hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler this is my second conversation with Neil Stevenson who needs no introduction but do let me tell you about Neil's new book poan which I read an advanced copy of uh it's a very different kind of book I wasn't sure what to expect but I very much liked it and the real test of this is
when the book ends are you sad that it wasn't longer and I was sad it wasn't longer and I will be pre-ordering Parts two three and whatever else comes Neil welcome good to be back how is it that you think about why you sometimes switch from showing us the future to illustrating the past you know for me it's a Continuum um
all of my science fictiony books have had uh call backs to historical um historical themes some more than others um and so um so to me I you know I've always enjoyed history I've I've had the opportunity to write historical fiction I've greatly enjoyed it um and um um so uh it's been a while since I went there and um I was very uh
I was it was like going home almost uh you know being able to to go back and uh and and work in a historical setting again sometimes I think that when the present and future are changing most rapidly that's when we need to write about the past that it's easier to speculate about the future when
nothing's happening well it's interesting I mean we're in a weird situation now where um I think that uh the formal uh education people's formal education in history is probably at an alltime low uh and yet there are all of the new ways of learning about history that didn't exist um you know 50 years ago there's you
know podcasts and YouTube videos and so on um that you can sink your teeth into if you um if you decide that you're interested in some particular era of of History um so I think that more and more what we have now is kind of autodidacts out there um who've uh you know who sort of in their in their on their own time not at school but during
their Leisure Time have have decided to become history Geeks why is this book called pistan you know it's uh the the name is explained toward the very end of the the book um it is um uh there's a funny thing about book titles um today which is that um uh they need to be searchable they need to be uniquely searchable so uh I've had
the experience a few times in the last decade or two of proposing a title for a book and uh the publisher coming back saying that's an awesome title um you know we'd love to use it but it's not going to work when people begin typing it into a search engine um so now the the trend is towards finding things that
that'll Auto complete pretty pretty quickly um and um so so poan is a word that emerges it's it's sort of a joke that one of the characters makes um toward the end of the book uh but it it's a reference to the the fact that that the sport of Polo enters into the storyline in uh in a few different uh uh contexts how many spies do you think
psychologically or just totally screwed up are all of them screwed up or can you be a normal spy the way you might be a normal grosser I think that um it uh I I suspect that it begins to screw you up um o over time you might go in normal um but um it it takes a big psychological toll to be uh trying to maintain
multiple identity um and always worrying about divulging information it's just not a natural way for for people to live um so the um you know from what I can tell looking at kind of Espionage in the era of say the second world war um the best spies were completely unexceptional people and that's probably still true today but you
don't want James Bond you know you don't want a fem fatal kind of character who's going to stand out you want somebody who just could disappears into the the background so that's the kind of people that they they like to recruit and you want psychological compartmentalization people Express emotion yeah yeah I mean um um I think
that uh it's easiest when you don't have to lie um you know when you're the the role that you're playing is reasonably close to uh to who you really are um and uh uh I guess unless you're a total sociopath spies might be total sociopaths right there's some reasonable percentage of sociopaths out there and you're going to do something it's a
sociopath maybe spy is it yeah yeah maybe it's a uh I don't know there's a Myers Briggs category for that but um maybe that's what they look for I heard a story once that um that there was a phase I don't know it was in the 70s or 80s where um there had been some leaks uh from compromised people in the American
intelligence world and so they went they started trying to hire real real Straight Arrow types um you know who just had no blemishes or perceived blemishes anywhere on their record that could be used to kind of compromise them or blackmail them and they ended up with such sort of uh pure uh uh innocent kind
of characters that um that the Brits started so withholding information because they they just couldn't you know they they couldn't stand um having to deal with these kind of small town naive um uh people who were being sent their way by the Americans don't know if it's true but good story I'm not saying Mormons are naive but I'm
told the CIA has a disproportionate share of Mormons which makes sense right yeah it's it's it's that's where you would go to look to to find uh to find such people if we run through different counterfactuals you know the secrets of the atom bomb which do of course leak out to the Soviet Union but how contingent was that can you easily
imagine a lot of very different Futures where we just can that secret for 10 years or more or do you think it inevitably was just going to happen you know there's some debate as to how important that leakage really was I mean at the time it seems like a horrendous uh failure um to to have let that information go um but
