Fireside Chat with Naval Ravikant and Neal Stephenson | Blockstack Summit 2019

I'm very excited to be here with Neil Stevenson who is a like many of you one of my childhood heroes actually Snow Crash which raise your hand if you read Snow Crash just Snow Crash all right how many people have read something by Neil yeah good if you haven't read anything by Neil if as some of you may know I'm a very avid reader a very avid consumer of science fiction and in fact I have many things to blame Neil for but among the hem Snow Crash is actually my most reread fiction novel of all time I've probably given away it doesn't copies I have two physical and a digital copy at home my oldest physical copy is very well dog-eared and I probably made the mistake when I was in college of taking everything Neil said very literally so the things that he was trying to make fun of and to warn against is kind of sort of where I ended up but that's that's another story if you haven't read Snow Crash I highly highly recommend it you should probably just stop what have you doing right now and buy a copy I'm getting no Commission on this but seriously I picked it up last night again because I wanted to refresh my memory and I ended up till 2:00 a.m. reading the book the first two chapters alone are incredibly fast witty brilliant and you'll find it's the kind of book that you have a very hard time putting down thank you and thank you for being such a profit Center buddy I hope you're still getting royalties on it although I do remember you saying somewhere that writing is not how you get rich it's not a not a good way to get rich anyway well compared to some other activities that are popular in this area in this area right like speculating on critical things Michael playing let me get through his background very quickly for those of you don't know Neil is mostly an incredible science fiction novelist I would say is one of the really key founding fathers of cyberpunk genre alongside William Gibson and Bruce Sterling he's also wrote some great nonfiction pieces mother earth motherboard back in the day was a big one in Wired magazine that I loved about the wiring of the globe he's written a bunch of other books seven eaves reamed and Crypton nomicon which was a series the diamond age beautiful book and nanotechnology many others he's a chief futurist for magical leap whatever that means and he is so prescient at predicting things in the near future that he was recently even accused of being Satoshi Nakamoto so he joined that hallowed pantheon on people accused of being Satoshi Nakamoto or credited with being Satoshi Nakamoto unfortunately for Neal I think no such luck on that one although he holds neither confirm nor deny I deny it okay his most recent book is a book called fall which is mostly we're going to talk about or use the springboard to talk about various higher-level topics there will be some spoilers or we'll try and keep away from some of it but it's it's a it's a book that's regardless what you think you know what you glean from this conversation is absolutely worth reading it revisits simulation theory which was a big piece of Snow Crash Snow Crash decades ago talked about the meadow verse which is an internet type virtual reality world and he's really updated that in this book fall fall combines questions of religion consciousness nature of truth the future of the human race what happens to life after death and so on and we're gonna be talking about that I'm gonna launch into the first part of fall to kick us into a conversation that I think is very relevant today a lot of us here thinking about the future of the internet and today the Internet is dominated by fuse giants especially in the social media space and of course we have Facebook and Twitter in the book there's a company called like ly ke that's used as a proxy for for Facebook and similar but the Internet has taken the dark turn in in Neil's book fall and in fact you refer to the Internet as the miasma and can talk about that a little bit and the pet name that one of the characters has for the internet he's got two of two names one is the den so when you look at your phone it's got little red speckles all over the apps telling you that you've got messages waiting or that you've failed to to look at your phone enough recently that that's under the heading of the din and then the miasma is just kind of the whole swamp of a bad data that's out there sort of you know wrong information and stuff that's been put there either by people who are just wrong or by more often now by people who are deliberately trying to steer the are kind of national dialogue in one direction or another for purposes of their own so that's that's the miasma that the people in the book are referring to at the beginning of the book and then sort of we keep jumping forward in time from from there and the miasma is kind of the Internet is always kind of almost attacking you and it's attacking you with all these streams of information and people have to set up filters to keep the noise out and they have to have editors to determine what gets in but that editing actually creates its own version of reality and so everyone's kind of living in there in a different reality based on which edit stream they're subscribing to and what they're what they're pushing out and it sounds highly stressful you have a line in the races the Mia and this will sound familiar to those of you who are in Twitter it's certainly resonates with me the miasma behaves sometimes as if it expected every man woman and child on earth to have a social media and PR staff and 24-hour call and I think there's that moment where when you send out a tweet or you do a Facebook post or you put something on the internet where you're both titillated and terrified you're like oh this is gonna be popular was this good am I gonna get attacked over this you're I have to cancel what I was gonna do for the rest of the day right cuz I need to deal with the aftermath of this this thing yeah and then there were these BOTS and programs floating around in their much more advanced than what we think of as BOTS today but you have ones called autonomous proxies for execration apes yeah well that's an idea that is an old idea with so the Bay Area cypherpunks and people like that like 25 years ago Eric Hughes was talking about the idea of a slander service you could hire somebody to just spam the internet with negative information