Neuromancer by William Gibson with John Hill and Jesan Sorrells

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Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells,

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and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

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Podcast, episode number

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203. So today,

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I will not be opening the show with a selection from the book.

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Instead, our guest co-host today,

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John Hill, will be opening up with a selection of the book because I did

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not bring my copy of the book today to the studio, to the show. So,

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John, pick a selection from chapter 1 and take it away.

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Oh, wow. Okay, hold on one second.

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So this is going to be cliché, but I’m going to start kind of like

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right here in the beginning because for as much as I have to say about

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this book, there are things about how it is written that I think are

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very beautiful, very interesting

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turns of phrase, and very interesting choices around this, right?

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So The sky above the port was the color of television

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tuned to a dead channel. It’s not like I’m using, Case heard

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someone say as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the

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Chat. It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.

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It was a sprawl voice and a sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a

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bar for professional expatriates who could drink there for a week and never hear

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2 words in Japanese. And

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it’s so interesting because like, this is my favorite thing

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about science fiction and like this pulpy style of

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science fiction. It’s how hard of a drop

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can they drop you into this thing and how quickly can they build the world

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around you, right? And so I read this book when I

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was a kid and I was very excited to kind of come back to it.

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And I had a very different experience with it this time,

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but that idea. You’re going to get dropped into a thing and you’re going to

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have to figure it out. This is the greatness of pulpy sci-fi.

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And you got to suspend some disbelief. You got to be willing to give them

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the benefit of the doubt. And you just have to dive in and start reading

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and just kind of give them some trust that it’s going to be

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okay. And it kind

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of felt like coming back home because opening that thing up, I was like, oh,

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absolutely. Now, very interesting experience reading through it

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again, 30-something years later and stuff like that. But

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Great place to open. Great place to open. And

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as a matter of fact, I never read this book

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before. We agreed to cover it on the podcast

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today. I’d heard of, of course, the author of this book.

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He floats around, his name floats around many circles that I

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am involved in. And of course, if you’re going to read any kind of science

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fiction in this genre, you’re eventually going to run up against this person.

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I had a little bit of a different experience than, than John with this book,

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though. After I finished it, which was probably about a month and a

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half ago now, maybe, maybe about a couple months ago now, because I’m reading

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like 8,000 different things from a bunch of different projects that I’m involved in.

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I, I got into my car and I drove to my, my local, my

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local grocery store and Well, I was pulling

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into the parking lot, and this anecdote is sort of where

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I’m going to go with this book today, at least in my understanding of it.

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When I was parking, I looked across the lot and I observed some of

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the pedestrians in the crosswalk, and I saw a small child,

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probably no more than maybe 3 or 4, walking

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behind his parents who were pushing a cart, looking very

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dejected and very upset that they had to go to the grocery store.

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And this little, this little man, uh, was

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holding, clutching underneath his arm quite tightly,

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a, uh, a tablet. Now, I could not see the

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brand of the tablet, but it didn’t really matter.

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Kid couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 years old.

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And in looking around, of course, getting out of the car,

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Looking around, I put my own, you know, communication addiction

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device in my own back pocket as I got out of the car and looked

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around and saw that everybody else was in varying stages of having their

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own communication addiction device either attached to their head or in

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their hand, or, you know, as they were walking through the store,

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attached to their head, actually using it for a phone.

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Now, the movie The Matrix came out in 1999 when I had

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just graduated from high school. Right.

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And when it did, the internet that our author

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envisioned in 1984, that sort of

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set the table for how John opened us up today, that internet

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hadn’t yet come to fruition, not in any kind of real meaningful way, not the

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way we think of the internet. But it was on its way.

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And The Matrix, at least the original movie, was

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a warning shot across the postmodern bow of the ship of culture and

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society of the late ’90s. Some of us, of course, heard the shot.

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That has been our author today. Others were confused by the sound

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of the shot, and many of us ignored it altogether

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and were completely and utterly surprised when we wound up in the space that

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we’re in right now.

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Timothy Berners-Lee turned on the commercial internet in 1989.

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It was a seminal year that included the crushing of rebellion at

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Tiananmen Square and the falling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism.

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And the beginnings of the post-Cold War peace dividend that the boomers had been promised

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by the generations that fought the Cold War and World War II and Korea and

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Vietnam before them. 37 years later,

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however, after all of that has happened, after social

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media and 240 characters and cryptocurrency and

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self-driving cars, instant shipping, and here we

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are right on the cusp of AI. We all live,

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even that kid in the grocery store lives now, in the fully

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realized backwash of the author of our book today’s

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nightmare. We’re in the backwash of the nightmare of this

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book. And yet, and I

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pointed this out to John when we were talking about this book and how we

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were going to approach it, yet I still have to load the dishwasher by

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hand. And I did some data entry today. And

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I still had to switch between screens, and I’m

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doing stuff by hand. I’m still dealing with people that print off

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paper in order to edit things.

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So today on the show, we are going to examine a book, John and I

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are, that was once blurbed by the Village Voice as, quote, a

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mind-bender of a read in 1983.

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But now that, to me at least, reads kind of

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flat and cold. We will try to pull lessons for leaders

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from Neuromancer by

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William Gibson.

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Leaders, try not to bury the lead today. We’re going to talk— this is going

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to be a wide range of conversations. So I’m going to try not to bury

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the lead today. But leaders, I think that

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for the 21st century, we need new myths.

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I think we need myths that take into account everything from this point

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forward in history, not myths that

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revisit all of the old horrors that we couldn’t figure out how to deal with

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back in the ’80s or ’90s.

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And I think this book points the way to how we maybe can do some

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of that. I already mentioned that our

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co-host today will be Jon Hill, and he opened us up with a selection from

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that book, the very famous, for First line, right?

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And this book is going to be turned into Neuromancer is going to be turned

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into an Apple TV show. So this is hitting, hitting right on time. I

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believe it comes out either this month or next month. I’m going to be streaming

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on Apple TV, which for the life of me, again,

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37 years after the internet, I can’t figure out why they’re only doing it now.

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Like, really? Like, really? It took you this long?

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John, you said you read this book a long time ago when you were a

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young man. And you’ve had a lot more sort of meaty

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interaction with it. Talk to me about this book for you. Talk

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to us about sort of what does this book mean? And we’ll talk a little

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about William Gibson and sort of who he is as an author. Um, because

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he’s actually stopped writing science fiction books and has now moved on to, to more

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quote unquote serious literate literature. But, um, talk to me about this book

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and the impact that it had on you. You were 15 and now you’re not

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15. Yeah. So like reading it, reading it then and reading it

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now. Well, it’s, it’s funny because, uh,

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reading it this time, I finished and I was kind of like,

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huh, right? I just kind of sat with it,

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right? Because I didn’t have that, that moment of like

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triumph, right? Because like whenever I was a kid, I was probably—

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what year did this come out? I’m trying to remember exactly. Well, the version I

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have came out in ’84. I mean, I was

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probably 13, 14, so

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’93, ’94, right, when, when this was coming out. And

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I’m reading everything I can in this sci-fi kind of

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vein that is more kind of about the character and

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the story. So I’m reading lots of Heinlein, lots of this stuff, things like that.

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And I’ve always been interested in tech right now.

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Mm-hmm. I’m gonna be honest, right? Being a— being an

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adolescent guy, right, it’s more about the sex and the, the

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other aspects of this. And, and the tech was— it was an interesting

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kind of portal for me. Like, you know, I’m just gonna be honest about it.

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Right. Um, but, uh,

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the idea of like cyberspace and you’re loading into an

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environment and everything, like, this was

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compelling to me. Like, it seemed like direction that we were going to

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go, but it didn’t seem so far off. Like, it, like, it just seemed like

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a normal leap versus some of the other sci-fi that I was reading at the

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time. More rocket ships, spaceship, we’re

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colonizing other planets and stuff like this. That felt more

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like future, future, future state. This felt more just like

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near future kind of thing, right? Which I couldn’t really appreciate as an

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adolescent guy. But, you know, the internet was around enough. I had

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AOL. I’d seen— I’d heard of the movie Hackers. I don’t think I’d seen it

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yet. Right. like that, that this idea that this is gonna grow and this was

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gonna be something we were gonna move into. Okay, I can get behind that, right?

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Yeah. And, you know, so

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read it probably 2 or 3 times because I was kind of like, oh, wow,

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this is really interesting. And then kind of moved on, right? It’s always been on

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the shelf since then. And then getting the opportunity to kind of go

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back to it because I’ve never really dug too much into the other William

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Gibson library, right? Like, this was the big one. And then I think I saw

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Johnny Mnemonic, which was just supposed to be a movie

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adaptation of a William Gibson thing. And that was

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pretty, pretty disappointing in my memory of it.

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Yeah. And then like fast forward, we get to The Matrix. The Matrix is a

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huge deal for me because I’m a martial arts nerd. Obviously we’ve talked about it.

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And then this is the first time that it’s like been tech

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but also looks cool. Like the tech meets the

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technology that we’re able to capture it with. And that was a big deal

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for me at the time. And so once The Matrix got here,

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largely, I’d kind of forgotten about Gibson, right? And the idea that he

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was the first guy to use the word web space,

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right? I think, and stuff like this, right? So like, Yep. you know, looking at

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the impact he’s had just on, on the culture at large was

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significant, right? Because I kind of like you, the minute you were like, The Matrix,

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I was like, oh yeah, The Matrix. I was like, now wait a minute. It

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was easier for me to accept The Matrix and really geek out on The Matrix

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because I had read this book and I’d read so many other books in this

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kind of area and stuff like that. But coming back to it, I

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finished it and I was kind of like, huh, is this different just

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because I’m old and I’ve seen too much? Like, I know too

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much, you know? And so I decided to

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go get on Goodreads, right? Because I like going and looking at other

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people and how they think about the books. And it was so fascinating because, like,

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looking at the reviews, there’s a lot of people that read

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this annually and have, like, a different reflection on it annually.

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There’s people that have had my experience. They come back to it later on and

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they’re like, eh. And, you know, To me, that’s what

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indicates that a book is like meaty enough, right?

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That there is such a wide-ranging opinion on it and people will

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come back to it. They will make it a reference thing and stuff like that.

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And other people can’t, can’t care for it at all. Like,

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to me, that’s, that’s a signal of something, right? Mm-hmm. And so

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going through that and reading some of those reviews, I’m like, you know, I

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think I need to read it again in about a year. and like see how

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I feel about it then, right? Because you said the line

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that we’re now living in that experience, right? And we kind of talked about it

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on text and chat and everything. Yeah. And like,

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you know, you’re not, you’re not reading, you’re not reading

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the fantasy that’s going to make it the next 35 years today

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because it hasn’t shown itself to be

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that good, right? And so that’s the hard part, I think, of science fiction is

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you’re writing for a fan, for a future that you don’t know is going to

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come true. And we can only see as far as we can see, right? Like,

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it’s really cool to go to, like, there’s this— I

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think it’s actually in Albuquerque, which is funny because we were talking about Albuquerque before

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we turned on the recording, the Museum for

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Nuclear Bombs, right? Or the Nuclear Museum and everything. Oh, yeah. And they’re

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talking about how, like, Robert A. Heinlein was talking about, like,

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debit cards and credit cards and how all of these science

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fiction people in the tapestry of our history

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have these things that have talked about coming true. Well, for every one of those

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that has come true, there’s been 100 other hypotheses of like, oh, this is going

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to be and fit the story that has not ever come true.

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And that’s something that, yeah, that’s something that you’re

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gliding or alighting across something that I want to

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get into a little bit, at least early. So as

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usual, I have to go and look at Gibson because I’m not as familiar necessarily

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with him as I might have been with Asimov or Heinlein or

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any of those guys. So Gibson comes along, or he was born in

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1948, and he began

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his writing career in the late ’70s.

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And his early works were noir, near-future stories. So he was very much

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focused on the near future, right? That explored the effects of

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technology, cybernetics, and of course, computer networks on humans.

