Neal Stephenson on History, Spycraft, and American-Soviet Parallels

0:04Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatis .org. For full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit ConversationsWithT Tyler .com.

0:26Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. This is my second conversation with Neil Stevenson who needs no introduction, but do let me tell you about Neil's new book, Polestan, which I read an advanced copy of. It's a very different kind of book. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I very much liked it. The real test of this is when the book ends, are you sad that it wasn't longer? And I was sad that it wasn't longer and I will be pre -ordering parts two, three and whatever else comes. Neil, welcome. Good to be back. How is it that you think about why you sometimes switch from showing us the future to illustrating the past?

1:06You know, for me as a continuum, all of my science fictiony books have had callbacks to historical themes, some more than others. So to me, I've always enjoyed history. I've had the opportunity to write historical fiction. I've greatly enjoyed it. It's been a while since I went there. It was like going home almost, you know, being able to go back and work in historical setting again. Sometimes I think that when the present and future are changing most rapidly, that's when we need to write about the past. That it's easier to speculate about the future when nothing's happening. Well, it's interesting.

1:46I mean, we're in a weird situation now where I think that the formal education, people's formal education in history is probably at an all -time low. And yet, there are all of these new ways of learning about history that didn't exist 50 years ago. There's podcasts and YouTube videos and so on that you can sink your teeth into if you decide that you're interested in some particular era of history. So I think that more and more what we have now is kind of auto -died acts out there, so in their own time, not at school, but during their leisure time have decided to become history geeks. Why is this book called Paulistan?

2:33You know, the name is explained towards the very end of the book. There's a funny thing about book titles today, which is that they need to be searchable. They need to be uniquely searchable. So I've had the experience a few times in the last decade or two of proposing a title for a book and the publisher coming back saying, that's an awesome title. You know, we'd love to use it, but it's not going to work when people begin typing it into a search engine. So now the trend is towards finding things that are a little autocomplete pretty pretty quickly. So Polostan is a word that emerges. It's sort of a joke that one of the characters makes toward the end of the book, but it's a reference to the fact that the sport of polo enters into the storyline in a few different contexts.

3:28How many spies do you think psychologically or just totally screwed up? Are are all of them screwed up, or can you be a normal spy, the way you might be a normal grocer? I suspect that it begins to screw you up over time. You might go in normal, but it takes a big psychological toll to be trying to maintain multiple identities and always worrying about divulging information. It's just not a natural way for people to live. From what I can tell, looking at kind of espionage in the year of, say, the Second World War. are the best spies were completely unexceptional people. And that's probably still true today, but you don't want James Bond.

4:11You don't want a femme fatale kind of character who's gonna stand out. You want somebody who just could disappears into the background. And so that's the kind of people that they like to recruit. And you want psychological compartmentalization? People to express emotion? Yeah, I think that it's easiest when you don't have to lie. You know, when you're the role that you're playing is reasonably close to who you really are. I guess unless you're a total sociopath. Well, spies might be total sociopaths, right? There's some reasonable percentage of sociopaths out there. And if you're going to do something as a sociopath, maybe spy is it.

4:53Yeah, maybe it's, I don't know if there's a Myers -Briggs category for that. but maybe that's what they look for. I heard a story once that there was a phase, I don't know, it wasn't the 70s or 80s where there had been some leaks from compromised people in the American intelligence world and so they went, they started trying to hire real real straight arrow types, you know, who just had no blemishes or perceived blemishes anywhere on their record that could be used to kind of compromise them or blackmail them. And they ended up with such pure, innocent kind of characters that the Brits started with holding information because they just couldn't, you know, they couldn't stand having to deal with these kind of small town naive people who were being sent there away by the Americans.

5:44Don't know if it's true, but good story. I'm not saying Mormons are naive, but I'm told the CIA has a disproportionate share of Mormons, which makes sense, right? Yeah. It's, it's, it's where that's where you would go to look to find such people. If we run through different counterfactuals, you know, the secrets of the Adam bomb, which do, of course, leak out to the Soviet Union, but how contingent was that? Can you easily imagine a lot of very different futures where we just can hoard that secret for 10 years or more? Or do you think it inevitably was just going to happen? And you know, there's some debate as to how important that leakage really was.

