← Old School with Shilo Brooks
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- [00:00]
Tim Ferriss
Hey, Shiloh. Here with an invitation for all my old school listeners. I'm going to be taping a live episode of Old School at the National Constitution center in Philadelphia hosted by the Jack Miller center as part of their national Summit on Civic Education. I'll be sitting down with the incredible historian and Pulitzer Prize winning author Jon Meacham to talk history, leadership and the future of our Republic. Tickets include a reception and a three course dinner before the show. And the best part, listeners get $50 off tickets with code TFP. T like Tim, F like Frank, P like Pam. Don't miss it. Grab your tickets now at the link in the show notes. See you in Philly.
- [00:38]
Shiloh Brooks
I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm talking to Neal Stephenson. Neil is a legendary science fiction writer. Edward Gibbons, the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman empire, published from 1776 to to 1789, changed Neil's life. Today I'm asking him why this is old school. Neal Stephenson, welcome to Old School.
- [01:15]
Neal Stephenson
Good to be here.
- [01:17]
Shiloh Brooks
So you know, you're a writer who people say can predict the future, but for today's show you've chosen a book about the past, which I want to get to in a minute. You've chosen Edward Gibbons, Decline and Fall the Roman Empire. But I have been given to understand that you have coined terms like metaverse, that you have anticipated large language AI models, that you have coined the term or at least popularized the term avatar. You talked about cryptocurrency before it was a thing. I'm curious, when you're writing, do you feel like you're predicting the future?
- [01:52]
Neal Stephenson
I think that would be very counterproductive to be constantly aware of having that pressure. The last book that I wrote that was set in a future kind of environment was Termination Shock, which is about geoengineering and know. So in that case it was, you know, fairly near future. And everything in it is kind of based on reasonable extrapolations of science and engineering concepts that had already been worked out by other people. So I think once you kind of gain that reputation, it becomes a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy in a way. And so sometimes people do some kind of pattern matching in their brain and think that some prediction has happened when maybe it's not actually there.
- [02:54]
Shiloh Brooks
I know that there's a lot of folks who treat your novels almost as roadmaps. You're influential on a lot of technology figures. Bill Gates and Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel why do you think your books resonate with those folks?
- [03:08]
Neal Stephenson
Well, in order for a fantasy or science fiction story to hold up and engage the reader, it's got to be internally consistent. You know, it has to make sense. You've got to set out the rules of the world, and then you've got to stick to those rules. You've got some leeway at the beginning to make stuff up, but then once you've set down some basic principles, you know, you have to stick with them or the readers, you know, suddenly just set the book down because it no longer makes sense to them. The technological world has to make sense. It has to be coherent, it has to add up. And so the technology needs to be based on actual science and technology as much as possible. But on top of that, it has to make sense economically and socially. There has to be a kind of plausible business plan, for lack of a better term, behind why these fictional technologies exist in the book and why they make sense. And once you've got that, that gives you the sort of basis that you need to keep following through with a plot that makes sense. And so that's what I've tried to do, and that's what a lot of science fiction writers try to do in, in making my books. And to the extent that succeeds, I think if you're a tech entrepreneur, you. You kind of see that you pick up on those details and, and maybe get a sense that what you're reading, you know, actually is a kind of semi plausible roadmap.
- [04:53]
Shiloh Brooks
So it seems like what you're saying is you have to have not just intuition, creativity with respect to the science and technology side, but there has to be some social intuition, some wisdom about human affairs. The why of the technology is, in a way, what you're saying. The reason I ask you that question is because when I asked you to pick a novel or a book today for us to discuss, you picked a book not about science fiction, not about the future. You picked a book about the distant past, and you picked a book that was written in the 1770s, all the way up to 1789 by Gibbon. And so I can sense from what you just said and by the book that you picked that you're. You're certainly a kind of student of the human things and of human affairs and of human nature just as much as you might be of engineering and technology. When did you first find the six volumes that are the Decline and Fall of Rome? And how did they strike you when you found them?
- [05:46]
Neal Stephenson
Yes. So it's been A long time. Okay, it's been a while. I started reading them in my early 20s, fresh out of college. I was working on a novel. My first published novel is called the Big you. I. I felt the need for something to pattern the story on. And it's set in a fictional university and there's a series of university presidents, you know, who are kind of tracing the arc of what happens in this university over time. Somehow I hit on the idea of basing them on a particular series of Roman emperors pretty early. I got this edition, which is from, put out by a historian named Bury J.B. burry about in like 1909. So it's in seven volumes and that's the one I've stuck with ever since.