um how long would it have taken the Soviets to duplicate that that effort you know based on on sort of available information um I don't think it would have taken a lot longer their incentive to um to build a bomb was was too great and um and particularly if if you're willing to settle for the gun style of a bomb as
opposed to the implosion device um you know that's a pretty simple object it could just be they had multiple decent spies so if we had stopped the ones who carried the secrets if there were 20 others waiting in the wings then it's not that contingent at all yeah and how do you think about AI Secrets do you think those are are are
bound to flow out or it's contingent you mean like Cades Secrets or proprietary software that's that's in AI systems or some people would say it's the weights the data different opinions as to what the secret are but there's something in there that not everyone has well yeah I mean the way you get those weights is by running these big
training sessions right that are incredibly expensive um and so um so I haven't actually thought about it before but yeah I would imagine that um um if you've spent billions of dollars to um you know to to to get a a set of Weights um that you're you're going to try to hang on to that how effectively could you stage
your own death you you really so you really want to do it and you're willing to do it fake to fake it or to actually fake it but every everyone thinks it's real I read about it in the papers Neil is gone I nod my head I weep and then I forget about it I don't mean I forget about you but you understand what I'm
saying yeah yeah um boy there's not that many any circumstances under which all you know physical traces of of someone um can be obliterated I mean that's a a fairly hard thing to do because you know it would would have been easier a hundred years ago but you we've got cam cameras everywhere and we've got DNA testing and
uh you know other ways to prove that uh uh that's or to disprove that um that somebody's actually dead so um you know I guess it would have to be something like a a plane crash into the ocean but then how do you survive it oh yeah okay I mean to kill yourself is one thing but to pretend you've killed yourself and stayed alive seems
harder yeah yeah um H I mean you could perish shoot out you know if it was a if it was like a a small plane like not a jet airliner full of people but you know a single single Cedar I guess that might hire a private plane have it crash parachute out into somewhere you're witnessed you're witnessed um getting into the plane and
taking off yeah um but then uh there's no way to recover the evidence for something reason it's pretty it's pretty hard to do I mean if someone really wanted to if they were just determined to go and find the uh the like the you see the efforts that people have gone to to to go down to the Titanic you know
well I mean if you can go find that thing and and check it out with a submarine then it's it's pretty hard to um to really find a place that can't be accessed in that way do you still write your novels in long hand on legal pads not on legal pads but but I do write them on long hand yeah yeah um I I buy this fancy paper from
Italy um I mean I kind of had this idea that uh if I if I bought fancy paper you know i' I'd use less of it I'd be more kind of concer ative um and uh I don't think that worked uh cuz even fancy paper doesn't cost very much I I like opening the package too much it's it comes in a nice package with like Wax the wax seal on it so how
does long hand improve your thinking or writing process compared to say typing well I can type really fast so it's easy to just so just you know keyboard goes bur kind of you know uh thing where um uh stuff gets put down on the screen uh almost as fast as ideas are coming into my head and that's not
necessarily a good thing um it's it's valuable for uh a sentence to be lodged in the buffer for a little while um because you can it's really easy to improve it or even just to to get rid of it while it's between your ears but as soon as you uh put it down on the screen even though it is editable and all that
um it takes on a kind of permanence uh it requires more effort to to go back and and fix it um so I think that the first draft quality is better uh and um you know that's it's it's also just fast to edit on on paper you know I can just like draw a box around a paragraph and put a big X through it or cross out a word or write something in um and it
just takes longer to do all of those things if you're screwing around with a mouse or whatever now you must have spent a lot of time thinking about communism over the last few years why is it in your view having come to grips with the topic that so many American intellectual became infatuated with stalinism and not
just agnostic but positively enthusiastic this often survived their visits to the Soviet Union how did that happen are we just as humans deranged beings the um I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that uh the the main character in pistan is the a daughter of of a a Russian dad and a a an American woman the the who are both um so very
involved in leftist politics uh in the late teens early 20s and um so there were a lot of um not just Americans but westerners in general who went to the Soviet Union in those years um because they thought that this was an opportunity to build something great and this was obviously before stalinism and all that um but um
even then there was was all kinds of bad stuff going on uh the ca the precursor of the KGB was coming into power and doing bad things and um if you had the eyes to see it uh you could see that um that this was going in a bad Direction but a lot of those people did not want to see the bad side of things and kind
of close their eyes to it so there's a great book by Malcolm muggeridge called um I think it's called Moscow and winter which he wrote in the I think 1933 um but it's sort of uh it's fictionalized but it's clearly it's a thinly veiled account of of these kinds of people in Moscow in the early 30s and um and uh muggeridge has been there and he