about you so that any true negative information that happened to come out would be discounted nobody would believe it this is a great political strategy now yeah apparently it works and Matt Blais was talking about the Encyclopaedia distant from Attica which is a sort of anti Wikipedia that woman or maybe it is the wiki yet anyway it was a sort of seemingly believable source of information that was actually giving putting out information that was subtly wrong so if you if you cited it in your term paper you'd get a bad grade and you'd learn your lesson not to just trust anything that was on the Internet so those are ideas that have been around for 20 25 years in the in the crypto world and you know they did not get adopted so we ended up with the that version of the Internet in which those in which people still take everything at face value and even now after everything we've seen in the last few years I see it all over the place people if you know even super sophisticated people who are very discerning and very sophisticated will see a tweet or a meme that just happens to line up with what they want to believe and they'll just fall for it hook line and sinker yeah I think pretty much everybody in this room is subscribing to a conspiracy theory it's just a different one for each person based on who they follow and who they trust in which rathole they happen to have fallen into in the past week well I can't speak for for everyone in the room but it's it's just a common human trait right you see somebody out there who's see saying something that that confirms what you believe what you wish were true and your filters just fall away you know you lose your ability to to filter this stuff out so one of the concepts you have in the book is that instead of trying to establish truth you want the people want to create a trusted internet but the way to do it is to as you said discredit the existing Internet by exposing all of the lies it's kind of a clever rhetorical bit but well yeah I mean it's it's an idea that again that's been around for for a while the idea that you could implement some kind of a secured system that would be where you know assertions would be somehow traceable to just to like a signed authority or something like that and again it's all within the realm of possibility from a technological standpoint we've had so cryptographic protocols in place for a long time that could that could do all of that but it you know it just has not been adopted yeah and I think that's partially the promise of a crypto based internet where you have sort of a trusted internet model where you can subscribe to people they can sign off on it going back to the old PGP web of trust models where you can have rings of trust layers of trust and filter it but then that gets to the problem of different people trust different people for example who you follow on Twitter and who you're friends with on Facebook and so you're just looking at different versions of reality and so that will actually separate you as people and in your book America is quite separated well I think not just not just in my book yeah oh you have blue states and you have what you fondly call a meristem yeah well there's a the the the point there is just that I don't I it's it's easy to look at war-torn parts of the world that are just a mess and to think that there's that those places are just different somehow you know they they went down the wrong path and or they never found the right path and and that's just that's just those people but you know I think we're always one or two generations away from being a failed state and maybe that that time is getting closer so so I'm the the Ameri stand thing is a like half serious way of trying to make the point that you know geography is not going to save us you know the fact that that that we had a functioning democracy or a somewhat better functioning democracy you know in past decades isn't going to save us at all because you have to reinvent a stable democracy with every generation we're not doing that right so we can't take it for granted yeah so in in this model where you have that social media and choose your own reality is sort of separating the country pushing people further apart it's almost toxic exposure to the unfiltered internet or to a poorly filtered or edited Internet that drives my direction I was struck by this quote you said and this this gets to where the Internet is maybe headed direct unfiltered exposure to the flumes of the Internet the torrent of porn propaganda and death threats 99% of which were algorithmically generated never actually seen by human eyes was relegated to a combination of AIS and third-world eyeball farms see if all these people filtering everything gets that you but even then what makes it through can still poison you and poison you against your fellow person well there's there's things that you can do to you know to apply some some filters but if you don't have I mean they cost money right so the whole the whole problem with where we are now is that editing doesn't scale like putting eyeballs in the loop and having someone who exercises discretion says no that's a bogus story that shouldn't go out on our system cost money and it just doesn't scale and so you can't that does not lead you to the IPO down the road that that makes you a billionaire so what this kind of gets to is this idea you mentioned that we're wired for intersubjectivity a lot of our reality comes from what other people are thinking and then this sort of flows into is the book actually gets to a simulation part without being too much of a spoiler the main character in the book sort of dies and ends up in a yeah oh oh this is not this is not a game of Thrones kind of expose it happens pretty quickly and I think it's even mentioned on the back cover so I'm not really blowing anything yeah most of a large part of the book takes place in the simulated world where this character emerges and this is a very different simulated world than the one you had in Snow Crash and Snow Crash there is a what I would call kind of a crudely rendered very commercial Metaverse which feels top-down holodeck style that the living step into where's the big world that's featured in this book feels very organic it feels like designed by you know not chat Minecraft where you're sort of going out and creating the world but in a very organic fashion created by necessity by the beings that live in it very high