- [06:47]
Shiloh Brooks
I think for people who have never heard of Gibbon, it might be helpful for us to just summarize. And this is hard because this is a six volume book. It took Gibbon many years to write. I think he started writing it maybe in 1773, 1774. It comes out in 1776. So it's as old as America. It's about to reach the first volume. It's 250. I think he completes it in 1789. But I wonder if you might be willing to just tell people what is this book about?
- [07:17]
Neal Stephenson
Some basics about doesn't get rolling until about 180 AD, which is the moment when Marcus Aurelius, who's one of the best emperors, hands it off to his son Commodus, who's one of the worst. So it's as good a moment as any to sort of mark the beginning of the decline. And that happens to be the exact same moment that we see in a very fictionalized form in Ridley Scott's movie Gladiator. You know, it's that handoff from Marcus Aurelius to Commodus. And so a key thing to say right up front is that if you've got sort of a passing familiarity with Rome from video games or YouTube videos or whatever, you probably know about certain stories. You know, about Hannibal crossing the Alps and Vesuvius wiping out Pompeii and Spartacus rebelling. And so Caesar crossing the Rubicon and all of that stuff, all of that is far in the past at the beginning of Gibbon. Okay? There's no one alive who still remembers any of that stuff at this point. And so it starts in about 180. The empire falls in about 470ish, 476, I think. So it only really, that's only a span of 300 years, but the Eastern Roman Empire continues for another thousand years. Okay? It doesn't fall until 1453. Along the way, Gibbon covers not just the 300 years to the fall of the west, but he covers what we refer to as the Dark Ages. He covers the rise of Islam, the spread of the Islamic power across North Africa and into Spain. The Battle of Tours in 732, where Charles Martel turns the forces of Islam back in central France. He covers the Crusades starting in around 1,000 and going up through at least the fourth crusade. There's a lot about the history of the Persian Empire and the Holy Roman Empire talks about Charlemagne. So it's really an entire history of kind of Western civ, if you will, up to about the year 1500.
- [09:53]
Shiloh Brooks
So this is a complicated book. It's a big book. There's a lot that goes on. My understanding about this book is that there are two kind of central theses about what caused the decline and fall of Rome. The first is that what caused the decline and fall of Rome is that a hungry, scrappy, cunning young people become lazy and fat over time with their success, such that the old Roman virtue starts to soften. Barbarians begin to encroach on these people whose empire spans too far for them to defend and whose souls have somehow over time, become softened. So that's kind of one view of what's going on in this book. The other view is that Christianity has something to do with the decline and fall of Rome. Now, it may be the Christianity causes that softening. We can talk about what it is about Christianity, but that the decline and fall of Rome is really about the history of Christianity. Gibbon says when he decided to write the book that he had this idea of almost like it was a moment of revelation. And you're a writer and you mentioned that he had inspired you and without him, maybe your first novel, the Big you wouldn't be what it was. He says, I had the idea it was at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first came to my mind. So I'm curious if you have any reflection on that image, that moment of inspiration and how it might color the thesis of the Decline and Fall.
- [11:38]
Neal Stephenson
Yeah, well, it's incredibly powerful image. Gibbons have got this reputation pretty early on as being a skeptic or even outright hostile to Christianity and so pinning the fall of the Roman Empire on Christianity. I don't see that so much. You know, when I read this, he'll hit the pause button every so often and drop in a chapter about the development of the Church, you know, and, you know, the Council of Nicaea or whatever, you know, various important developments in the theology of the Church and the development of both the Eastern and the Roman traditions. There's plenty of explanatory material for why the Empire gradually decayed over time. And I just think that the idea that he's pegging it all on the rise of Christianity is a little bit overstated. And maybe it might be a holdover of some early reactions to the book at the time it came out when people were expecting a more kind of pious, you know, and less skeptical attitude towards religion. But I don't see it that much in the actual reading of it.
- [13:01]
Shiloh Brooks
What do you think about the part of the thesis that says the virtue of a great people can become softened with luxury? That there was a kind of discipline, a kind of singularity of purpose and focus, a toughness of the early Romans that gives way as a city becomes an empire. Do you think that that is a kind of crucial part of this? Do you think that's a true account of the nature of how great people evolve?