knows he knows bad things are happening he knows about the the famine the man-made famine in Ukraine um probably knows about a lot of other things and he's depicting these these these Western expats who just they they refuse to to acknowledge any downside to the um to the the revolution um so there's there's plenty
of stories like that um from that era and uh I don't know if it means that we're deranged I think um we want we want to see nice things happen in the world and if if we've decided that there's a particular political movement or ideology that's going to make nice things happen then uh it's a little too easy for us to deceive
ourselves about um about the downside of of such movements and what is it about the Soviet Union that you have ended up most admiring most admiring most admiring right because you've spent a lot of time studying it reading about it thinking about it um well they make really good Rockets uh so if you're in the rocket
business um you know their ability to make high performing uh rocket engines and so on is is pretty pretty astounding um but um the um the the amazing thing that they did in the 30s which is the period I'm focusing on was to um kind of uh yank this backward country forward from the the 19th century into the the 20th century um by bu building
this huge industrial base at Breakneck speed and in the course of doing that they did a lot of terrible things so so when I say that it's admirable um you know I'm just referring to to kind of oh look they build a big steel mill and I'm not taking into account the the body count it strikes me that it was a
reasonably favorable environment for enabling strong women and I'm not sure exactly why but I do see that in the data yeah so the they were pretty serious about uh about equal rights for for women and so for I think that was maybe a big part of why a lot of Western leftists um thought it was a great place because um um there really were uh a lot
of uh women um getting uh better education becoming doctors um getting roles in the military um that you know there was uh it was easier to get things like abortions or to get a divorce um so they they did kind of put their money where their mouth was as far as Women's Rights was concerned and to get into the the head
space or the the feel of writing about Soviet Union of that time Are there specific things you do you put on prfv or you you know open Dr chivago or what how does that work for you or you just do it I like to find uh firstperson accounts uh I like to to look at pictures to the the iconography of the uh of the Soviet Union um the uh um you
know there are various people who went there in the 20s and 30s and wrote Memoirs Americans you know who wrote memoirs um describing uh their experiences there and um because they were written at the time kind of before people knew about stalinism and you know the excesses of of stalinism it's it's written without
kind of a full premonition of how bad things were going to get um and um and so uh uh in particular there's an account of a I I don't I I'm not going to be able to remember the name right now but there was an American engineer who went and worked at this huge steel mill at magnor um in the the 30s and helped them
build that and so he's got uh a memoir telling about just his day-to-day experiences of working with these people kind of the the good and the bad mixed together is there much in Soviet fiction that you admire man I don't know if I've ever read a single word of Soviet fiction fosy Grossman life and fate I'm doing a
whole podcast on it that's a great great novel okay okay um there's some Soviet science fiction like strugatsky which ended up turning into the movie stalker from Poland stanislav LM probably salaris he's very good yeah yeah yeah yeah slings I think overall yeah do you think there are other American fiction writers who've
succeeded in capturing something of the Soviet experience so I think of Norman maer's Oswald book which I think is quite good it's maybe my favorite Norman merer uh but not many examples but I like what you did with it oh thanks thanks yeah I was just listening to the the uh rest is history podast podcast about the Kennedy
assassination and they do a segment on um on oswalt's stint in the uh the Soviet Union and Dilo writes about it too um but um the um um but no I I I don't I'm sure it exists but I'm uh I'm too poorly read to uh to know about it you know since when I was 19 I visited Gary Indiana which of course is now a while ago it was more up and
running than it is now and ever since then I had this dream to visit magnitogorsk I mean do you like me also want to go there or is just somewhere you want to stay away from assuming you could go safely forget about the current War and the like yeah if I could go safely it would be interesting to see
for sure but you obviously I'm not setting foot in Russia anytime soon but um yeah the the story for those who don't know it is that um is that Stalin said uh I want the world's biggest steel mill and at the time it was Gary Indiana so they just got the the numbers on Gary Indiana and so increased them by I don't
know 10% and started working on this huge steel mill in this place called magnor which means magnetic Mountain which is in the eurals um out in the middle of nowhere where and um called magnetic Mountain because it's an incredibly Rich load of uh of iron ore um and so in a pretty short time they built this giant steel mill complex
which still exists and the city has grown up um grown up around it um I imagine that a lot of what made it interesting in 1933 is probably gone now um but uh I I did go to vulgarr Once which you know got a few things in common with magnor I guess the former the former Stalin grad you know I don't know Russia well