resolution very consensus based and in fact a lot of times what you can and can't do in that world what manifests as reality in that world is based on the consensus of other organisms around you so this leads instance to kind of a large exploration of simulations and it's worth looking at fall because you're talking about simulation theory from a completely different angle than we always think about it from when we hear Elon Musk for example in Joe Rogan talking about sim theory we're always envisioning that OVR AR is gonna get a lot better we're gonna put on these headsets and we're gonna go inside but there's still gonna be a meatspace mapping of the real person whereas you're talking about post death simulation theory the digital afterlife living forever immortality it's a completely different take on it so just wondering if you have any you know how your thoughts developed on on all of this well yeah I mean so of interest subjectivity is a thing that I became aware of when I was working on Anna Thumb and I was I ended up God helped me reading Husa role because girdle was obsessed with whose role so this is the hardest stuff I've ever read my life it's it's really hard to wade through but he talks about in their subjectivity and a way to kind of describe that is that one of the reasons that solitary confinement is a terrible thing to do to someone is that you lose the ability to compare notes with other people and so you it's hard to know what's real at a certain point and a reason that prisoners in that situation will will take as a pet they'll take a cockroach or a mouse or whatever they've got and sort of keep them around just to have another organism in their space that's reacting to things and kind of help convince them that they're not crazy and so what happens to our main character when he sort of wakes up in a digital world is that he doesn't have that he there's nobody else to to compare notes with he doesn't know where he is his memory has been wiped he he doesn't have a world to exist in and so he ends up making that world and he makes it based on kind of half-remembered things from the prequels of whatever was in his brain during the last few hours before he passed away is what tends to come to the surface first so the last thing he sees before he passes away as a street with with falling leaves on it red leaves and so that's kind of the first thing that he creates when he when he's reincarnated in in bit world and then the the level of the resolution of the simulation kind of gets better from there so so yeah it goes back a little bit to Snow Crash where you've got this of class distinction between you've got the Clint's and the Brandy's who are the the people who can't afford a nice avatar so they have a low res avatar and people who are wealthy can have a higher res avatar and there's a kind of similar dynamic in bit world in in in the book fall where essentially computing costs money it takes resources to compute it in order to get better computation you know better shaders better materials in a simulation you need to put more cycles into it more resources and so the thing gets more and more resource hungry as time goes on and it's all to be to be to be fair it so a lot of this comes from David Deutsch who has a book called the fabric of reality where he talks about a lot of these issues of like how much computing power would it take to simulate the physical world at full resolution without losing any anything and seems to the answer seems to be it would take a lot ya Deuter video which I highly recommend reading as well he also has another great book called the beginning of infinity yes which is about epistemology and good explanations and how we know how the human race progresses by understanding the universe around it what the limits are to that it's actually a very optimistic but yet grounded in science book and he I think he's one of the creators or the fathers of popularizers of quantum computing yeah really really impressive guy yes and so one of the things that at this point when you get into the same theory piece now we start doing the really hard thing of mapping what is going on in the virtual world which turns increasingly into a fantasy oriented world I should warn you this book switches halfway through from a sci-fi to being a fantasy book like a lot of Neil's books do it's a very wide-ranging but it's kind of fun it keeps you from kind of getting bored into one set of things but then you map really interesting concepts from computing into explaining age-old problems so for example the problem of like why is there evil well it could be a bug in the system it could be legacy code it's good because of backwards compatibility with in with an older model you know why can't we be everywhere at once why is your speed of light cause and effect you start mapping those things in mana and computation so I think that must have been a fun part for you trying to map something that on one end look a fantasy world which you model after I think the the Greek pantheon meeting Paradise Lost Milton's Paradise long I came and do justices you have to read it but there's a Zeus type character in there there's angels and there's demons and the whole Adam and Eve story is recreated and some very very clever ways right from the beginning running as a threat throughout the whole book but then you're mapping it to server farms data centers tech billionaires in Seattle fighting it out life extension etc sounds like quite a romp yeah yeah well now I'm just getting lost and try to remember this book it's a 900-page book there's a lot going on yeah the the where some of that comes from is conversations I've had with my brother-in-law Steve Wiggins who's a Old Testament scholar about about the idea of chaos so if you read a lot of old mythologies there is some mention of chaos it's always you know the the primordial God whoever that might be in your particular religious system so creates order out of chaos and and then that starts the ball rolling and hijinks ensue and and that always was interesting to me because it seems like such an abstract idea it seems like such a modern sort of scientific notion the idea of chaos and so when people use that word three thousand years ago making up stories around the campfire what were they thinking you know what was their you know experience that led them to imagine such an idea and so today we've got you know chaos theory you know it's