YouSaid · the spoken record

Neal Stephenson

lines on the record: 144
first: 2021-11-11
most recent: 2021-11-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And being able to figure out why things are the way they are. And that has created changes in our thinking and our way of life over the last few centuries that are explosive compared to anything that came before. And David sort of verges on classifying this as like a force of nature in its potential transformative power. If we keep going, we could figure out how they're colonized the universe, like you were talking about earlier, how to spread to other star systems, then it is effectively a force of nature.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as far as I know, we're unique in the universe. There's no evidence that there's anything else in the universe that's as complicated as what's between our ears. Might be. You can't rule it out. So we appear to be pretty special. And so it's got to have something to do with that. And one of the reasons I like David Deutsch, in particular his book, The Beginning of Infinity, is that he talks about the power of explanations and the fact that most civilizations are ecstatic, that they've got a set of dogmas that they arrive at somehow. they just pass those on from one generation to the next and nothing changes, but that huge changes have happened when people sort of follow whatever you want to call it, the scientific method or the enlightenment. There's different ways of thinking about it, but basically explanatory, it's about the power of explanation.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meisner, Thorne, and Wheeler gravitation, you know, is one of those. Or another one is The road to reality by Roger Penrose, which is just Incredibly deep. And it starts with like two plus two equals four. And at the end, at the boundaries of physics, it's an amazing book.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a key detail that's an important thing to add to what I said, which is that this might not happen the first time you do a thing. Maybe it will. But you might have to climb that learning curve. And if there's pressures in your life that are making you feel bad about that. Then it might prevent you from getting where you need to be. So there's some complexity there that can make this kind of non-obvious. But that's why we need good teachers. Beneficial thing of the internet is YouTube and being able to learn things, how to do things on YouTube. The dude who made the YouTube video doesn't care how many times you hit pause and rewind. They're never going to like roll their eyes and be impatient with you.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a big part of it is finding the thing that you will do. Happily, and I don't want to say obsessively because that sounds like maybe it's pathological. But if you can find a thing that you'll sit down, you'll start doing it. And hours later, you kind of snap out of it. Where did the time go? Then that's a really key discovery for anyone to make about themselves when they're young. Because if you don't have that, it's hard to figure out where you should put your energies. And as you might have the best intentions, you might say, I want world peace or whatever. But at the end of the day, what really matters is how do you spend your time? And are you spending it in a way that's productive? Because it doesn't matter how smart you are or well-intentioned you are unless you've figured that out.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, martial arts of enslaved Africans who would learn machete fighting techniques in the Caribbean, South America. He's probably within a mile of us. Amazing guy”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of the good you were talking earlier about the good effects of the internet, social media that we sometimes overlook. And one of those is that there were all these isolated people around the world who were interested in this, who found each other and kind of created a network of people who help each other learn these things. So that doesn't mean that anyone is up to the level of that you're talking about yet. But it is happening. And so there's a large number of old treatises, old written documents that have been dug up from libraries and people have been going over these and translating them from old dialects of Italian and German to make sense of them and learning how to do these techniques with different weapons. There's a guy here and”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's the richest, most powerful people in those societies spending whatever it takes. Get the best gear and the best training because you're right, everything depends on it.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a set of stances and basic reactions that you try to learn that are thought to be. Defensible and safe or safer. And so it tends to be a series of short engagements where you'll. Close in, you'll try out your idea And it works or it doesn't, then you back off again.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a standoff art like boxing or some kinds of sword fighting ear. Not touching the other person most of the time. Your visual system is doing something way more slam. And trying to figure out what the other person is up to. And so that always felt more my speed. So, in Olympic style fencing, It doesn't start really until you're crossing blades with the other person. And now you're back to wrestling. You're feeling. They're doing, and it's all about that. But some of the older sword arts don't engage the blade that way. You stand off at range and then you make cutting attacks. And so those are all processed visually. And I think I'm more of a slow thinker, so it works for me better.