6:24I mean, at the time, it seems like a horrendous failure to have let that information go. How long would it have taken the Soviets to duplicate that effort, you know, based on some available information? I don't think it would have taken a lot longer. their incentive to build a bomb was too great. And particularly if you're willing to settle for the gun style of bomb as opposed to the implosion device, you know, that's a pretty simple object. It could just be they had multiple decent spies. So if we had stopped the ones who carried the secrets, if there were 20 others waiting in the wings, then it's not that contingent at all.

7:09Yeah. How do you think about AI secrets? Do you think those are bound to flow out or it's contingent? You mean like create secrets or proprietary software that's in AI systems? Or if some people would say it's the weights, the data, it's different opinions as to what the secrets are, but there's something in there that not everyone has. Well, yeah, I mean the way you get those weights is by running these big training sessions, right? that are incredibly expensive. So I haven't actually thought about it before, but yeah, I would imagine that if you've spent billions of dollars to get a set of weights that you're going to try to hang onto that.

7:53How effectively could you stage your own death? You, you really, let's say you really want to do it. If they're willing to do it. To fake it? Or to actually do it. Fake it. But everyone one thinks it's real. I read about it in the papers, Neil is gone. I'm out my head. I weep. And then I forget about it. I don't mean I forget about you, but you understand what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. Wait. There's not that many circumstances under which all, you know, physical traces of someone can be obliterated. I mean, that's a fairly hard thing to do. because you know, it would have been easier 100 years ago, but you know, we've got cameras everywhere and we've got DNA testing and other ways to prove that or to have disproved that somebody's actually dead.

8:41So, you know, I guess it would have to be something like a plane crash into the ocean. But then how do you survive it? Oh, yeah, okay. I mean, to kill yourself is one thing, but just to pretend you've killed yourself and state alive seems harder. Yeah, I mean, you could very shoot out, you know, if it was like a small plane, like not a jet airline or full of people, but you know, a single, single cedar, I guess that might work. So higher, a private plane, have it crash, parachute out into somewhere where you're, you're witness getting into the plane and taking off. Yeah. But then there's no way to recover the evidence for some reason.

9:28It's pretty, it's pretty hard to do. I mean, if someone really wanted to, if they were just determined to go and find, you see the efforts that people have gone to go down to the Titanic, you know. Well, I mean, if you can go find that thing and check it out with a submarine, and then it's pretty hard to really find a place that can't be accessed in that way. Do you still write your novels in longhand on legal pets? Not on legal pets, but I do write them on longhand. Yeah. Yeah. I buy this fancy paper from Italy. I mean, I kind of had this idea that if I bought fancy paper, you know, I'd use less of it, a bit more conservative.

10:14I don't think that worked because even fancy paper doesn't cost very much. I like opening the package too much. It comes in a nice package with wax, the wax seal on it. How does long -hand improve your thinking or writing process compared to say typing? Well, I can type really fast. So it's easy to just, you know, keyboard goes burr kind of, you know, thing where stuff gets put down on the screen almost as fast as ideas are coming into my head. And that's not necessarily a good thing. It's valuable for a sentence to be lodged in the buffer for a little while, because it's really easy to improve it or even just to get rid of it while it's between your ears.

11:07But as soon as you put it down on the screen, even though it is editable and all that, it takes on a kind of permanence. It requires more effort to go back and fix it. So I think that the first draft quality is better. It's also just faster to edit on paper. you know, I can just like draw a box around a paragraph and put a big X through it or cross out a word or write something in. And it just takes longer to do all of those things if you're screwing around with a mouse or whatever. Now, you must have spent a lot of time thinking about communism over the last few years. Why use it in your view having come to grips with the topic that so many American intellectuals became infatuated with Stalinism.