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It’s interesting, when he was writing, when he was writing

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this book, Neuromancer, he went and saw Blade Runner. And he

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almost didn’t finish the movie because he was like, oh my— or finish the book

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because he walked out of Blade Runner in like

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1982. I presume he was probably on his close to

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final draft of Neuromancer by that point. Walked out of that movie

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and thought, oh my God, they’ll think it’s derivative of Blade Runner.

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like, they’ll think that I’m just ripping this movie off. I’m just ripping off Philip

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K. Dick. And the,

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the, the thing about Gibson is he was a

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shy teenager who didn’t really, like, get along with everybody else

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in his community, or quite frankly, in his, in his high school. And

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he’s even quoted as saying that he grew up in a, quote unquote, highly mono—

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highly a highly— what do you call it— a

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problematic monoculture, right? Mm-hmm. And you can see some

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of that reflected, his sort of rebellion against that. You could see that reflected in

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Neuromancer. He consciously rejected religion and

257
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took refuge in reading science fiction, starting with writers such as William

258
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Burroughs, who wrote Tarzan, and

259
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moving on, of course, into maybe more of your classical authors like a Henry

260
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Miller, you know. And now

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Neuromancer is an interesting book because it became the first winner

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of the science fiction, quote unquote, Triple Crown. So that’s like the 3 sort of,

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you know, awards that are given to a science fiction novel. So

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he won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick

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Award. And it eventually sold more than 6.5 million

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copies worldwide, right? Elon Musk for

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sure read this book. Peter Thiel read this book.

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Mark Zuckerberg read this book. Jeff Bezos, when he

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was in college in the ’80s, read this book.

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They did. They read this book like it landed like a freaking atomic— you talk

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about atomic bomb. This book landed like an atomic

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bomb. Marc Andreessen, who

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came up with the Netscape

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browser back in the ’80s, or sorry, back in the early ’90s when he was

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in college at like Southern Illinois University. He read this book when he

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was in high school in the ’80s. Okay. I mean, like,

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everyone— Sam Altman, who’s like running around right

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now begging Congress to please put handcuffs on me so I don’t build

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the AI that’s gonna kill us all while he’s still building the AI that’s quote

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unquote gonna kill us all. He read this book in the

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’90s when he was in— when he was in high school.

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Corey Doctorow. Okay. who doesn’t believe that the—

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I love this line from Corey. He’s like, I don’t know why we believe that

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the machine, that the word predicting machine is going to somehow wake up and attain

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consciousness. It’s not. We’re just idiots. Corey Doctorow

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00:17:55.581 –> 00:17:58.327
read William Gibson. As a matter of fact, there’s a picture of him floating around

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00:17:58.327 –> 00:18:01.426
on the internet where he like went and had William Gibson sign his copy of

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Neuromancer, like back in the day. Everybody, and

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Corey Doctorow is about as left-wing anarchist as you can get. From the left-wing

290
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anarchist Cory Doctorow to about as right-wing capitalist person as you

291
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can get, Jeff Bezos, they’ve all read this book.

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Every one of our modern tech titans understands

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what’s in this. Well, maybe not understands, but read this book and was influenced by

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it. This is the power of William Gibson. And eventually, if you talk to them

295
00:18:28.080 –> 00:18:31.465
long enough, they’ll bring up Neurolancer. So this book was

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huge, has been hugely influential. And this is where I kind of— this

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is the thing I’m relighting over. I think it’s been hugely influential, and Gibson

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has been hugely influential in building the thing out that he

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was describing, even though he was

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00:18:46.165 –> 00:18:49.877
speculating about it. People took him seriously, even

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more so than they took Asimov seriously, or Bradbury,

302
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or even Philip K. Dick. They took him dead serious,

303
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and they said, we can go build that.

304
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And now,

305
00:19:07.249 –> 00:19:10.924
now we’re here. And this is the part

306
00:19:11.396 –> 00:19:14.534
that drives me nuts. This is the part that drives me nuts.

307
00:19:15.549 –> 00:19:17.719
And I’m going to keep coming back to this over and over again, but this

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00:19:17.768 –> 00:19:20.895
is the part driving us. You said we can only see as far as we

309
00:19:20.895 –> 00:19:21.316
can see. Yeah.

310
00:19:25.355 –> 00:19:26.861
The bad stuff is in the book.

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The downsides are in the book. They’re all right there. It

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00:19:33.793 –> 00:19:37.572
wasn’t like Gibson just gave us the fantasy and it was like, and everybody lived

313
00:19:37.572 –> 00:19:41.339
happily ever after, the end. No, everybody doesn’t live happily ever

314
00:19:41.371 –> 00:19:45.074
after. It’s terrible. It’s an ambiguous ending. Yeah. But it’s

315
00:19:45.074 –> 00:19:48.423
kind of a terrible postmodern nihilistic ending. By the way,

316
00:19:48.845 –> 00:19:52.497
because Gibson doesn’t understand the impact of religion and rejected it in his own life,

317
00:19:52.513 –> 00:19:56.219
there’s no religious belief system anywhere in this book. Which at least Philip

318
00:19:56.219 –> 00:19:59.444
K. Dick at least gave a nod to that. And he was up until this

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00:19:59.508 –> 00:20:02.991
point, and we, and we read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? On this podcast.

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I would think that Dick, Philip K., I thought up until Gibson, I met him

321
00:20:07.067 –> 00:20:10.325
in a dark alley. I thought Philip K. Dick was the most nihilistic science fiction

322
00:20:10.421 –> 00:20:14.144
writer I’d read. No, no. Gibson goes all the way down

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00:20:14.144 –> 00:20:17.033
into the abyss. He’s hanging out down there with Nietzsche, like all the way down

324
00:20:17.033 –> 00:20:20.868
at the bottom, expecting like supermen to rise. Interesting perspective. Yeah. Yeah. Expecting like

325
00:20:20.868 –> 00:20:24.221
supermen to rise. And there’s no, there’s no Superman

326
00:20:24.657 –> 00:20:28.163
because we can’t create our own values out of our own self, no matter how

327
00:20:28.519 –> 00:20:32.197
much we’re jacked into the matrix. We just can’t. We can’t do

328
00:20:32.328 –> 00:20:34.517
it. We don’t have the capacity inside of ourselves.

329
00:20:38.145 –> 00:20:41.986
That’s not my, my primary knock. That’s not my

330
00:20:41.986 –> 00:20:45.423
primary critique against, against the book. My primary critique is

331
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all of the bad stuff is in there.

332
00:20:51.124 –> 00:20:54.900
We have tech leaders that have read it, seem

333
00:20:54.900 –> 00:20:58.660
to have ignored the 90% of the bad stuff and just went,

334
00:20:58.740 –> 00:21:01.397
hey, wouldn’t this really be cool if we could, like, jack into the internet and

335
00:21:01.494 –> 00:21:05.141
then, like, run around with no bodies, like hacking

336
00:21:05.205 –> 00:21:08.933
things? Yeah. Okay.

337
00:21:09.143 –> 00:21:12.728
Let’s try that. Well, we tried it for— we’ve tried it for 37 years. We

338
00:21:12.728 –> 00:21:16.411
got— we’ve got Wade from Kim Possible running around the

339
00:21:16.411 –> 00:21:20.209
dark web stealing everybody’s data. Like, like, that’s

340
00:21:20.209 –> 00:21:23.398
what we’ve got. We’ve got that guy. That guy is here.

341
00:21:25.082 –> 00:21:28.916
We don’t— what we don’t have is a solution for that

342
00:21:28.949 –> 00:21:32.751
guy. And I’m a solutions-oriented guy. I would

343
00:21:32.751 –> 00:21:36.480
love to have a solution for that guy. Because I think that guy’s a real

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00:21:36.480 –> 00:21:40.006
problem. This is a fascinating conversation to me because the—

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00:21:40.377 –> 00:21:44.145
what I’m, what I’m hearing from you is that because, because

346
00:21:44.161 –> 00:21:47.686
he talks about the bad things, We should have taken a completely other

347
00:21:47.702 –> 00:21:50.352
route entirely. When have we ever done that?

348
00:21:50.673 –> 00:21:54.496
Yeah. When have we ever looked boldly and

349
00:21:54.528 –> 00:21:58.077
been like, oh, let’s discern this and let’s look at all the choices and all

350
00:21:58.077 –> 00:22:01.578
the tradeoffs and everything and like, look at it on it. We don’t ever do

351
00:22:01.594 –> 00:22:05.417
this, buddy. Like, and so, so, so, so in that mode, the

352
00:22:05.465 –> 00:22:09.127
only way that like these, these things that you’re so concerned

353
00:22:09.143 –> 00:22:12.162
about don’t come true is like there’s no progress.

354
00:22:14.122 –> 00:22:17.512
Right. And, and, and, and the line in Oppenheimer, which I keep going back to

355
00:22:17.512 –> 00:22:21.207
that movie because that, that, I mean, Christopher Nolan sort of

356
00:22:21.207 –> 00:22:24.758
nailed it with this. The line from Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer when

357
00:22:24.758 –> 00:22:27.072
he’s in the scene. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie. I have seen

358
00:22:27.072 –> 00:22:30.446
it. Okay. So, you know, the scene where he goes and all of the,

359
00:22:30.911 –> 00:22:33.868
all of the communist or

360
00:22:34.044 –> 00:22:37.852
communist-coded scientists are having the meeting about whether or not they

361
00:22:37.852 –> 00:22:41.610
should keep working on the bomb. And they’re all like having this existential

362
00:22:41.610 –> 00:22:44.741
crisis because we beat— we already beat the Germans and we were building the bomb

363
00:22:44.741 –> 00:22:47.872
to drop on the Germans. And now we don’t have to do it because like

364
00:22:48.595 –> 00:22:51.581
we’re going to eventually beat the Japanese. Yeah.

365
00:22:51.645 –> 00:22:55.403
Okay. Spoken as people, by the way, who didn’t have to like go into murder

366
00:22:55.403 –> 00:22:59.112
holes with the Japanese, purely like didn’t have to do that at all or

367
00:22:59.112 –> 00:23:02.725
island hopping. Okay. Okay. So you’re speaking from your own little

368
00:23:02.725 –> 00:23:06.165
window in your own little house. In a lab. Yeah. In a lab, right? And

369
00:23:06.326 –> 00:23:07.840
what is it that he says? He says,

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our fantasies, our dreams are their

371
00:23:14.482 –> 00:23:18.238
horrors, but they won’t know that until we

372
00:23:18.449 –> 00:23:22.262
use it. They won’t know to be horrified

373
00:23:22.456 –> 00:23:26.271
until we use it. That’s the only way they’re going to

374
00:23:26.271 –> 00:23:29.916
know. And by they, he means average Joe Schmo public who’s not

375
00:23:29.916 –> 00:23:33.127
smart enough to be in the lab with him. He also said earlier in the

376
00:23:33.127 –> 00:23:36.600
movie, my other favorite line, which I always say on this podcast, I love this

377
00:23:36.600 –> 00:23:39.356
line, at a certain point you have to move from theory to practice. You got

378
00:23:39.356 –> 00:23:42.238
to move from the mathematics on the board to actually being out in the real

379
00:23:42.334 –> 00:23:45.957
world. Mm-hmm. It

380
00:23:45.957 –> 00:23:49.516
isn’t like, again, it isn’t as if, if I had Gibson on the

381
00:23:49.516 –> 00:23:53.215
show, I think Gibson would agree with me. It isn’t as if he

382
00:23:53.215 –> 00:23:56.994
didn’t write about the downsides in Neuromancer. He did. He absolutely, I don’t blame

383
00:23:57.010 –> 00:24:00.524
him at all. I don’t, I don’t lay— he did exactly what he was supposed

384
00:24:00.524 –> 00:24:04.365
to do as a writer. He laid out a fully realized world, and I think

385
00:24:04.365 –> 00:24:08.052
that’s where people— what people really like is that it’s a fully realized world

386
00:24:08.569 –> 00:24:12.286
that seems— that logically is consistent all the way to the end,

387
00:24:12.448 –> 00:24:13.659
which is good. Okay.

