(phone ringing)
- Welcome to The Shiproom, you're on the air.
(upbeat music)
My guest today is the original hacker tourist,
a Hugo Award winner and a New York Times Bestseller
on four different occasions, and if I could grow a goatee,
you wouldn't be able to tell us apart.
His new novel "Fall or Dodge in Hell" is in stores now.
Neal Stephenson, welcome to The Shiproom.
(dramatic music)
- Good to be here.
Thanks for having me on. - Fantastic to meet you.
I had a ball reading the book, it was big.
- It's a Neal book.
- So what do you think is harder,
somebody getting through the book,
or you writing it by hand?
- So, it was mostly by hand,
but I don't find that particularly difficult.
It's a few pages a day.
I'm writing long-hand,
I'm using a good fountain pen, good paper.
So it's not a physically arduous thing in any way.
- And so for you it's more easy for you
to be creative writing rather than typing.
- It's a slower output, so the ideas sort of get to sit in
the buffer a little bit longer.
The first draft quality is a little higher as a result.
Editing that way is just a quicker and easier process,
if I wanna get rid of a sentence,
I just (imitates paper whooshing).
- Having been one of the leaders here
that has watched this thing called the public cloud
just birth in front of us,
what was the storyline you set out
with this latest book of yours?
- I just wanted to do sort of a modern take
on "Paradise Lost," if you read Milton's "Paradise Lost'
it starts with Lucifer being cast out of heaven,
and follows his adventures subsequently.
Even thought the character's an evil one,
it was an interesting character to Milton,
and he wanted to not just trivialize that character
as being a one-dimensional baddie,
but wanted to explore why he was rebelling.
I like the idea of trying to take that kind of a story
and set it against a technological backdrop.
30-40 years ago, it would've been a book
about a single, giant machine somewhere
doing all of the computation,
and it would've ended up being a very different story,
until we had the cloud as kind of a ubiquitous
and known thing.
I don't think it would've been possible
to write this kind of a book. - Sure.
(upbeat music)
In your books you've looked ahead
at what the future might look like,
where technology may get us,
what might be waiting when we get there.
I'm curious what you think will make
the next big impact in the future.
So what I have here is this really incredibly,
sophisticated decision-making matrix,
and this 64-team tournament has been boiled down
to the elite eight.
- [Bridge] It's a big day for everyone
filling out a future tech bracket.
- That's right and I just don't think that A.I.
is going to think its way out of this one.
- Do not sleep on the thorium reactors,
there's huge upsides.
- The alpha decay is slow,
and it has the perfect number of neutrons.
- Not one, not two, but three: Helium-3.
- The idea of undersea colonization is in way over its head.
- This is not the first time ion drives take center stage.
One word.
- [Both] Robots.
- We are here to find out about the inevitability
of future technology.
- Augmented reality, or quantum computing?
- Well I'd have to say augmented reality.
- Neurolink, or thorium reactors?
- Thorium reactors.
- Space elevator or ion drives?
- Ion drive.
Just because there's material science questions
around space elevators that are...
But we know we can-- - All those nanotubes, right?
- [Neal] Yeah, yeah.
- Ultra tall buildings, or microwaves that don't blow up
when you leave a spoon in the bowl?
- Well I wrote a story about ultra tall buildings, right,
so I've got to go with that.
- We'll put that one in there.
All right, final four now.
Augmented reality versus thorium reactors.
- Augmented reality.
- Ion drives versus ultra tall buildings.
- Ultra tall buildings.
- You gotta go with that one, right?
- Yeah, yeah. - All right.
Now the difficult choice, which of these two is gonna win?
- You know, my heart in some ways
is with ultra tall buildings
which is the thing I've been championing
for a really long time,
but nobody seems to be working on those.
I mean you and I both work for the two companies
that are currently shipping-- - Yep, exactly right.
- Ambulatory augmented reality devices,
so I think it's gotta be it.
- Alright I'll put that in the winners bracket.
(air horn blaring)
(upbeat music)
(clock ringing)
The cloud has got a huge role to play in your book
and our future, and a big plot point
that you have is security within the cloud, right?
There's security of A.I.,
there's security essentially with biometrics,
and so as you were writing the book
how did you start to think about that balance
of keeping sensitive data up in the cloud,
keeping it secure, but also having data
that's constantly kind of in motion, and learning?
- There have been efforts made in this area
to figure out ways to do distributed secure computation,
where you basically got encrypted packets
jumping back and forth between processes
and it's not possible to actually inspect
and know what's being computed.
That's a topic that I've been hearing about,
at least in the abstract since the,
kind of the cypherpunk days back in the 1990s,
and then there's another element that comes in,
kind of have to be somewhat careful about spoilers,
but the idea of how do you identify somebody,
and know what identity means
and right now the way we generally identify ourselves
of course is by typing in a password,
and sometimes we've got two-factor ID
or other more advanced kinds of identification,
but it's possible to get a lot fancier than that
and use all kinds of other biometrics.
- Quantum computing, simulated souls,
rebooted brains, just normal stuff.
- Just, yeah, a day in the life.
- Do you like the tattoo or not?
- [Neal] Okay.
(laser buzzing)
- What's that say?
- That's Y.T. on a skateboard,
and looks likes she's being towed behind a minivan.
- But that's a keeper? - Yeah.
That is...
Oh, that looks like some sort of a kabal,
or an alchemy kind of uh...