but some part of me feels that the Soviet Union and America had more in common in the 1930s than they ever had before or have had since does that make sense to you at all and what what is that something I think it does uh I've I've actually got one of my characters um in the book he kind of talks about this a little bit um because uh there's
this in both cases there's a there's one part of the country in in the United States it's basically everything from Chicago to the Atlantic which is densely populated um and urbanized and lots of industry and then uh if in the Soviet Union obviously that's the the western part of the country and then there's this huge
Hinterland uh which is mostly empty and um it's got uh it's got indigenous people it's got a history of those people being uh being poorly treated by The Cosmopolitan industrialized uh you know dominant culture um and you know it's kind of vast open resource extraction Zone to feed the uh to feed the industrial
Beast so so it's got that in common and um you know I do think that there are some some ways in which uh uh those two countries sort of understood each other at the time and I think I think there was some of that thinking in um the when when Americans would would come and visit um and try to get involved in building the the Soviet
Union there's some common Obsession to industrialize to urbanize the working class is quite focal in in very different ways but in both places but at the same time idealizing the the Wide Open Spaces the Wilderness you know the idea of the frontier so it's kind of both of those things going at once I have some questions about other
issues in Tech sure augmented reality it's gotten a lot of attention lately so there's meta's orian product which is forthcoming at some Pace uh Apple Vision Pro with the second version on the way what do you think of these are we getting somewhere or is it still stuck um well I think we got somewhere
with with magically you know a few years ago I think these products are all kind of doing similar similar things and and um the um sort of the only thing I'm interested in hearing about is how much how many billions of dollars these companies are putting into the development of content to run on these devices because um nobody's going to use
them or want them unless there there's a reason to put them on reason to use them and um making content for um an augmented reality device is is very difficult you know I mean it's uh you you take you take ordinary game development that's no picnic you know in and of itself that's a requires a lot of smart people with specialized skill
sets VR is a whole step above that in terms of um it's uh level of difficulty and AR is is Way Beyond VR because there's so many other um factors that you have to to take into account in order to make content that that actually takes advantage of uh of what AR can can do so I I feel that you know my general sense is that the kinds
of people who invest in building this Hardware they're very comfortable building Hardware um they're not comfortable investing in content plays and they have the mentality of um you know if we build it they will come if we provide the hardware then creators are just going to somehow jump out of the woodwork and uh build um build cool
applications that run on this Hardware I think that magically did a really good job of supporting um uh a bunch of different creative teams um making content for for that device uh but um but it's still they still could have used more and um you know so far I there are both of those companies have got
programs to try to encourage people to to build content um but I think they're still relying on other investors too much to to somehow come in and start writing checks and supporting uh developers um you know on I mean it it takes years and millions and millions of dollars to make anything at all that that's worth seeing on one
of these and so where do you find the where do you find the investors willing to to write those checks what do you think of the the daily uses of AR so let's say I don't want to watch a movie on Apple Vision Pro but I want to walk around to a party and it will tell me the name of all these people people I've met before the
names uh but I don't remember their names and it tells me who they are now this might violate privacy for some people uh but will that be popular will there be oh I take it into the Whole Foods and it just points me to what's on sale or what's good that day is that going to work me the the thing is Tyler that the
those two applications that you just described are things that um that we were talking about 10 years ago at at Magic leap and they were old ideas then so I'm not I'm not cracking on you for having old ideas but I'm just saying that you know what is it about this space that um you know with the like probably hundreds of billions by this
point that have been poured into to building these systems uh and the zillions of of person years um that you know were still talking about the the party name finder application right but don't llms make all the difference I mean that would be the change so llms at equality level are quite recent and I can talk to it it can talk back to me
that's now virtually seamless isn't that going to mean it's all going to work it's like becomes the operating system for your AR um it it can work and it does work and it's um um it's very promising you know I'm I'm working on a a project uh with that right now but the um the there's no obvious sort of organic connection
between that and AR particularly so um the uh um if I'm if I want to build an application uh that uses llms or any other kind of cool technology that's comeing along again I've got to think about the numbers I've got to think about um okay I'm going to have to employ X number of programmers for X years you know here's
