Latest / Core Memory / The Man Who Sees The Future - EP 94 Neal Stephenson

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The Man Who Sees The Future - EP 94 Neal Stephenson · Core Memory

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone wants to know, like, utopia or dystopia?
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, where are we heading?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Do we take our foot off the gas,
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: hit the pause button,
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: China gets it, or, you know, do we keep the pedal to the metal?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: They may not necessarily be amoral, but they gotta do what they gotta do.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Very well-known tech figures fully think we are living in the singularity.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm more of an S-curve guy.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: The two big problems that I'm scared of are too much carbon in the atmosphere and
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: the fact that people cannot agree on what is real.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: They found a cube of uranium in some guy's garage.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: He'd built a nuclear fuser in his garage.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Bedroom using only Claude as his guide.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: He'd never built a hardware system before.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone should have tons of TV shows and movies based on their work.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's you.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: The whole AI revolution sort of blindsided me in a lot of ways.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: You become an instant expert in whatever you're writing about and then you walk away from it.
• 0:59
  [music]
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Normally this time I would be doing an introduction or would have already done
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: an introduction, but our guest today needs no such introduction.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'll embarrass you by saying living legend,
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: one of the greats among us,
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Neil Stevenson,
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: famous author,
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: sci-fi author,
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: historical fiction,
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: and some nonfiction now and then at least in magazines and whatnot.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: While most,
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: as a fellow author,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: since most people will be listening now,
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think we should get right to the point at the beginning,
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: which is you have a new book out.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want to?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: D. Yeah, D. And whatever you want to tell us about it.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's a sequel, and I'll let
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: you do it.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, it's the second book in a series that'll probably go to three.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so the name of the series is Bomb Light.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: The first book was called Polo Stan.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Dee is continuing the story from pretty much where Polo Stan left off.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a story about the whole series is about developments in physics
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: during
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: the 30s that led up to the Manhattan Project and the bomb.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: But it's stuff that I didn't really know about.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Until comparatively recently,
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: everyone knows kind of the basic story of the Manhattan Project about Oppenheimer
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: and Groves and the other big players in that project.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: But that stuff all happened.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was all kind of teed up in the mid to late 30s by other things that went on
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: in Europe that I think are equally interesting in a lot of ways.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I decided to write about that.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, I mean,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: I say it's about physics and it is,
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: but in case that's scaring anyone off,
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: it is also kind of an espionage and action kind of book because...
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like one of the weirdest things about this part of history is
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: that these incredibly important developments that led to nuclear energy and
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: the bomb just happened by pure coincidence to be going on at exactly the same time
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: as the rise of the Nazis and Hitler's invasion of Poland and the beginning of
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: the Second World War.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that's Merely a coincidence,
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: but the fact that those things were happening simultaneously made for
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: a really interesting situation.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure our audience in particular,
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you have many,
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: many readers among our listeners who have been waiting for this book and are excited
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: to grab it.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to go,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: now I'm going to go off script, if that's okay, because
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: I figured you have to...
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know there was a script.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: No, there isn't.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: There isn't really.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: But it's really, it's hard to interview someone who's been interviewed so many times.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And instinctually, I put up on X, what should I ask you?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then everyone wants to know your vision of the future.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you don't really like to do that.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: What's it like being...
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: I was curious how you feel about the whole book tour exercise.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's never my favorite thing to do.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like you have to go on autopilot and repeat yourself over and over again.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so obviously it's a huge privilege to publish a book at all.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And among people who get to publish books, it's a huge privilege to have a book tour.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now you're going to make me look
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: like an asshole.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I have to preface the answer by saying that.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: You understand, you know.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the, I mean, I actually don't mind it.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think, I mean, I only have to do it for like two weeks every two or three years, right?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I could do anything.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And, I mean, they make it pretty easy.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's not...
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: People used to go on these endless book tours for months that were just terrible.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I was going to ask you.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: It must be different than when you first started writing because especially even
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: before COVID,
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: it felt like they were slowing down and it felt like COVID almost killed
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: the book tour to some degree.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then I noticed now all my author friends, it's very condensed.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think they are, yeah,
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: it could be that the author friends you have now are different from the ones you had
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: before because I think that...
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: The old school,
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: like driving from city to city with a bunch of books in the trunk of your car style
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: of book tour is something that people used to do to get their career going.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the modern,
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: so publisher-financed and publisher-organized book tour is a whole different animal.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what they're basically trying to do is...
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Is hit the bookstores that they think are going to give the best numbers and cram
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: as many of those events into,
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: say, a two-week period as is physically possible with airplanes.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so, because,
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: you know, what you want to do is jack up the sales figures for those key stores.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's partly about,
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: hopefully you get a position,
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: a better position on the bestseller list, which leads to knock-on effects.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And even if you don't, it's a way of making friends with the people who run those bookstores.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not a high...
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Paying job a lot of times.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the perks if you're a person who works in a bookstore or runs
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: a bookstore is being able to do an event.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of win-win.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they love it.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: I live in Mountain View and Andy Weir used to live there.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: And for a moment in time, I will not compare myself to Andy Weir, but we...
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Had cornered the market on Mars and the bookstore loved it.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've done two events on two occasions when he came to Seattle.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: I got to be the interlocutor who talked to him.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's perfect.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Third place books.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was fun.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean,
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: there's,
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: there's,
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: there's,
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: I feel bad because I know people will throw similar questions at you,
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: but then there's some things where I feel like I have to,
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: I have to ask you this
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: stuff and I'm going to be,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: doesn't matter, just turn my brain off.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to be indulgent and, um, and ask, and ask these things.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, look,
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: so many,
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I've spent my entire career pretty much covering, so I,
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: I tend to cover things that are like at the very edge
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: of What's just becoming possible and the, yeah,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: the sort of,
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: you know, not, I mean,
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: a little bit crazy,
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: like real ideas, but at the fringe end of science and technology.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: And quite often it's things that you predicted would happen and or people
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: who were inspired by your books and ideas who then went off to make them real.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then clearly we're living in this peculiar moment where AI is...
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: Lighting up in some sort of fashion.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I mean, I got you here.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: I just couldn't be more curious about what you make about this particular moment in time.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, that's pretty broad.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see what I can do with that.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, for me, the whole AI...
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, revolution sort of blindsided me in a lot of ways.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've obviously been aware for decades
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: that there was this thing called artificial intelligence and people were working
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: on it, you know.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And until pretty recently, it seemed like it was just software, you know.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And AI was always used to refer to something that we haven't quite got working yet.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's clearly no longer the case.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so after decades of kind of,
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I guess,
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: downplaying it a little bit,
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: I've been a little slow to realize that, you know, something's happening now.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I have, you know, kind of belatedly come to it and started using it.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's sort of amusing.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean,
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: when you're writing books,
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: like one thing that people may not realize is that
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: you become an instant expert
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: in whatever you're writing about and then you walk away from it.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so...
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so people tend to assume I know a lot of things about stuff
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: that I stopped paying attention to like 30 years ago because I finished the book
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm like, okay, you know, what am I going to write about next?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So...
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so anyway, I mean, um, the, uh,
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm kind of up to speed on it now as much as you can be
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: without actually working at a, at an AI lab.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been using it, um, quite a bit, not, not for writing, but for other stuff.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, the,
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: there's people who are,
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: I guess,
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: perhaps more, um,
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: fully directly associated with something like the singularity,
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: like Ray Kurzweil,
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: although you explore These themes in your book, but there's guys I hang out with.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, this is, you know, it's not like I'm in some private company here.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the very well-known tech figures fully think we are living in
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: the singularity right now or whatever, the beginning of the takeoff.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, do you have any?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm more of an S-curve guy.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: So the only...
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Example I can really think of where it didn't tail off at some point become
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: an S-curve was nuclear weapons.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that was a case where it went from,
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: people in labs doing little tabletop experiments to Hydrogen bombs in like 15 years.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was a case where there wasn't there never was really a ceiling that
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: That it tapered off to,
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: like the Russians end up building the Tsar Bomba,
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: which is like 50 megatons,
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: and basically figured out that you could go on making them bigger all you want,
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: but beyond a certain size,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: all it does is punch a hole in the atmosphere and vent out into space.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: So there wasn't a technical ceiling on how big you could make a bomb.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the...