actually we can sort of create a mathematical definition of what what chaos is so I to me that was kind of a bridge that I thought I could sort of build on between ancient mythologies and and moderns of topics that are of interest to computational physicists and then you know having established that there were it became possible to map other sort of yeah it becomes kind of an origin of the world story that's sort of plausible latches onto existing mythology but still stems from technology it's a very clean or as clean is gonna get sort of mapping from technology to mythology I mean Milton or the author of Paradise Lost was an incredibly interesting guy who was from a sort of Puritan family went to I think Cambridge carried his sword was so you just sort of like a Puritan duelist almost like and went to Italy during the English Civil War where was a dangerous place to be for him because a lot of the people who were there the English people who were there were Royalists who were on the other side of that civil war up so but he went there to hang out with Galileo and and then he came back he went blind he got kicked out by his family and he wrote Paradise Lost but you can kind of see I mean the interesting thing about Paradise Lost is that it starts with an overthrow so the God and the sort of good angels throw out Lucifer and the rebel angels and they sort of crater on the ground and the the opening of the the poem is them hanging around trying to decide what to do next and Milton although is a believing Christian and and you know apparently a sincere Christian does an amazing job of making not all of the the fallen angels but certainly Satan or Lucifer into a completely believable sort of normal character so I mean occasionally we cut away to to God talking to Jesus or something like that and I mean it's it's not as interesting as what's going on on the other side of that yeah you do you do a very good job of muddling who's the good the good people and the bad people in the story and it kind of seems to switch back and forth and one of the things I appreciate is that even the so-called bad guys often refused to commit murder they have a code of ethics they're actually trying to get towards a better world you just have a disagreement on what that entails like if you're gonna go into a simulation should we all be human should we all have concepts of time and space should we all be limited as we are here or should we just start from a clean slate yeah there so you you did it wrong we have to we have to to get rid of you know everything that you guys built so that we can you know it's like it's like the age-old problem of you know do you want backwards compatibility and you're right in your software or she just nuke the whole system from orbit and and writes something new so that's essentially the the argument that those guys are having yeah I mean they're trying to create iOS and they don't want it running Doss underneath or Linux or you know old Mac OSX yeah but at the same time I think your your your the world that you portray is very evolved I think that's what I meant by the Minecraft analogy and it's interesting to watch how it evolves both internal and external forces yeah it's it's if we sound all over the place it's because this book covers a lot it's gonna it covers everything from there's a there's a great scene which we talked about a little bit but I really liked read a few times about how a brain a consciousness booth reboots itself and comes online almost like a computer rebooting itself you know and for those of you old enough remember the little green and black text as the scrolls buy as a thing reboots or if you used to a UNIX machines and you can kind of see how this consciousness boots itself but it boots itself into a blank environment it doesn't even have concept of time or space or cause and effect or feelings and it has to sort of reconstruct each of these and when it doesn't have a concept of time you know how when a computer executes it can take a long time to do something or I can take a short time but from inside the computer's view it's all the same thing it's just clock cycles and however many clock cycles that go through where it's the time that we're experiencing is completely disconnected from the computers boot of time and then when this computer boots itself up it sort of has to figure out well what world am I in and what can I influence and what can I create which is what do I have to take as a given and then this gets referred back to later in the book where people are even talking about well how much of reality is reality because you believe in it and how much of it is there because it's real and I think those lines are constantly blurred so this is the kind of book where you can if you want you can stop in every page and think for a while well thanks that's and there's 900 pages so you can be thank you for what I was fun to write it because I've been reading high fantasy literature since I was a kid and the there's a it but there's always kind of these these questions about like you know how did how did we get it works you know how did we get ents really talking trees I mean it's awesome but where did you know how did we get there and so and of course those answers those questions are answered within Tolkien if you you know do enough reading but the I thought it would be interesting to try to build a high fantasy world in which in which those sort of different types of creatures emerged out of a process that we could all kind of watch happening as it were yeah there's a lot of good technology-based creation myths in the story switching gears for a second I think one of the things that I like about your books is that you will take a whole bunch of different concepts that seem a disparate and you will interconnect them and show the underlying commonality so the technology mapping onto mythology is an example of another one is a great line of snow crash where snow crash again I'm not giving out big spoilers these are the other minor you'll see when you read the book but in Snow Crash there is a a drug that will essentially modify a person's brain if you look at it that's the thing that's called Snow Crash and one of the characters the the main protagonist and the character in the book literally speaking says ask another character says this Snow Crash thing is it a drug a religion or a virus and another character responsible what's the difference what's