Yeah I'm not so keen on that one.
- Thumbs down, next.
- So that's Cosa Nostra Pizza from "Snow Crash."
You know I'm always a little nervous
about facial and neck work,
but I know that the kids these days,
are all about it, so as long as--
- It's all the rage?
- Knows what they're getting into.
- That's a keeper? - Yeah.
Oh Yeah, it's a little too close to home,
and imagine what happens when this person
is 80 years old and it's all saggy
and out of shape...
Then they're definitely going to regret having that.
- That's a thumbs down then. - Yeah.
- Remove that one.
(upbeat music)
So you wrote an article that really hit home,
it's called "Innovation Stagnation,"
where you talk about the limits
that organizations put on people
who might otherwise be thinking really big.
It's just the fear of risk, and the risk of failure, right?
- Yeah it's funny because I just saw a piece about this,
I think it's on Twitter just this morning,
saying a similar thing that if you go
to tech conferences now you see a lot of innovation
but you don't see a lot of experimentation.
So there's people doing new things,
but this person was perceiving a lack of willingness
to just try stuff for the sake of trying it.
It boils down to being willing to try things
that might not work out,
and that is a hard thing to sell,
I think, in any kind of shareholder controlled company.
I think working on things that can't possibly make money,
can sometimes lead to things paradoxically
that could make money.
- Sure, sure.
This has been something that Microsoft,
we worked on before,
we really had a stigma about failing,
it was to be wrong, or to fail,
it was career limiting, and so from our culture
instituting this mindset, we call The Growth Mindset,
which is experiment, be okay to fail,
fail fast, learn, and move on to the next thing,
but it's just a core part of what our culture is now
but it took us years to get to that point,
and to change the culture of the company.
- It's really tough, once people have been burned
and feel that they've gotten in trouble--
- Yeah, it's a fear. - Yeah it is,
and it's you know perfectly understandable
for people to feel that way.
(upbeat music)
- Okay so anyone that's seen a video of you,
understands that you know a lot about swords.
Like a lot.
So this weekend we were looking at swords,
I'd love for you to take a look at a couple ones
that I found and tell me if you think I got a good deal,
if I made wise decisions.
Okay sword number one.
- This is a Cutlass,
obviously made for a right-handed person.
- Obviously.
- At $18.12, it's a good date,
it could also refer to the year,
because this is a weapon that would've been used
by people in the Navy,
and it's something that you would use
in sort of close combat.
So this appears to be, shaped like a Katana,
a Japanese sword.
It's got a typical weight for that kind of sword
which means it's pretty blade-heavy.
It's got the wavy line along the edge,
which in a real one is left by putting clay
along it during the tempering process.
The handle feels, not like a real Katana handle.
So I would say it's a pretty inexpensive reproduction.
It's a little light on hand protection.
Even for what it is,
I suspect it's maybe not the greatest reproduction.
This is a classic design that shows up
in a lot of reproductions.
Usually gets built as a Claymore,
this one doesn't look like one of your better reproductions,
it's got a ricasso, this part is not sharpened,
but it's associated with the Scottish Highlands
and I think it's pretty much
what we would call a wall-hanger.
(upbeat music)
- As we've been talking,
we have this really fascinating thing here at The Shiproom
where we have our own learning bot.
It listens to the conversation,
it analyzes it and it comes up
with the 12 most relevant questions
from what you and I have talked about.
So we're gonna try to finish these tangrams
before the time is up.
We call it The Database Dozen.
(playful music)
What was the job you had
before you started writing that you really liked?
- I think the one I most liked at that stage
was driving for a funeral home.
- At what point did you just say screw it
and start shaving your head?
- Right after I finished "The Baroque Cycle,"
in about I think it was 2004.
- Hey check this out.
- Yeah you win.
- So is the time you spent here today with us
gonna prevent you from hitting your daily page quota
for your next book?
- Currently I'm not in a writing mode
during the few months that lead up
to the publication of a book,
it's just really hard to get going.
- Oh another one look at that.
- Just rubbing salt in my wounds.
- Would you ever consider hiring a ghost writer
if it actually was a ghost?
What would be easier to live without,
a dishwasher or your microwave?
- Oh, microwave.
- Star Wars or Star Trek?
- Trek.
- If you could eat dinner with anybody in history,
what would you eat? - What would I eat?
- Oxford comma, yes or no?
- I tend to use it.
- Would you rather be roommates with someone
learning to play the bagpipes, or the accordion?
- I think probably bagpipes.
- If a friend offers you pizza with pineapple on it,
would you have one less friend?
- Yes.
(upbeat music) (people applauding)
- Well thanks for hanging out with us today.
- Oh sure, it was fun.
- It's been great talking with you.
- [Neal] Yeah, it's been great.
- Now before we go, if they want to find out more about you,
or your latest book, where should they go?
- Well the publisher's websites,
HarperCollins, will have everything about it.
- I highly recommend it, I loved it.
Thanks Neal, thanks everyone for watching The Shiproom,
this is Brad Anderson, we'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)
- Bridge, the Cinderella story
for self-driving cars is over.
- Yeah, they gotta drive those pumpkins home themselves.
- I know quantum computing thinks
it could be in two places at once,
but it might just end up in one place, out.
Hey everyone, now that you've watched this episode
of The Shiproom, I really recommend
that you go to Microsoft365.com/shift
and learn how to get started
deploying Windows 10 and Office 365.