- [13:29]
Neal Stephenson
I mean, that is the overall kind of overarching theme of the book. As the story goes on. You read about emperor after emperor and all of these developments over the course of 1200 years. There are many opportunities during all of that for Gibbon to sort of step in. And Gibbon does this very well. He's very opinionated and he loves to kind of drop in these witticisms and sly remarks. So sprinkled throughout the whole book. There are these bangers, these great quotes where he'll provide some insight. And he's not like leading you by the nose to try to tell you what to think or trying to impose a simple minded explanation on this. But you can kind of draw it out over time by following the story and you can kind of figure out, you know, what his attitude is.
- [14:31]
Shiloh Brooks
We're talking about two kind of separate threads here, and I want to ask you whether they're connected. One is that a great people over time becomes softened by either by luxury or by success, such that the hunger, the edge, fades. The other part, of course, that we're talking about is that Rome, oddly this pagan nation, becomes the storehouse of and springboard for Christianity. Now there are thinkers, there are great philosophers given, I think, I suspect, had at Least part of this in mind. Who would say that Christianity is a cause of softness? In other words, that the pagan toughness of the Greeks and the Romans, there's a moral transformation with Christianity, a kind of inversion of values such that the Christian virtues, charity, love, neighbor love, the veneration of suffering by the suffering God on the cross versus say the great know the pagan gods who are running around muscular and throwing lightning bolts, that this is. There's a whole. It's not just the decline of a civilization, it's the decline of an entire moral worldview and in a way an inversion of that. And I wonder if you think Gibbon is going that far or really what you make of that moment in the history of the West.
- [15:51]
Neal Stephenson
I mean it's certainly about the overall decay of the, the kind of, for lack of a better word, morals of the people and of the state. I again don't see that much directly linking that to Christianity. It's more to do with the corruption of institutions in my mind. And if anything, you could argue that the Christians might have been a countervailing force against some of that sort of moral degradation. There's a lot in here Gibbon is famous for. When he comes across some material that's too spicy to print in English, he'll drop it into a footnote. And so all of the kind of the Jeffrey Epstein type material in the book tends to be in Greek or Latin at the bottom of the page. And he just assumes that if you're capable of reading that, that you're, you know, mature enough to, to be able to handle it. Right. But he has a lot to say about kind of the degeneracy of morals and the, the way that that sort of public offices went up for sale and, and the way that, that the. Came to exercise too strong of a role in the selection of who the next emperor was going to be. There are plenty of ass kicking Christians. I mean Constantine, the emperor who founded Constantinople and formally converted their empire to Christianity was an ass kicker. And famously he saw this vision in Hochstigno vinces by adopting the cross. By this sign you will conquer. And later we get on to Charles Martel, Chuck the Hammer who, who takes down the Muslims at the Battle of Tours and we get to the Crusaders and all of that. So for me, this may be me reading it through the lens of what's going on right now in our politics. It's more to do with what we expect of our leaders in the way of upright, disinterested behavior.
- [18:38]
Shiloh Brooks
Do you think that Gibbon is writing a book that is meant to teach future generations about the decline and fall of their own empires. There are places in Gibbon where I think he resists this on the one hand, so I believe there are places where he seems to indicate that civilization can't collapse the same way that it did in Rome because civilization now is spread across borders, meaning it's not as though there's one civilized center of the world. The other part, of course, is that in the Romans time, there were spots on the map, peoples on the map that Rome was wholly ignorant of, that these people could come in the barbarians from outside. It's not clear what they are, who they are, what their power is, what's
- [19:26]
Neal Stephenson
going on, who the hell are these people? Yeah, yeah, exactly right.
- [19:29]
Shiloh Brooks
So that's why I say he's right, that that's a peculiar, singular situation. Rome, the civilized capital, and the Huns, who are unknown. We don't have that anymore. On the other hand, I do tend to agree with you that there's something in this book that resonates with, as you were just saying in your recent remark, contemporary conversations about the decline and fall of the west as a whole. The decline and fall of the United States in particular.
- [19:53]
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- [20:55]
Neal Stephenson
Can I. Can I read a couple bits? Would this be an opportune time for me to. I mean, the. The problem with this guy is that he's got a banger on almost every page that I want to read. Okay, sure.