the difference we need a drug religion or virus and I think we see that with Facebook and Twitter and social media very similarly in the crypto world we're sort of asking is that money is a code or is it speech and again the question is what's the difference these things inter inter relate at some very deep levels so I think what's with with social media this is part of the problem talking about social media it's so many different things so many people you can't just go in there or can you and say we should do it a different way is there a better way to do social media to do it acknowledge that it's this combination of things there was a time when I started working on Krypton gnomic on where the title of the book the whole project was speech that is not speech and worst ins and so actually my earliest notebooks that I was taking notes in I've still got him on my shelf at home are all stins one stins two stems three because this was kind of during that the time when certain kinds of of crypto were were being outlawed for export because they were they were classified as weapons and so and so the the argument that arose from that was well hang on a second it's just it's just words it's just code so it's speech and you can't outline so so I actually called that project stints until there was an intervention from my editor who quite wisely said what do you want to call it it can't be speech that is not speech so good move totally agree with her in retrospect yeah Phil Zimmerman I think when they were trying to regulate PGP as an export for export as ammunition he printed the algorithm on his t-shirt and he would just wear the t-shirt around ya and that was sort of his protest but we see this coming back the whole debate around back doors around encryption you can see Facebook sort of retreating to this position where they're saying well actually everything's gonna be encrypted and we can't even we can't look inside so we can't be liable for it and I think they're starting to remove themselves from the debate around what to regulate what the sensor bike sort of adopting this black box position I'm not sure how defensible that is yeah once you've shown you can put your your thumb on the scale and given that you have to take out certain things like child porn and terrorism things and threats of attack something that are legally required to take out then you have the ability in the process to actually moderate and censor the whole thing yeah I mean sooner or later you need to display it on people's screens and and non-encrypted before right so but yeah you can see I mean you can easily see the problem that they're they're wishing they could solve but it's right I don't think it's a soluble problem right I think the argument that some people might make is that there's you can have decryption at the end at the end user level so you decrypt it completely on your computer but then you get into a password and key management issue which I think you're also covered in the book which is and I think in the book you kind of abdicate it the passwords are still around and key management is still is still like a thing you still have to figure out how to manage your private key yeah just the idea that there's so many other ways of figuring out your you besides your ability to type a series of characters into a keyboard and so what if we kind of combined all of them into just a sort of AI system that basically can tell you're you and that's kind of key I I had to put that in there to make the story logic work in in bit world so but it makes sense like a human who knows you well can tell it's you yeah and so a lot of hours by the way you walk you can see somebody you know 200 feet away walking down the street with their back to you because of the way they walk yeah and a lot of the crypto tokens security systems rely on something you talking to someone or getting permission for someone who authenticates it's you and you could see that that would be something in AI could solve given enough private data and pattern matching and it's a very large data set to steal as opposed to a small like private key type thing might be a large data secure as well yeah but there's a million things Lila the way you type right you know the way you the way you sound you know but all kinds of biometrics that could go into it and so so yeah that that's that that's a thing that in the book that I think is a actually kind of an interesting thing to explore and I'm sure people are exploring it but I had to put it in there to solve a particular narrative plot logic problem anyway yeah it has the one of the most interesting methods for securing a private key that I've ever seen but I'll let you read the book to figure that out it's it's I think one of the things that Neal excels in is near future possibilities and even though I asked for questions on Twitter for this conversation and a lot of them were around around the basis of well what do you see happening next and I think that's hard to say because no one knows what's gonna happen next but you tend to have a lot of ideas that have a high probability of working out in the near future so for those of you who are building startups it's always invigorating mentally to kind of look at Neal's predictions because at least some of them will work out oh here's one that didn't I'll pull out one that did in Snow Crash you point out that you said 15 years ago a hacker could sit down write an entire piece of software by himself now that's no longer possible and luckily I think the tools have gotten good that we still have counter examples to that people like Satoshi Nakamoto and knotch so on although Satoshi had help obviously and actually didn't even write the code but Moore wrote the paper but still a very small band of hackers can still make a huge huge difference yeah that's fair yeah and I'm and I'm hoping that that is a way out of you're not be able to scale the internet editing problem but but we'll see about that here's one that did work out which is I read this line and I immediately thought of where we where we are today in the scope of the internet the Internet today is is dominated by a few large monopolies and it's kind of ironic because we thought the internet was gonna liberate us and make atomized everything and put us all on a level playing field but now we're in a world with two taxi dispatchers you know one ecommerce retailer one librarian slash search engine and you know