Silicon Valley Wants ‘More Everything Forever’

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com

The futures of the past have curdled into the nightmares of the present. The richest and most powerful people the world has ever known want to colonize mars, live forever, and digitize human consciousness. To make these technological miracles come to pass, they say, will require people to dramatically change the way they live and work. Will it be worth it? Does science even say it’s possible?

On this Angry Planet, astrophysicist and author Adam Becker joins us to explain all the problems with Silicon Valley’s dreams of the future. It’s not a short list. Much of the tech, and even the physics, don’t work the way techno-utopians say it does. Some of the people hawking robot slaves and immortality are chasing the impossible for tragic personal reasons. Others are just trying to sell you something. It’s all the subject of Becker’s new book: More Everything Forever.

Franics Fukuyama and the end of everything
“Death is the ultimate limit, the ultimate loss of control.”
Moore’s law, the singularity, and Ray Kurzweil’s father
The Face on Mars and large language models
Elizas all the way down
The false binaries of the tech bro future
Silicon Valley’s lost boys
“Death is avoidable and taxation is theft.”
Stasis for me but not for thee
“Mars sucks”

Against Life Extension by Francis Fukuyama

More Everything Forever on Bookshop

More Everything Forever on Amazon

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now.
0:17.7	Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.
0:21.5	I am Matthew Galt.
0:22.8	Jason Fields is in an office today wearing a suit for the first time in years.
0:26.5	Pray for him.
0:27.5	But he will be back.
0:29.9	So today we're doing kind of what I would call part three in an ongoing series we've had exploring the masters of the universe as they are now, the ideology of the masters of the universe, or maybe just the people who think that they're the masters of the universe.
0:44.9	And to help us do that, we have a new guest, Adam Becker, talking about his wonderful and kind of prescient book, More Everything Forever.
0:55.5	Sir, can you kind of introduce yourself and give me the, I know before we jumped on,
1:00.8	you said you tend to go on when people ask you a question, where a Rambley show, but
1:05.6	give me like the back of the book summary for what this is.
1:09.9	Sure. So I'm a journalist with a
1:13.9	background in astrophysics and specifically a science journalist. And this book is about
1:23.8	the horrible ideas that tech billionaires have about the future and why they don't work.
1:30.1	That's succinct. That's beautiful. Thank you.
1:32.4	Thanks.
1:35.0	So I was thinking about this conversation earlier in the week.
1:38.5	Did you happen to read the new essay from Francis Fukuyama?
1:45.0	Actually, I didn't, no.
1:46.9	So he published something on Persuasion,
1:49.7	which is Yasha Monks like Substack,
1:51.6	like on Monday or Tuesday.
	...

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