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a formative thing for me growing up there for sure. It's just used to be a very orderly place. Social capital, very minimal class differences. So like you'd have some people who would drive a Cadillac instead of a Chevy, but that was it. Those were the rich people, right? And a college town is always a different environment. Austin has some of this. So it was a pretty kind of utopian other than the weather and a few other things environment to grow up in. The martial art I ended up doing is sword stuff, which is interesting because it uses a different feedback loop. So if you're grappling. Everything is through sense of touch. And your sense of touch is very old. And simple, right? Like earthworms don't even have eyes. But they can tell when they're being touched, right? So it's very fast. And with”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really cared about it a lot, you know, and so it was pretty tough. I didn't think I had the right body type. But then when I was after college, I was in Iowa City for a few years when he was coaching the wrestling team there. And he won like nine. Championships out of 10 years during that time. So he was both the greatest individual wrestler of all time and like the greatest. So I've never met him, but we've He's kind of been like in my sphere of awareness since I was kind of my whole life. And people would always tell stories about him He got arrested once for some kind of I don't know, minor offense in Ames. And so he just basically stayed up all night. He was in this cage in the Jail. He just stayed up all night doing pull ups So, yeah, but.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From 100 feet away, a little dot on the mat prouncing his opponents him and Chris Taylor, so the other star was this 400-pound plus guy named Chris Taylor, who also went to the Olympics. So, yeah, people, you know, he was an athletic hero. Wrestling is... There's certain states like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Iowa, where wrestling is the sport because those are states of small towns. And so if you're a small town, if you're like Dan Gable. And you have to be on a football team with 20 other guys who are not Dan Gable, then no matter how good you are, your team might suck. But if in a solo thing you can Can go to the Olympics. So we did a lot of wrestling in our gym classes in school, and I didn't like it. And I think partly it's just that it was so So competitive, and the people who cared about it.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think so it was a late thing for me, but growing up in Ames. Dan Gable was a few years older than me, and so sometimes we would go to the arena at the university and watch wrestling meets. And this was before his Olympic career. So everyone knew he was the star of that team. And then he was the best. But people didn't yet know he was the greatest of all time.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody is. It's a mystery. So, I mean, if we do include it, then it's easily the Lord of the Rings. I mean, greatness is an interesting quality to try to define. For me, a lot of the fun and the joy of such books is not in what you'd call greatness, but just storytelling. So, I was always a big fan of have spacesuit will travel, which is a Heinline young adult book. It's just a fun, good read.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was like the first time I thought about trying to find such a job, you know, being a writer. And then I just read a lot of just classic science fiction short stories and started trying to write some of my own. And they were just classic young adult stories larked by Heinlein. And the other classic names that you think of, but the Heinlein ones have stuck with me in a way that the others didn't.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Know the answer I usually give is that when I was in fifth grade, One of my friends came to school one day who's wearing leather shoes, like dress shoes. And I hated dress shoes because mine never fit. And so they were uncomfortable. I couldn't run. You know, they were cold. It was Iowa. So I kind of said. I remember very clearly thinking, I don't like where this is going. Does this mean that? Next year All of the kids are going to be wearing leather shoes So I need to find a job where I don't have to do that.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So you could get kind of a grounding in a lot of classic works of literature without actually reading them, which is, you know, it's great when you're nine years old. So I read a lot of that stuff for sure, the annotated Sherlock Hol”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, reading Moby Dick, if you're nine years old, is a tall order. There's some very complicated sentences in there. And a lot of digressions. But if you're just looking at the comic books, it's like, holy shit, look at that whale.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm trying to remember. Well, Moby Dick was definitely a big one. I used to read a lot of classics comics. I don't know if you've seen these, it's a whole series of comic books. That it was viral. You could, in the back of each comic book was an order form. You could check some boxes and fill out your address and mail it in and more would show up. But it was like they would do the count of money. Cristo, you know, Moby Dick. Robert Lewis Stevenson, Robinson Crusoe, you know, all this classic books put into comic book form.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's definitely that. I circle back to Moby Dick a lot because we read it in a really great English class I had in high school. And I came in with an oppositional stance because I thought that the teacher was going to try to talk me into having all kinds of high fallutin ideas about allegory and what does this mean? What's the symbolism? And it turned out that Turned out to be a lot more interesting and satisfying than that”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is one of these questions where I always blank out, and then when I'm walking out the door, I'll remember 12 of them.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe seven eaves because it's got big themes. It's, you know, it's about heavy things happening to the human race. But hopefully the story is told through a cast of characters that people can relate to, you know, and it moves along. So it does go kind of deep eventually on how rockets work and orbital mechanics and all that stuff. People were able to get through it anyway, or some people just skip over that. It's fine, you know.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when people ask me that, I usually ask them what they like to read, right? Because, I mean, the best known one is probably Snow Crash, but that's a cyberpunk novel that's at the same time making fun of cyberpunk. So it's kind of got some layers to it that might not seem so funny if you don't have that, if you don't get the joke, right? As you point out, I've written historical novels. Some people like those. Some people prefer those. So if that's what you like, then cryptonomicon or the Baroque cycle is where you would start. If you like sort of techno thrillers that are set in a modern day setting but aren't science fiction-y per se, then REAMD is one of those. Determination shock is definitely one of those. So it just depends on what people like.