Neal Stephenson said something in this conversation that I keep coming back to. He said that the ability to tell a story around a campfire, to take your own near-death experience and hand it to someone else so that they don't have to live it themselves, is probably the most powerful evolutionary advantage a species could have. If you think about what that means, before writing, before the internet, before any of this modern world, humans were already building a shared memory, a way to survive together by sharing what one person learned. That's what this show is about. That's what Autograph is about, the company that I have started since the last season that now powers the show. It's not just about recording conversations, it's about recording the kind of knowledge that otherwise would be lost, doesn't fit into a textbook. It's the kind of knowledge that comes from being there, from being lived.
Neal has been everywhere. He is one of the most famous sci-fi authors in history. He has an amazing track record of prophecies coming true, apart from being employee number one at Blue Origin and, like, you know, amazing technical contributions to gaming, VR, and just an infinity of futurism. I was very lucky to sit down with him in a conversation that went deep. Welcome back. This is Rabbit Hole Research.
Mr. Neal Stephenson, thank you so much for being on the show. So glad to have you here.
Good to be here. How are you?
I'm doing all right. I'm, you know, I've been counting myself very lucky that our paths crossed in such a serendipitous way and very excited to jam a little bit around narrative storytelling and thinking about narrative as a technology that has an evolution and an arc. And I know that this is something that you've thought about a lot and you've participated in the canon. I think that your works are now, you know, count as canon in the Western world. And so it'd be fun to talk about that evolution and sort of see how not only you see it as a technology arc, but also how your process has evolved as you appraise this. So I have a fun question just to break the ice, which is, when you know, who do you write for these days?
I mean, I'm sitting there alone as I do it. So, I'm usually not super conscious of what the audience might be. I think, you know, by definition, an audience has a large number of, hopefully a large number of participants. They might all have different interests, different tastes. And so, you know, I try to write something that I find interesting in the moment because I'm always there, you know? I don't have to send it out to a focus group or a test reader or anything like that. So, but in general, you know, my approach isn't super focused on, I'm thinking about the audience all the time.
Yeah, and I hear, I think I was sneakily trying to get at this, this ambient observer that is always present, that is you, that is at the intersection of, you know, like in the commonalities between everybody who reads your books. There is a part of you that resonates with someone else. And I think that there's something there that's really interesting to me in how that sense of self is persistent across time and across generations. And, you know, we start seeing patterns in narrative that sort of transcend... Well, it's certainly relevant to what you're working on right now. So, so yeah, I can see, I can see why you'd have that take on it. But please go ahead. No, no, but I think that there's something there about this fine treatment of the ego as you're the consumer of your own production. And I think that there's an evolution there that is worth exploring. And it reminded me of this question that we had at the Long Journey Ventures retreat that was, who are you performing for? And, you know, like if you're not really conscious about that question, it's kind of funny to think about who you're performing for. And I think that it's just an interesting backdrop in this context of narrative as technology where, well, how do we measure the efficiency of that technology? And maybe I like that's the place where we can start. How do you measure the success of narrative?
Well, for one thing, I do think that the mental processes of a storyteller are different from those of a story reader. And so, I don't think that for what I do, that it would be productive or helpful to be focused on the reader experience. I have to be focused on the writer experience, which is a different process in a lot of ways. So, I'm just sitting there alone with pen in hand, you know, sort of spilling out sentences in a way that satisfies me as a storyteller. And if that happens to align with what readers like to see, then, you know, we're having a good day, you know, we got a good product-market fit, as we say in the tech world. And, you know, for the most part, I've been fortunate in that that fit has existed.
Mhm. I mean, certainly so. And there's something to be said about the process, which I think, I mean, it's probably a bit tired to ask like what your writing process is, but maybe there's a more interesting question around how has your process evolved or how does the production of Polostar and that universe compare to the early days of prior work?
Well, I think it hasn't changed that much. I think I'm more confident in what I do now. And so I have a better sense of what's going to work, what's going to... You know, there's, when you're, when you've got kind of less experience under your belt, you're more apt to kind of go down blind alleys, make mistakes, maybe spend time on things that aren't going to pan out. Like a classic example is just to over-research a thing. And then you've got, you know, a bunch of material that is really extraneous and not that interesting and has to be removed. So, I don't think the process has changed a lot except in the sense that I'm just a little bit more efficient because I have a pretty good sense of what's working, what's going to work. And I also, I think an important thing that comes with that experience is just having a certain amount of confidence that I am going to get to the end of the book. So, when you're starting out, you're always kind of wondering, can I do it, you know, am I producing enough? Geez, I only wrote X many words today, you know, or in the last week, you know, I need to write more. I shouldn't take any time off. I shouldn't, you know, I shouldn't hit the pause button to go off and think about something or do some research. And over time for me, that kind of anxiety has gone away because I know that once I do get into a productive mode, you know, I will produce a lot of material and I will get to the end of the book that I'm writing before too much time has gone by.
