Lamina1: Building The Future of The Creator Economy

**Neal Stephenson** (0:00)
It's impossible to architect a compelling experience backwards from a desired financial outcome. So if you start with, let's make a lot of money, and then you try to work backwards from that to make a story or anything creative, it's not going to work. Premature financialization is the root of all evil. You know, if we try to resist that temptation to just immediately financialize everything, and concentrate instead on the intangible value of what people are creating, I think that there's an opportunity to make something that's going to be more stable.

**Friederike Ernst** (0:33)
You've made that point again and again, that kind of like we've gotten a lot of things wrong. So maybe let's talk about the things that you think genuinely should matter in Web3.
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the Blockchain revolution. I'm Friederike Ernst, and today I'm speaking with Neal Stephenson, who is a visionary author, who many of you may know, and the co-founder of Blockchain Project Lamina 1 Few writers have had their fiction mistaken for blueprints quite like you, Neal. Your cautionary tales somehow became the instruction manuals for a lot of the digital age. Super happy to kind of talk with you about Web3 and your general take on the ecosystem. But before we do that, let me tell you about our sponsors this week.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:28)
This episode is brought to you by Gnosis, building the open Internet one block at a time. Gnosis was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance. Gnosis is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others like Safe and Cowswap. At the center is Gnosis Chain. It's a low fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years and secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real world financial applications like Gnosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Gnosis DAO, a community run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in Web3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at gnosis.io.

**Friederike Ernst** (2:21)
Neal, it's a pleasure to have you on.

**Neal Stephenson** (2:24)
Good to be here. Thank you, Friederike.

**Friederike Ernst** (2:26)
So you've written so many books and they often feel eerily prescient. You wrote about the metaverse in the early 90s and about cryptocurrencies a few years later. And so many of those ideas have since come to pass that there's even been speculation that you might be Satoshi. Do you think of yourself as kind of predicting technology or do you just notice what others haven't yet articulated?

**Neal Stephenson** (2:58)
I'm a storyteller and the primary job of a storyteller is to tell a good story or a yarn, as we say, that will keep people turning the pages and keep them engaged. And in science fiction, you're creating an imaginary world and that world has to make sense because readers are very sensitive. If they see something that doesn't add up, that doesn't make sense, that's inconsistent, they immediately lose their interest in the book. And so, you know, if you're creating an imaginary world that has some technology in it or that has a business or, you know, something, you know, people who are trying to do something in an organized way, that has to make sense, it's got to add up. And so in science fiction, particularly what we call hard science fiction, part of the writer's job is to have fictional technologies that make sense, that are plausible. And so when we're building such a world, we try to think it through, we try to do some research, we try to learn something about how these technologies actually work, what is and isn't possible. And then we make up imaginary rules for our imaginary technologies. Or if we're writing about a corporation, some kind of business, we need to have some idea of why that business makes sense. How do these people make money? Would it actually work? Because if you don't do those things, eventually the whole logic of the story breaks down somewhere. So in the case of books like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon, I tried to be careful about creating these imaginary technologies and businesses and so on in that way. So I think that when engineers, nerds, technologists, entrepreneurs, when they read a book like that, they can kind of see, oh, okay, you know, this sort of makes sense. You know, this could actually happen. So some of them may decide that some version of that imaginary technology or that imaginary business plan is worth actually trying to bring into the real world.