11:55And not just agnostic, but positively enthusiastic. This often survived their visits to the Soviet Union. How did that happen? Are we just as humans deranged beings? I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the main character in Polistan is the daughter of Russian dad and an American woman. And the who are both very involved in leftist politics in the late teens, early 20s. So there were a lot of not just Americans, but Westerners in general who went to the Soviet Union in those years because they thought that this was an opportunity to build something great. And this was obviously before Stalinism and all that.

12:42But even then there was all kinds of bad stuff going on. The checker, the precursor of the KGB was coming into power and doing bad things. And if you had the eyes to see it, you could see that this was going in a bad direction. But a lot of those people did not want to see the bad side of things and kind of close their eyes to it. So there's a great book by Malcolm Muggeridge. I think it's called Moscow in winter, which he wrote in the I think 1933, but it's fictionalized, but it's clearly just thinly veiled account of these kinds of people in Moscow in the early 30s. And Mugridge has been there and he knows he knows bad things are happening.

13:33He knows about the the man -made famine in Ukraine probably knows about a lot of other things. He's depicting these western expats who just they refuse to acknowledge any downside to the revolution. There's plenty of stories like that from that era. I don't know if it means that we're deranged. I think we want to see nice things happen in the world. and if we've decided that there's a particular political movement or ideology that's going to make nice things happen, then it's a little too easy for us to deceive ourselves about the downside of such movements. And what is it about the Soviet Union that you have ended up most admiring?

14:22Most admiring. Most admiring, right? Because you've spent a lot of time studying it, reading about it, thinking about it. Well, they make really good rockets. So if you're in the rocket business, their ability to make high performing rocket engines and so on is pretty astounding. The amazing thing that they did in the 30s, which is the period I'm focusing on, was to yank this backward country forward from the 19th century into the 20th century by building this huge industrial base at breakneck speed. And in the course of doing that, it did a lot of terrible things. So when I say that it's admirable, you know, I'm just referring to kind of, oh, look, they build a big steel mill.

15:17Yeah, I'm not taking into account the body count. It strikes me that it was a reasonably favorable environment for enabling strong women. And I'm not sure exactly why, but I do see that in the data. Yeah, so they were pretty serious about equal rights for women. And so for, I think that was maybe a big part of why a lot of Western leftists thought it was a great place because there really were a lot of women getting better education, becoming doctors, getting roles in the military. It was easier to get things like abortions or to get a divorce. So they did kind of put their money where their math was as far as women's rights was concerned.

16:04And to get into the head space or the feel of writing about Soviet Union of that time, And are there specific things you do you put on Prokofiev or you open Dr. Shivago or what, how does that work for you or you just do it? I like to find first person accounts. I like to look at pictures to the iconography of the Soviet Union. You know, there are various people who went there in the 20s and 30s and wrote memoirs Americans, you know, who will memoirs describing their experiences there, as they were written at the time kind of before people knew about Stalinism and the excesses of Stalinism. It's written without kind of a full premonition of how bad things were going to get.

16:55In particular, there's an account of, I don't, I'm not going to be able to remember the name right now, but there was an American engineer who went and worked at this huge steel mill at Magnita Gorsk in the 30s and helped them build that. And so he's got a memoir telling about just his day -to -day experiences of working with these people, kind of the good and the bad mixed together. Is there much in Soviet fiction that you admire? man. I don't know if I've ever read a single word of Soviet fiction. Fossily Grossman, Life and Fate. I'm doing a whole podcast on it. That's a great, great novel. Okay.

17:38Okay. There's some Soviet science fiction like Strukotsky, which ended up turning into the movie stalker from Poland, Stanislav Lamb, probably Yulika Salaris. He's very good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure I know that one. Yeah, I think overall. Yeah. Do you think there are other American fiction writers who've succeeded in capturing something of the Soviet experience? So I think of Norman Mallor's Oswald book, which I think is quite good. It's maybe my favorite Norman Mallor. But not many examples. But I liked what you did with it. Oh, thanks. Thanks. Yeah, I was just listening to the Restless History podcast about the Kennedy assassination and they do a segment on the Oswald's stint in the Soviet Union and Delilo writes about it too, but no, I don't, I'm sure it exists, but I'm too poorly read to know about it.