- [21:09]
Shiloh Brooks
Let's do it.
- [21:10]
Neal Stephenson
In fact, I came across this. It's a slight brief digression, but it put Me in mind of the Russians in Ukraine. Okay, okay. In the part of Ukraine that they control. Okay, so the Goths were now in possession of the Ukraine, a country of considerable extent and uncommon fertility, intersected with navigable rivers which from either side discharged themselves into the baristhenes, and interspersed with large and lofty forests of oaks, the plenty of game and fish, the innumerable beehives deposited in the hollow of old trees and in the cavities of rocks, and forming, even in that rude age, a valuable branch of commerce. The size of the cattle, the temperature of the air, the aptness of the soil for every species of grain, and the luxuriancy of the vegetation all displayed the liberality of nature and tempted the industry of man. But the Goths withstood all these temptations and still adhered to a life of idleness, of poverty and of raping. Made me think of what's going on right now.
- [22:23]
Shiloh Brooks
Say more about that. How did it and what about it?
- [22:29]
Neal Stephenson
Well, just the idea that these people have invaded Ukraine, which is one of the most fertile and prosperous places on earth, but instead of so being being peaceful and productive, all they want to do is live off the land in a parasitical way and engage in further acts of conquest. Raping is the, the term that he uses, which sort of is a word we don't use very much anymore. It's not about sexual rape, but it's about sort of rapacious behavior and so pillaging the landscape for short term game instead of gain, instead of trying to make improvements and live in an industrious and peaceful way.
- [23:26]
Shiloh Brooks
So you offer that passage because you see in it one way in which Gibbon isolates something that is enduring about human beings as such. Because we had said, well, maybe Rome is a singular example, maybe something like this can't happen again. But you're saying something like, on the other hand, there are these examples of human behavior in the book which seem to recur. Yeah, yeah.
- [23:49]
Neal Stephenson
And it changes when you read. So when I read that, you know, decades ago, I thought, okay, well, he really socked it to the Goths there, you know. You know, the Goths really, you know, come off pretty poorly in that description. But I'm thinking of it as a thing that happened a thousand years ago, whereas when I read it post the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it takes on an entirely different meaning and significance to me. So that's why in some ways this is a good book to keep rereading.
- [24:29]
Shiloh Brooks
There's chatter about the decline and fall of the American regime, and I Don't want to take a position on that. But I'm curious if you think Gibbon has something to teach us.
- [24:37]
Neal Stephenson
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the interesting fact that the first book came out in 1776. Right. And if you read sort of American history, colonial American history, and the decades leading up to the American Revolution, these people were always using pseudonyms that came from. Mostly from the Republic, the Roman Republic, not from the. The imperial period. So, you know, somebody would write an editorial in the paper, and they would sign it, you know, Cicero or Cato. So these people saw themselves at the time as embodying the virtues of the Republic, not of the empire. And, you know, the. That's how we get Cincinnati. The city of Cincinnati is named after a Roman hero who was a farmer who went off to war, won the war, came back, returned to his plow, and instead of consolidating power and becoming a permanent placeholder, returned to his farm as soon as he could. If you see old statues or sort of iconography of George Washington, for example, sometimes they'll be standing kind of with one hand on the handle of a plow, which is just a call out to the story of Cincinnatus. And the Veterans of the American Revolution had a. A club, you know, an order, the Order of the Cincinnati, which was intended to. Just to say, okay, we fought in the war, won the war, got our independence, fine. Now we're going to go back to just being regular, you know, tillers of the soil and, you know, salt of the earth kinds of people. There's a very strong resonance there between, given, you know, publishing this thing starting in 1776 and what was going on in the States at the time. I think when I read it, started reading it in the 1980s, it was a different time in America and we still. Not everything was perfect, but, you know, it felt like we were at more of a high point then than we are now in a lot of ways. Reading it now, I see connections I didn't see. When you read about the kind of sexual misbehavior of some of these emperors and other figures in the book that 40 years ago, when I read that stuff, my reaction was, wow, those people back then were, you know, they really got up to some weird. Some weird stuff, you know. And when I read it now, I just see, okay, yeah, this is what people do when they get that much power, you know, is that some of them just go off the deep end and behave in a really, you know, depraved way.