how much it's going to cost the the investors supporting this project are going to want to get paid back um now how many people own AR headsets okay like a few thousand I don't know um are are they is that tiny group of people going to actually generate enough Revenue that the investors who Bank bankrolled this whole project are going
to get paid back um well regardless of what your answer is to that question it's definitely the case that there's billions of people literally billions with a a be who have access to uh to phones pads laptops you know flat screen technology and so um that market is so much more enormous that um that so the economic
considerations Force you as a developer to to make whatever you're making you got to make it run on phones and iPads and and all of that stuff um so if you do that um uh then you may you might also have the same thing ported to an AR device um but uh it's it's the the market and the revenue that you get out of your
application is going to be completely dominated by by the version of it that runs on ordinary flat screen devices or social media being replaced by group chats and if so is that good or bad group chats like Discord U Flack that kind of thing or or WhatsApp to often small groups occasionally large people talk about issues of the world
it's private in a way Twitter never has been um it seems to me those are much more influential does that make you feel better about social media or the same yeah I mean it's hard to feel worse about social media so um the uh uh I I do think that U anything that um sort of gets you out of the glare of uh of the big social media
platforms and and kind of Dr risks it um and and uh uh you know if when you have the feeling that you're talking amongst friends among people that you know um you don't have to be as guarded you don't have to spend as much time kind of fending off Bots and dealing with just complete asinine that comes at
you so thick and fast on on Twitter or other kind of uh you know open platforms does it matter much that it seems today in the United States there's so much more surveillance than say 10 years ago people don't seem to feel that it matters right I mean I may have my own opinions but but people are just amazingly willing to um
to put devices in their homes that keep them 247 surveillance you know they listen to every sound that they make and track them with cameras and you know they're on the internet all the time um so um the I guess we haven't yet seen a a huge disaster resulting from that you know we haven't yet seen a um well I don't know I
mean I I guess I'm I'm giving a western perspective here but um that it does seem that for a couple of DEC we got like a couple decades Head Start before the authoritarian totalitarian countries of the world figured out how to make use of the internet right so the um the internet was kind of open everywhere and now it's not now
China and Russia and North Korea have ways of Walling off their internet and uh and you know controlling what goes in and out of the country information wise um and in like manner um they're making use of um kind of the surveillance capabilities of of of technology that we've naively you know provided them with um
so I think there have been bad consequences obviously in those countries um for dissidents you know or anybody who kind of runs a foul of the the authorities um if if that stuff is happening here um I guess I I haven't heard about it yet it doesn't seem to matter yet now your writing seems to influence actual technologists does that make you
nervous at all do you feel some kind of moral nervousness every time you sit down to handr write something out like oh my goodness you know what what's this going to cause in the world or you just go ahead and you write blly and try to write something that's interesting you try to write uh something that
um that's reasonably balanced in terms of Pros and cons um and that is uh uh rooted in in some kind of um basic understanding of the the technology so um uh and then let the chips fall where they may um so um I mean most recently you know the most recent book of that type that I've written was termination shock which is about solar
radiation management solar geoengineering and you know I uh I feel like I went to some effort to present a balanced approach there um and to present arguments on both sides and to to show uh why some people would think it was great and other people would would hate it um so um my feeling is that if I do that then you know no one can say I'm
presenting a sort of uh propaganda istic one-sided view of the the issue and uh people are then free to kind of make up their own minds as to what position they want to take in what year do you think we will first see a novel co-authored by a human and an AI where the AI does more than just some basic research but actually
writes a fair amount of the novel and that the novel is at least as good as what a talented human could accomplish well I mean something close to that's probably happened already um so U the um I mean I'm sure it's happened so so your question boils down to a a a critical judgment as to Quality um so um the
my position on this which I I put out in a a substack a couple weeks ago go is that the real purpose of Art and the reason we like art is because it exposes us to a very dense package of of micro decisions that have been made by by the artist and as such we're engaged in a kind of communion with with that artist
and um and what makes it interesting is is that that connection it may be to a living writer or it may be to a sculptor who died you know 20 500 years ago but in either case we're making a human to human connection um if um if we know that we're um reading something or experiencing a work of art that was just
generated by an algorithm then that element of human connection is isn't there anymore and furthermore we know that for every one such book or image or whatever a million more could be generated just by you know clicking a launching a python script basically um and so uh familiarity or um I mean the law of supply and demand takes over at that
