Reframe with Neal Stephenson (Science Fiction Author & Founder @ Whenere) | Season 1, Episode 3

I'm doing good. I'm down in San Francisco for a couple days.

Doing a panel discussion this evening.

I don't like to overprepare for these things. Something about science fiction becoming reality. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think it comes through. People can recognize spontaneity when they see it, but they can also recognize the lack of spontaneity.

Yeah. That's why doing, when I do book tour appearances, over the years I've tended to skew the time more towards question and answer because you can't fake that.

I mean, I'm good. You know, I'm healthy. Knock wood. Family is healthy. I'm productively engaged on a few fronts. I'm working hard on the next book, but I'm also engaged on a startup, When/Where, which, you know, we could talk about later if you want. But basically I like being busy. I like working on things. I like being engaged at a pretty low nitty-gritty level on projects. And right now I've got the opportunity to do that.

So this is a company called When/Where. It's when plus where, and it's co-founded by me and Karin Lure, who's a longtime collaborator of mine. She was the texture artist who did most of the texture art on Half-Life One and later worked at There.com and Forterra.

So she worked at There.com, which is sort of a competitor to Second Life, and Forterra, which was a serious games company. And we started working together about 15 years ago. Anyway, When/Where is a sort of response to the fact that in our media industry right now, there are these story worlds that fans just are in love with. And it can be anything. It could be Harry Potter or Star Trek or Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, what have you. But the people who love these worlds are literally insatiable. They can't get enough. And they'll read all the books over and over. They'll watch all the movies and the TV episodes over and over. They'll go to Comic-Con and put a lot of money and effort into building costumes that enable them to kind of be in those worlds among their friends. And movies and video games, TV, they're just too slow and cumbersome and expensive to produce the content that these people want. So they're writing fan fiction, they're maintaining wikis, a very high level of quality and detail about these worlds. So, we think that by combining the power of modern game engines, we're using Unreal Engine, and AI, that we can build these worlds, or small parts of those worlds at least, and populate them with AI-driven characters in such a way that if you want to go in and experience that story in an immersive way, okay, you hit a button and that happens. But you can also use a simple scripting interface to write your own sort of fan fiction and see it played out in that world with the same assets, the same level of fidelity as the original story, as well as being able to have conversations with the characters and interact with them in a kind of natural way. So that's the project we've been working on now for about a year and a half. We've been running on pre-seed kind of angel money. Thanks in part to you guys. Very much appreciated.

Yeah. And so we've, you know, we've got to a point that's exciting and that we think we've proved we can do it. And so now we need to sort of turn our attention to polishing and executing and, you know, building something that we can put out in front of users sometime later in the year.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But we have two, you know, sort of primary engineers on the project, but my job, I like to describe myself as the cowcatcher on the front of the cowcatcher engineering locomotive. Yeah. So there's always the weird things that come up that need to be kind of figured out that would waste a huge amount of engineer time if you threw it into their laps. And so I've gotten good at identifying those when I see them coming along and I say, you guys, please keep doing what you're doing. You're doing a great job. I will try to absorb the pain, you know, of climbing this learning curve and figuring out if this thing is going to be a good thing to integrate into the project. So it's, I've had to learn some new stuff. I think a few years ago I was really grumpy and irritable about the fact that so much documentation now takes the form of YouTube videos. I was just like, I don't have time to watch these videos. Just write it down. Write me a document, you know. And now I sort of, I've resigned myself to it, you know. I've gotten good at, you know, watching YouTube videos at 2.0 times normal speed while doing something else. So it's a growth opportunity, I think, and, you know, so I hope it keeps me a little bit agile.

Yeah.

I mean, part of it is just that I think I'm a curious person and there's a lot out there to be learned. So particularly in the area of tech and engineering, there's so much going on, so many new software packages coming online that are just incredibly capable compared to anything I dreamed of when I was a younger person. And, you know, now available for free or cheap. And so, you know, it's kind of hard to remember, but unlike just a couple of decades ago, to get access to a really powerful, you know, software package or something, you'd have to pay a huge amount of money to get a license and then you'd have to sort of kind of learn things the hard way. But there's so much power available now to people who want to build things and create things that it's just, you know, it's just this unlimited sea of opportunity and I kind of can't stop, you know, tackling new things.

Yeah. So the existing kind of pipelines for creating media that we can share and enjoy have become kind of sclerotic. They're all kind of choked up and inefficient now. And so, you know, in order to bring something to the screen, it's necessary to raise, you know, an incredible amount of money and there's only a few people willing to back those kinds of ventures. And so you've got to work with decision makers. And so the allocators of capital who have positions of power in those industries, and I don't think that those are evil people necessarily, but there's only a few of them and, you know, it's just a really cumbersome system. And the kind of the flow of information that drives that decision making, I think, is still kind of stuck in the middle of the 20th century. So it's all, okay, what's our take from the box office? You know, how do we know whether a project has succeeded or not? Well, in the modern era, there's other ways we can tell immediately if something is succeeding, if people are responding to it, if they're liking it, and we ought to be a lot more agile in the way that we allocate resources to such projects. So the where we've ended up with is a system in Hollywood and to a lesser degree in sort of AAA games where there's an extremely high quality bar. So the kinds of people who make movies or who do games have gotten to a point where they kind of insist on and they judge themselves, they judge their work based on very, very high standards of visual and auditory quality, which is great. It's just really expensive and slow. And so a lot of times we instead kind of take some inspiration from soap operas because soap operas are, they're looked down upon in a certain way by people who are higher up the food chain of entertainment. But they are incredibly popular, profitable franchises that go on for decades, and they're based on a very simple kind of production modality. You've got a couple of sets, some furniture, you know, you got a cast of characters that doesn't change very much. They come in every day. They, you know, they do their scripts. And again, it doesn't have the level of glamour of a Hollywood premiere, and yet it makes a lot of people happy, you know.