basically two media companies which just completely dwarfed all the other previous media companies put together to the point where current media companies are reduced to sort of supplicating the large ones or threatening the social media companies to behave and as as you all probably saw in Lux recent speech he decided to split off completely from the earlier definition of media and decided to call social media the Fifth Estate so he's basically carving out a separate place where they're saying we're no longer part of the Old Fourth Estate and you don't necessarily get to tell us what to do but here here's your here's your line that stuck with me from Snow Crash you were talking about how in the future and this was kind of tongue-in-cheek but pizza delivery is dominated by the Mafia the Mafia goes legal they go public on the stock exchange and they run all the pizza delivery and it's and they call cosa nostra pizza and I said Koster knows cosa nostra pizza doesn't have any competition competition goes against the mafia ethic and I like that because Peter Thiel always talks about action right yes yeah yeah right right so don't don't go into any business where you might have to actually compete because there's no money there yeah yeah so actually the dirty secret is in Silicon Valley everyone wants to be a monopolist even though we talk about free trade and free exchange and all that yeah it's interesting I kind of went back and forth on this exact topic because in in the book which is so pre pre web and we'll certainly pre-web and so pre the Internet as a I mean the internet was around but people when I wrote the book we're still on CompuServe or AOL they're wearing one of those silos you know for the most part and and so you've got the street you've got the Metaverse it's sort of all owned by one company and they create artificial scarcity on the streets so real estate values on the street are high because there's only one street and then then we got the web where you know any Earl is the same as any other or also anyone can create a website so for a long time I was thinking a lot got that wrong you know there's no scarcity of websites but but yeah it's it's kind of funneled back in just as you say and and there is kind of that that artificial scarcity now that people can can profit from yeah it seems to be like it's going back to a model that humans are very familiar with which is there are cities with downtown's that are incredibly scarce and expensive and desirable and then there's unlimited land around that nobody actually wants to live on because it's empty right people attractive is there right right yeah so we're gonna get into Q&A in a in a few minutes so I just want to touch on one last thing a lot of people have asked me to ask you about you know this is a common these days everybody asks what's your morning routine yeah right and then everybody goes into a long talk about how they do meditation yoga and juicing and smoothies and SoulCycle and whatnot and some people are carnivores in some people are vegans and we don't want to get super personal but you're obviously a very prolific writer you how many how many pages do you turn out right now do you think that make it public and I or is really there I mean the like what I try to do is is I think it's a good day if I've got five handwritten pages produced you handwrite yeah well that's something what's going into you so yeah I've done that since the beginning of the Baroque cycle so I could do more but in in general you know like even if you write a single page a day that's three hundred sixty five pages a year so it doesn't it's really more about a steady routine than it is about so being incredibly prolific on one day so I tend to to get up get to work as soon as I can get those few pages out and then there's a thing that happens after that that I called easily which is you used to be with with old cars that after you turned off the engine he would keep running even though it was switched off because it was sort of operating as a diesel motor for you you literally couldn't make it stop and so and I do that creatively after I stopped for about 15 minutes half an hour these lines will come to me or sentences so I just speak them into my my I used to carry a little tape recorder and now I just used the their work voice memo thing on my phone and and a lot of times that's the that's the good stuff it seems some very interesting if I find that when I'm trying to be creative or brainstorming just for efficiency's sake I sit down with my iPad or computer in tight but I have a much harder time doing it it's much easier to be creative when you're talking to somebody else you have a whiteboard or in your case you're saying handwriting i sketch a lot on a pencil and graph paper well I used to get stuck before I took up this habit I would get stuck sometimes and I couldn't get going and then what I discovered kind of a random was that if I got away from the keyboard and just sat down and started writing that I would get unstuck so then when I when I began working on the Baroque cycle I thought well if it's if it's all that I mean it seems to work and it's thematically appropriate if I'm writing a book set 350 years ago you know writing it by hand seems like a fit so I'm just gonna start and see what happens and then if if it's terrible then I'll just go back to typing and ended up working pretty well and I mean it's got a lot of advantages it's got because it's slower I think that each sentence or idea spends longer up here in the buffer before you commit it to any kind of fixed form so I think the the first draft quality is higher I think editing is a lot faster because you can just you know wipe out a whole sentence with one stroke but it's still there you know you can still see it and so so I do that up to a point and then I I type it in using I'm afraid to even say it because it's going to touch off cheering and booing in this audio so it's one of two famous text editors used by programmers so that's the lesson tech cred so because everything else gets gets like people you know every few years somebody to introduce the new slimmed down trim clean simple text editing system and and then five years later it's it's gotten bogged down with with all kinds of features and issues so the at least with Emacs you're adding all of that yourself instead of helplessly watching as somebody else does it yeah actually right before this