- [27:50]
Shiloh Brooks
Let me ask you one Final question about Gibbon. And then I want to turn to some broader questions about technology. But this is a book that could intimidate people. It's six volumes. It took the guy, you know, however many years to write. One of the things that fascinates me about Gibbon is that he's been influential on a wide variety of people. And so I want people out there listening. When you hear Neil and me talking about Rome, some names you've never heard, some periods of history you might not be well acquainted with, don't let that intimidate you. This book is accessible. This book is the book to read if you want to learn about those periods. Let me read you a quote from Winston Churchill about Gibbon and some others that I think you'll be interested in hearing the way he has influenced them as he's influenced you. So Churchill says this. In my early life in history, I decided to begin with Gibbon. Someone had told me that my father had read Gibbon with delight, that he knew whole pages of it by heart and that it had greatly affected his style of speech and writing. So, without more ado, I set out upon the eight volumes of Dean Millman's edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I was immediately dominated both by the story and the style all through the long, glistening middle hours of the Indian day. For when we quitted the stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of polo, I devoured Gibbon. I wrote triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all. That was Winston Churchill. Now, let's take a completely different human type. Iggy Pop, the great rock star in 1982. Iggy Pop says, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American south playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I would read with pleasure around 4am with my drugs and whiskey in cheap motels, savoring the clash of beliefs, personalities and values played out on antiquity stage by crowds of the vulgar, led by huge archetypical characters. Your predecessor, arguably, I don't know how you view him, but Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer, says this. I borrowed freely from Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in planning the foundation series. And I believe that the motion picture Star wars did not hesitate in turn to borrow from the foundation series. And so he seems to be saying, gibbon is Star wars because the foundation series is Star wars, and I took from Star. So. Neil Stevenson, Winston Churchill, Iggy Pop, Isaac Asimov, all fans of Gibbon. I invite your reflection on why Gibbon resonates with so many different kinds of people.
- [30:29]
Neal Stephenson
First of all, it's a big. You should think of it as more of a library than a single book, and so you can pull out individual bits when you want. Like, not everybody is Winston Churchill who can sit down and read the whole thing cover to cover. He's painting a picture with recognizable human characters in it, and he's. He's telling the story in a way that's witty and engaging, and he's, like, summarizes enough that you don't have to go through all the details. But, you know, he'll. He'll tell specific narrative stories when he, you know, when there's an interesting story to be told. For me, the. The three great prose stylists that have had the biggest influence on me are given Dickens and Churchill. So this green series of green books here, that is. That's Churchill's biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough.
- [31:28]
Shiloh Brooks
Yes, indeed.
- [31:29]
Neal Stephenson
If you read that thing, you can feel the cadences of Gibbon in it. You can see how much he was influenced by Gibbon's style. So I think a side effect or additional benefit of reading this stuff is that it makes you a better reader. It's going to increase your vocabulary, not in a tedious, like, memorizing list of words kind of way, but as you're reading along, you might come across a word that is a little bit new to you and, you know, that's rewiring your brain in a way that I think is beneficial and just the ability to process these somewhat longer and more complex sentences than we typically see today on Twitter or whatever. It's all good. It's good for you.
- [32:23]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Let me turn us now to questions about contemporary technology and their relationship to discourse about decline and fall. Neil Ferguson has said about you in the Free Press, he says this Stevenson probably has a better idea of the social consequences of new technology than anyone pontificating about the subject today. So I want to ask you a couple questions first. There's a lot of talk about decline and fall of the human race at the hands of technology and especially artificial intelligence. So I want to ask you today for, you know, for people who are. Who don't know a lot about it, who don't understand, where is AI going and what is it likely to do to us, if anything?
- [33:04]
Neal Stephenson
Well, the. I Mean, I have, I think, a moderate view of its powers. You know, I'm not a, I don't think it's going to be the end of the world, at least not in the way that some people think. And, but I don't think it's nothing. I think it's obviously capable of doing certain things really well. The downside for me is that many of the activities that people use AI for, summarize this document or write a document for me that says the following things. Tell me about this, tell me about that. These are, these are activities that if you do them yourself under your own power, make you smarter and more capable as a person. And, and there's the side benefit that, that it's free. Right. So I think something that maybe people don't seem to recognize is that the big AI companies were funded to the tune of probably trillions of dollars at this point, certainly hundreds of billions of dollars by people who expect to get their money back. So when you use an AI to write a memo or summarize something for you, I mean, that's great. But ultimately the people who've, who providing that service do want to get paid back in some way. Whereas, you know, if you maintain in your own mind, if you develop and maintain the capacity to write things the way Gibbon wrote them, you know, or to, to read books and understand books without assistance, you don't have to pay anyone for that. Having to make effort, you know, having to like work hard on things and experience setbacks and deal with, you know, temporary frustration of a setback and find a way around it. These are all, to use an old fashioned word, these are all virtues that are really important and, and, and if you never, you know, if you're working with AIs that are, that are trained never to frustrate you, you know, always to give you what you want, then you're not developing those virtues and those inherent capabilities between your ears that, that I think are, are just really important.
