a day so um it's it's an activity that requires focus and
attention you can't just drift off while you're doing it so it it it it occupies the kind of front room of your your brain for a while and allows interesting creative things to happen in the back did driving a funeral car help your writing uh well that was before I was doing a lot of writing I was delivering um chairs uh rental chairs for a funeral
home and um kind of rattling around town in a 1948 Chevy pickup this was in this was like n the late 1970s so it was pretty old vehicle uh and um um I it it did sort of uh give me freedom to roam around and to interact with a a bunch of people basically anybody in town who needed to rent chairs when it comes to swords what is your dream my dream is to uh be good at
it which I'm not uh it's actually been a a really interesting thing to pursue in that it's it's informative to spend so much time uh work working on something and still be so so bad at it what would you do if you didn't write I would probably have ended up working in some kind of tech company probably WR I would probably have ended up writing code
somewhere and then over time I would have migrated into something that was a little more physical you actually building you know robots or something that had code in it and if you meet a tech person and they're thinking of becoming a writer what's the question they should ask themselves as to whether they should do Tech or writing how much money is in your bank account I you know
it's not it's it's a terrible Choice economically if if you've got a uh an actual career in Tech um then uh that probably means a Financial Security and then some uh and it's extremely unlikely that you'll be able to uh to come have anything like that level of income if you're starting out as a writer as a writer of speculative fiction you almost
certainly have a very large number of white male nerds as your fans it would appear so they would but that that that aside what do you think is a common element that binds a lot of your readers together either demographically or mentally or emotionally it's the uh it seems to be this desire and willingness to spend a lot of time in uh in a big
story world and so uh I also see a lot of people uh in the military who who are readers of these books um I signed a copy of snow crash last night that had been around the world a couple of times in nuclear submarines I've talked to people who read these books in Afghanistan um so um I the they're big books there's a lot in them uh you kind
of need to be have the time and the willingness to um to kind of sit back for a while and be immersed in a big story Universe in order to enjoy these books and what else do you think that's correlated with that desire to spend a lot of time in a story world what are the other empirical corelates H so people in the military maybe people on nuclear submarines yeah uh people in
Tech I think it's just a people who who think about um who who think about things who have a kind of complicated inner life and uh uh and who you know derive satisfaction from uh uh from from Reading big stories with with lots of uh lots of ideas in them now a lot of writers and also science fiction authors they seem to become less Visionary as
they age that doesn't seem to have happened to you how would you account for that well it may be uh it may be economic pressures in some ways if your um your livelihood derives from uh working on a particular series of books um and and there's an expectation from your publisher uh that that's what you're going to do um then that's what you're going to do um so you might still
be a a Visionary but that's kind of not where the the money is um so uh that might be part of it but uh beyond that you know it's it's hard to speculate what's the worst aspect of marketing a book the uh I actually enjoy book tours more than people assume that I do the uh um so it's not that um overall I would say it's the and is none of it's
terrible but if you know if you're asking me to pick out one thing that that doesn't agree with me it's just that there's a lot of um in a runup to the publication of the book there's a lot of little interruptions that happen uh that that basically make it impossible for me to to work work on writing the next book last two questions first what is your most unusual writing
habit I don't know if it's unusual but kind of a peculiarity is that when I stop writing for the day which usually happens at something like 11 in the morning and I uh and you're starting around when oh maybe 8 okay as I'm walking around for the next 15 minutes or so sentences will come into my head that are by and large they're the best sentences and so um I've learned to
carry a recorder with me now it's just the voice recorder app on my phone because I know that these uh if I jump in the car and start driving somewhere I'm going to uh have a few of these uh these lines that I don't want to lose and finally what is it you think you'll do next the writing wise uh I've got a couple of uh ideas that I've been um
working on for a while and so um what I need to do is um is go home and calm down it takes a while like after my first book tour I think it was six months before my eyelid stopped twitching um so I need to uh to kind of calm down get back to normal and then take a good look at uh at at this this project I've been thinking about and figure out
how to reboot it Neil Stevenson thank you very much it's good to be here thanks thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show