conversation I met with Neil for a bit we chatted I took a bunch of notes I got ready for this talk and then my notes synching app which has never failed me failed me and lost everything so then I did reconstruct it all from memory but handwritten it down perhaps that would have been a solution yeah right right yeah so so anyway so I do that I use tech to typeset it and print it out that's kind of my pipeline and and you famously guarded with your time well I just think you know you've only got so many days that you're alive and you should use them in the highest value way that you know and attend conferences for example it's gonna be meeting like-minded people so and it's it's very easy to to fritter away a lot of time doing email and you know so if stuff that in the long run doesn't matter and it's that's it's you only become more so since I wrote that piece because you know now you know the feeds that we get from social media are kind of carefully designed exactly to engage us and keep us wanting to to stay on right so yeah the first 30 year buck the impression I get is the main character as or the first part of it he's trying very hard to avoid the internet stay away from the me as I'm a lower the din edited out then when email comes at him or there's another character later email comes at him he he lobs it back like it's a grenade so someone sends him a to do an email and before it explodes he has to love it back to somebody else and that it lands in their inbox and I think many of us can can sympathize with it to them email yeah yeah yeah so that's all that is I mean you got to make some choices about how you're gonna spend your time so so you're not answering fan mail with handwritten notes anymore no yeah so thanks for giving us the the look behind fall and kind of how you you right on it I do want to we're running out of time so I want to leave some questions for the audience I gathered a couple on Twitter we're just gonna go through one or two of those quickly and then we have Mike here who's got you know a picture in rapid fire mode here okay yeah let's do one minute each from Reuben seona on Twitter how would you create a cultural guerrilla movement that brings back the optimist futuristic thinking of the 50s 60s in the mainstream or at least into the youth I guess is an assumption that we were pessimistic these days that Peter Thiel critique yeah I mean I actually I tried to do that once I sort of did it with Arizona State put together a an anthology called hieroglyph which was so of optimistic short stories science fiction stories and I contributed one about building a tall tower Cory Doctorow contributed one about 3d printers on the moon and Elizabeth bear and a bunch of other people contributed cool stories to it so from my point of view that's one way is to actually create entertainment in that vein that is that does that and I think it's easier in in the written word I think there are kind of economic reasons why dystopias are so popular boring right you know well it's it's you know I think it's all started with Planet of the Apes when at the end they come around the corner there's the Statue of Liberty lying there in the sand and it's a super powerful image that was probably really inexpensive right because you just take the statue of model of the Statue of Liberty you kick it over you shovel some dirt on it done right so it's easy to to put those images on the screen it's harder it's more expensive to to try to create a new reality a new world that you know that that hangs together visually do just one more from Twitter dinah brevis do you think will be smart enough the next decades to use technology and modernize children's education can be iPad or similar become world's primer and this refers to a book that Neil wrote called the diamond age which has sort of a magic book that is used to raise and train this young girl to be very intelligent self-taught well a lot of people have worked on on such things and more power to them like the God we you know it's a thing that that really needs to happen and I wish it would the the the flip side of that is that in the book in the diamond age only one copy of it really works properly because there's a human in the loop and that the that person being in the loop makes that book work and creates a relationship through the intermediation of this this technology between the the girl who's learning and the woman who's effectively become her her teacher and kind of mother figure so the you know as much as I would love to see a technology that would solve this you know at the end of the day we need teachers and it's I think that is you know outside the scope of what tech nerds are are good at yeah it's like the old line that we thought that people are going to want to talk in the 70s with AI research we thought people are going to talk to computers but they actually want to talk through computers right to other people yeah yeah other people are the product they're the I'm gonna turn it over to audience Q&A and even got any questions for Neil please try and keep them brief no speeches one question thank you the cripton Omnicon is the absolute work of genius no thanks when you wrote it in what 98 published at 99 and you predicted F of epiphyte corporation which is basically a blockchain system when you predicted a stable coin gold would be good as your exact words that was absolutely brilliant twenty years ahead of time the descriptions of the boondock is good rock and a cold cave structure he described and finally the Nazi gold which has just recently been proven to have arrived in substa and windows heavies and come down through Chile Patagonia and your description of being in the jungle and only a person who's been through the jungle and hacking in the jungle like that could have described how where did this come from it's it's too real nd of stock tips thanks yeah thank you thanks Thank You Neil think you know my question is related to how are my ecology and religion are all steeped in to cost dying I mean that may be true today but maybe in a few decades a little small that what do you think will be mankind at that point or what do you what are your thoughts about that this is what fall is all about is that did you say my ecology it's mythology mythology sorry I was thinking the study of fungi yeah mycology yeah okay yeah yeah sorry that really got me off on the right well there's that guy who has a mycology shroud that when he