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The key to any storytelling is getting the readers to suspend their disbelief. And there's all kinds of triggers and little tells that can break that And once it's broken, it's really hard to get it back. You know, a lot of times that's the end. Somebody will just close the book and not pick it up.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the main thing that it does is present little details that you might not have come up with on your own. So, if you're just sitting there freely imagining things, your brain probably isn't going to serve up the wealth of details and the resulting complications and surprises that the real world is constantly presenting us with. And so in my case, if I'm trying to write a story about something that involves some technology like a rocket or orbital maneuvers or whatever, then delving into those details eventually is going to turn up some weird unexpected thing that gives me material to work with. But also subliminally readers who see that are going to be drawn in more because they're going to find that, oh, I didn't see that. Coming. It's got some of the complexity and surprise value of the real world.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe they co evolve. Yeah, so I think that you've got to work with that. And I think sometimes it seems like in kind of Literary circles that having a lot of plot is a little bit frowned upon as it's pulpy or it's exploitative. But for me, I don't have any compunctions whatsoever about that. I like stories that are grabby and fun and exciting to read. Once you've got one of those going, once you've got a good yarn going. That people will enjoy reading, then you're free to do whatever you want in the frame of that story. But if you don't have that, then you got nothing.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they know a bunch of stuff now about how to stay alive that they could not have learned in any other way. I mean, animals who don't have speech, though they might warn each other, they might make a sound that says danger, danger. But as far as we know, they can't tell more complicated stories.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The power of good yarns, good narratives to pull people in is incredible. I think my sort of amateur theory is that it's an evolutionary. Development that if you're a cave person sitting around a fire. In the Rift Valley a million years ago, if you can tell the story of how you escaped from the hyenas or how Uncle Bob didn't escape from the hyenas. And if the people listening to you can take that in and they can build that scenario in their heads, like a kind of virtual reality and see what you're describing, then you've just conferred an incredibly important advantage on the people who've heard that story.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fine for me, yeah, and it keeps you from messing around with formatting. Like, oh, what if I put this chapter heading in a sans serif font? It's just classic wanking. And so the... Those options are closed off in what I'm doing.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I use regular expressions. So I was to do italics in You know, you put it in curly brackets and you do backslash IT, and then you type what you want to type. And that's how you get italics in tech. So you can create a regular expression that'll look for some text between curly brackets preceded by backslash IT. And then instead Convert that to italics. And Word will do that Word if you go deep enough into its search and replace.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I want to print it out, yeah, I just have some simple. Macros that I use, but then I have to. The publisher put their foot down and they wanted in Word format now. Years ago, I wrote some macros to convert. And this time, what did I do?”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shell scripts, you know, all that stuff. You can't run the modern world without. A bunch of shell scripts, you know, booting out machines and running things. So it's That is going to be a hard thing to replace”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a certain amount of what's the story of the American folktale of the guy who the hammer guy who drives the railroad spikes, John Henry trying to keep up with the steam hammer. And eventually the steam hammer wins because he can't drive the spikes fast enough. So there's a sense in which Microsoft, like, Who knows how much they've invested in code, Visual Studio, or Apple with Xcode? So they've put huge amounts of money into enhancing their IDEs. And Emacs, in theory, can duplicate all of those features by, you know, if you just have enough Linux hackers writing Emacs Lisp macros. But at some point, it's going to be hard to maintain that. Level of to keep up feature for feature.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yes. Yeah. No, I mean, whenever you're doing anything in Linux, you're spending a lot of time editing little config files and scripts and stuff. And you need to be able to pop in and out of editing those things. And it needs to work. Like, even if the windowing GUI is dead and all you've got is a command line to get out of that problem, you might need to enter an editor and alter a file. So I think on that level, there will always have to be sort of very simple, well, Emacs isn't very simple. But I mean, there have to be basic editors that you can use from either the command line or a GUI just for administering systems. Now, how widespread they'll be.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there is. I think there is just the simplicity of it and not having any intermediary technology beyond the pen and the paper is just very simple and clean. So I've got a bunch of fountain pens. I started buying fancy paper from Italy a few years ago because I thought I would be more conservative with it. But it still doesn't still a trivial expenditure, so it doesn't really alter my habits very much.