18:37You know, since when I was 19, I visited Gary, Indiana, which of course is now a while ago. It was more up and running than it is now. And ever since then, I had this dream to visit Magnita Gorsk. I mean, do you really like me also want to go there or it's just somewhere you want to stay away from assuming you could go safely. Forget about the current war and the like. Yeah. If I could go safely, it would be interesting to see for sure, but, you know, obviously I'm not setting foot in Russia anytime soon. Yeah. The story for those who don't know it is that Stalin said, I want the world's biggest steel mill.

19:13And at the time, it was Gary, Indiana. So they just got the numbers on Gary and Deanna. And so, increased them by, I don't know, 10 % and started working on this huge steel mill in this place called Magnetagoras, which means magnetic mountain, which is into yearls out in the middle of nowhere. It's called magnetic mountain because it's an incredibly rich load of iron ore. And so in a pretty short time they built this giant steel mill complex, which still exists, and the city has grown up around it. I imagined that a lot of what made it interesting in 1933 is probably gone now. I did go to Volga grad once, which got a few things in common with Magnetagoras, I guess, the former Stalin grad.

20:05I don't know Russia well, but some part of me feels that the Soviet Union and America had more in common in the 1930s than they ever had before or have had since. Does that make sense to you at all? And what is that something? I think it does. I've actually got one of my characters in the book. He kind of talks about this a little bit because there's this in both cases, there's one part of the country in the United States. It's basically everything from Chicago to the Atlantic, which is densely populated and urbanized and lots of industry. And then in the Soviet Union, obviously, that's the western part of the country.

20:51And then there's this huge hinterland, which is mostly empty. It's got indigenous people. It's got a history of those people being poorly treated by the cosmopolitan industrialized dominant culture. And you know, it's kind of fast open resource extraction zone to feed the industrial beast. So it's got that in common. And you know, I do think that there are some some ways in which those two countries sort of understood each other at the time. And I think I think there was some of that thinking when Americans would would come and visit and try to get involved in building the Soviet Union. There's some common obsession to industrialize, to urbanize.

21:37The working class is quite focal in very different ways, but in both places. But at the same time, idealizing the wide open spaces, the wilderness, the idea of the frontier, so it's kind of both of those things going at once. I have some questions about other issues in tech. Sure. Augmented reality. It's gotten a lot of attention lately. So there's Meta's Orion product, which is forthcoming at some pace. Apple Vision Pro with the second version on the way. What do you think of these? Are we getting somewhere? Or is it still stuck? Well, I think we got somewhere with magically, you know, a few years ago.

22:18I think these products are all kind of doing similar. similar things and sort of the only thing I'm interested in hearing about is how much, how many billions of dollars these companies are putting into the development of content to run on these devices because nobody's going to use them or want them unless there's a reason to put them on, a reason to use them. and making content for an augmented reality device is very difficult. You take ordinary game development, that's no picnic in and of itself. That requires a lot of smart people with specialized skill sets. VR is a whole step above that in terms of its level of difficulty.

23:09and AR is way beyond VR because there's so many other factors that you have to take into account in order to make content that actually takes advantage of what AR can do. So I feel that my general sense is that the kinds of people who invest in building this hardware, they're very comfortable building hardware, they're not comfortable investing and content plays, and they have this mentality of, you know, if we build it, they will come. If we provide the hardware, then creators are just going to somehow jump out of the woodwork and build dual applications that run on this hardware. I think that magically did a really good job of supporting a bunch of different creative teams making content for that device, but they still could have used more.

24:06So far, both of those companies have got programs to try to encourage people to build content, but I think there's still relying on other investors too much to somehow come in and start writing checks and supporting developers. It takes years and millions and millions of dollars to make anything at all that's worth seeing on one of these. And so where do you find the where do you find the investors willing to to write those checks? What do you think of the daily uses of AR? So let's say I don't want to watch a movie on Apple Vision Pro, but I want to walk around to a party and it will tell me the name of all these people I've met before, the names, but I don't remember their names and it tells me who they are.