Do you... there's an interesting question there around, you know, the gardener versus the architect and how much you need the telos of the whole message enough to support the production and versus discovering the stuff that just happens to be beautiful along the way that lets you, as a, you know, in the relationship between author and reader, experience or wander about the world. Where do you fall in that spectrum of, you know, allowing the story or like the prose to guide where the narrative goes versus the light at the end of the tunnel? This is the outline that I need to follow.
Yeah. Understood. I think a certain amount of telos is necessary. Like, you do need to have a sense of what the end of the project is going to be, whether it's, you know, what's the end of this book, or the end of this chapter. And as long as that's there, I think that the gardening approach tends to be most productive. Because at the end of the day, you still are having to produce the work, you know, one letter, one word at a time, right? I mean, that's just a given. And so, I mean, I've always seen a close parallel between the writing process and the process of writing computer code, because in each of those cases, you're, you know, typing it out one character at a time, and there's no other way to actually enter the code into the machine. But if you don't have a sense of the architecture of what you're building that's constantly there, then you're not moving closer to any actual useful purpose. So you kind of have to have both. But I would say, like a common error, and again this goes to this topic of confidence and experience, a common error is to over-stress the telos, the what's the big architecture of what I'm doing, and then get stuck on being able to actually produce, you know, produce the work, you know, one word and one sentence at a time. So, the closer you can stay to that end of it, I think, the better off you're going to be and the more opportunities you're opening up for serendipity along the way, you know, creative excursions that might not have been part of the original teleological scheme that was in your head, but that in a lot of cases can actually really make or break the quality of the finished product.
Mhm. And I mean, I have to double-click on this idea that you just brought up about computer code and narrative or fiction. And I mean, the parallels are definitely present. The narrative is computer code for human software. How much do you think about the effect of the software that you write for human brains?
Sorry, I had a noise that I just didn't get the last part of your sentence.
Okay, I mean, like, how much do you think about the effect, the subjective effect that you, like, you know, before and after difference in a human reader, be it yourself going through the authorship exercise or someone who read your books that you know has a new perspective evolved because of something that you encountered in your work.
Well, again, it's, I think it would be sort of paralyzing to think about that very much during the actual process. So, and I think it creates a little bit of a risk that you end up producing a work that's meant to be a tool, you know, kind of the utilitarian approach to books. And so, in general, I tend to shy away from thinking about those effects for a couple of reasons. You know, one is, I don't think it would help me. Well, it certainly wouldn't help me. It'll probably hurt. And I think that in general, readers can be quite sensitive to any perception that a book that they're reading is an axe-grinder, you know, that the... I mean, this is a problem, you know, particularly in progressive spaces, of this tendency to want to tell people what to think. Nobody likes to be told what to think, particularly if it's being done in kind of a sneaky way. And so, the risk of always thinking about what effect a book is going to have on people is that it begins to show through, you know, and people begin to, you know, Stephenson's trying to sell me something here. And then, you know, once that's a kind of breaking of trust in a way between the reader and the writer. And once that's broken, you know, there's no fixing it.
Mhm. No, I think that's so valid and valuable. And the reason I asked was because I'm interested in, like, the origins of narrative as a construct. You know, like, and you know, if you go back to that 200,000 years ago when, you know, we operated on oral history, there was this balance of entertainment, social cohesion, you know, mythology and religious, you know, adjacent stuff that was designed to engineer society in a certain way so that, you know, pretty utilitarian goals, right? Like, essentially provide for the weak, you know, enhance the strengths of the strong, figure out how to marshal resources and things like that. And so I guess my question was more geared around, you know, and how did we evolve from this very Spartan world, you know, story as a last resource almost, to story as an entertainment device that has side effects that may be illustrative of other stuff. And it may be, you know, like, there may be genuine gigantic alpha in literature today. You know, the people who read certain books may be quote-unquote better off because of the peace of mind it gives them, the frameworks that it gives them, so on and so forth. But, you know, we've built all this architecture around writing, media, books, tapes, all kinds of archival stuff to preserve knowledge. But there's a transition there that I think is really interesting in the form of narrative itself. I just wanted to know if you had thoughts on that.
Yeah, I mean, my theory of where narrative comes from, which is just me making it up, it's not based on any hard research or anything, but is that if you think about it, the ability to share those narratives over the campfire 200,000 years ago is, it's hard to imagine a more powerful evolutionary advantage that a species could possibly have. Because you can tell the story about how you almost got eaten by a hyena. And under other circumstances, the only way that the other people listening, the other people in your community could learn that would be to narrowly escape being eaten by a hyena, which, you know, is not a great way to learn things. But if you can essentially take your experience and convert it into language and then make an infinite number of copies of it by virally spreading it to the people in your campfire circle, then a species that's capable of doing that has got an evolutionary advantage that's second to none. So, I think that's where it comes from. That for me seems like a plausible explanation of why at a certain point in history our brains suddenly got really big and we turned into a completely different and completely dominant species. So, I think that's where it comes from. And then once it's there, once we've all kind of got it as a sort of hardwired capacity in our brains, then, you know, you can work with it in different ways. Not every single story that you tell has to be a survival narrative about hyenas or whatever. You can tell stories that serve other purposes. And some of those purposes may be just pure entertainment. But even in the field of stories that are entertaining, it's possible for those, if it's done right, possible for those to carry a kind of payload that's useful in other ways. You just don't want to be too obvious about it. Like, I'm thinking back to, you know, kind of favorite classic books of the 19th century, Dumas, Dickens, Jane Austen, and those can be very entertaining stories in their own right, but as you're experiencing them and as you're reading them, you're sort of learning things about the world. You're learning things about human character, about, you know, good characters and bad characters and how to recognize them, how to deal with them. So it's a kind of, you know, more elevated version of the hyena story where the threat model in this case isn't wild animals, you know, who are coming to eat you, but it's, you know, people within your society who may be deceptive, who may be untrue, you know, and sort of that you need to be warned about so that if you encounter people like that in your life, you'll sort of be able to recognize them and match them up against patterns you've seen in reading literature and hopefully avoid, you know, making mistakes that could have really terrible consequences for you and your family.