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then editing first draft of editing is just faster because instead of like trying to move the cursor around or whatever, or, you know, hitting the backspace key, I can just draw a line through a Around the whole paragraph and exit out. And in doing so, I very quickly created an edit, but I've also left behind a record of what the text was prior to the edit.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, I started it as an experiment when I started the Roque cycle because I had noticed that sometimes if I was stuck having a hard time getting started, if I just picked up a pen and started writing, it was easy to go. So I just decided to keep with that. If it got in my way, I didn't like it. I could always just go back to the word processor and be fine. But that never happened. There's a certain security that comes from knowing that it's ink on paper and there's no operating system crash or software failure that can obliterate it. It's a slower output. Technique. And so a sentence or a paragraph spends a longer time in the buffer up here before it gets committed. Paper, whereas I can type really fast. And so I can slam things out before I Thought them through. So I think the first draft quality ends up being higher.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the adults took over initially, and then it was later on that people started using it for fun, frivolous things like memes. And I think that's pretty much unstoppable. Because even people who are very serious enjoy. Sending around a funny picture or something that amuses them.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I don't follow the different coins that much, so I don't hear about Dogecoin and I've kind of followed the story of it.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, David Bryn has been saying for a while that Only way to settle arguments with, you know, across the political divide is to make bets. So people can say the election was stolen or whatever controversial position they're taking. And they'll keep saying it until you wager real money on it. So maybe there's something there if you could kind of turn that into put a user interface on that thing.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. In a lot of ways, I think in that realm of technology that the money per se is one of the less interesting things you can do with it. So I think cryptographically enforceable contracts and organizations built on those, that seems to me like it's got more potential for change just because we do already have money And although it's an old system, it's been digitized to a large extent by the stripes and the credit card companies of the world.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big questions, right? So, I guess there's a little bit of the cynic in me thinking that as soon as it becomes important enough, the existing banks and people in power are going to sort of control it. I guess an easy answer is that maybe it won't be a big change in the end A utopian strain sometimes in the way people think about this that I'm not so sure about.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we're in a stage now that kind of goes beyond the initial, like there's the stuff I was describing in. Had a little bit of an air about it of the underpants gnomes in that we're going to build this system and then we'll make money somehow. But the intermediate step was left out. And that is. I think we're now sort of into that phase of the thing where Bitcoin blockchain exists, people know how it works, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exist. People are using them. And it's sort of like, okay, what now? Where does this all lead?”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's the new wrinkle is the need to do a lot of computation and to keep your GPUs from melting down. So people building things in Iceland or in shipping containers on the bottom of the ocean or whatever.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of effort that went into finding these physical locations that were deemed kind of safe. And that all goes away with blockchain. It's no longer necessary. And so that really changes the picture in a lot of ways because you no longer have, I mean, from a novelist point of view, the old system was a lot more fun to work with because it gives you a situation where hackers are wandering around in strange parts of the world. Trying to set up server rooms. So that's a great storytelling.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking was based on the idea that you would have to have a physical region of the earth that was free of government interference. You couldn't achieve that freedom by purely mathematical means on the network. You actually had to have a room somewhere with servers in it that a government couldn't come and meddle with. And so a lot of ideation happened around that view of things that there were efforts to figure out jurisdictions where this might work. There was a lot of interest for a while in Anguilla, which is a Caribbean island that had some unusual jurisdictional properties. There was sea land, sea land, which is a platform in the North Sea. And so there was”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, cryptonomicon is pre Bitcoin. It's pre-Satoshi. It's pre-blockchain, as you point out. So at that point, I was kind of reacting to what I was seeing among people like the Bay Area cypherpunks in Berkeley. There was some, there was a branch here in Austin as well. And a lot of their...”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you build on that. So then the next time something happens, you automatically look at your new friend and they look back at you. And before you know it, you're hanging out together. You've already established without even talking to each other that you're on the same wavelength.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can think of an example of this. When I went to college, we'd be sitting at the cafeteria, a bunch of people eating our dinner together that we had just met, let's say. So a bunch of new people in your life. And someone might make a funny remark or a not-so-funny remark or something would happen. you might then at that moment make eye contact with someone you didn't know at the other end of the table. And in that moment, you would realize this person is reacting. This person heard what I heard. They're reacting the way I reacted. Nobody else appears to get the joke or to understand what just happened, but random stranger down there and I, we have this connection.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source