24:53Now this might violate privacy for some people, but will that be popular? Will there be, oh, I take it into the Whole Foods and it just points me to what's on sale or what's good that day. Is that going to work? I mean, the thing is Tyler, those two applications that you just described are things that we were talking about 10 years ago that magically and they were old ideas then. So I'm not cracking on you for having old ideas. But I'm just saying that what is it about this space that with like probably hundreds of billions by this point that have been poured into building these systems and the zillions of of person years that, you know, we're still talking about the party name finder application, right?

25:45But don't LLMs make all the difference? I mean, that would be the change. So LLMs at a quality level are quite recent. And I can talk to it. It can talk back to me. That's now virtually seamless. isn't that going to mean it's all going to work? It's like becomes the operating system for your AR. It and work and it does work and it's very promising. I'm working on a project with that right now, but there's no obvious, so an organic connection between that and AR particularly. If I want to build an application that uses LLMs or any other kind of cool technology that's come along, Again, I've got to think about the numbers.

26:29I've got to think about, okay, I'm going to have to employ X number of programmers for X years. Here's how much it's going to cost. The investors supporting this project are going to want to get paid back. Now, how many people own AR headsets? Okay, like a few thousand, I don't know. Now, is that tiny group of people going to actually generate enough revenue that the investors who bankrolled this whole project are going to get paid back? Well, regardless of what your answer is to that question, it's definitely the case that there's billions of people, literally billions with a B, who have access to phones, pads, laptops, you know, flat screen technology.

27:18And so that market is so much more enormous, so that the economic considerations force you as a developer to make whatever you're making, you gotta make it run on phones and iPads and all of that stuff. So if you do that, then you might also have the same thing ported to an AR device, but the market and the revenue that you get out your application is going to be completely dominated by the version of what there runs on ordinary flat screen devices. Our social media being replaced by group chats and if so is that good or bad? Group chats like discord, slack, that kind of thing. Or WhatsApp, often small groups occasionally large.

28:07People talk about issues of the world. It's private in a way Twitter never has been. It seems to me those are much more influential. Does that make you feel better about social media or the same? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to feel worse about social media. So I do think that anything that gets you out of the glare of the big social media platforms and kind of de -risks it. You have the feeling that you're talking amongst friends, among people that you know, you don't have to be as guarded, you don't have to spend as much time kind of fending off. bots and dealing with just complete azanine bullshit that comes at you so thick and fast on Twitter or other kind of open platforms.

28:55Does it matter much that it seems today in the United States there's so much more surveillance than say 10 years ago? If people don't seem to feel that it matters, right? I mean, I may have my own opinions, but people are just amazingly willing to put devices in their homes to keep them 24 -7s of valence. You know, listen to every sound that they make and track them with cameras and you know, they're on the internet all the time. I guess we haven't yet seen a huge disaster resulting from that. You know, we haven't yet seen a line of know. I I guess I'm giving a Western perspective here, but it does seem that for a couple of decades, we got like a couple of decades head start before the authoritarian, totalitarian countries of the world figured out how to make use of the internet, right?

29:57So the internet was kind of open everywhere. And now it's not now China and Russia and North Korea have ways of walling off their internet and controlling what goes in and out of the country, information -wise. And in light manner, they're making use of the surveillance capabilities of technology that we've naively provided them with. So I think there have been bad consequences, obviously, in or anybody who kind of runs a foul of the authorities. If that stuff is happening here, I guess I haven't heard about it yet. It doesn't seem to matter yet. You're writing seems to influence actual technologists.

30:48Does that make you nervous at all? Do you feel some kind of moral nervousness every time you sit down to hand write something out? Like, oh my goodness, you know, what's this gonna cause in the world? Or you just go ahead and you write blithely and try to write something that's interesting. You're kind of right. Something that reasonably balanced in terms of pros and cons, and that is rooted in some kind of basic understanding of the technology, and then let the chips fall where they may. You know, the most recent book of that type that I've written was Termination Shock, which is about solar radiation management, solar geoengineering.