No, I think, yeah, I'm really interested in this tension between the payload that you're talking about where, you know, like, and I'm, and I'm, you know, this is probably foreshadowing for later in the conversation, but I'm really interested in the concept of this payload as it relates to AI and training systems where the real target of a payload in modern literature could be the other fellow human that needs to, you know, have their priors updated in a certain way, but probably more impactfully it is really about these training systems that are going to be at the, you know, the very central node of technology in the coming years and, you know, what is the payload architecture required to influence that world. But there's another thread here too that I think is interesting. Once you have the democratization of storytelling and, you know, it's not just the priest or the chieftain that can tell the story and if anybody can sort of share their lived experience, there are these underlying grooves in narrative that keep appearing. You know, the allusion to the good and bad, the dark night of the soul, you know, the frameworks like the hero with a thousand faces and archetypes. Yeah, yeah. Right. And what do you think of those, like, primitives in narrative? You know, like, I'm somebody whose life has been, like, how do you play that tapestry of musical instruments? How do you relate to them and what do you think they are? Where do they come from? That kind of stuff. Yeah.
Yeah, well, to sort of rewind just to the beginning of what you said, I think I suspect it's always been pretty democratic. Because basically anyone around that campfire who has got a good yarn to tell and is good at telling it will immediately command the attention of everyone who's there. And so I guess if it's a really authoritarian situation, then there might be ways of, you know, forcing those people to shut up. But it is a, you know, the ability to tell stories is something that's kind of, I think, pretty randomly and widely distributed across the population. And when you, you know, we've all run into raconteurs in our lives, right? And they're not necessarily people who went to a writer's workshop to learn how to tell stories. It's just natural. You know, they start telling a story and you're like, or you're overhearing them on the bus or whatever, and it's like, you know, holy, this is a really engaging yarn. And then we know other people, you know, who just cannot tell a story to save their lives. And it has nothing to do with intelligence or whether they're a good or bad person. You know, it's just a knack that some people have. So, I've already forgotten the latter half of your... what the primitives and the... Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so there's a, I don't think I have it here, but, you know, Joseph Campbell is obviously the person that we associate with the hero's journey. And some of the primitives that you're talking about, he wrote, he produced a series of books. They're big picture books. They're coffee table books. They're skinny. There's like five, it's a series of five books. And it's like a precursor to the hero's journey stuff, but he's kind of telling the story of the transition in human societies from early hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies. And basically that, according to him, in a lot of different societies, at the moment when this transition happens from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled agricultural societies, you start to see the appearance of the sacrifice as an important thing. The theory being, I guess, that now you're sort of subject to the whims of weather, you know, rainfall and all of that. And so you're at the mercy of these, you know, mysterious forces you can't control. Somehow people come up with the idea that the way you get what you want is to appease the gods by sacrificing. And, you know, eventually that gets turned into symbolic sacrifices like the communion wine and the wafer in Christian society. So there are these, you know, you can go back, if you're into this stuff, semiotics and that kind of thing, you can sort of go back and look for places where those grooves or those archetypes might have come from. Obviously Jung is the big name in archetypology, you know. And it's a fun, interesting exercise. I try to avoid being overly conscious of that stuff. I mean, I'm sure it's in my books. It's kind of hard not to. There might have been a character somewhere called Hero Protagonist. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's kind of inevitable that that stuff will find its way into any story that's worth telling or that people are interested in hearing. And so what matters is the friends you make along the way, you know. Well, what are the new twists that you can apply to it? And how can you have fun with it? But to really study it is, you know, that's what, I mean, there are whole university departments full of people who kind of dig into the deep history of these stories.
Yeah, I mean, I certainly enjoy the exercise of trying to figure out what was the process that led to the world that we inherited, you know, like why does the day have 24 hours, the year has 365 days, like these things come from somewhere and it's just very much mangled evolution of oral history that has been structured into, codified into different media. And I was talking to a friend about a month ago and we were talking about the archetypes. This is a very mathematically inclined friend who basically has two frameworks to look at life. He understands reality as either narrative or math and he dropped this line that the archetypes are the eigenvalues of the matrix.