Gripping. It is. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of a theme that we keep circling back to when we're talking about, so what's the bar that we're initially trying to meet in When/Where.

Well, also think about who watches them. Yeah. You know, one of the number one occupations we don't talk about are stay-at-home moms. Yeah. You know, and they tune in during nap time. Yeah. Or while the washing machine is running or something like that.

And that's the audience you're talking about, Cyan, is one that has been, you know, completely ignored by the game industry. I shouldn't say completely. There's always exceptions.

Yeah. Yeah. Happy to. This is a thing that I became aware of through a conversation with Jonathan Rauch, who's a writer who has a Substack. You can find his work pretty easily. But he published a book not long ago called The Constitution of Knowledge, which is sort of about this problem that we have that we can't agree as a society on what's real anymore. And one of the things he talked about was an American philosopher from the late 1800s named Charles Sanders Peirce. And Peirce had a philosophy called fallibilism. And unlike some philosophies, this one is incredibly easy to understand and describe. It just basically means you might be wrong and it's okay to maintain an awareness, you know, that you might be wrong in your beliefs. And so I started reading into it a bit and learning about Peirce's work. And he kind of goes through four levels of, he talks about what he calls the fixation of belief. So people are naturally in a state of kind of irritation or anxiety if they don't have a, they don't know what to believe. And so what are some strategies that people have used to resolve that anxiety and feel...

Better? And the first method is called the method of tenacity, which just means you stick to what you believe. It's very easy to, you know, we've all met people who just believe what they believe and you can't argue with them. But then, as Peirce puts it, even for those people in their saner moments, they have to be aware that lots of people have different opinions. And so you can't have a society where everyone's following the method of tenacity with different opinions. And so the next one is the method of authority. The method of authority is you just pick a person, a leader, or maybe it's a book, you know, but it's something that you just unquestioningly agree in. And if you can get enough people to all follow the same authority, then you have kind of the basis for a society. But we all know ways that that can go wrong. So the third one is what he calls the a priori method, which is sort of an awkward designation, I think, but basically it's let's be reasonable. It's the let's be reasonable approach. And so it's kind of what you see most people doing when they're carrying out discussions of things on the internet. So it's like, okay, well, let's look at the facts and let's structure some arguments, you know, and come up with logical reasons to believe what we believe. And that's a tricky one because it seems reasonable, like of course that's what you should do. But the problem is that it's very easy to kind of inadvertently go astray and end up going into wrong conclusions that you believe in all the more strongly because you believe you got to them through a rational argument. So he talks, for example, about say the early Greek astronomers who were definitely rational people, you know, very intelligent, strong thinkers, but they had opinions about astronomy that were just totally wrong, like planets moving on epicycles and all that kind of thing. So to talk to these guys, you would think that they had arrived at, you know, their theories through a rational chain of reasoning. But they were still wrong. So finally he gets to what he calls the scientific method or kind of fallibilism, which is sort of similar to that to a priori, but basically it's just don't be so sure of yourself. You know, the way science works is you can have a theory for a while, you can believe it, but you understand how you got there and you're willing to change that opinion if new evidence comes along. You don't just hold to it dogmatically. So that's kind of a super quick summary of Peirce's philosophy. And what it did for me was kind of crystallize a lot of stuff I had been vaguely thinking for a long time, you know, just reading internet discourse and seeing how people could, you know, apparently reasonable people could fall into certain ideological camps and then become incredibly rigid and intolerant of other views. And so when I saw that, it was kind of like a bell went off in my head and, yeah, I started to just feel more comfortable with not necessarily having a super strong opinion about every possible topic and trying to be more accepting of different takes on things.

Um, I don't know. Maybe we should circle back to it. I'm not...

Right. So there was, you know, when the... So there's the lab leak hypothesis, but then there's the original one that we were all kind of told to believe, which was that it came from a market. And that one, the idea that it had escaped from, you know, wild bush meat being served in a market, was presented to us as the scientific answer. And so when you see somebody saying that, believe the science, you know, what they really mean is that they've got a particular take on it that they think is supported by science, but it might get overturned later. And so the real test of whether people believe the science is whether they're willing to change their minds when new evidence comes up.

Yeah. Well, people are too quick to ascribe it to sort of evil motives. And so, yeah, you know, somebody can always go back to the tweet that you posted two years ago and say, 'Well, back then you had a different point of view. Look, you're a hypocrite. You know, you're being dishonest.' And so social media doesn't allow us a graceful way to change our minds about something in public.