- [35:51]
Shiloh Brooks
I mean, this echoes in some ways what we said earlier about the Romans, namely that there was a hardness and a virtue and a self discipline and an excellence that was acquired, that gradually softened over time. Whether it was wealth, whether it was Christianity, what a success we can that, but that a people, once a people, has access to a luxury that especially one that does something for them that they no longer have to do, which is what technology does. You don't have to wash your dishes anymore. You have a dishwasher. I could give infinite examples and so could you. But once you no longer have to perform the thing that results in the withering away of the capacity. And in this case, it seems to be what you're saying is that this could conceivably result in not the withering away of your capacity to do your dishes, which is not an existential crisis, but of your. And of your ability to think. And that. That is, I mean, I leave you to say, a civilizational, I don't know, threat, a decline and fall, a Gibbon type, you know, moment. And that's the threat.
- [36:50]
Neal Stephenson
Yeah, I mean, the opening incident in. In the movie Gladiator and in Gibbon is the handoff from Marcus Aurelius, you know, the Stoic, to Commodus, who was completely corrupt and fought as a gladiator. I mean, it takes a constant effort, I think, sort of steady, relentless maintenance from one generation to the next to prevent that from happening.
- [37:29]
Shiloh Brooks
You wrote a novel called Cryptonomicon, which is often credited with sketching the kind of basis of cryptocurrency. I'm curious, looking at the crypto ecosystem today, do you have concerns about it?
- [37:43]
Neal Stephenson
So in the 90s, there were people emerging in the tech industry in the Bay Area, in Austin, who were of a kind of libertarian bent and who saw in the Internet and in digital technology and in crypto the beginnings of a sort of technological basis for a freer and more decentralized society. Okay? So those ideas were just in the air, and a lot of really smart people, you know, spent many years thinking about them really hard and trying to find ways to realize those goals. It was pre blockchain, okay? Blockchain doesn't come along until well after Cryptonomicon is published. So it's really more about the particular kind of mindset and the cultural bent within the tech community than it is about a particular technology. I think it's easy to be overwhelmed by the noise and chaos of it and to see some prominent failures and scams and some bad behavior on the part of some people in that space. Less obvious is that there are definitely true believers still in the kind of decentralized vision who are very technically competent and people of integrity who are still dedicated to the idea of building systems that kind of Foster that original 1990s cypherpunk goal of decentralizing big power structures and solving some kind of structural problems that they attribute to centralized banks and centralized power systems. So it's a real mix of all of those things, and it's massively complicated by regulatory concerns. And then there's these waves of speculation that Drive prices up and get people very excited about the latest meme coin or whatever, and then the inevitable, you know, collapses that happen in the wake of that. So, you know, it's a really complicated picture overall in terms of the kinds of people who are involved. It's extraordinarily complex on a technical, engineering level. I mean, I'm pretty okay with math and coding, but I wouldn't dream of coming anywhere near crypto stuff because it's so. It's incredibly advanced mathematics and difficult engineering that you shouldn't touch, you shouldn't mess with, unless you're someone who basically devotes all of your attention and all of your talents to understanding how these things work.
- [41:00]
Shiloh Brooks
I want to move to a quick lightning round, but I do want to ask you one final question, since you're a science fiction writer. We talked about Gibbon and the decline and fall, and part of the decline and fall in the theme of that book involves the preservation of civilization and what it would mean to preserve civilization. It seems to me, from what you just said about AI from what you said about crypto, that there's a sense in which, if we do have a kind of decline and fall of the human race underway, the odd difference from what Gibbon predict, or at least sees in Rome, is that there barbarism destroys civilization. Today, civilization threatens to destroy civilization, meaning science itself. All that was at its outset promised to alleviate the estate of man. This is what Francis Bacon says, that the project of modern science and the Enlightenment will make the lives of human beings better, easier, more fulsome, more plentiful. But it seems as though there's a sense in which one could read the effects of modern science as destructive and harmful to man. As a science fiction writer, I wonder what you make of that distinction. That it's not barbarism that's destroying us necessarily, but it might be civilization itself.