point so if there's an infinite supply of this stuff then it's its value drops to zero um so um so even if such a book kind of reads pretty well as a novel I I don't think people are going to um be interested in it well but they may not know it was partly written by an AI or fully written by an AI right yeah I mean you know that's an
interesting thought experiment is try to craft a try to lie and claim that there was a human who wrote it um and um um and you know create a fake fan club or or whatever um you know uh I guess that's possible um but um uh I don't know personally I I'm just not interested in it I I have too many books
on my shelf that I haven't read yet that were written by humans what for you is the biggest weakness or flaw in current llms they they don't yet seem to have a understanding of of spatial relations and just basic logical um relationships that exist between between things in the real world um so um the um I mean there's a million
examples of this on the uh on the internet there are people on Twitter who Delight in posting you know the results of you know some non you know as llm to do an arithmetic problem and it'll give you the the wrong answer in a very convincing and confident way um so they kind of don't know their own limitations in that sense um you know they it the
the llm should say oh well that looks like a math problem and I I I suck in math you know I can't I I can't give you the right answer you should you know get get your calculator out um but um but they don't do that they just confidently you know give you the wrong answer do you think we can use robots and robotic data to in essence teach
llms about spatial relations the robot will learn spatial relations going through the world right oh you bump into a tree you need to stop and this all gets fed into the llm and then we have them make videos and we grade the videos and do reinforcement learning on how good the videos are and can't we unless
than five years have AIS that are just awesomely good at that we have a terminology issue to to talk about here which is you know llms um the um um I don't think that an llm per se is the right kind of architecture to use to to solve that problem uh I'm sure that um that you can uh you can train a some kind of a AI on
um uh on that kind of data set and in fact we know that this is happening with um um say self-driving cars um you know where um you can use let's say a game engine to create an imaginary City with imaginary roads and then you can generate the videos you know of from the car's point of view of what it would look like to drive around that
City and so you can generate that vid that video data set way more cheaply and rapidly than than you know if you had to physically go out in a car with a camera on it and and drive around in in a car so you can definitely feed um huge amounts of uh of synthetic data to uh to an AI system and and help
but learn that way it's just a it's a different kind of brain from a large language model per se I have a long question from a reader which I'll paraphrase but it basically says You seem to be better at predicting the future than almost anyone else and you've done this in a wide variety of areas what's your self-awareness as to
how this has been possible I think there's kind of a scattershot phenomenon going going on where you know a science fiction book might include a large number of hypothetical inventions um and the ones that are in there might be described somewhat vaguely so uh a bunch of those um might might never get realized um but
people very generously tend to forget about those they they give the writer the novelist a free pass you you know uh and uh uh and they they only take into account the ones that seem to have have come true and the um um there's also some generosity there in that the description of the invention might be a little wishy-washy a little vague uh um
but um but then later on when a somewhat similar real invention gets made some is nice enough to to say that you know the science fiction writer invented this um so um let say the trimmer from Diamond age do you feel we have that now or soon with large language models they will teach you almost anything right not how
to make a bomb but anything scientific anything legitimate they'll give you multiple choice questions they'll grade them for you they're not perfect but is that in fact what you meant bunch of different elements that have to come together to make something that would work like the primer in the diamond age and you just describe one of
them uh which we can now get with with llms um the other or another part of it is um how do you create that special relationship between the the learner and the object the the book so somehow it's just not as compelling to to sort of go on the internet and pull up a large language model and ask it to um to teach you something and you
can do it for sure uh but um uh you don't see uh a lot of people that I know of kind of um using it that way so what you need is to put productize that I think to to use a really crass word um and you know soort package it in a way that a kid or somebody could pick up an object um and you know open it to the
next page and see what they needed to see that day um tailored for for their learning style um and I don't know if people are working on that or not probably they're working on it could you imagine that we have a near future where artificial general intelligence comes AGI and that basically people don't much notice or care and the world just
continues and some people have these big doses of extra IQ in their pocket at a low price but the world doesn't change that much sure I mean that sounds like you know a promising uh place to to begin a science fiction novel Tyler you should uh you know you should you should work on that I like it um the um uh I