388
00:24:16.807 –> 00:24:20.408
And I’ve always been this way. Like, when I was in art school, I never

389
00:24:20.585 –> 00:24:23.997
really had a problem with Pablo Picasso, although

390
00:24:24.396 –> 00:24:26.177
Over the course of time, I’ve had more and more of a problem with that

391
00:24:26.177 –> 00:24:29.804
guy. Um, at a human level, not at an artistic level.

392
00:24:29.868 –> 00:24:32.756
Artistically, I think that’s a whole other kind of thing, but at just a human

393
00:24:32.836 –> 00:24:36.334
being level, he was, he was not a good human being. Um,

394
00:24:37.409 –> 00:24:41.244
but the, the challenge is with the people who come after

395
00:24:41.244 –> 00:24:44.694
him, the people who look at what he did or do

396
00:24:44.694 –> 00:24:48.464
shop, right? And they go, oh, it was an

397
00:24:48.464 –> 00:24:52.074
upside down urinal. So now I can put a shark in like formaldehyde and call

398
00:24:52.074 –> 00:24:55.469
that art. And I’m not saying a shark from formaldehyde is not art. I’m just

399
00:24:55.469 –> 00:24:58.833
saying like, that’s where you get to, right? Or, you know,

400
00:24:59.561 –> 00:25:02.990
we can have a, we can have a, we can have a

401
00:25:04.254 –> 00:25:07.964
virgin. Yeah, a Virgin Mary made out of poo and

402
00:25:07.964 –> 00:25:11.149
call that art. Made out of cow dung. Like, we can have that. That’s fine.

403
00:25:12.130 –> 00:25:15.974
Yeah. It’s almost as if the followers

404
00:25:16.087 –> 00:25:19.761
miss the joke. And I think the followers of Gibson,

405
00:25:20.824 –> 00:25:24.142
the readers of Gibson, miss the joke.

406
00:25:26.703 –> 00:25:30.493
And I don’t know if this is the perennial tension. So you

407
00:25:30.510 –> 00:25:32.687
and I were talking about this a little bit in a different context, but maybe

408
00:25:32.687 –> 00:25:36.398
there’s the perennial tension here between art and commerce. Maybe

409
00:25:36.398 –> 00:25:39.822
this is part of that tension as well. Mm-hmm. Or maybe it’s the perennial

410
00:25:39.870 –> 00:25:43.004
tension at a deeper level between art and the viewer.

411
00:25:43.728 –> 00:25:46.875
Or the reader of the art. Because once you put something out there,

412
00:25:47.726 –> 00:25:50.552
like I know this, I’ve written 3 books, I’m working on a 4th one right

413
00:25:50.552 –> 00:25:53.410
now. The second you put a book out in the world, it’s out of your

414
00:25:53.410 –> 00:25:57.168
control. Yeah. You have no control over what people are going

415
00:25:57.200 –> 00:26:00.909
to think about that book. Um, and that’s frustrating to me as an

416
00:26:00.957 –> 00:26:04.505
artist because I know what I wanted to put in that book and I tried

417
00:26:04.505 –> 00:26:06.737
my hardest to put it into the book or put it into my art or

418
00:26:06.737 –> 00:26:10.139
whatever, film, whatever. But then they’re running around

419
00:26:10.139 –> 00:26:13.523
interpreting things all kinds of different ways, and I have zero control over that.

420
00:26:17.918 –> 00:26:21.526
And that, that bothers you? As a, as a,

421
00:26:21.833 –> 00:26:25.164
as a Type A, as a Type AD

422
00:26:25.698 –> 00:26:28.592
artist? Yeah, yeah, it bothers me a little bit. I’m not gonna lie, it does.

423
00:26:28.641 –> 00:26:31.535
It bothers me. But there’s a— but like, I do up to 200-some-odd episodes of

424
00:26:31.535 –> 00:26:34.644
this podcast. I have no idea what people think about every single episode. Yeah.

425
00:26:35.258 –> 00:26:38.597
That’s fair. And, but I can kind of like let it go with this,

426
00:26:39.049 –> 00:26:42.308
but like if I’m making prints or I’m writing books, it seems more personal to

427
00:26:42.308 –> 00:26:45.839
me. And thus I, you know, I don’t know. It’s a weird sort of

428
00:26:45.839 –> 00:26:49.463
emotional, you know, like— I think, I think that’s a, like,

429
00:26:51.395 –> 00:26:54.962
that’s fascinating. Like to me, content is content, right?

430
00:26:55.043 –> 00:26:58.804
If I’m, if I’m writing a post to put on social versus

431
00:26:58.901 –> 00:27:02.127
like publishing a book or putting out an episode of my thing,

432
00:27:03.022 –> 00:27:04.731
I, I think it’s kind of my duty to be more or less the same

433
00:27:04.731 –> 00:27:07.990
person. in all those lanes?

434
00:27:09.480 –> 00:27:13.312
Oh, I show up as the same person. Mm-hmm. Um,

435
00:27:14.530 –> 00:27:18.297
however, where— what I’ve had to do just for myself, what I’ve

436
00:27:18.313 –> 00:27:21.519
had to do, and I don’t— and I think Gibson eventually got to this point

437
00:27:21.599 –> 00:27:25.126
too, because he doesn’t really talk about Neuromancer anymore.

438
00:27:25.511 –> 00:27:28.091
He’s almost gotten to the point where he’s like, actually, I think he has gotten

439
00:27:28.091 –> 00:27:31.762
to the point, um, where, because he’s a— he sort of

440
00:27:31.762 –> 00:27:34.584
abandoned the science fiction genre because he wants to go off and do other different

441
00:27:34.664 –> 00:27:38.222
and has gone off and done other different things, particularly, and we just talked about

442
00:27:38.271 –> 00:27:41.571
Cosmopolis. written by Don DeLillo on our last

443
00:27:41.571 –> 00:27:44.465
episode, which was written,

444
00:27:45.369 –> 00:27:48.903
written, gosh, right after 9/11 and then published like in

445
00:27:48.999 –> 00:27:52.404
2003. 9/11 for

446
00:27:52.404 –> 00:27:54.141
Gibson was a linchpin moment where,

447
00:27:56.576 –> 00:27:58.856
and I think he’s been quoted as saying this, if I remember correctly, when I

448
00:27:58.856 –> 00:28:02.578
was looking at his bio, basically everything changed for him then

449
00:28:02.837 –> 00:28:06.286
because he was like, science fiction doesn’t This doesn’t mean anything. We need to be

450
00:28:06.286 –> 00:28:08.951
dealing with like the real world. Oh, wow.

451
00:28:10.388 –> 00:28:14.136
And that I understand as a, as an artist,

452
00:28:14.265 –> 00:28:17.208
but I, and I also understand, and this is how sort of I deal with

453
00:28:17.208 –> 00:28:19.100
attention, the idea of,

454
00:28:22.350 –> 00:28:26.057
yes, what you see on the podcast or what you read in a LinkedIn

455
00:28:26.057 –> 00:28:29.676
post from me or what you read on a blog post from me or what

456
00:28:29.676 –> 00:28:33.136
you read in my book, that’s my voice. That’s me. That’s all me, right?

457
00:28:33.749 –> 00:28:37.573
I sometimes compare when I used to tweet regularly. I, I

458
00:28:37.622 –> 00:28:41.075
said, I’ve always said this, about 26% of my tweets will get me canceled.

459
00:28:41.550 –> 00:28:44.900
That’s about the number. It’s about 26%. They’re gonna piss off somebody

460
00:28:45.423 –> 00:28:49.060
like they just are. And if somebody comes

461
00:28:49.092 –> 00:28:52.893
back to me and is like, yeah, I

462
00:28:52.893 –> 00:28:54.430
absolutely thought that on that day at that time.

463
00:28:57.933 –> 00:29:01.187
Well, you want to explain yourself? No, I don’t owe you an explanation

464
00:29:01.844 –> 00:29:05.626
because see, the Hasan you get is that Hasan right there in the tweet. That’s

465
00:29:05.626 –> 00:29:09.457
the Hasan you get. You don’t get to get the other Hasan. You don’t

466
00:29:09.457 –> 00:29:12.919
have, you don’t have permission to get the other Hasan. So the Hasan that you

467
00:29:12.919 –> 00:29:15.115
get on the podcast, which by the way is the same as my other Hasan,

468
00:29:15.643 –> 00:29:19.314
but like it’s the same person, but you get it in this context. You don’t

469
00:29:19.314 –> 00:29:23.000
get it over there. You mentioned this in another way, and I

470
00:29:23.000 –> 00:29:26.396
thought it was super interesting actually. You said this line that That, uh,

471
00:29:26.970 –> 00:29:30.551
that I owe you the performance. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t owe you.

472
00:29:31.100 –> 00:29:33.410
How did you phrase that? Because, because I think you got it as a line

473
00:29:33.426 –> 00:29:37.195
from someone else, like from Sinatra. Sinatra. Yeah. What’s the line? All I

474
00:29:37.341 –> 00:29:40.600
owe you is a good show. I don’t owe you anything else. That’s all. I

475
00:29:40.600 –> 00:29:44.230
don’t, I don’t owe you anything else. But we now live in, because of

476
00:29:44.602 –> 00:29:48.284
the William Gibson Neuromancer reality we all live in now,

477
00:29:49.867 –> 00:29:53.582
we think we owe either, either we fully lean into the show

478
00:29:54.092 –> 00:29:57.666
Right. And that’s where you have fake people running around all over the place

479
00:29:57.714 –> 00:30:00.695
doing stuff. Oh yeah. Fully have leaned into the show. Or you have people who

480
00:30:00.775 –> 00:30:03.179
struggle with cognitive dissonance who will,

481
00:30:04.653 –> 00:30:08.388
you know, protest for what we were just

482
00:30:08.388 –> 00:30:12.186
talking about, racial issues before we hit the, before we hit the,

483
00:30:12.442 –> 00:30:16.096
before we hit the button. They’ll protest against racial issues, you know, in

484
00:30:16.208 –> 00:30:19.862
1 hour, but then they’ll go sign up to

485
00:30:19.878 –> 00:30:23.020
be, they’ll go, they’ll go fill out an application to work as a, as a

486
00:30:23.020 –> 00:30:26.785
consultant at McKinsey. Like, you know, they’ll talk

487
00:30:26.785 –> 00:30:30.327
about queering the Intifada at Columbia, but then they’re gonna like go want to work

488
00:30:30.327 –> 00:30:33.980
at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Mm-hmm. And they don’t seem to, they don’t seem to

489
00:30:33.980 –> 00:30:37.826
recognize the cognitive dissonance there. And

490
00:30:37.842 –> 00:30:40.454
we have a lot of that. I think, I think part of that is because

491
00:30:40.486 –> 00:30:44.156
of the internet. And it’s part of that ability. It’s part of that, that inability

492
00:30:44.156 –> 00:30:47.825
of people to connect the thing they’re doing

493
00:30:48.578 –> 00:30:52.224
with the thing they’re saying, to your point about content. And then trying to figure

494
00:30:52.224 –> 00:30:55.032
out what’s owed there. I don’t think people are working through that.