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: But other than that, most technologies do at some point hit some kind of natural limitation.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so what seemed like an exponential curve at a certain point ends up being an S-curve.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I assume that AI is one of those.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: I could be wrong.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a weird moment because it feels like What we've done
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: so far is extremely brute force vacuuming up all these words, um,
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: kind of getting,
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if lucky is the right word,
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: but having some things like transformers come out that unlock these new powers
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: on this stuff.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's not at all clear to me, even though they're clearly getting better and better.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: There is something about this that still feels very,
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: uh, almost rudimentary and early days to me.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: And like we could sort of hit a wall, um,
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: But when you talk to the people at OpenAI and Anthropic,
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: they argue something very different,
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: that it is totally clear to them that this just keeps going from
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: the computers we put in.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they know more than I do.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: You're so bellow about all this.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: I thought this would be sort of a profound moment of sorts, maybe.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, all I can do is play with it.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Play with what's publicly available, you know, see how it might be interesting or useful to me.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I think right now
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: the steepness of the curve feels very palpable to a lot
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: of people because there's whole swaths of the economy that Where people are looking
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: at this and saying, okay, I think my job is becoming obsolete, right?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or at least it's going to get radically transformed now.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that adds a strong sense of anxiety and crisis to what's going on
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: because it's obviously showing the potential to disrupt a lot of people's lives
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: and careers.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that adds to a sense that, you know, kind of something explosive is going on.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: But again, I just don't have enough knowledge of my own knowledge to know where it might end up.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's other themes that you've written about that seem to be taking place
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: among these AI companies, or at least to me, you have them.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: It looks to me a moment in time when corporations are clearly quite
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: a bit more powerful than the government in a lot of ways.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: You have whatever the number is you want to put on it, four or five of these giant labs.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: They're run by figures that at the moment all seem to kind of hate each other and are...
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Are chasing, I mean, it's almost, it always reminds me of Lord of the Rings.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: They're all sort of chasing the ring, but they're deeply afraid of the ring at the same time.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, that part could be comical at times.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know,
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: this is something I've been writing about for a long time,
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: which was even back when,
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: like when Tesla started building a nationwide charging network and
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: then SpaceX started.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: With its success,
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: with its rockets,
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: you could just tell that companies were doing things that governments used to do
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: and doing them much,
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: like the government seems almost incapable of doing things like this now.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then you reach this point where these AI companies,
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: they have so much more computing capacity,
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: even if the,
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think if the US government wanted to build data centers of the scale
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: that these companies are, I'm not sure that it could.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that it could,
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: yeah.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so you end up in this spot where If this technology even remotely lives up
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: to its billing, the companies are in charge with something very powerful.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, this is a very long-winded way.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even know how much you pay attention to this stuff, but clearly...
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: One large group of people think these tech companies are evil.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: All five of these people running these labs are to be questioned.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Do you come down one side or the other on any of this?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: the question that keeps coming up is,
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: do we take our foot off the gas, hit the pause button,
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And think about this a little bit,
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: in which case China gets it, or do we keep the pedal to the metal?
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: So a funny thing about this book,
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: about Dee,
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: is that that question has a lot of parallels with what I'm talking about in Dee,
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: because I didn't Know that when I started it.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I started this series a long time ago,
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: like 2012,
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: and put it aside for a long time and then kind of got back into it
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: about four years ago, four or five years, I think.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole AI revolution has happened during the time I've been working on it.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if you look at, actually, there was just a big story that broke last week.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: About the German bomb program.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And because the big the big impetus behind the Manhattan Project was obviously
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: the fear that the Germans might have it.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: OK, so in the early eventually this will will end up wrapping back around to AI,
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: by the way, but it's going to take me a minute.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: The
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: The reactor that the Germans wanted to make to start working on
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: the bomb was uranium cubes suspended in a vat of heavy water.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: So the uranium does the fission and the heavy water is there as a moderator to slow
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: the neutrons down.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so they needed a lot of those two things.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And in February of 1940,
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: so it's after the invasion of Poland,
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: But it's before the invasion of Europe, the rest of Europe, I should say.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: The head of IG Farben,
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: the soon-to-be infamous giant German chemical company,
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: sends a letter to the manager of this plant in Norway.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's the only place in the world that makes heavy water.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And says, we want to buy all of your heavy water now.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so this guy...
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Gets in touch with his banker,
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: who's a French guy named Jacques Allier,
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: and Allier notifies the Deuxième Bureau,
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: which is the French intelligence service,
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: and they talk to physicists,
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: and the physicists are like, this is really frightening.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is really important.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to explain why, but just take our word for it.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: We do not want the Germans to get all of the heavy water.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: So that happens in February.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: By March,
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Allie is in Oslo,
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: evacuating the existing stock of heavy water out from under the noses of
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: the Germans just right before the Germans invade Norway.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he succeeds in doing that.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole story downstream of that that's in the book.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: But it's in June.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then that the Germans do invade westward and they overrun Belgium and Belgium has
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: the Belgian Congo, which is where uranium comes from.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the first thing they do upon getting control of Belgium is to place an order
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: for basically all of the uranium they can get from the Belgian Congo mines.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're A person in the know,
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: in the intelligence services of France or England or the US,
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: and you know that they are aggressively moving to get all of the heavy water
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: and they're aggressively moving to get as much uranium as they can get their hands
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: on, then there's only one conclusion that you can safely draw from that.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what kicks off the Manhattan Project.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: And just last week, they they found a cube of uranium in some guy's garage somewhere.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: He was, I think,
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: a Harvard professor who had is one of the cubes that the German nuclear project made
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: during the war that they were going to suspend in the big tank of heavy water.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: OK. And I might get to see it in a couple of weeks.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: But But the point being that I told you this was going to get back to AI.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: If if all you know is,
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: Germany trying to corner the market on heavy water and uranium,
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: you have no further info.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Then the only thing you can do at that point is launch the Manhattan Project.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then later on,
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: we find out, now we know that the Germans never came anywhere near making a bomb.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Their reactor didn't work.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't have enough stuff.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: They were maybe screwing up the calculations because Heisenberg wasn't a great experimentalist.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it turned out to be unnecessary paranoia, but you can't know that.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you're in the middle of the actual war.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of where we are, I think, vis-a-vis China with the whole AI thing.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, okay, sure, if AI is scary, we could take our foot off the gas.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: But then,
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: what if there's,
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: stuff we don't quite understand that's happening in China that would allow them
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: to seize a commanding lead?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: This episode is brought to you by Brex.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: I spend all of my time inside of
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: the world's most ambitious companies making rockets, semiconductors, robots.
• 23:58
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• 24:04
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• 24:07
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• 24:08
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• 24:10
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• 24:12
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• 24:15
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• 24:18
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• 24:22
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• 24:26
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• 24:48
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• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Core Memory.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: In the Manhattan Project,
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: clearly you had big personalities who were driving that,
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: but ultimately it was the government at the end of the day that owned and controlled
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: the technology for quite some time.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in this case, you have companies and individuals.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, look, everybody knows.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: I tend to be more on the optimistic side and fascinated by all this stuff.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's large, just,
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know when this podcast will air,
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: but as we're recording this,
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've got a movie coming out on Mark Zuckerberg,
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sam Altman, Elon Musk, SPF, and Elizabeth Holmes.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: None of these movies are flattering.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: People do not trust these people now.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just as somebody who's, like,
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: explored this intellectually,
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just curious what you make of...
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, the...
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you start a company.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you're lucky, it grows.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: It gets big.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then you find yourself
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Having a fiduciary responsibility,
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: a legally enforceable fiduciary responsibility to pay the investors back
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: and pay them back as much as you can.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't take all necessary steps to do that, then the board will replace you.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Unless you're really smart, that is, and you've got special shares that make that impossible.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: But the point is still the same,
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: is that I think when you're running one of these companies,
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: you have to make certain business decisions based on business,
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: not on kind of highfalutin ethical decisions.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Considerations.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the dilemma that these people are in.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: They may not necessarily be amoral people, but they got to do what they got to do.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I sense you're a little...
