How Much Money Is in Your Bank Account?

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If you meet a tech berson and they're thinking of becoming a writer, what's the question they should ask themselves as to whether they should do tecker writing? How much money is in your bank account? I'm i signed a copy of snow crash last night that had been around the world a couple of times in nuclear submarines. I've talked to people who read these books in afghanistan. There's a lot in them. You kind of need to be have the time and the willingness to im to kind of sit back for a while and be immersed in a big story universe In order to enjoy these books.

If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he’s created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-world progress in crypto, social networks, and the creation of the web itself. Though Stephenson insists he’s more often wrong than right, his technical sharpness has even led to a half-joking suggestion that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of bitcoin. His latest novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, involves a more literal sort of brain-picking, exploring what might happen when digitized brains can find a second existence in a virtual afterlife.

So what’s the implicit theology of a simulated world? Might we be living in one, and does it even matter? Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the book and more, including the future of physical surveillance, how clothing will evolve, the kind of freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today’s media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph, whether we’re in a permanent secular innovation starvation, Leibniz as a philosopher, Dickens and Heinlein as writers, and what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions.

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Recorded June 14th, 2019 Other ways to connect

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