495
00:30:56.097 –> 00:30:59.771
Well, have you seen The Good Place? I’ve heard of it, and

496
00:30:59.771 –> 00:31:02.122
people tell me about it, but I’ve never seen it. Oh man, one of my—

497
00:31:02.608 –> 00:31:05.850
like, and I was super resistant to watching this show, and then I, and then

498
00:31:05.850 –> 00:31:09.610
I just sat down and watched it. I think it should be next on

499
00:31:09.610 –> 00:31:13.304
your list, right? The Good Place? Okay. Yeah, because it

500
00:31:13.320 –> 00:31:16.943
talks about this very concept. It talks about the idea that, like, it’s kind of

501
00:31:16.943 –> 00:31:20.782
hard to know if you’re doing good, right? Because I’m not gonna buy from

502
00:31:20.782 –> 00:31:23.783
this company. I’m gonna buy from this company. Oh, well, it turns out that the

503
00:31:23.783 –> 00:31:26.171
people at the head of this company do this and this and this and rah,

504
00:31:26.188 –> 00:31:29.846
rah, rah. And since most companies are only owned

505
00:31:29.846 –> 00:31:33.553
by like a handful of like leadership teams and roll-ups anyway and

506
00:31:33.553 –> 00:31:37.310
stuff like this, it’s always, you know, but The Good Place

507
00:31:37.423 –> 00:31:39.757
as a show talks about this idea that like

508
00:31:41.384 –> 00:31:45.106
everything you do has a value, right? Either positive or negative and everything. And so,

509
00:31:45.172 –> 00:31:46.112
well, if you just go do the right things, you will end up in the

510
00:31:46.112 –> 00:31:49.788
good place. Right. But

511
00:31:50.014 –> 00:31:53.862
what if there is no one right, good way of doing

512
00:31:53.878 –> 00:31:57.227
these things? Because everything has trade-offs, everything has constraints and stuff like that. And the

513
00:31:57.581 –> 00:32:01.328
show does a really interesting job about that. And Kristen Bell is hilarious

514
00:32:01.328 –> 00:32:04.936
and Ted Danson is amazing. And I think you would probably really geek out on

515
00:32:05.050 –> 00:32:08.830
it. Because yeah, like, you

516
00:32:08.830 –> 00:32:12.517
know, it’s hard to know

517
00:32:13.016 –> 00:32:16.155
how to vote with your feet. Right. And I talk about this all the time.

518
00:32:16.203 –> 00:32:20.041
Like, I don’t really care what words

519
00:32:20.137 –> 00:32:23.814
you say, right? Like, on some level, I’m going to pay

520
00:32:23.814 –> 00:32:26.913
attention to them and everything else like this. But the thing I’m more focused on,

521
00:32:26.961 –> 00:32:30.751
and this comes from like, like a martial arts thing, if I’m watching someone

522
00:32:30.751 –> 00:32:33.545
and they’re going to teach me a martial arts thing, I’m not listening to what

523
00:32:33.545 –> 00:32:36.852
you were saying. I’m looking for like your, your elbows and your knees and where

524
00:32:36.852 –> 00:32:40.624
they are in relation to it. Like, I’m looking for other points, I

525
00:32:40.689 –> 00:32:43.729
could— you could be silent for all I care. Just show it to me. I’m

526
00:32:43.745 –> 00:32:46.624
going to be able to figure it out, right? Right. If anything, it’s probably more

527
00:32:46.656 –> 00:32:50.022
helpful if you don’t come up with some weird metaphor to try to land this

528
00:32:50.298 –> 00:32:53.122
for me. Just show me what it looks like. We’ll figure it out. And so,

529
00:32:54.761 –> 00:32:58.580
like, I don’t do all the

530
00:32:58.580 –> 00:33:02.406
performative stuff, right? I’m so mad. I’m so mad. But not

531
00:33:02.519 –> 00:33:05.684
taking any action bothers me, right? And stuff like that.

532
00:33:06.314 –> 00:33:09.272
And that’s my, my biggest frustration right now is that because there are so many

533
00:33:09.272 –> 00:33:12.975
things to care about, and maybe this is me being

534
00:33:13.247 –> 00:33:16.698
way too idealistic, and I’m curious as to your position on this. There’s so many

535
00:33:16.698 –> 00:33:20.518
things to care about that it’s hard to like really pick up something

536
00:33:20.534 –> 00:33:24.322
that has the weight for you to go have the impact, to go be

537
00:33:25.125 –> 00:33:28.222
like actually in the community standing up for what is right, because

538
00:33:28.961 –> 00:33:32.267
now there’s 50 things to be worried about and everything. And like, okay,

539
00:33:33.294 –> 00:33:36.424
you know, what are your thoughts on that idea? Is it, is it harder to

540
00:33:36.424 –> 00:33:39.907
be, uh, like a, like a caring citizen and being thoughtful?

541
00:33:44.545 –> 00:33:48.165
I think it’s harder because the level of— we talked about noise, right? The

542
00:33:48.165 –> 00:33:51.737
noise-to-signal ratio is all off in everybody’s life.

543
00:33:52.268 –> 00:33:55.814
It’s not just our social media feeds, it’s our lives. The noise-to-signal ratio is off.

544
00:33:55.894 –> 00:33:58.749
So, yeah, if,

545
00:33:59.684 –> 00:34:01.910
if I’m, if I’m an adult human

546
00:34:03.511 –> 00:34:07.042
living and or married with another adult human, In in a in a

547
00:34:07.348 –> 00:34:11.035
square footage building called a house with a

548
00:34:11.035 –> 00:34:14.738
bunch of other small humans, you know, and

549
00:34:14.738 –> 00:34:18.332
each one of us as humans all has a device

550
00:34:18.445 –> 00:34:20.081
like this—a small triangle in our

551
00:34:20.081 –> 00:34:23.208
hand—that delivers

552
00:34:23.958 –> 00:34:25.522
us noise

553
00:34:26.184 –> 00:34:29.635
24/7/365. Every single time we

554
00:34:29.667 –> 00:34:31.425
unlock it, there’s noise flooding after us.

555
00:34:33.160 –> 00:34:36.893
And there’s noise coming at us from that big square box on

556
00:34:36.893 –> 00:34:40.206
our wall that used to be called a television. It’s probably running

557
00:34:40.206 –> 00:34:43.362
24/7 now. Probably running 24/7. Oh yeah, for sure.

558
00:34:45.523 –> 00:34:49.211
And we have the internet in our refrigerators,

559
00:34:49.502 –> 00:34:53.184
in our stoves. I mean, we have the internet. There’s

560
00:34:53.184 –> 00:34:56.406
no place where we are left

561
00:34:56.487 –> 00:34:59.808
alone, which is why Things like hiking and

562
00:34:59.808 –> 00:35:03.453
backpacking and outdoor stuff has become huge because that’s the one place

563
00:35:03.662 –> 00:35:07.163
left, which is nature, where you could be left alone to actually do the thing

564
00:35:07.195 –> 00:35:10.391
you’re talking about, which is have enough

565
00:35:10.985 –> 00:35:14.535
space, mental space, to create a judgment,

566
00:35:14.824 –> 00:35:18.598
discernment between what signal for yourself, what signal and

567
00:35:18.598 –> 00:35:21.633
what’s noise, right? Yeah. So is it harder?

568
00:35:22.291 –> 00:35:24.813
Yeah, it’s harder because the signal to noise ratio is off.

569
00:35:26.350 –> 00:35:30.186
Oh. But it’s also harder because— here’s the

570
00:35:30.186 –> 00:35:32.339
other thing— it’s also harder because,

571
00:35:34.007 –> 00:35:37.759
and this is what you see with Case in the book, yeah, he’s

572
00:35:37.759 –> 00:35:40.803
an addict, yeah, he’s unreliable.

573
00:35:42.056 –> 00:35:45.609
Gibson started with the— with, with an unreliable

574
00:35:45.609 –> 00:35:48.640
addict. Gibson didn’t start with

575
00:35:50.076 –> 00:35:53.731
a middle-class person Yeah. Just hanging out,

576
00:35:53.748 –> 00:35:57.369
living their life. An addict— and I’ve

577
00:35:57.385 –> 00:36:01.081
known addicts in my time. Same. I have known serious

578
00:36:01.178 –> 00:36:04.970
addicts in my time. A serious addict has

579
00:36:05.308 –> 00:36:08.855
absolutely zero problem distinguishing signal from

580
00:36:08.871 –> 00:36:11.221
noise. Zero problem.

581
00:36:13.968 –> 00:36:16.894
They have zero problem because the signal is the drug.

582
00:36:17.743 –> 00:36:21.463
The noise is everything else around the drug, from interpersonal relationships to how you

583
00:36:21.511 –> 00:36:24.558
get the drug yourself. And you see this in Neuromancer too, when he’s, when he

584
00:36:24.558 –> 00:36:27.204
goes to the resort, which we’ll talk about that in just a second. When he

585
00:36:27.204 –> 00:36:30.283
goes to the resort and he’s actually hanging out in the real world with people

586
00:36:30.412 –> 00:36:33.844
and he’s like, what the hell is this? You know, because it’s all noise. All

587
00:36:34.020 –> 00:36:36.313
of that stuff is noise, but that’s an addict’s brain.

588
00:36:37.773 –> 00:36:41.365
Well, the— And we don’t, we don’t, we still have enough people in this

589
00:36:41.477 –> 00:36:45.117
society. We’re just actually talking a little bit about substances before we also came on

590
00:36:45.246 –> 00:36:48.260
the show. You have enough people still left in our society

591
00:36:49.238 –> 00:36:52.558
who recognize the dopaminergic nature

592
00:36:53.247 –> 00:36:56.999
of our reactions with the internet and who are actively

593
00:36:57.047 –> 00:37:00.880
seeking to pull away from that. But it’s hard because it

594
00:37:00.880 –> 00:37:04.552
is everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere. Which again, the

595
00:37:04.632 –> 00:37:08.400
everywhere lesson is the lesson that everybody learned from Cory Doctorow to

596
00:37:08.400 –> 00:37:11.897
Jeff Bezos. They learned the everywhere lesson. They

597
00:37:12.058 –> 00:37:15.759
didn’t learn the signal-to-noise lesson. What I

598
00:37:15.759 –> 00:37:19.573
find funny is like, I not really thought about the impact

599
00:37:19.573 –> 00:37:22.592
that this book has had on, you know, some of the people that I

600
00:37:23.834 –> 00:37:27.004
wish were broke. Let’s just put it that way, right? Yeah.

601
00:37:28.055 –> 00:37:31.757
But like, it’s funny because like you were, you were talking about that and I

602
00:37:31.757 –> 00:37:35.428
was like, well, that’s the same thing as The Wolf of Wall Street, right? I

603
00:37:35.476 –> 00:37:38.883
can’t tell you how many people watch that movie and they’re like, Oh yeah, I

604
00:37:38.931 –> 00:37:41.820
want to be just like that. And I’m like, how much bigger do they have

605
00:37:41.852 –> 00:37:45.560
to paint the picture that this is not like an aspirational

606
00:37:45.560 –> 00:37:49.026
story? Right? Right. He even says that he was

607
00:37:49.700 –> 00:37:53.488
wrong and he shouldn’t have done these things and stuff like this. But there’s still

608
00:37:53.488 –> 00:37:57.292
going to be that. And this is, this is my, this is the same thing

609
00:37:57.340 –> 00:38:01.128
that I have against like Stoicism, right? Like, like

610
00:38:01.192 –> 00:38:04.177
this, like the sociopathic bros that want to kind of like

611
00:38:04.546 –> 00:38:08.352
cherry-pick some of the aspects of it and everything. And so if,

612
00:38:09.043 –> 00:38:12.736
you know, thinking about guys like Musk and like them reading this book and then

613
00:38:12.752 –> 00:38:16.285
being like, oh, well, look how smart he is. He’s not a

614
00:38:16.285 –> 00:38:19.224
hero though, like in any way, shape, or form. Like he’s barely

615
00:38:19.978 –> 00:38:23.656
like making it through. But because he finishes the story, it’s super easy to be

616
00:38:23.656 –> 00:38:27.173
like, well, you put me in there, right? And this is,

617
00:38:27.767 –> 00:38:30.978
in my opinion, the wrong with being too aspirational about yourself. It’s going to be

618
00:38:30.978 –> 00:38:34.543
different for me. Right? You give me this tech, you give me this,

619
00:38:34.752 –> 00:38:37.465
this capability, and I’m— it’s not going to corrupt me. It’s going to be different

620
00:38:37.465 –> 00:38:40.756
for me because my choices are accurate, right?