- [42:13]
Neal Stephenson
So Gibbon's writing really at the. The peak of the enlightenment, of the, you know, the beginnings of the industrial revolution, it's when all that stuff is on the. The steepest part of the. Of the curve. I think that the social structures at the time were such that what we would now call cognitive elites had a kind of status and ability to shape events that is starting to come into eclipse now. So up until pretty recently, we had a fairly uninterrupted improvement in standard of living as the result of things like vaccines, you know, the polio vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, and various improvements in health and in our living conditions. And so as long as those improvements continued I think that the majority of people, even if they didn't understand science and technology very well, we're kind of willing to give the cognitive elites some latitude to keep on doing what they were doing. We've gotten into a space in the last generation or so where people are less and less trusting and really openly distrusting of the cognitive elites. And that's when we start to see the growth of conspiracy theories and hostility towards the cognitive elites, which is kind of the situation that we're faced with right now.
- [44:02]
Shiloh Brooks
And is some of that hostility warranted?
- [44:05]
Neal Stephenson
I don't think it is very much. In the case of people who are pursuing science and technology, occasionally things go wrong that. But overall, I think people in that sphere tend to be very conscientious about doing the right thing. I think part of what happened is that the rise of, for lack of a better word, wokeness or the perception of wokeness on the part of academics has created a kind of place for a crowbar to be jammed in and sort of an excuse for funding to be cut to academic institutions in general and for doubts, aspersions to be cast on the whole academic enterprise.
- [45:14]
Shiloh Brooks
The word of the day is cyberpunk. Our guest today, Neal Stephenson, revolutionized the genre of cyberpunk. The word is a combination of two things. Cybernetics, meaning human mind augmented with computers, and punk, meaning rebellious, countercultural, arguably even low life. The Matrix is a foundational movie in the cyberpunk genre. There is the tabletop RPG series Shadowrun for people who are really niche. And then of course there's the blockbuster video game from CD Projekt Red called Cyberpunk 2077 Cyberpunk.
- [45:57]
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- [46:08]
Neal Stephenson
Absolutely.
- [46:08]
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- [46:15]
Shiloh Brooks
I would don't see how anyone can
- [46:17]
Neal Stephenson
look at this story and think they were happy.
- [46:20]
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- [46:28]
Shiloh Brooks
Let's close out with a quick lightning round if you've got just sure moment. Is there a technology that people are currently overestimating?
- [46:38]
Neal Stephenson
I think that LLMs you've got. So LLMs are a subset of a bigger world of AI. And LLMs is the thing that most people come into contact with. LLMs are really good at some things, but there are limitations to what they can do. So I think there's some overestimation that's happening just because maybe some people aren't entirely clear that there's a distinction between LLMs and the larger kind of Venn diagram of different kinds of AI systems and what they're capable of.
- [47:21]
Shiloh Brooks
Is there a technology that we're underestimating that people. It's not on people's radars, but you see it, and it's something that we should have our eye on.
- [47:29]
Neal Stephenson
I mean, photovoltaics, solar cells that make electricity have become really cheap really fast. It's kind of happened as just a steady thing in the background. And so if you haven't been paying attention to it and you suddenly go check, you know, what these things cost, you might be surprised at how transformative that is going to be.
- [48:02]
Shiloh Brooks
Who's your favorite philosopher?
- [48:05]
Neal Stephenson
This is entirely predictable based on our conversation up until now. But I did start getting back into Marcus Aurelius, you know, the Stoic, which is a. Stoic is a word that has come to have meanings that Marcus Aurelius might not have recognized.
- [48:25]
Shiloh Brooks
Do you have a favorite classic novel?
- [48:27]
Neal Stephenson
Pride and Prejudice.
- [48:29]
Shiloh Brooks
Pride and Prejudice. Love it. It's so good. Well, Neal Stevenson, thank you for sharing Gibbon with us, and thank you for being on the old school.
- [48:37]
Neal Stephenson
It's a pleasure. I enjoyed it. Thanks.