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.
Follow Neal on Twitter
Follow Tyler on Twitter
More CWT goodness:
Alain Bertaud on Cities, Markets, and People
Samantha Power on Learning How to Make a Difference
Hollis Robbins on 19th Century Life and Literature
Masha Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia
Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World
Eric Kaufmann on Immigration, Identity, and the Limits of Individualism
Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business
Russ Roberts on Life as an Economics Educator
Ezekiel Emanuel on the Practice of Medicine, Policy, and Life
Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom
Margaret Atwood on Canada, Writing, and Invention (Live at Mason)
Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain
Emily Wilson on Translations and Language
Raghuram Rajan on Understanding Community
Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent
Jordan Peterson on Mythology, Fame, and Reading People
Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama on *Persecution and Toleration*
Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head
Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Navigating Life After 40
Teaching Learning Leading K-12
Regenerative Skills
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Mel Robbins Podcast