621
00:38:41.174 –> 00:38:44.112
And to me, that was the thing that I thought was like so interesting, and

622
00:38:44.625 –> 00:38:48.463
it kind of opened me up to this like perspective that is, is like a

623
00:38:48.463 –> 00:38:52.252
common kind of a recurring theme in like a lot of sci-fi

624
00:38:52.252 –> 00:38:55.463
books that I read. It’s about this like, we want to live

625
00:38:55.463 –> 00:38:59.284
forever because we know the right way to do things. Right? And this

626
00:38:59.397 –> 00:39:02.978
is in Neuromancer. This is in— I mean, this is in Altered Car. I mean,

627
00:39:03.075 –> 00:39:06.608
I have seen it. I’ve seen every ilk of this idea, right? And it’s around

628
00:39:06.608 –> 00:39:10.447
this idea that, like, like, I, I’m a big, huge

629
00:39:10.479 –> 00:39:14.189
believer in a good idea, right? Like, I’m a planner myself, you

630
00:39:14.189 –> 00:39:18.028
know, but you got to check back in occasionally, I would say, and be

631
00:39:18.028 –> 00:39:21.561
like, hey, is this, is this going according to plan? Are we hitting our goals?

632
00:39:21.609 –> 00:39:25.303
Are we doing— are we— were we right? Right? And

633
00:39:25.496 –> 00:39:28.946
I love when they’re talking about just how

634
00:39:29.106 –> 00:39:32.794
long this trajectory has been going with the family and the,

635
00:39:33.179 –> 00:39:36.931
and the sleep cycles and all of this other, like, in like reading

636
00:39:37.027 –> 00:39:40.731
it, I’m just like, they think they’re right. Oh

637
00:39:42.078 –> 00:39:45.686
yeah. And again, I want to be very clear, I am not knocking

638
00:39:45.782 –> 00:39:49.454
Gibson. I think that he laid out, at least has laid out a

639
00:39:49.454 –> 00:39:53.046
cautionary tale here. When I got to the end of Neuromancer,

640
00:39:53.383 –> 00:39:56.922
I didn’t feel good. When I got to the end of Neuromancer, I was like,

641
00:40:00.770 –> 00:40:03.465
what the hell am I supposed to take from that? And it took me a

642
00:40:03.610 –> 00:40:07.339
while to sort of get on, get on the idea

643
00:40:07.339 –> 00:40:11.126
that I’m on today. Mm-hmm. Because it was the only conclusion I

644
00:40:11.126 –> 00:40:14.677
could come to because otherwise Neuromancer is the kind of book,

645
00:40:15.544 –> 00:40:19.191
again, reading it in 2026, not reading it in

646
00:40:19.191 –> 00:40:22.958
1986. Not reading it even in 1996,

647
00:40:23.423 –> 00:40:27.257
reading it in 2026. Yeah. This is the kind of

648
00:40:27.353 –> 00:40:30.256
book that lands, again, for me,

649
00:40:31.363 –> 00:40:34.122
flat and cold, and will go right back on my shelf and I’ll never open

650
00:40:34.122 –> 00:40:37.089
it again because I don’t need to. I’m in it.

651
00:40:38.019 –> 00:40:41.356
Give me something I can use, Bill. But you

652
00:40:41.468 –> 00:40:44.949
couldn’t. You couldn’t because you wrote it in 1984 and you’re not going to go

653
00:40:44.949 –> 00:40:48.349
back and revisit it. I get it. Absolutely. I understand. It’s like asking

654
00:40:48.847 –> 00:40:52.121
I picked on Picasso. Let me pick on somebody else. It’s like asking Jackson

655
00:40:52.217 –> 00:40:56.021
Pollock to, like, not paint with house paint on, like, canvas anymore. Like,

656
00:40:56.406 –> 00:41:00.129
paint something else, Jackson, right? Okay, Jackson Pollock’s not gonna do that.

657
00:41:00.563 –> 00:41:03.773
I don’t have the expectation that William Gibson will. This is one of those books

658
00:41:03.773 –> 00:41:07.448
to me, and this is again why I’m surprised by the Apple TV show being

659
00:41:07.480 –> 00:41:11.252
done now. This is one of those books that’s frozen in time to me.

660
00:41:12.118 –> 00:41:15.942
Oh. Like, there are certain books that are just like Frozen in time. So

661
00:41:16.184 –> 00:41:19.989
you and I did Ben-Hur. Yeah. I think that

662
00:41:19.989 –> 00:41:23.715
the themes in Ben-Hur are going to be applicable

663
00:41:23.715 –> 00:41:27.557
across time. Now, will people cotton

664
00:41:27.751 –> 00:41:30.763
to those or pick the same things up from those themes across time?

665
00:41:31.792 –> 00:41:34.685
No. Neuromancer,

666
00:41:36.453 –> 00:41:38.847
I’m not quite sure that people in 100 years are going to be reading this

667
00:41:38.960 –> 00:41:42.560
book. But I’m pretty sure that people in 100 years will still be reading. It

668
00:41:42.560 –> 00:41:45.337
was easy for me to pick on Ben-Hur. Let me pick another one. I’m pretty

669
00:41:45.353 –> 00:41:48.418
sure that people in 100 years will still be reading Shakespeare. And everybody goes, oh,

670
00:41:48.499 –> 00:41:51.035
well, yeah, because it’s Shakespeare. Don’t dismiss that.

671
00:41:52.174 –> 00:41:55.786
That’s actually really hyper important. And I’m not saying that every single

672
00:41:55.866 –> 00:41:59.509
author that we bring on here was writing books for perpetuity. Mm-hmm. But I am

673
00:41:59.509 –> 00:42:03.185
saying that some books, just like some movies, for

674
00:42:03.185 –> 00:42:07.021
instance, Casablanca. Casablanca is a movie that can never, can

675
00:42:07.118 –> 00:42:10.614
never actually be remade. Never. It’s frozen in time.

676
00:42:12.050 –> 00:42:15.198
It is so hyper-specific, that movie. It is so

677
00:42:15.198 –> 00:42:19.039
hyper-specific that, that subject matter, Humphrey Bogart, all

678
00:42:19.087 –> 00:42:22.874
of it, it’s so hyper-specific to that time. You can’t go back and remake

679
00:42:22.874 –> 00:42:26.193
that movie. Another movie that can’t be remade, although someone will try,

680
00:42:26.661 –> 00:42:29.839
is The Godfather. That also, that movie is frozen in time.

681
00:42:31.081 –> 00:42:33.921
By the way, just as a, as a side note on our other project, I

682
00:42:33.921 –> 00:42:36.427
actually went home and I realized, oh my God, I do have a copy of

683
00:42:36.427 –> 00:42:39.840
Godfather. Sitting right there on my shelf. I just never look on that

684
00:42:39.840 –> 00:42:42.910
shelf. We’re gonna have to get another one. Actually, we are good.

685
00:42:44.740 –> 00:42:47.280
But like, so there are certain things, there are certain types of art that are

686
00:42:47.280 –> 00:42:50.740
frozen in time, and that’s okay. And I

687
00:42:50.740 –> 00:42:54.180
gotta— okay, I have a bone to pick with you though. Yeah, go ahead.

688
00:42:54.400 –> 00:42:58.040
Okay. I’m only as good as my sparring partners, so go ahead. That’s

689
00:42:58.040 –> 00:43:01.780
fair. Let’s go, baby. I’m gonna try to be the best sparring partner you

690
00:43:01.780 –> 00:43:04.998
can have then. Okay. Because here’s the thing, you read

691
00:43:05.206 –> 00:43:09.054
non-business books to look for business themes to apply for business. Okay. I

692
00:43:09.054 –> 00:43:12.580
do. And you’re telling me that this book doesn’t have any themes that are themes

693
00:43:12.580 –> 00:43:16.428
that are going to stand the test of time, right? Let’s look at

694
00:43:16.749 –> 00:43:20.404
the over-indexation on tools. Let’s

695
00:43:20.420 –> 00:43:24.043
look at the over-indexation on our plan is the right plan. And as long as

696
00:43:24.043 –> 00:43:26.832
we stay in power, everything is going to be okay because like we know what

697
00:43:26.848 –> 00:43:30.698
we’re doing. Let’s talk about the, the, the coping

698
00:43:30.698 –> 00:43:34.548
mechanisms, right, of like how, how just culture

699
00:43:34.548 –> 00:43:38.238
can get super weird in the body modification culture that

700
00:43:38.238 –> 00:43:42.057
talks about in that book of like chasing ideals of perfection

701
00:43:42.169 –> 00:43:45.955
that like, you know, to me there’s like— it would be

702
00:43:45.955 –> 00:43:49.549
super easy to read the book, in my opinion, and be like, ah, I

703
00:43:49.549 –> 00:43:53.239
hate this because I’m living in it. Okay, cool. I can respect that.

704
00:43:53.720 –> 00:43:57.555
But The idea that, like, and I’m

705
00:43:57.555 –> 00:44:01.135
just arguing about this one thing, that this book won’t be here in 100 years

706
00:44:01.232 –> 00:44:04.891
because it’s not deep enough, big

707
00:44:04.891 –> 00:44:08.485
enough, enough to me, I’m like, well,

708
00:44:10.738 –> 00:44:14.542
I think if it’s made it this far, I think I’d bet the other way.

709
00:44:15.509 –> 00:44:19.297
Okay. Personally, because I think we can, I

710
00:44:19.474 –> 00:44:22.500
mean, I, you know, we talked about being kind of like

711
00:44:22.500 –> 00:44:26.300
devil’s advocate, right? And professional red team. I could argue that

712
00:44:26.300 –> 00:44:29.780
any book we have read probably shouldn’t be in the topic or

713
00:44:29.780 –> 00:44:33.500
in the tapestry of our culture and stuff like this. Like, 2

714
00:44:33.500 –> 00:44:37.040
people have come up to me since we did Ben-Hur, right? And

715
00:44:37.040 –> 00:44:40.780
they’re like, oh my God, how did you make it through this book, dude? And

716
00:44:40.780 –> 00:44:44.020
I’m like, oh, you having fun? You know? And they’re like, I

717
00:44:44.020 –> 00:44:47.700
mean, Jon, you’re not even a super religious person and you read this book. Right.

718
00:44:47.700 –> 00:44:49.860
So I was like, if Jon can read it. And I’m like, oh, I’m like,

719
00:44:49.860 –> 00:44:53.394
you know, you forgot the other part I’m actually a reader. Like, I

720
00:44:53.634 –> 00:44:57.463
do the work, right? I don’t have to like it to read it, you know,

721
00:44:57.479 –> 00:45:01.116
kind of situation. Right. And so it’s, it’s,

722
00:45:01.389 –> 00:45:05.154
it’s very interesting to me around this idea that like, because we are

723
00:45:05.154 –> 00:45:08.839
living in this version, right, or a version of it that is not super

724
00:45:08.935 –> 00:45:12.716
great, right? And we can see it here. Like, I don’t know, man.

725
00:45:12.780 –> 00:45:16.225
Like, to me, that makes it that it should stand out more. It should be

726
00:45:16.225 –> 00:45:19.413
a word of warning. It should be required reading. It should be a thing that

727
00:45:19.413 –> 00:45:22.563
everybody is reading. So that way, like, hey, Look what happened when we had a

728
00:45:22.563 –> 00:45:25.871
generation of guys that all thought they were too smart to be

729
00:45:25.871 –> 00:45:29.711
corrupted, read a book like this, and now look what’s happening, right?

730
00:45:29.760 –> 00:45:32.744
Like, I mean, it should be a warning more than anything else.

731
00:45:35.841 –> 00:45:39.374
So let’s pick up another section from the book. Let’s do that. So let’s, I

732
00:45:39.374 –> 00:45:42.663
don’t know, let’s see. Let’s go to,

733
00:45:44.065 –> 00:45:47.634
so I want to, there’s another point I want to bring up. Part 2, maybe.