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if reluctant is the right word.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to generalize across five, six individuals.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: But you don't seem to want to be casting judgment on our current batch
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: of tech overlords, in my sense.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, they're all different people.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, it's hard to make...
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to speak in general terms.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I've said is kind of broadly true of anybody in that position.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know the specific...
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Decisions that these individuals have to make necessarily.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: When we were talking about China,
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: how much do you pay attention to what's going on in China at the moment from a tech
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: and science standpoint?
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Tech and science.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't have any great insights that go
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: beyond what another reasonably well-informed person would know.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have a lot of contacts there.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't visit there.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know if I can be super interesting about that.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: No, I find it fascinating.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: I have become quite convinced that they will be leading our technological future.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's all kinds of evidence to support that.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't know if you'd played out in your head maybe what that looks like at all.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: How much do you follow the brain-computer interface stuff that's going on?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: I, you know, have, I've known a couple people who've gotten involved in that stuff.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, I mean,
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: it's obviously great for,
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: if you've got ALS,
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: let's say, you know, or locked in syndrome or something like that.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, so that's wonderful.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, I'm, my whole life and career is, Everything that makes me happy is about words.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's about translating concepts into words and then words back into concepts.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the interface of letters on a page is what I like.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's where I'm happy.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've never felt any particular desire to have something different.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I've tended,
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: I guess,
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: not to pay super close attention to that stuff just
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: because I don't see how it's applicable to my life.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: This is so different than I was picturing in my head.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: I just thought you'd be obsessed with all this stuff and where it was at.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's still a little too abstract for me, I guess.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: So if I could look at specific examples of what people are doing with it,
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: then maybe it would be more something I could react to.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I think we are embodied creatures, and I think that...
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: Bypassing the body, I just don't understand it.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: I write with a fountain pen on paper.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: The full engagement of the body,
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: not just the abstract stuff up here,
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: but the motor cortex and down the arm to the hand,
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: that is all part of thinking to me.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not It's not that there's thinking,
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: which is this separate thing up here,
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: and then this chunk of meat attached to it that's kind of dumb and stupid.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's all, you know, we're all one big kind of brainified, you know, creature.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean,
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it's an interesting thought experiment to think about bypassing the body,
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: but I can't get any real traction on it myself.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: I read you talking about this and how you write.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was envious when I was younger in my teenage years.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: Always had the notebook and was writing short stories and things like that.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: But my handwriting is so bad that I could barely read it then.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: Couldn't
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: read your own handwriting?
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: pretty bad.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay,
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: but I wouldn't want to write an entire book and then have
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: to transcribe what I've done.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: But that sensation you're talking about, I do miss that.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I am totally a different, I think, quite differently person.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: Writing than I do just speaking what's coming out of my...
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like when I think about, oh,
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: what would it be like if you had a BCI and you could just think out the thoughts,
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think I would do really quite poorly because there is something
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: about this movement and this process of how the words get shaped that feels
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: so natural.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I got really interested in...
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a weird like side...
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a related but weird thing.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I started watching a lot of WNBA and so watched a lot of video of Caitlin Clark.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: And she does something that Michael Jordan used to do,
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: which is that Basically,
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: if you're on the opposing team and you see their tongue come out,
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: you know something bad is about to happen to you.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it's the moments of maximum concentration when they're about
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: to do some amazing thing,
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: athletic feat,
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: that suddenly the tongue is sticking out and then they do the amazing thing.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then sometimes after it's done,
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: The tongue comes out again when they're exulting in a dunk or an amazing shot or
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: a great pass or whatever.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was kind of thinking about the whole tongue thing because it was
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: a Michael Jordan thing and you see it with some other great athletes.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: Why would you do that?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's got to be a reason, right?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: So...
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: your brain at that moment fully engaged in taking
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: in this whole sensory world around you and every muscle in your body kind of working
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: in concert to carry out a three-dimensional plan.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what's the point of sticking your tongue out?
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know the answer, but there must be a reason.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, one thing that...
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: The curse to me is that,
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: you know, uh,
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: your, your tongue is, um, I don't know if it, if it never touches the spinal cord.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if there's nerves that go straight from your brain to your tongue
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: without going through your spinal cord or,
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: um, or if it's just very, very high up in the spinal cord.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: But, um, you know, maybe that's part of it.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and, and, um,
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of to the earlier point about BCIs,
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: the human tongue does amazing stuff when you think about speech.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's this multivalent tool.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: We use it to eat, obviously.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: But...
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: But we also use it in speech.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: And speech is one of the things that differentiates us from primates or other higher primates.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a question for people who study evolution and neurology,
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: but what's the evolutionary pathway
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Where, um, we,
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: uh, where early humans kind of repurposed this basically food swallowing machine.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: To, to make sounds, uh, to, to speak in a way that I think led to, um,
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: Led to us very rapidly lapping all of the other animals in the world in terms
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: of our brain size and our brain complexity.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one of the things that I...
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's not really a clear train of thought or a clear conclusion,
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: but when I think about brain-computer interfaces, I'm like, well...
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: What's the, are we gonna bypass the tongue?
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean for an embodied creature to not have to use that weird,
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: complicated muscle anymore?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I've spent a lot of time on the BCI.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: I've been filming a Neuralink documentary and hanging out with the patients.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: And like you said,
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you have ALS or you're paralyzed, I mean, It's quite obvious what we do.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: Then I try to play it forward in my head and I'm like,
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: what superpower would I be sort of wanting from this?
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know,
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: we're already at the point where if I wanted to be controlling a robotic arm
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: or something like that with my mind, I basically could be.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: Or if I had a prosthetic or an extra arm, I could.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, I don't know if I would want that.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: We can't really...
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: Put information in yet in any like meaningful way.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: Although,
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: the thought of just like in The Matrix downloading Kung Fu or Spanish
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: or something like that seems appealing.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: My favorite is the one that I like feel on some sort of visceral level
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: and I don't know if it would be good or bad is more of like the arrival style where
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: the aliens are communicating with a This symbol and it's,
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: I do feel like our words are limited and that like if I go to a concert and I'm,
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: it's like hitting me in this euphoric way and you almost want to share that with
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: the person next to you as you express it, you,
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: I don't really have a mechanism to convey to them what I'm feeling in my body
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: and head and I have this, this
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: You'd have to go home and write poetry.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but even then, it still wouldn't be as visceral.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: Of chemicals and energy and stuff.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder, I do sometimes wonder if we could get somewhere like that with BCI.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe that's horrible.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if we all want to experience each other that way.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and then it becomes, if it's just a bunch of bits...
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: Then it's repeatable.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know,
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: you could just sit there like the monkey hitting the lever,
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: hitting your pleasure centers over and over again to inhabit this kind of fake,
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: euphoric, imaginary world.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll, like, veer off.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of questioning.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, okay, so I'm here.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm covering BCI stuff.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm covering...
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: Artificial wombs, you know, everything.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: There is this weird class of,
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: especially in biotech, things that are right on the edge of becoming possible now.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: As I stated, I mean, I tend to get excited about these things.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, other people can see them in quite dystopian points of view.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's nothing about this particular moment
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: in 2026 that's making you tilt Utopian or dystopian one way more.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like this moment feels a little unnerving and different.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, so if I've got ALS, then the biggest problem in my life is that.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if a BCI helps with that, then BCI is solving a huge problem.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's really important.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's great.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: For me,
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: the two big problems that I'm scared of are too much carbon in the atmosphere and
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that people cannot agree on what is real.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: OK. And so any technology or doesn't have to be a technology, but,
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: any any thing of any action of any kind
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: that addresses those problems is really interesting to me.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm all over it.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: OK. OK.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: But if it's not like.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: ECI, I don't see how it solves any problems that I'm currently having.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think you wrote an essay,
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was 2011-ish in Wired about the struggle to come up with new big ideas.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if I remember right,
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was at least part of it that was things have become so specialized.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you have to be so...