don't know if I don't know how important IQ really is so I mean to your earlier question about are we all depraved you know um like lots of lots of people with high IQs fell for ridiculous during the 20th century and are falling for it today um so uh getting access to even more IQ in a pocket or whatever doesn't
necessarily get you anywhere in dealing with practical real world uh decision making what do you think then is scarce is it kindness is it common sense is it being more skeptical or what's the one thing we really do need more of if the marginal value of extra IQ is iffy well I mean kindness sounds great um but it might be somewhat cheap
in Supply right like oh everyone's kind but we don't do much about it and you know s weeks later there's still babies on Africa with malaria yeah yeah I mean the uh a lot of people who uh you know going back to our earlier topic who who uh were involved in terrible political movements in the the 20th century and
now probably did so in the belief that they were ultimately being kind you know that they were trying improve the the world somehow um so um so that's uh you know there's a level of self-deception that can creep in uh that that makes can make kind of people paradoxically very dangerous do you think readers enjoy reading scenes of
torture enjoy in a broad sense of the term so I don't know about I don't know if en Joy is precisely the right word uh one of my favorite writers is Joe abomi who writes s of uh fantasy novels um the and and one of the um main characters in his whole cycle of novels is a professional torturer and um the uh and so the the
trick that that Joe manages to achieve is that he he depicts this guy doing horrific things uh but um but yeah he ends up being a really interesting character and you almost end up kind of rooting for him in in a strange way um so um you know I think uh there's a whole field of what's called body horror um which it
which some writers kind of like to work with um that um that's somehow fascinating to people we all have bodies we all know things can go wrong with our bodies uh and um and so um the uh and so this this this shows up from from time to time in uh in in fiction so I think that uh if you're going to depict it um the key thing is just not to
um to do it in a way that doesn't appeal to to the worst parts of the reader's human nature do you like the TV show The Americans haven't seen it which by the way has had a whole bunch of torture scenes in it oh okay haven't uh haven't seen it you should watch it I think it's very good and some parts of it are not
unrelated to themes in your book well that that's why that that's why Tyler I I like vaguely know what it's about and so if I'm working on a a project of my own I so actively avoid trying to see other fictional treatments of the same or similar subject matter did you go see the movie Oppenheimer I did what' you think
uh I would have liked to see more about making the bomb and less about his bureaucratic troubles getting his security clearance renewed I mean I I guess I see why that that makes for us a a certain kind of drama that plays well on on screen um but um the uh it's not what I went there for last question not asking for any
spoilers but on the cover of poan which again I liked very much it says volume one of bomb light which is going to be some kind of Series without giving it away is there anything you can tell us about where this is headed yeah I mean it's about the you can guess from the name of the series that it it's going to relate to the
bomb eventually and so the what I've kind of became aware of starting about 10 years ago is that in the 10 years or so leading up to the the man the the the building of the first atomic bomb there was all kinds of really interesting stuff going on in the world uh in the world of physics um you know the neutron wasn't even discovered until
1932 um so you know within living memory um the uh there were all kinds of uh of physics um experiments underway during the 1930s where people like the fies and or fmy and the curies uh uh Compton milikin uh Rutherford Chadwick were um were so solving the the mysteries of uh you know pursuing this kind of detective
story of um you know how does the universe work using very simple comparatively simple kind of experiments and just deductive reasoning and so frailing just on the coattails of that you've got people in the world of military the government and so on beginning to understand that this is going to be really important they don't necessarily
know that the bomb is going to be possible um that early but um but they know it's important and so uh and so all kinds of weird stuff begins to happen um that is uh is understood only by a few people in the world um but people who are in the know understand that it's really important and so to me um there's all kinds of
fodder in that situation for storytelling for novel writing and so um um so I'm starting I mean this one really gets going in about 1932 polan it ends in early 1934 it features one one of the the main characters of the series who's a young woman uh who I mentioned before who's half Russian half American um the next book in the series
is going to focus more on uh a different character who's introduced in this book but we don't see much of him then there's a third book planned that'll be based around a different character and eventually all this sort of comes together in the in the 1940s um and and along the way we we see the development of what's going on in
world of physics but we also see what's happening in parallel with that with the rise of of the Nazis and stalinism the Spanish Civil War you know everything else that that's happening um in the world during that decade Neil Stevenson thank you very much my pleasure thanks for having me on your program again