734
00:45:49.178 –> 00:45:51.348
Okay. Let’s pick up something in Part 2.

735
00:45:56.155 –> 00:45:58.775
Pick anything. The parts in this book, as I was

736
00:45:59.530 –> 00:46:03.244
reading through it this time and how he parsed things and how

737
00:46:03.308 –> 00:46:06.153
he separated them, right? So Part 2, The Shopping

738
00:46:06.250 –> 00:46:09.870
Expedition. This to me was probably

739
00:46:10.047 –> 00:46:13.829
the most confusing part of it, right? Because it seems

740
00:46:13.829 –> 00:46:17.472
like he’s trying to force like a version of our

741
00:46:17.472 –> 00:46:21.287
normal geography into this future version of it. And

742
00:46:21.319 –> 00:46:24.990
it felt like a big freaking slog, if I’m being honest,

743
00:46:25.150 –> 00:46:28.805
right? Because he’s like, he’s trying to make transportation more effortless.

744
00:46:29.382 –> 00:46:32.764
And so you can go from Boston down to Atlanta and it’s just like a

745
00:46:32.764 –> 00:46:36.323
hop, skip. And I’m like, like, I couldn’t go with him on that stuff, right?

746
00:46:36.371 –> 00:46:39.224
Right. Because that, because that is the other interesting part of this is about reading

747
00:46:39.256 –> 00:46:42.911
science fiction out of time. You’re like, nope, still haven’t figured that out.

748
00:46:43.168 –> 00:46:46.390
Look how dumb you were, right?

749
00:46:48.613 –> 00:46:52.027
Again, I still have to load the dishwasher by hand, Bill. Yep.

750
00:46:53.128 –> 00:46:56.542
And I love, I love that, I love that you and the venerable William Gibson

751
00:46:56.542 –> 00:46:59.376
are close enough you can just call him Bill. Like, I love, I love that

752
00:46:59.376 –> 00:47:03.123
you guys are just on a first name basis about that. Let’s

753
00:47:03.123 –> 00:47:06.863
see here. That is gonna be

754
00:47:07.254 –> 00:47:10.249
way too in the weeds. But hold on a second. There was a part in

755
00:47:10.346 –> 00:47:11.388
here that I thought was interesting.

756
00:47:14.304 –> 00:47:17.948
Got it. Yeah, I think that this will be interesting to read.

757
00:47:18.306 –> 00:47:21.247
Let’s go into this. Okay, you ready? All right.

758
00:47:22.311 –> 00:47:25.664
So picking up in the second part of this book, right, this

759
00:47:26.003 –> 00:47:29.677
part I thought was interesting. Once they entered the bazaar,

760
00:47:30.048 –> 00:47:33.815
the Finn brightened noticeably as though he were comforted

761
00:47:33.815 –> 00:47:37.470
by the crowd density and the sense of enclosure. They walked with

762
00:47:37.760 –> 00:47:41.392
the Armenian along a broad concourse beneath soot-stained sheets of plastic and

763
00:47:41.392 –> 00:47:44.830
green-painted ironwork out of the age of steel. steam.

764
00:47:45.521 –> 00:47:49.101
A thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered. Hey,

765
00:47:49.118 –> 00:47:52.811
Christ, the Finn said, taking Case’s arm. Look at that. He

766
00:47:52.811 –> 00:47:55.653
pointed. It’s a horse, man. You ever see a horse?

767
00:47:56.344 –> 00:48:00.165
Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was

768
00:48:00.181 –> 00:48:03.971
displayed on a sort of pedestal near the entrance to a place that sold birds

769
00:48:03.971 –> 00:48:07.488
and monkeys. The thing’s legs had been worn black and

770
00:48:07.488 –> 00:48:11.181
hairless by decades of passing hands. Saw one in Maryland

771
00:48:11.261 –> 00:48:14.614
once, the Finn said. And that was a good 3 years after the

772
00:48:14.614 –> 00:48:17.944
pandemic. There’s Arabs still trying to code them up from the

773
00:48:17.944 –> 00:48:19.731
DNA, but they always croak.

774
00:48:22.446 –> 00:48:26.085
Right? Like, the idea that, like, a

775
00:48:26.085 –> 00:48:29.627
horse is such, like, a rare instance,

776
00:48:29.965 –> 00:48:33.446
right? Yes. And, you know, the concept that they’re talking about a

777
00:48:33.495 –> 00:48:37.109
pandemic and that things were significantly different

778
00:48:37.109 –> 00:48:40.353
after that and stuff like that, which is kind of, like, interesting. But, like, this

779
00:48:40.353 –> 00:48:42.606
idea that, like, I love when a book can take a thing

780
00:48:43.963 –> 00:48:47.775
like that, that is so like, I mean, I’m from Texas. You live

781
00:48:47.775 –> 00:48:51.038
in Texas, right? Horses are everywhere, right? When I tell people that I’ve never ridden

782
00:48:51.070 –> 00:48:54.746
a horse and they’re from Texas, I get weird

783
00:48:54.778 –> 00:48:57.967
looks, right? Yeah. I’ve never ridden a horse, right? So like, it’s just part of

784
00:48:58.724 –> 00:49:02.538
the culture, right? So the idea that like you would only ever never see one

785
00:49:02.587 –> 00:49:06.090
outside of a museum, never see one not embalmed, was kind of like a very

786
00:49:06.926 –> 00:49:10.269
interesting attempt to build the world.

787
00:49:10.790 –> 00:49:14.554
Right? Because this is the thing I really appreciate about, like, really great

788
00:49:14.602 –> 00:49:17.224
writing is the world building is—

789
00:49:19.412 –> 00:49:23.078
you don’t have to do it. Right. Right? So the idea that you’re

790
00:49:23.078 –> 00:49:26.723
choosing to do it, I wonder, I wonder how

791
00:49:26.787 –> 00:49:30.218
long he had to sit and kind of think about, like, how do I really

792
00:49:30.218 –> 00:49:34.052
seal how far ahead this is? Oh, a dead horse, right? Like, to

793
00:49:34.052 –> 00:49:37.865
me, that is very fascinating because I mean, with a,

794
00:49:37.996 –> 00:49:40.793
with a book like this, and there’s so much content and there’s so many ideas

795
00:49:40.793 –> 00:49:44.512
and everything, he didn’t have to go into the worldbuilding the way that he

796
00:49:44.512 –> 00:49:48.129
did, right? So the choice to do so, I think, is really interesting.

797
00:49:49.117 –> 00:49:52.607
Well, it’s interesting. So I’m always fascinated, and this is sort of a

798
00:49:52.607 –> 00:49:56.451
Minority Report idea. I kind of brought it up

799
00:49:56.451 –> 00:49:59.967
earlier with, with sort of his opposition to, to religious

800
00:50:00.080 –> 00:50:01.499
themes and to religion. Okay.

801
00:50:04.376 –> 00:50:08.103
I find it interesting what the writer leaves or what the, what the person, the

802
00:50:08.151 –> 00:50:11.509
artist leaves in and what the artist,

803
00:50:12.489 –> 00:50:15.284
you know, ignores, right? So I was kind of thinking a little bit about this

804
00:50:15.300 –> 00:50:19.107
this weekend, a different kind of context, but it works for this. So when you

805
00:50:19.107 –> 00:50:22.770
think about sort of the sci-fi that’s at, or the fantasy

806
00:50:23.107 –> 00:50:25.758
that’s at the top of the mountain, right? So

807
00:50:26.561 –> 00:50:29.597
Tolkien, please, let’s, let’s just be real. Okay,

808
00:50:30.256 –> 00:50:33.515
everybody, even Stephen King said this. Everybody is

809
00:50:34.334 –> 00:50:36.919
trying to climb to the top of the hill, top of the mountain to take

810
00:50:36.919 –> 00:50:40.708
on Tolkien because Tolkien as a

811
00:50:40.756 –> 00:50:43.084
linguist understood at a deep level,

812
00:50:43.967 –> 00:50:47.403
as a philology professor, sorry, and a linguist

813
00:50:47.820 –> 00:50:49.875
understood at a very deep level how

814
00:50:51.224 –> 00:50:55.029
myths and language and ideas all click together in a hierarchy.

815
00:50:55.776 –> 00:50:59.370
And then from there, everything else spreads out like a tree with just multiple

816
00:50:59.370 –> 00:51:02.935
branches, and you could just keep going and going and going. That’s why, you know,

817
00:51:03.032 –> 00:51:06.678
Tolkien was working on Lord of the Rings for his entire life.

818
00:51:06.984 –> 00:51:09.759
Like, that was the whole thing. He didn’t need anything else, right?

819
00:51:11.830 –> 00:51:14.969
Yeah. That is fundamentally, though, intimidating

820
00:51:16.530 –> 00:51:20.330
if you’re a writer like Stephen King, right? Like, I’m, I’m a huge fan of

821
00:51:20.330 –> 00:51:23.717
the Dark Tower series. I think that that’s That’s one of the, one of the

822
00:51:23.749 –> 00:51:27.558
things that he actually has done, done well. But even the Dark Tower

823
00:51:27.558 –> 00:51:30.828
series, even the Dark

824
00:51:31.220 –> 00:51:34.370
Tower— I’m not going to go down Stephen King road. Please, somebody,

825
00:51:35.230 –> 00:51:38.632
somebody— I’m going to whisper this very softly to the internet. Somebody take away his

826
00:51:38.665 –> 00:51:42.148
cell phone and stop him from tweeting, please. Somebody.

827
00:51:42.797 –> 00:51:45.619
We did not really— I’ve not seen his tweets. Oh, Lord. We did not really

828
00:51:45.619 –> 00:51:49.318
need to know what was in that man’s mind anyway. The books are enough, Stephen.

829
00:51:49.478 –> 00:51:51.874
Really? We got it. Thank you. But like for Dark Tower,

830
00:51:51.906 –> 00:51:55.418
even like that book, that book

831
00:51:55.418 –> 00:51:58.921
series sort of starts to peter out right around with Song of

832
00:51:58.921 –> 00:52:02.681
Susanna, book 4. And then he, he’s like, I have to finish

833
00:52:02.793 –> 00:52:06.569
it. And so he’s like pushing it, right? But the world building has stopped, right?

834
00:52:06.891 –> 00:52:10.731
But he needed multiple volumes to get there. Or the example that

835
00:52:10.731 –> 00:52:14.379
proves the rule, and we haven’t talked about this guy on this show

836
00:52:14.507 –> 00:52:18.284
ever up until now, which is kind of surprising, um, George

837
00:52:18.284 –> 00:52:21.793
R.R. Martin. Like Game of Thrones will never,

838
00:52:21.922 –> 00:52:25.434
ever be done. The worst thing that ever happened to him was

839
00:52:25.466 –> 00:52:29.284
HBO. Like it just was. On

840
00:52:29.284 –> 00:52:32.886
the one hand, sure, you got famous and more people read the books. But then

841
00:52:32.886 –> 00:52:36.199
on the other hand, what is it? Song of Fire and Ice will never be

842
00:52:36.199 –> 00:52:39.570
done. The world building’s over because the

843
00:52:39.570 –> 00:52:42.703
visuals came in. And this is the, this is the thing of a movie. Oh

844
00:52:42.703 –> 00:52:46.382
yeah. The visuals came in and killed it for you. Now, as a writer,

845
00:52:46.463 –> 00:52:50.251
you’re stuck. Because how do you overcome those visuals that are already all in everybody’s

846
00:52:50.251 –> 00:52:52.929
brain? Dude, oh my gosh. Okay, so

847
00:52:54.946 –> 00:52:58.379
reading this, this time I had this moment of feeling

848
00:52:58.508 –> 00:53:01.889
so like— because the thing I was looking forward to

849
00:53:02.355 –> 00:53:05.833
was like getting back into how they talk about

850
00:53:05.833 –> 00:53:08.983
cyberspace and the concept of ICE and, you know,

851
00:53:09.291 –> 00:53:13.140
viruses and how, how they interface with it and everything. Because

852
00:53:13.156 –> 00:53:16.970
like as a kid reading this, I thought it did a

853
00:53:16.970 –> 00:53:20.532
beautiful job about building that world. Now

854
00:53:21.142 –> 00:53:24.608
reading it this time, I was kind of— I was like, man, where’s the depth?