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: Knowledgeable about this minutiae in your field that it was kind of hard
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: to think maybe broad enough and be able to push things for you.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: There was more to it than that.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: And when you wrote that,
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: I remember,
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think in just a couple of years earlier,
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: this guy,
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: Jonathan Huebner,
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: who was in the Navy,
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: he'd written this quite a paper that a lot of people had paid attention to,
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: which is he'd gone through all the patent record and was trying to argue
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: that Similar thing
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: that we just weren't having these big world changing breakthroughs anymore.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: We'd kind of gone to the edges of the tree of invention.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was thinking I paid a lot of attention to that essay.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then I noticed that yours was nearish in time.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking back to that moment in time.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, a lot of it.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly now,
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: if you look,
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: AI would be something that is quite different,
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: at least there were hints of it back in 2011, but nothing like we have now.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's things like a ton of fusion startups now.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: There's people doing some interesting things in space,
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: although I don't know if it would be revolution in some ways, but in other ways not.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was just kind of curious.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's been, I would think, 15 years since you wrote that.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Do you still feel the same way?
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the, um, I think that came out of, uh,
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: I totally got the date wrong.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, that sounds about right.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: I had, um, uh,
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it was in Wired though, but, um,
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: I had been on a panel discussion with Michael Crow, the president of Arizona state.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: And, and he was sort of, uh,
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: jokingly saying,
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: um, you know, we've got all this technology and, you know, uh, We're ready to go.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're ambitious.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you science fiction writers are letting down the side
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: because all you do is write kind of sad dystopian garbage that,
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: you know, depicts a future we don't want to live in.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: So why don't you,
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: shape up and write some futures that are worthy of being made real,
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: you know, and kind of go back to your
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: be more productive members of the society basically by inspiring engineers
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: to do cool things.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so out of that came a book that was about then.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I did write a piece about it.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: But I worked with the Arizona State people.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: We brought out an anthology of science fiction stories called Hieroglyph
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: that was meant to depict more kind of positive futures.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so my contribution to that was a story about making a tall tower.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: Which was kind of the one,
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: of all the alternative space launch technologies that we looked at in
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: the early years of Blue,
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: that was the one that kind of stuck with me as,
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: hey, you know, this is actually worth doing.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Just for the non-space nerds for Blue Origin.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: Blue Origin, yeah.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: At the time it was...
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was Blue Operations, LLC, but then it became Blue Origin.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, this is a common theme.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard this from a lot of people, even within the last few months.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard multiple times from people in the tech world,
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: investors,
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: mostly investors,
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: who I kind of like, hey,
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: you know, uh,
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: is there any way we can foster the, uh,
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: the writing of,
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: science fiction that's inspiring and that makes people want to go out and build,
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: build cool things again?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: I hear this all the time.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's, uh, I was actually, I was going to ask you about this very thing.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm, um, I, I just, uh,
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: three weeks ago, um,
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: Was one of the judges on a SpaceX,
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: not SpaceX,
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: XPRIZE
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: competition to make films
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: that presented technology and particularly AI in
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: a somewhat more encouraging light.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: Do you feel like you at all have a...
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I've been through this exercise.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: After ChatGBT came out,
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: There were a bunch of people in Silicon Valley who kind of got together.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't like a cloak and dagger thing, but it was a little under the radar.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like, can we get, people don't know what's coming.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: We see what's coming.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to scare them.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: And we're pretty optimistic about what's happening.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: We need to very quickly make some science fiction mass media that's on Netflix
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: or somewhere where enough people will see it that people can...
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: When was this?
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is like...
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: This is probably like 2024-ish.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's possible it's all spilled over and spilled out in some ways.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or a little parallel evolution or something.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was co-sponsored by Google, 100 zeros.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so mine's a little different, but...
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and so I'm sitting here in these conversations.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I sort of get the spirit of it.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: Almost all good science fiction tends to have things going wrong in some way for
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: the most part, I think, is fair to say.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then,
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: so you're sort of in this battle of,
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: well, you can't just write some everything is wonderful type thing.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the tech people tend to struggle with that.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then...
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: Struggle quite badly.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then,
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: it's not all clear to me,
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: like someone like you,
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: you write about these futures where things do go wrong,
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: but you're clearly very interested in technology.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: So that is something that appeals to you on some level,
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: is that you do think you can...
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm happy to help, you know, foster that stuff.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a little side...
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: Project or series of little side projects that doesn't,
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: you know, I mean, it could have some kind of constructive effect.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: It could,
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: maybe help some writers or filmmakers, you know, get some traction somewhere.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, like you say, a lot of people in the tech world are keen on the idea.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly make the worst films, though.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so, I mean,
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: this is a kind of hobby horse of mine for a long time,
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: but I do think that, um,
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: in my theory is that the big bang of this was the,
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: the last shot of Planet of the Apes where you see the Statue of Liberty,
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: it's fallen over,
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: and, um, it's a super powerful image and, um, uh, But a very inexpensive one, right?
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean,
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: they got a model of the Statue of Liberty and they kicked it over
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: and threw some dirt on it.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, so that was a really cheap and easy way to make a very powerful image.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so you kind of see this in a lot of post-apocalyptic dystopian movies.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: You see examples where they've just taken something that exists today And sort of,
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: you know, bang it around and throw some dirt on it.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it looks cool.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't require a big imaginative investment, okay?
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you're trying to
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: show a more
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: positive kind of future, you know, you do have to...
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: To do some pretty hard imagining.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: At this XPRIZE thing I was at,
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: one part of the program was a documentary called The 60-Year Mission,
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: which is a documentary about the creation of Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry and all
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: of that.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they had to put some energy into imagining what that future world was going to look like.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's the kind of thing that you have to do if you're going
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: to create any kind of positive science fiction.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think it's tremendously hard,
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: but it seems to be just the path of least resistance for people.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: For movie companies and TV companies to kind of go the dystopian route.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: So they have to try harder, be more creative.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think so.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a person on our staff.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: His name is Kamen Hodges.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: He's an enormous fan of yours.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: It is his life's ambition to see Snow Crash made into a movie.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: He has an idea where...
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'll read it to you.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if he expressed it.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: I have a question.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: He wants to adapt it exactly how Hollywood...
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: Would have treated it in 1992 when the book came out.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: Pretend it's a lost, unfinished artifact that got shelved before release.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: Blair Witch style marketing.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, that I was looking through all your works and you've addressed this before.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: But my God, I mean, if anyone should have...
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: Tons of TV shows and movies based on their work.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's you,
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: you seem like me to have,
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_01: in a much bigger way,
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: to have been caught in some kind of the typical Hollywood option rights hell
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: where things get started and don't get finished and they just get,
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: it's crazy to me though.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this must be frustrating.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, to your friends... Can we have the rights to Snow Crash?
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: To your friend's point, there was actually...
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've been watching people think about adapting Snow Crash since it came out.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: And at every stage along the way,
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've kind of said, boy,
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: it's a good thing that they never made that movie in 1995 or 2000 or 2005 because...
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because just a few years later, the computer graphics had gotten so much better.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I remember having gotten so much better that it would it would look dated.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: OK, in the way like the original Tron looks.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, looks dated today.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I had a during one of these during one phase of this
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: Conversation, one of these guys had the idea to use HDR photography.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of rendering the metaverse using computer graphics,
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: just shoot it straight,
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: but then manipulate the film to kind of send you a message
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: that this is actually generated by computer graphics, right?
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was the first point when People began to think, okay,
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: the graphics are so good that in this future world,
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_00: you know, it's just going to look like photography.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: And now, of course, we're to the point where it simply would look like photography.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't be able to tell it apart from...
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, from,
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: from something that really happened unless there was some other visual cue,
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: like something that was physically impossible, you know, in, in the scene.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, um, so, so, uh,
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: I just found that an interesting, uh,
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: reflection from the, the, the,
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_00: the message you just read, um,
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: because, um,
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: you know, you,
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: you could kind of flip that on its back and,
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: um, Go ahead and make it using 1995 Doom.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's what he wants, yeah.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: Can we do that?
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: Is it still tied up?
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: It is, yeah.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: You started Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_01: I assume you guys are still friendly.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he owns an entire media organization.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's at a different media organization.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: It has been for a long time.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: So
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: it's been at Paramount and Paramount slash Skydance for a long time.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: So they just write you a check every year?
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: That was true for a while and then they just bought it.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_00: So at some point they're like, we have to stop writing the analyst check every year.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean...