dies he wants me eating my mushrooms and he'll go into the global mushroom brain so that's one hypothesis and what happens when he died yeah sorry I yeah I think involves correct that a lot of this you know sort of ends up in if I'm you know I think there's a reason for mythology there are there are certain grooves that our mind wants to run in and you know we can speculate about why that is where it came from evolution wise but it's kind of part of who we are and so the and and so a lot of what's going on in in fall is telling the story that even if we start with a blank slate creating a new a new world in the digital realm we end up rebuilding a lot of the same the same sort of mythological elements that we've got here you have questions hi I wanted to know what keeps you away and what's the worst possible you see the next day with technology man just the breakdown of civil of civil society of the the sort of history you know I think there's a book I like to recommend by Barbara Shapiro called a culture of fact which is about where we got the idea of facts because we didn't always have it it sort of became a thing like 300 350 years ago at least kind of in the english-speaking world and the and it changed a lot of things and sort of the the idea that we could that we could have algorithms that we could use to agree on what was real and then based on that decide you know make decisions and the so the the sort of good bad part of that is that it's it's good that that you can you can start without with with the idea of facts not existing and and and create it but sort of the scary part is they could go the other way right now it's it's going the other way so you know that's the scary thing for me I hope we'll all sort of turn it around you know but it's going to be a long struggle to do that unfortunately we just have time for one more question their next of all deals it's been a great discussion um you know in NF them there is a world very much like Earth not to get too much of that story away it's also an excellent book that in in my reading seems to have found some way through this question of how do you keep an orderly society how do you maintain long-standing traditions but also have diversity of new opinions and it seems to happen to this this cloistered existence of certain people within the society who find it necessary to separate for varying durations some of them are a thousand errs some of them are hundred or mm-hm and they only come together given certain coinciding moments like when a clock strikes a certain time mm-hmm yeah do you do you still think that there's maybe I am I am I wrong to read into that that maybe there's a more stable way of having a diverse conversation within society without the potential for collapse based on some sort of self reflection and then emerging do you put stopped yeah I mean yeah yeah it's kind of a double-edged thing again in that is it's if you read that book closely enough it's a little bit ambiguous as to whether they voluntarily went into these cloisters because that's the way they liked it or if they were rounded up and herded into them so it's not the so it it's and that all emerged from from conversations around at in the late 90s having to do with the long now foundation z' idea of the 10,000 year clock and sort of the the notion that maybe getting a constant stream of news updates in in your in your phone or whatever was was sort of too much of a good thing so the you know I like the idea of trying to actually establish some some places like that I don't know how it would work the advantage of setting it up in a fictional world is that you can just sort of wave your magic writer wand and and say that it is that way but but but it often does seem as though the kinds of people who are so if contemplative and and like to read books and and think about stuff are existing and kind of a whole different subculture from from everyone else and they sort of have ways of recognizing each other and in connecting and so in some ways the book is kind of a metaphor for for certain aspects of how things are today in our you know our world all right well I want to thank Neil for coming all the way down from Seattle to see us for all that for all the peaks into the future that he's given us in the beautiful package which actually one of the things that we didn't really cover here because it's hard to do is Neil's books are actually quite funny and they're actually optimistic and they sort of have this rollicking movement to them where they kind of just keep you going in sort of a fun adventurous way and not all of them but some of them some of them are more weighty this depends the topic but I highly encourage you to pick them up read them he's got an enormous range as a writer books like nfm and a Krypton AMA can read very differently than a Snow Crash or a diamond age so you can always find something you like in there I'm gonna leave everybody with one quote that I think is actually it just element of it's irrelevant it just struck me as I was reading fall fall has a lot of very quotable lines and I have many many of them this one just jumped out at me it was set as an aside by one random character to another I'm not even sure you meant it to have this much meaning but it has a lot of meaning for me and he said free minds are the only company worth having and I loved it because it sort of solved the question of well you're in a sim why would you not just enslave everybody else if you're the first one in and just create whatever you want why don't we try and regulate what facts are and how people get to facts why are we here trying to build an internet that is really under the users control and where we're not taking our marching orders from either politicians or from monopolists who are running global technology monopolies and so I just love design free minds are the only company worth having so thank you for giving us the company of your free minds thank you [Applause]

Channel: Stacks

Views: 28,336

Rating: 4.9366198 out of 5

Keywords: Blockstack, Blockstack PBC, Blockstack Summit, Decentralized, Decentralized Web, blockchain, web 3, crypto, bitcoin, Naval, Naval Ravikant, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, Fall, Fall or Dodge in Hell, Stephenson, SciFi, snow crash

Id: 0JDFd_BoN1k

Length: 60min 4sec (3604 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Jyontaitaa]

Oh shit two of the most interesting dudes around