855
00:53:24.672 –> 00:53:27.881
Where’s this thing? And I had just enough presence of mind to be like,

856
00:53:28.443 –> 00:53:31.893
I wonder if I can appreciate this because this was a

857
00:53:32.053 –> 00:53:35.728
version of the internet and I’m used to our current version of the

858
00:53:35.728 –> 00:53:39.547
internet and stuff like this. And so this just feels, you know, a

859
00:53:39.595 –> 00:53:43.410
bridge too far, a bridge to nowhere kind of thing. is where I

860
00:53:43.410 –> 00:53:46.530
was thinking about that. But I had this very specific kind

861
00:53:46.530 –> 00:53:50.170
of like idea of being let down about that

862
00:53:50.170 –> 00:53:53.370
side of it. And honestly, you

863
00:53:53.370 –> 00:53:56.170
know, as I was reading this, I was like, man, I want to go back

864
00:53:56.170 –> 00:53:58.870
and I’m going to rewatch like Hackers because it’s been a very long time since

865
00:53:58.870 –> 00:54:01.690
I watched Hackers. And now after finishing it, I’m like, I don’t think I want

866
00:54:01.690 –> 00:54:04.050
to go back and watch that movie, right? Because like, I don’t think any of

867
00:54:04.050 –> 00:54:07.810
the cyber stuff, the computer stuff, the technical stuff, it’d be like going back

868
00:54:07.810 –> 00:54:11.410
and watching like Tron now, right? Like, I mean,

869
00:54:11.410 –> 00:54:15.070
The Matrix doesn’t hold up, and I loved that movie. It just doesn’t

870
00:54:15.070 –> 00:54:18.390
hold up. It still does for me. It doesn’t hold up for me, dude. Like,

871
00:54:18.390 –> 00:54:21.520
I— like, it might be more in the realm of nostalgia.

872
00:54:22.190 –> 00:54:25.510
Maybe I’ll grant you that. I mean, so for me, the movie that holds up

873
00:54:25.510 –> 00:54:28.580
that was also released the same year, which everybody forgets, this is Fight Club.

874
00:54:29.210 –> 00:54:32.910
Fight Club holds up, and Fight Club holds up for a whole variety of different

875
00:54:32.910 –> 00:54:36.385
reasons. In The Matrix, it’s comparing apples and oranges. Yeah. And yet They

876
00:54:36.593 –> 00:54:39.964
both came out in that year. Also, by the way, American Beauty, another movie that

877
00:54:39.964 –> 00:54:43.382
doesn’t hold up, came out in that year. Right? So you have

878
00:54:43.655 –> 00:54:47.106
American Beauty, which won a bunch of Oscars and everybody loved it.

879
00:54:47.427 –> 00:54:50.798
Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening doesn’t hold up. Like the

880
00:54:51.359 –> 00:54:55.195
themes in that movie, every— you can’t make that movie

881
00:54:55.195 –> 00:54:58.983
now. You know, the old guy who quits and then like he’s hitting on

882
00:54:58.983 –> 00:55:01.567
the little girl and you forget it. You can’t make that movie now. Yeah.

883
00:55:02.657 –> 00:55:06.422
Fight Club, weirdly enough, holds up because— I don’t think you

884
00:55:06.422 –> 00:55:09.706
could make that movie now. I think you would have to make— I think you’d

885
00:55:09.706 –> 00:55:13.502
have to make like a, like a such a— because like, to me,

886
00:55:13.967 –> 00:55:17.748
the beauty of that movie is the juxtaposition, right? Reading the book

887
00:55:18.228 –> 00:55:21.096
is tough. Oh, reading the book is hard. Oh yeah. Yeah, reading the book is

888
00:55:21.240 –> 00:55:24.957
really, really, really tough. I don’t, I don’t suggest that for most people. But like

889
00:55:25.085 –> 00:55:28.465
reading the— or I’m sorry, watching the movie, the thing about it is you get

890
00:55:28.465 –> 00:55:31.910
to see the juxtaposition and like that kind of seals it at the end. If

891
00:55:31.910 –> 00:55:35.408
they were going to make that now, The Tyler Durden version of

892
00:55:35.440 –> 00:55:37.608
today would be such a

893
00:55:38.733 –> 00:55:41.833
caricature. He’d be Andrew Tate, basically.

894
00:55:42.588 –> 00:55:46.362
Times 10. Like, times 10. Like, Grant Cardone, Andrew Tate come

895
00:55:46.362 –> 00:55:49.960
together, they have offspring. That, that’s what that would be. It would be a

896
00:55:49.976 –> 00:55:53.751
nightmare. Oh my God. Which is one of those reasons why I say

897
00:55:54.217 –> 00:55:57.911
Fight Club holds up, but because of the internet and because we

898
00:55:57.927 –> 00:56:01.170
live after 9/11, think about the last scene in the movie,

899
00:56:01.685 –> 00:56:05.421
there’s all kinds of disjunctions in with that. Mm-hmm. Matrix,

900
00:56:06.693 –> 00:56:10.478
for me anyway, this is, this is my, this is my mileage, right? For me,

901
00:56:10.607 –> 00:56:13.621
I go back, like, I watch— I think I watched it like, uh, maybe 3

902
00:56:13.621 –> 00:56:17.313
or 4 months ago again, and I barely got through half

903
00:56:17.313 –> 00:56:21.156
of it because I was like, okay, the martial arts stuff is cool

904
00:56:21.156 –> 00:56:24.683
because I’m a martial arts guy just like you, but like, after that

905
00:56:27.282 –> 00:56:31.039
Like you, so, so here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. The guy who was,

906
00:56:31.298 –> 00:56:34.796
who was, who was pulled out of the internet, the— Cypher. Cypher, right?

907
00:56:35.363 –> 00:56:39.051
The, the, and I’m not the original, the originator of this

908
00:56:39.149 –> 00:56:42.787
idea. The point of The

909
00:56:42.787 –> 00:56:46.477
Matrix, just like the point, weirdly enough, I think of Neuromancer, because look at

910
00:56:46.509 –> 00:56:49.752
where we get to at the end of Neuromancer. At the end of Neuromancer, Case

911
00:56:49.769 –> 00:56:53.503
is not trying to live in the real world. Case is trying to get back

912
00:56:53.503 –> 00:56:57.095
into the machine. Same thing with The

913
00:56:57.127 –> 00:57:00.886
Matrix. And I heard that this is in the 4th movie that they just

914
00:57:00.886 –> 00:57:03.907
released like a couple of years ago, which I will not touch. I will not

915
00:57:03.955 –> 00:57:06.597
go back and I won’t watch that at all. I don’t, I don’t want to

916
00:57:06.597 –> 00:57:09.297
watch it. I didn’t know there was a 4th. I don’t think— Oh yeah, yeah,

917
00:57:09.507 –> 00:57:13.049
with Keanu Reeves. And they dug up Carrie-Anne Moss from somewhere. She still looks good.

918
00:57:14.204 –> 00:57:17.706
But she does. She looks good. Like, she looks good. He looks good. They don’t

919
00:57:17.706 –> 00:57:21.247
look old. Like, it’s amazing. Right? Um, they look

920
00:57:21.247 –> 00:57:24.958
exactly the same as they did in 1999, which is shocking. Um,

921
00:57:25.506 –> 00:57:29.120
but the thing with The Matrix is— the original Matrix is

922
00:57:29.799 –> 00:57:33.584
just like with Cypher. Who

923
00:57:33.730 –> 00:57:37.300
really wants to be in the real world eating sludge at the bottom of an

924
00:57:37.300 –> 00:57:41.096
abyss in a burned-out planet? That’s why Cypher

925
00:57:41.564 –> 00:57:45.243
wants to get back into The Matrix. Wait, what? wants to

926
00:57:45.307 –> 00:57:49.139
go back into the matrix. Case wants to go back into the matrix because

927
00:57:49.733 –> 00:57:52.683
in the section, I believe it’s not the shopping expedition, but this is a good

928
00:57:52.683 –> 00:57:56.468
example. In the shopping expedition where he goes and looks at the horse, the

929
00:57:56.468 –> 00:58:00.284
horse doesn’t have any meaning for him. The real world has

930
00:58:00.396 –> 00:58:04.117
no meaning. And I think that’s just another interesting point that Gibson put in there

931
00:58:04.325 –> 00:58:08.061
and the why he focused on the horse, because that example of natural beauty,

932
00:58:08.799 –> 00:58:12.505
just like when he goes to the vacation spot. And all these kids are

933
00:58:12.505 –> 00:58:16.187
jumping off and it’s not real or it’s partially real, but not fully real.

934
00:58:16.685 –> 00:58:20.110
Like there’s no connection to actual reality

935
00:58:20.142 –> 00:58:23.890
because, and this is not a knock on either Case or

936
00:58:23.938 –> 00:58:27.589
Cypher. I think they’re correct. The real world

937
00:58:27.589 –> 00:58:30.356
sucks. The Matrix is better.

938
00:58:32.069 –> 00:58:35.092
And that is the thing we’re struggling with now with the internet.

939
00:58:35.867 –> 00:58:39.563
The internet is better. Outside of

940
00:58:39.563 –> 00:58:43.378
the internet, I wrote a blog post one time. You have the problem

941
00:58:43.378 –> 00:58:47.196
of poopy people. You have to deal with your body.

942
00:58:49.590 –> 00:58:53.298
You have to deal with your obsessions and your appetites. You have to deal with

943
00:58:53.298 –> 00:58:57.114
consequences. You have to have conversations with people who, I mean,

944
00:58:57.470 –> 00:59:01.093
we’re going back and forth. We’re sparring partners, but like the conversations you have with

945
00:59:01.093 –> 00:59:04.925
people in your family who don’t accept your identity or, or don’t understand you.

946
00:59:06.065 –> 00:59:09.324
Like, we have all of this out here in the real world. And so of

947
00:59:09.356 –> 00:59:12.616
course people jack into the internet via their phones,

948
00:59:13.113 –> 00:59:16.902
via their devices. Of course they do. And now this goes back,

949
00:59:16.967 –> 00:59:20.194
of course, to what I’m— the point I made at the beginning with the 4-year-old

950
00:59:20.194 –> 00:59:23.341
with the tablet. And we’re getting younger and younger people in there.

951
00:59:24.288 –> 00:59:27.981
I mean, a 4-year-old with a tablet? Dear God. Like, I remember going

952
00:59:28.045 –> 00:59:31.512
to Disney World years and years and years ago, and I’m on the train. there

953
00:59:31.512 –> 00:59:35.184
with my kids. And I’m looking at everybody on the train

954
00:59:35.345 –> 00:59:39.129
in Disney World and all of the little 3 and 4-year-olds

955
00:59:39.129 –> 00:59:42.576
are on there on iPhones. And I looked at my wife and I went,

956
00:59:43.458 –> 00:59:47.242
this is not good. This is not, this, this, this is

957
00:59:47.290 –> 00:59:50.769
not going to have a good outcome. And this was years ago. Now those 3

958
00:59:50.769 –> 00:59:54.473
and 4-year-olds are now 18, 19, and 20. Oh

959
00:59:54.585 –> 00:59:58.417
yeah. Full on phone addictions. Full on phone addiction, full

960
00:59:58.513 –> 01:00:02.071
on in the internet. Because the internet is better.