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like, honestly, tell me to fuck off if I'm just going too far.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: But, like,
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: there's no way in hell Jeff must want to make at least some handful
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: of things you've written.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think they did have Seven Eves for a bit.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think they might have had Snow Crash.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: No, they didn't.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: But he delegates those kinds of decisions to the people who run those organizations.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's stupid.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I mean, it's a mystery.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's a tragedy is what it is.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's given me, I think, some kind of...
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_00: Some insights and some thoughts about the nature of that business,
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: how it works, how it doesn't work.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: You've got this started, is it Wenair?
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_00: Wenair, yeah.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was reading about it.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think I get it,
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: but I mean,
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: so you're trying to use AI to let people create these worlds from fictional works,
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: but you'd be able to kind of change them a bit.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: Or it's like if Lord of the Rings, I mean, you're reading...
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and if you look at the...
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: The fan reaction to Rings of Power,
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: there's multiple subreddits full of serious Lord of the Rings fans talking
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_00: about how much they don't like it.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's been the fate of fans.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: For a long time, right?
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is that there's all these fictional universes that have very intense fan groups.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is how entertainment works now.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was at Comic-Con in New York just a few days ago.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's like a giant monument to multiple fandoms obsessed with multiple story worlds.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: And their only way to see these things get translated into visual media...
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: Has been to, to wait for Hollywood to disgorge something.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes after decades.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and, and, and very expensively.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then, um, a lot of times they're not happy with, with the result.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: As we can all think of examples of,
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: like the last season of Game of Thrones or what have you, where, um,
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_00: if you're a fan of the, um,
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: Source material and you know the source material,
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: you can just see that,
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: oh my God, the person who wrote this scene doesn't understand that character at all.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's unsatisfying.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or the showrunners, you know, what were they thinking?
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this kind of frustrating situation for fandoms who just want
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: to see stories told in their favorite worlds.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: So what?
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, but are you guys, do you have massive...
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: Compute to go power this?
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: What state is that?
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, we're not using Gen AI video.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's right.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: You're doing a Unity thing, right?
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: Unreal.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, off a game engine.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: Unreal editor for Fortnite.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: The generation of the pixels happens at the edge using tried and true game engines
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: and game engine compatible hardware.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not hitting data centers for just churning out lots of pixels.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: But there's all kinds of other ways that you can use AI to assist people
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: in writing Writing scripts or to power sort of AI-powered non-player characters
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_00: in these worlds.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's a bunch of ways that AI can be kind of efficiently used,
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think, that don't
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: take creative agency away from the creator.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're working with a company called Dreamlands.ai that has a system that
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: That enabled us to generate a realistic environment in the universe of Pride
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: and Prejudice incredibly efficiently.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is that in the public domain?
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the thing is that, yeah, certainly Pride and Prejudice is.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you can't do Snow Crash because somebody has it, but you can do
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: somebody else's.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_00: But the source material is also public domain.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, for the visuals, right?
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want a Regency or a chair...
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know,
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: there's a million pictures of chairs on the internet just from antique shops
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: or whatever.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_00: So you're not screen scraping like somebody else's creative output
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: to repurpose it.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: You're working with just historical documents, basically.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'm exploring this world like a game or I'm watching it like a movie?
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's...
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can write scripts
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_00: with a web-based script editor in which you say what you want to happen.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then in Unreal, UEFN, basically in Fortnite, you see that script get played out.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm like in a Jane Austen novel, just getting to like...
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: Tweak the story a little bit or just make one up.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_00: So there's all kinds of AI enhancements that make that easier.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_00: you could type in,
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: tell Darcy he sucks and then hit a button and then,
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_00: you know, Claude comes back with a perfectly written sort of Regency era English.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I must observe Mr. Darcy that, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: That actually rings true in that world and that sounds like what
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: that particular character would say.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, go ahead.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: Is this like early days kind of small thing or this is like big, big, you guys are going full?
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's still, it's where we are right now is getting ready for kind of early play tests.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_00: So looking for people.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: So there's hundreds of millions of people who play Fortnite.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere there's some Venn diagram overlap between them and people
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: who like these kinds of books.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: The most popular sort of genre of books in the world is Jane Austen and Bridgerton
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: and all of that.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we're looking for a few of those people who are willing to put up with
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: a still kind of janky early days kind of version of this thing and play with it
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: and point out all of the things we're doing wrong.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: And once we get past that phase,
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: then the next step would be to launch it and see if people want to play with it.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you're friends with Tim Sweeney from Epic?
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: We certainly have a friendly relationship.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: We're in touch from time to time.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know if he was kind of behind this or helping.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: He's not.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll say that Epic overall has been incredibly helpful.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: So they've been great.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: But they're...
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're very scrupulous people, I think.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that comes from the top.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: It comes from Tim.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: so I think when they see,
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_00: if there's something that we need that has general utility for their developers,
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: you know, a lot of developers might want, then...
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: Then, you know, then we can have a conversation about that.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: But they're also very even handed about not privileging one developer over another.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm keeping an eye on time.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_01: I do want to get to a little bit of a rapid fire round for people who sent in.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: But before we do that,
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_01: there were just kind of like two last things that I really wanted to be indulgent
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: on.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: I know you've talked about your time at Blue Origin before, just to give people some context.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think you were basically.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_01: Employee number one or with Jeff and the idea in the early days was
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: to explore quite different ideas of what we could do in space.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: We know how to make liquid-fueled rockets and there's really not
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: that much you can do to tweak their design.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was kind of like, what else could we do that would be a bit more adventurous?
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: What comes next?
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is not meant to be mean or anything like that.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: I just,
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: I've written books about all this stuff and it was such a nice chance to talk to you
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: about this.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, so you're at that, I think for about six years.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_01: Blue Origin eventually gets going.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen you say that you left when things got a bit more conventional after all.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then,
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_01: you know, Blue, I mean,
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_01: I admire,
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: especially where they're at now,
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_01: but when you compare them to SpaceX, I mean, it's,
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like one company was almost standing still for about 18 years while
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_01: the other was developing four rocket families
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_01: and learning how to land rockets and dominating satellites and taking over
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: the entire space industry.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Blue is still trying to prove that it could even deliver satellites to space and all that.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, is that painful?
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, you haven't been there on a day-to-day basis for these 20 years.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: I've always been...
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: Blue's the only space company I really haven't spent time at in part
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_01: because it was quite secretive.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_01: Jeff is the only kind of tech billionaire type I've never really hung out with.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_01: Just I've always worked somewhere where somebody else covered Amazon and never had that chance.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I don't know.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_01: Blue's the one place I don't know much about.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's frustrating,
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_01: you know, to have all those resources and then get stuck for such a long time.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_01: Although, you know, they really are seeming to kind of come on strong now.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I mean, so what's your, I guess my question is twofold.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like,
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you have an emotional attachment to Blue still and sort
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_01: of how do you feel about how it's done.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then second,
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: and I've heard you say you're impressed of SpaceX,
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_01: but I'd be curious,
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: like sort of,
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_01: How impressed,
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_01: given that context of you were looking at doing things quite different.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so they've done some different things, but then some that aren't that radical.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, for starters, I'm very impressed with SpaceX.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you just, you know...
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can't not be if you know anything at all about rockets and space.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that's easy.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's an easy one.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was there from sort of the inception of it in 1999 up until the end of 2006 after
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: Launched the first kind of rocket-powered vehicle at West Texas.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: And with Pablo Holman, who's been in that chair as well, who I think is a friend of yours.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he was probably one of the first five people who was involved in Blue Operations, LLC.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so the... And then after that, I just said...
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is great,
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_00: this is fun,
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_00: really interesting,
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: but I feel like I could walk away for 20 years and I wouldn't be missed.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_00: Simply because in the early years,
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: we were doing studies on different alternative launch technologies,
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_00: which is different from Engineering, per se.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_00: And once Jeff made the decision to build rockets and picked a path to follow,
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: then it became an engineering organization from that point on.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I could have probably talked my way into some kind of engineering organization.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're a member of a team like that, you have responsibilities.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_00: You can't go on a book tour and fail to deliver a document in time for
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: the design review or what have you.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just didn't really see my relevance there from that point on.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a completely amicable parting of the ways at that point.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_00: But from that point,
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_00: end of 2006,
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't had hardly any real insider knowledge of how things work there,
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_00: what's going on.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_01: And again, if I'm overstepping my bounds, tell me, are you and Jeff, are you guys friends?
