Neal Stephenson Author of Snow Crash and other books.

“I think we are embodied creatures, and I think that bypassing the body, I just don't understand it. I write with a fountain pen on paper. The full engagement of the body, not just the abstract stuff up here, but the motor cortex and down the arm to the hand. That is all part of thinking to me. It's not that there's thinking, which is this separate thing up here, and then this chunk of meat attached to it that's kind of dumb and stupid.”

Core Memory · Startups & Venture · October 2026

Context

Ashlee Vance expected Stephenson to be fascinated by brain-computer interfaces. He says he isn't, apart from their value for conditions like ALS, because for him thinking includes the hand holding the pen.

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Transcript

Core Memory

Neal Stephenson

…words back into concepts. So the interface of letters on a page is what I like. It's where I'm happy. I've never felt any particular desire to have something different. So I've tended, I guess, not to pay super close attention to that stuff just because I don't see how it's applicable to my life.

Ashlee Vance

It's so different that I would have pictured in my head. I just thought you'd be obsessed with all this stuff and where it was at.

Neal Stephenson

I mean, it's still a little too abstract for me, I guess. So if I could look at specific examples of what people are doing with it, then maybe it would be more something I could react to. But I think we are embodied creatures, and I think that bypassing the body, I just don't understand it. I write with a fountain pen on paper. The full engagement of the body, not just the abstract stuff up here, but the motor cortex and down the arm to the hand. That is all part of thinking to me. It's not that there's thinking, which is this separate thing up here, and then this chunk of meat attached to it that's kind of dumb and stupid. It's all, you know, we're all one big kind of brainified, you know, creature. So, I mean, I guess it's an interesting thought experiment to think about bypassing the body, but I can't get any real traction on it myself.

Ashlee Vance

I read you talking about this and how you write. I was envious when I was younger in my teenage years. Always had the notebook and was writing short stories and things like that. But my handwriting is so bad that I could barely read it then. Couldn't read

Neal Stephenson

your own handwriting. I mean,

Ashlee Vance

like, you know, that's pretty bad. No, I mean, like, okay, but I wouldn't want to write an entire book and then have to transcribe what I've done. But I like that sensation you're talking about, I do miss that. I feel like I am totally a different, I think, quite differently writing than I do just…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Core Memory

“I follow the teachers' subreddit and a bunch of other channels of information where actual teachers and actual classrooms talk about the problems they face, none of which can be solved by giving them a piece of technology. Okay, I mean, that is at the bottom of their list in terms of what they actually want.” — Neal Stephenson, Core Memory

“My theory is that the big bang of this was the last shot of Planet of the Apes, where you see the Statue of Liberty, it's fallen over… it's a super powerful image, but a very inexpensive one, right? So, I mean, they got a model of the Statue of Liberty and they kicked it over and threw some dirt on it… Whereas if you're trying to show a more positive kind of future, you know, you do have to do some pretty hard imagining.” — Neal Stephenson, Core Memory