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_01: Are you pretty tight?
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_00: We communicate a few times a year, I would say.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_01: Have you asked him over the years, like, what the fuck is going on with me?
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_01: It went a little crazy for a while.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_01: It must have been very frustrating to see SpaceX just racing ahead.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_00: strangely enough, the one enduring thing that I contributed was that...
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_00: The it was would have been, I don't know, 04 or 05.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_00: And Jeff wanted to make a Like a seal or a coat of arms that would embody the company's values.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: The motto, yeah.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think at that point it was already evident that SpaceX,
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_00: which it started at about the same time,
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_00: was jackrabbiting forward at an incredible pace.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think part of the message that Jeff wanted to send was, you know, we don't care.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_00: We just don't care.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_00: We're just going to keep, you know, working at our pace.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's a thing that you see in coats of arms called supporters.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_00: You'll get animals that support the escutcheon.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: So like in the case of the arms of like the King of England,
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: it's a lion and a unicorn, you know, hold up the shield.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so I said, well, you know, Maybe the supporters should be tortoises.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's still there.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's like painted on the wall.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_01: I always love that.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then as the years went on, it started.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_01: It was looking like the tortoise was maybe too slow.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Blue Origin, they might get the moon.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_01: They might get the moon, but they have a lot of work to do still on that.
• 1:10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Although it seems like suddenly in the last few months, Elon is getting interested in the moon.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he is because that's where there's money and Trump is,
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_01: the government's turning its eye there.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Elon was always, we're going to do Mars and not the moon.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_01: The moon is just, you're just wasting time if that's where you go.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_01: But clearly, you know, I think there's things to be gained now and all the stuff is expensive.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting that Blue Origin is taking outside money for the first time.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Raising money, yeah.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the...
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Rob Meyerson,
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_00: who was the CEO of Blue Origin for a long time,
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_00: and Gary Lai,
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_00: who was a very senior engineer there that I used to work with,
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_00: have started a startup called Interlune,
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_00: which is going to mine helium-3 on the moon's surface.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty close to me in Seattle.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_01: I saw this and you guys, you've got Stokes Base up there, which is interesting.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, Washington still has a couple interesting things.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_01: I saw you when you first came in, you peeked at my little rocket.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, can't help it.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Which is, so that's Skyroot.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that's an Indian private rocket company.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_01: They went to orbit on their first try like two or three months ago, which basically never.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's rare.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_01: They made it to orbit and they put a satellite in the right spot.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Although it's a...
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's technically a four-stage rocket.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's really three stages with solid rocket fuel, so they went a little bit easier.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the four-stage is kind of a kick stage, and it wasn't clear if their stage...
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't totally clear how clean their stage separation was on a couple things.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_01: But...
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's a hard problem.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know what they built that for?
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think they...
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_01: So they started, I think, in 2018 at the time...
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_01: Commercial space was illegal in India, but they started anyway.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_01: So they started designing.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then around 2022, 2023, the Indian government made commercial space legal.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so these guys had a rocket that was coming ready.
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think they did it.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think they built that whole thing for $60 million,
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: which I don't think has ever been done for less than a billion years.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Where did they launch from?
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_01: From Sri Harikota.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's an island off the east coast of India.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same place where the Indian government, ISRO, launches the PSLV and all its rockets.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_01: I've been there for a launch.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's right by Chennai, which is a little bit north.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there must be some great sights there.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's unbelievable.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_01: So when I went, I got to stay on the island, and there are...
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_01: Monkeys crawling all over the rocket.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's cows at the launch site.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's full on jungle.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it was amazing.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know a couple of people who've been to the Baikonur site.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And apparently that's also pretty rural.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: The launch sites is one of my favorite things to do because they're always in
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_01: the weirdest places like French Guiana.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_01: You're in, I think it's in the bottom five of the poorest countries in the world.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden there's this huge European rocket launch site.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_01: I've been to Alaska, Ukraine, New Zealand.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_01: Rocket Lab is one of the most beautiful launch sites you can imagine.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm sure they have a spectacular site.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_01: So when you were looking at these different concepts,
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the only ones that I know that are quite radical today are...
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Spin launch with sort of the centrifuge type system where you're going
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_01: to throw something to space.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you've seen Longshot.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_01: We did a video on them.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_01: They're making like a 10 kilometer long space gun, more or less.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously not human rated.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is all satellites.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_01: But it sort of pushes a projectile along this tube and accelerates it
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_00: with gas.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything that you feel like?
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we looked at both of those.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's a...
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Is it, well,
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_00: we're really about to go down a deep rabbit hole here,
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_00: but there's a ramjet accelerator that was developed at the University of Washington
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_00: that sounds like what you're...
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's close to the long shot, yeah.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_00: ...Talking about that.
• 1:14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then the...
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Centrifuge.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: The centrifuge thing...
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Existed back then under the name of Slingitron.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was the same idea.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's a spiral thing.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big table that goes like this, and you have a spiral passage in it.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big gun, basically.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's all big gun systems have got...
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Problems that you're obviously aware of around,
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_00: what happens when you meet the atmosphere, you know, and that kind of thing.
• 1:15:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the, I mean,
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_00: as a kind of almost tongue-in-cheek thing,
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I looked at gigantic steel bullwhips, which is still a topic I'm obsessed with.
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've got five Substack posts about that kind of technology now.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_00: But the one that...
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_00: That I, I still think somebody out of build is the tall tower.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_00: So this came out of a paper by Jeff Landis, um, that, um, uh,
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_00: where he,
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_00: he went through and,
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_00: and enumerated all of the advantages that you would be able to benefit from
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_00: by launching from the top of a tower.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And some of them are kind of non-obvious, like, um, well,
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_00: if you know rocket engines,
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know that,
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_00: um, One that's designed to operate in vacuum has a big bell and it's more efficient.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you'd be able to do that.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Some really odd things like you have to build the rocket so it won't destroy itself
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_00: with its own noise.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not as noisy up there.
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_00: You have to build it so it won't buckle at max Q.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Up there, max Q is going to be a lot lower.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so you do have to put less weight into structural strength of the airframe.
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_00: So when you add all those things up,
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And factor those into the rocket equation, you know, an exponential equation.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_00: It turns out that,
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_00: at least according to Landis' calculations back then,
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_00: for a given kind of rocket configuration, you could get twice as much mass into LEO.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, um...
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to... No, sorry.
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't mean to cut you off.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no, I can...
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so then, I mean, SpaceX is...
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, they've gotten cadence way up for people who aren't space nerds.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_01: Governments, we're super lucky to do 12 launches a year.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_01: SpaceX is going almost every two days.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_01: They've got reuse down.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've gone from roughly 2,500 satellites in space now to about 15,000.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Almost the vast majority of that is overnight and driven by Starlink.
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_01: The Starship is coming.
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_01: So you're talking mass to orbit.
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, a giant...
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Leap forward on that.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you've already said SpaceX is impressive,
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_01: but are you dissatisfied because you still want these far more?
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Does Starship scratch your itch, or do you still want more?
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, I mean,
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_00: so
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_00: the question that was before us, you know, at the beginning of Blue Origin was...
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Are there optimizations that you can apply to chemical rockets
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_00: that would radically transform the economics of space launch?
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_00: So it turns out the answer is yes.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_00: That was not totally obvious back then.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: it was kind of felt that if you look at,
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_00: let's say the space shuttle main engine, you know, it's a pretty amazing engine.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's, you know, the specific impulse of that engine is very impressive.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so, well, that's not going to get a lot better.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the specific impulse is not going to get a lot better.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, um, that's just a thermodynamic reality.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so is there a way that you can, um, do something that's not all about that?
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know,
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_00: we looked at laser launch,
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_00: we looked at electromagnetic propulsion,
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_00: you know, uh, and, um, you know, all kinds of ideas, but the, um, um,
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_00: For me, the attraction
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_00: of the tall tower went beyond just it's a good way to launch rockets.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there's this additional factor of it would be really cool to have something
• 1:19:40
  SPEAKER_00: that big, you know.
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so it goes to the whole American dynamism,
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_00: you know, why don't we build big things anymore kind of questions.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if it were built,
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think it would be possible to monetize it in a whole bunch of additional ways
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_00: beyond just launching rockets from it.
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I haven't seen anything that interesting, but China seems to be...
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's got its own thoughts on reuse and things like that, which is kind of interesting.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think India is actually,
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_01: so from the moment the government made commercial space legal,
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_01: which is roughly 2023 till now, now there are 500 space startups in India.
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_01: And there's about,
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_01: there's probably around like eight rocket startups,
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_01: three to four of which I would say are sort of legit and have a chance.
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Not hugely radical ideas that are different yet, but we'll see.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah,
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_00: it's interesting that I think one thing that we did figure out,
• 1:20:42
  SPEAKER_00: it was sort of like a cold water in the face moment, was that...
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_00: The business of space,
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_00: at least then,
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_00: probably now,
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_00: is essentially launching these huge satellites up to geo
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_00: that are incredibly expensive and their time is incredibly valuable.
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And if you, uh,
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_00: so to begin with the cost of the rocket itself is kind of a round off error,
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_00: you know, it's just, uh, it's compared to everything else.
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh, yeah,
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_01: a launch,
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_01: even if it was expensive Lockheed or somebody was 300 million,
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_01: those satellites could be like $2 billion each.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the, um,
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_00: You need insurance,
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_00: and you're not going to get insurance on a brand new launch,
• 1:21:37
  SPEAKER_00: you know, a radically new launch concept.
• 1:21:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I assume that's why Elon launched that car into space.
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he had to show that he could do it.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_00: But no one was going to risk an expensive satellite, you know, until...
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_01: That was on the first Falcon Heavy one, I think.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I think Elon wanted.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_00: But it was a cold water moment in that we kind of realized, oh, man,
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_00: we could,
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_00: come up with the coolest new idea imaginable
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_00: and it would never go anywhere commercially.
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because it would be uninsurable.
• 1:22:27
  SPEAKER_00: If one of these launches gets delayed by a few weeks or a few months
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_00: by technical issues,
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_00: then that's a few weeks or a few months that it's not generating revenue for
• 1:22:38
  SPEAKER_00: the owner of that satellite.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's an enormous loss.
• 1:22:43
  SPEAKER_00: So why not just pay Lockheed to send the thing up?
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm looking at the time.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really pushing my limits now.
• 1:22:50
  SPEAKER_01: I have to let you go in about 10 minutes.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Can I go rapid fire?
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and we can go a little over if you want.
• 1:22:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I just want to be careful, and I want to...
• 1:23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, people tweeted these in, so I'm not responsible for what comes out next.
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's quite a bit of interest in your interest in sword fighting.
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'll let you pick one, which I think is...
• 1:23:14
  SPEAKER_01: One is extreme.
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was your 20 favorite swords.
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the other was ask about sword fighting techniques.
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Anything you want to tell the people about swords currently.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I assume they mean 20 favorite types of swords.
• 1:23:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what I said, but that's correct.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:23:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's – I have –
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_00: In the last probably 10 years have focused entirely on kind of niche sword type,
• 1:23:45
  SPEAKER_00: which is the basket-hilded broadsword.
• 1:23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a—it's not done by a lot of people these days, which is funny because it's—
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's the longest lived sword category that was in actual use in
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_00: the West anyway,
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_00: because,
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_00: we know it was in use in the 1500s and,
• 1:24:13
  SPEAKER_00: you know, it was in active military use until basically the First World War.
• 1:24:17
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a...
• 1:24:19
  SPEAKER_00: A single-handed sword where the hand is completely protected by a basket.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_00: And there were versions of it that existed in Italy called the Schiavone and
• 1:24:27
  SPEAKER_00: in Germany, but it's mostly associated with English and Scottish military.
• 1:24:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so I did a video about it.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's viewed as being kind of a weirdly heavy weapon for a single-handed user,
• 1:24:49
  SPEAKER_00: but I think that that's because people are doing it wrong.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the thing that I do.
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_00: I started doing it partly because I got tired of having my hands broken,
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_00: working with long swords, which don't have hand protection.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_00: And partly because it's a historical era that I'm kind of interested in.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the particular style that I practice.
• 1:25:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's based on mostly on the work of a guy named George Silver,
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_00: who was a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth and all of those guys.
• 1:25:28
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 1:25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And is a well-known and somewhat controversial figure in the world
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_00: of historical European martial arts.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_01: This question comes from one of my favorite readers.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it's answerable.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:25:48
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see.
• 1:25:48
  SPEAKER_00: We'll soon find out.
• 1:25:49
  SPEAKER_01: What are the mystics of America?
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the mystics,
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_01: they're kind of choose which technology they want to adopt and bring
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_01: into their society.
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, sort of inspired by the Amish.
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I mean,
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_00: so this is an idea that is from Kevin Kelly,
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_00: who kind of pointed out a long time ago that the Amish don't reject all technology.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_00: They use rollerblades.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_00: They just reject specific technologies.
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so...
• 1:26:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you see it all the time now if you're trying to communicate with people
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_00: because you've got people who use Signal,
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Telegram, WhatsApp, you know, plain old SMS messages, email.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's a very common and kind of trivial example of people deciding
• 1:26:44
  SPEAKER_00: which technology they're going to use and not going to use.
• 1:26:49
  SPEAKER_00: But...
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly, there's people now who are being super fastidious about AI.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I refuse to use AI.
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's a huge debate over should we allow students in classrooms to have screens
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_00: or children in any circumstance to have access to screens.
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_00: So you can kind of see examples of it all over the place.
• 1:27:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the screens, I assume you've had to answer this question before.
• 1:27:19
  SPEAKER_01: The screens kind of hits on another thing that came up about six or seven times,
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_01: which is, can we now make the young lady's illustrated primer?
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Should we be doing that?
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Can we, should we?
• 1:27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Are you?
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so this is now.
• 1:27:34
  SPEAKER_01: Should we describe what it is?
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a hypothetical device,
• 1:27:42
  SPEAKER_00: a nanotech,
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_00: a magic book in my book,
• 1:27:45
  SPEAKER_00: The Diamond Age, that teaches kids that it's an educational system.
• 1:27:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the...
• 1:27:58
  SPEAKER_00: So this is now hot in a way that the metaverse was like five or six years ago.
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I hear about it every day.
• 1:28:05
  SPEAKER_00: I
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_00: mean, I've been thinking about it a lot, I guess is the first thing to say.
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm actively thinking about this stuff.
• 1:28:20
  SPEAKER_00: What I have been doing is...
• 1:28:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to pay attention to what teachers actually want.
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I follow the teachers subreddit and a bunch of other channels of information
• 1:28:36
  SPEAKER_00: where actual teachers and actual classrooms talk about the problems they face,
• 1:28:41
  SPEAKER_00: none of which can be solved by giving them a piece of technology.
• 1:28:46
  SPEAKER_00: That is at the bottom of their list in terms of what they actually want.
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I, you know,
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's fine to to think about ed tech,
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_00: but I think it's really important to go about it in a way that is is observant of
• 1:29:05
  SPEAKER_00: the fact that there have been many ed tech initiatives,
• 1:29:09
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:29:09
  SPEAKER_00: down through the years that haven't worked out and that don't address the
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_00: the pressing issues that teachers actually have to to deal with day to day.
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_01: And this is all meant to be directly to you.
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'll say one thing.
• 1:29:28
  SPEAKER_01: One of the most read stories I've done recently, I had this experience.
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_01: I was with this 22 year old and I was hanging out with him.
• 1:29:35
  SPEAKER_01: He had built a nuclear fuser in his bedroom using only Claude as his guide.
• 1:29:41
  SPEAKER_01: He'd never built a hardware system before.
• 1:29:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we were hanging out in his little San Francisco apartment
• 1:29:47
  SPEAKER_01: and he had like seven different AI systems running at the same time.
• 1:29:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he was speaking into one of them.
• 1:29:54
  SPEAKER_01: He was like sending in all the receipts from Amazon that he had bought
• 1:29:57
  SPEAKER_01: for this fuser thing, getting his diagrams back.
• 1:29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he had this like fluidity with the computer that, I mean, I'm...
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Even though I'm on the older side now, I'm pretty good.
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_01: I use all the latest and greatest tech.
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_01: I go pretty deep.
• 1:30:11
  SPEAKER_01: He had a different relationship with his computer.
• 1:30:15
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't exactly a tutor, but it was this symbiotic thing going on that I did not have.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_00: The first question that comes up when you seriously start talking about this is...
• 1:30:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you know,
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_00: we don't want to just make a gadget that is going to serve
• 1:30:39
  SPEAKER_00: a small privileged population,
• 1:30:41
  SPEAKER_00: you know, that doesn't need it because they're going to be fine anyway.
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_00: No, we should,
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:30:48
  SPEAKER_00: make something that's going to work for everyone,
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_00: you know, that's going to have broad social impact.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then,
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_00: so once you go down that road,
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_00: which is very feel good,
• 1:30:59
  SPEAKER_00: and again,
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_00: start Looking at the real problems of education,
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_00: then very soon you sort of focus back down to,
• 1:31:08
  SPEAKER_00: okay, let's try a pilot program for a few kids.
• 1:31:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the kid that you're describing,
• 1:31:18
  SPEAKER_00: I would put it to you, would have been
• 1:31:24
  SPEAKER_00: just as successful 100 years ago.
• 1:31:28
  SPEAKER_00: My analogy for this is Abe Lincoln.
• 1:31:32
  SPEAKER_00: So when Abe Lincoln was a kid, he didn't have paper.
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_00: So he had a shovel.
• 1:31:39
  SPEAKER_00: So he would stick the shovel in the fire.
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was covered with soot.
• 1:31:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then he would flip it over, wait for it to cool down.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then he would scratch his lessons out on the shovel by scratching the soot off.
• 1:31:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then when the shovel was full of words, he would Stick it back in the fire again.
• 1:31:59
  SPEAKER_00: So there is Abraham Lincoln kids,
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_00: who just cannot be stopped,
• 1:32:04
  SPEAKER_00: you know, no matter how rugged their circumstances might be.
• 1:32:12
  SPEAKER_00: But they don't need help.
• 1:32:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not saying I have the answer.
• 1:32:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just saying that these are the immediate questions you have to start thinking
• 1:32:21
  SPEAKER_00: about when you begin to ponder, you know, Bringing out a new kind of ed tech.
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'll leave you with the last one.
• 1:32:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was going down this road before.
• 1:32:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's just a million things.
• 1:32:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this must be so frustrating because people see you as some kind of oracle.
• 1:32:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, talking to you has been different than I thought it would be in some ways.
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I thought you would be a total...
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_01: Latest and greatest tech obsessive across all these fronts.
• 1:32:53
  SPEAKER_01: I can just tell now.
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're just super thoughtful.
• 1:32:56
  SPEAKER_01: You research things.
• 1:32:57
  SPEAKER_01: You must have this unique ability to, like, conjure these worlds and futures in your head.
• 1:33:02
  SPEAKER_01: But it must be frustrating.
• 1:33:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure people turn to you all the time hoping for you to tell us what the future will be like.
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_01: But it is—it's all on here.
• 1:33:10
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone wants to know, like, utopia or dystopia.
• 1:33:12
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, where are we heading?
• 1:33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, look,
• 1:33:14
  SPEAKER_00: the— Well,
• 1:33:15
  SPEAKER_00: so what you're seeing is essentially a storyteller or a novelist method to thinking
• 1:33:24
  SPEAKER_00: about these things because the first duty of a storyteller or a novelist is
• 1:33:32
  SPEAKER_00: to keep people turning the page.
• 1:33:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so you've got to try to put them into an immersive world A fictional world
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_00: that is coherent and makes sense.
• 1:33:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there's all kinds of signals that you can inadvertently send to the reader
• 1:33:49
  SPEAKER_00: that they may not even be fully conscious of them,
• 1:33:53
  SPEAKER_00: but they'll immediately kind of say, oh, wait a second, that doesn't make sense.
• 1:34:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why that character did that.
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_00: This seems kind of simplistic.
• 1:34:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they closed the book and they put it down.
• 1:34:07
  SPEAKER_00: So...
• 1:34:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this goes to what I was saying earlier about Hollywood adaptations,
• 1:34:15
  SPEAKER_00: what makes them succeed or fail.
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're going to write a fictional scenario that involves technology,
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_00: you need to embrace the full complexity of that technology,
• 1:34:30
  SPEAKER_00: how it can go bad,
• 1:34:31
  SPEAKER_00: how it can succeed, and also how would a society interact with that technology.
• 1:34:41
  SPEAKER_00: And what would happen when people misused it or used it in really unexpected creative ways?
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And you also have to think about what's the business plan?
• 1:34:52
  SPEAKER_00: How would it make sense economically for a given fictional technology
• 1:34:59
  SPEAKER_00: to actually be rolled out and put to use?
• 1:35:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you do all those things and you do a good job of it,
• 1:35:07
  SPEAKER_00: then the reader reading the book will say, okay, yeah, that kind of adds up.
• 1:35:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this rings true to me.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't, again, they'll get a sense that it's false and they won't like the results.
• 1:35:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I think what you're seeing,
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:35:27
  SPEAKER_00: if you see me as being ambivalent or kind of complicated in my Some of my responses,
• 1:35:32
  SPEAKER_00: it's me,
• 1:35:34
  SPEAKER_00: the novelist brain,
• 1:35:36
  SPEAKER_00: trying to constantly ask the question of,
• 1:35:39
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:35:40
  SPEAKER_00: how could we tell stories here that have that complexity and subtlety about them?
• 1:35:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, which is fair.
• 1:35:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I wish the world was wired a bit more like that.
• 1:35:51
  SPEAKER_01: Neil, I can't thank you enough.
• 1:35:53
  SPEAKER_01: Honestly,
• 1:35:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to embarrass you or anything,
• 1:35:55
  SPEAKER_01: but it's like an honor of a lifetime to talk to somebody who's,
• 1:36:00
  SPEAKER_01: first of all,
• 1:36:00
  SPEAKER_01: just Prolific and wonderful at writing and,
• 1:36:04
  SPEAKER_01: and it was really like shaped the world in ways that I don't think I really,
• 1:36:11
  SPEAKER_01: it's rare to run into.
• 1:36:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, uh, please definitely buy the book.
• 1:36:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's the most important thing.
• 1:36:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:36:19
  SPEAKER_01: I knew I should get it first cause I knew we were going to get distracted
• 1:36:22
  SPEAKER_01: a little bit, but, um,
• 1:36:23
  SPEAKER_01: but please buy the book and,
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_01: and, um, yeah, no, just a highlight of, um, Highlight of the year.
• 1:36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:36:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's been fun.
• 1:36:32
  SPEAKER_00: I've enjoyed talking to you and looking at your cool rocket models.
• 1:36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Are those Tesla batteries?
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Are those whatever they are?
• 1:36:41
  SPEAKER_01: They are lithium ion batteries, but they got made in a laboratory in Tennessee.
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_01: We collect these artifacts as we go around.
• 1:36:49
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 1:36:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's my face built by some robots in Los Angeles.
• 1:36:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we just keep adding as we go.
• 1:36:56
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 1:36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:36:58
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:36:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's been fun.
• 1:36:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, man.
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Pleasure.
• 1:37:02
  SPEAKER_00: And good luck with the rest of the tour.
• 1:37:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 1:37:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:37:07
  SPEAKER_01: The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me,
• 1:37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Ashley Vance, and or Kylie Robison, or both of us together.
• 1:37:14
  SPEAKER_01: It is produced by me and David Nicholson.
• 1:37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland.
• 1:37:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the show is edited always by the John Sortland.
• 1:37:27
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much to Brext for all your support and thank you most of all
• 1:37:32
  SPEAKER_01: to everybody for listening or watching.
• 1:37:35
  SPEAKER_01: We love you.
• 1:37:36
  SPEAKER_01: Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things.
• 1:37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you and we'll see you again.
• 1:37:45
  [music]