961
01:00:02.921 –> 01:00:05.997
It’s better than the real world, even though

962
01:00:06.782 –> 01:00:10.580
both cases point. And what does Cypher say in The Matrix? I

963
01:00:10.628 –> 01:00:14.346
know this steak isn’t real. I know this wine isn’t real

964
01:00:15.035 –> 01:00:18.688
and I don’t care. Yeah. That’s the thing. Ignorance is

965
01:00:18.720 –> 01:00:22.053
bliss. That’s the thing we are, we’re, we’re struggling

966
01:00:22.502 –> 01:00:26.075
to overcome and we don’t have a compelling, I’m going to use a big religious

967
01:00:26.091 –> 01:00:29.891
word here. We don’t have a compelling eschatology or

968
01:00:29.891 –> 01:00:33.323
theology of reality for people

969
01:00:33.922 –> 01:00:37.157
for whom the Matrix, for whom the internet, for whom all of that is better.

970
01:00:37.238 –> 01:00:39.803
We just don’t have a compelling one because we never thought we would have to

971
01:00:39.803 –> 01:00:43.207
develop one until something came along that

972
01:00:43.207 –> 01:00:46.854
competed at a better level. And by the way, this is even before AI.

973
01:00:48.435 –> 01:00:52.116
Oh boy. Oh boy. Some of the things I’ve seen with AI, some of the

974
01:00:52.116 –> 01:00:55.874
things you’ve seen with AI, And this is the

975
01:00:55.890 –> 01:00:58.330
thing we’re all worried about, but we don’t know how to wrap our arms around

976
01:00:58.394 –> 01:01:01.845
it and get a solution. And by the way, Gibson doesn’t offer a solution either.

977
01:01:01.925 –> 01:01:05.039
He just says— and neither does The Matrix,

978
01:01:05.600 –> 01:01:08.698
neither does any of science fiction. They just go, well, here’s your options,

979
01:01:10.094 –> 01:01:13.850
and then sort of shrug our shoulders and walk away. Mm-hmm. I don’t think the

980
01:01:13.850 –> 01:01:17.044
shrugging our shoulders and walking away part

981
01:01:18.376 –> 01:01:21.955
is a good use of art at this moment.

982
01:01:22.614 –> 01:01:25.730
I think it’s a fine use of art at the moment he wrote that book.

983
01:01:26.148 –> 01:01:29.023
And that’s another reason why I don’t think it ages well, because I don’t think,

984
01:01:29.440 –> 01:01:32.798
I don’t think any Gen Zer who’s like 18 or 19 reading

985
01:01:32.798 –> 01:01:36.363
Neuromancer, if they’re going to read Neuromancer, or

986
01:01:36.508 –> 01:01:40.283
watching the Apple TV show, which is probably more likely than not, is going to

987
01:01:40.347 –> 01:01:43.431
go, oh, hey, there’s got to be a better solution for this. I think they’re

988
01:01:43.431 –> 01:01:47.093
going to go, yeah, of course it’s great. Like, what’s the critique here? I don’t

989
01:01:47.093 –> 01:01:50.941
understand. And so I think we’re in this

990
01:01:51.120 –> 01:01:54.866
weird cul-de-sac culturally and societally, mostly in

991
01:01:54.866 –> 01:01:58.287
America, where we don’t— we can create,

992
01:02:00.114 –> 01:02:03.539
we can clone Dolly the sheep, or we can create a genetically engineered

993
01:02:03.555 –> 01:02:06.337
horse, but we can’t give it any meaning

994
01:02:06.337 –> 01:02:10.056
for people who are looking for meaning.

995
01:02:11.044 –> 01:02:14.479
And that’s what Case is looking for. That’s what Cypher is looking for. Looking for

996
01:02:14.479 –> 01:02:17.206
meaning. Uh,

997
01:02:18.097 –> 01:02:19.263
interesting. So in—

998
01:02:21.984 –> 01:02:22.891
I don’t think,

999
01:02:27.244 –> 01:02:31.028
I don’t think the case for Cypher is looking for meaning personally, right? I think

1000
01:02:31.028 –> 01:02:34.811
Cypher, I think Cypher is looking for ease, right? And I,

1001
01:02:34.972 –> 01:02:37.708
and I think that that’s like, in my opinion, the bigger part of this thing,

1002
01:02:37.824 –> 01:02:41.667
right? The internet provides a great place to like not

1003
01:02:41.699 –> 01:02:45.520
deal with your own problems. Okay. Yeah. But before the internet— That’s what

1004
01:02:45.520 –> 01:02:49.147
makes it better. That’s part of what makes it better. There was sports, right?

1005
01:02:49.227 –> 01:02:52.742
Like you could, you know, there was family. There’s always been things of,

1006
01:02:53.401 –> 01:02:55.953
you know, not looking at the horror

1007
01:02:56.932 –> 01:02:59.981
and getting very fixated on the, on the things that you want to go do,

1008
01:03:00.078 –> 01:03:03.657
right? The internet is a version of that. And because it is so

1009
01:03:03.834 –> 01:03:06.883
wide and because there’s so many people that have a voice in it, there’s, I

1010
01:03:06.883 –> 01:03:10.680
would say, a lot more more of opportunity for it not to be aligned

1011
01:03:10.680 –> 01:03:14.415
with any one person’s ideas and thoughts and beliefs, right? But

1012
01:03:14.527 –> 01:03:17.183
like, like the thing I always go back to is like way back in the

1013
01:03:17.183 –> 01:03:18.937
day, uh,

1014
01:03:21.093 –> 01:03:24.599
and I, and I forget if it was, if it was

1015
01:03:24.713 –> 01:03:27.874
books or if it was chess, but it was one of these two things. And

1016
01:03:27.874 –> 01:03:31.441
they were, even that, they were looking for a reason to demonize it, to

1017
01:03:31.441 –> 01:03:35.178
say that it’s gonna, it’s gonna pull focus away. It’s going to make people

1018
01:03:35.306 –> 01:03:39.059
dumber, right? And like, you know, we’ve heard that about TV,

1019
01:03:39.075 –> 01:03:41.849
we’ve heard that about the internet, we’ve heard that about, about all of these things,

1020
01:03:41.881 –> 01:03:45.537
right? And what I, what I’m fascinated by is like the historical precedence, right?

1021
01:03:46.034 –> 01:03:49.867
Anything new, there’s a lot of room for people to just like hate on it,

1022
01:03:50.364 –> 01:03:53.347
cherry-pick things that make it bad, and to try to turn away from it and

1023
01:03:53.347 –> 01:03:55.977
everything. Like, and if we’re going to say that like books are going to make

1024
01:03:55.977 –> 01:03:58.960
you dumber or chess is going to make you dumb, like, let’s just, let’s just

1025
01:03:58.960 –> 01:04:02.735
call it for what it is. Right? Like most people don’t actually know

1026
01:04:02.751 –> 01:04:06.518
the impact of what they’re labeling as as positive or negative, and

1027
01:04:06.518 –> 01:04:09.496
this is why the look back I think is is so important. How are we

1028
01:04:09.496 –> 01:04:13.279
measuring any of these things? Right? So

1029
01:04:13.457 –> 01:04:16.436
okay, so I have a question for you. Sure. So here’s the question. Please.

1030
01:04:20.891 –> 01:04:23.466
How do we then

1031
01:04:25.105 –> 01:04:26.436
chart a course?

1032
01:04:30.528 –> 01:04:34.342
Hmm. Out, not necessarily even out of, how do

1033
01:04:34.342 –> 01:04:37.350
we chart a course of integration? There we go.

1034
01:04:38.002 –> 01:04:40.123
Because the technologies you’ve mentioned,

1035
01:04:41.935 –> 01:04:43.862
and I’ve said this before on the show, I want to be very clear. I

1036
01:04:43.862 –> 01:04:47.489
want to be very transparent, consistent, right? Want to be consistent and transparent.

1037
01:04:48.187 –> 01:04:51.771
I have said on this show, the same arguments we have about the internet as

1038
01:04:51.820 –> 01:04:55.658
a technology, Are the exact same things that medieval— same arguments that medieval

1039
01:04:55.658 –> 01:04:59.159
peasants were having in the 15th and 16th century about the book.

1040
01:05:00.235 –> 01:05:04.072
Except the outcome of that was, and we all get

1041
01:05:04.072 –> 01:05:07.203
head up about this, about there being the religious part, but it actually wasn’t the

1042
01:05:07.203 –> 01:05:10.976
religious part. What drove the religious, the religious

1043
01:05:11.041 –> 01:05:14.429
wars of the 16th and 17th century that, by the way, ultimately led to the

1044
01:05:14.429 –> 01:05:17.367
Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and then the Enlightenment ultimately.

1045
01:05:18.527 –> 01:05:21.837
which we’re all post-Enlightenment creatures now, all of us.

1046
01:05:23.135 –> 01:05:25.114
The technology that drove that was the book.

1047
01:05:26.970 –> 01:05:29.990
Without the book, Martin Luther doesn’t get anywhere.

1048
01:05:30.636 –> 01:05:33.916
Without the book, the Catholic Church doesn’t get threatened.

1049
01:05:35.030 –> 01:05:38.435
Without the book, hell, without the printing press, medieval

1050
01:05:38.451 –> 01:05:41.969
peasants are not freed from having to know Latin

1051
01:05:42.728 –> 01:05:46.340
and having to go talk to somebody about a book, which, by the way, if

1052
01:05:46.340 –> 01:05:49.689
you were a medieval peasant, the likelihood of you seeing a book in your

1053
01:05:49.689 –> 01:05:52.653
lifetime before the printing press, dead

1054
01:05:52.733 –> 01:05:56.258
minimal. What a beautiful reminder,

1055
01:05:56.498 –> 01:05:58.789
right? Because, like, my book collection is

1056
01:06:00.023 –> 01:06:03.852
astounding. Like, I had to redo my, like,

1057
01:06:03.868 –> 01:06:07.601
my particular, like, not even the main bookshelf, right? Like, I’ve got

1058
01:06:07.713 –> 01:06:11.126
mine for the books that my wife doesn’t want to display in

1059
01:06:11.254 –> 01:06:14.932
our big shared one. And I was redoing that and like,

1060
01:06:15.013 –> 01:06:18.178
man, I’m surrounded by all these books and like, I can’t even, I can’t even

1061
01:06:18.226 –> 01:06:22.037
fathom in existence that

1062
01:06:22.037 –> 01:06:25.646
like the ability to self-serve. Right. Right. And

1063
01:06:25.743 –> 01:06:28.642
to me, I think, I think this is the, I think this is the most

1064
01:06:28.642 –> 01:06:32.241
interesting thing because the coolest thing to me about the internet is

1065
01:06:32.338 –> 01:06:35.685
around like lanes of information exchange.

1066
01:06:35.994 –> 01:06:39.389
Right. I live in Fort Worth, Texas, and there’s this little bitty

1067
01:06:39.930 –> 01:06:43.400
area here, and it’s called White Settlement, right? And I hate the

1068
01:06:43.400 –> 01:06:47.000
name. I’ve always hated the name. It’s, you know, it’s every, you know, kind of

1069
01:06:47.000 –> 01:06:49.940
thing. But I think about— By the way, just as a side note before he

1070
01:06:49.940 –> 01:06:53.520
continues, there are a lot of Black people in White Settlement. Just— There

1071
01:06:53.520 –> 01:06:57.340
are, right? Yes, for sure. There are a lot. And I think they voted to

1072
01:06:57.340 –> 01:07:00.160
change the name like a few years ago. I heard this before when I moved

1073
01:07:00.160 –> 01:07:03.420
here, like they voted to change the name, and apparently everybody was like, no, we’re

1074
01:07:03.420 –> 01:07:07.120
just going to keep it. It’s fine. Yeah, I, I’ve never heard about that

1075
01:07:07.120 –> 01:07:09.620
part of it, right? But like, I’m, I’m just always thinking about, and not so

1076
01:07:09.620 –> 01:07:13.442
much in the name of it being white, I’m just thinking small town Texas. Yeah,

1077
01:07:13.458 –> 01:07:16.477
yeah, yeah. There’s, there’s one probably small

1078
01:07:17.055 –> 01:07:20.379
newspaper. Yeah, right. And it is going to

1079
01:07:20.427 –> 01:07:24.056
disseminate the ideas that it thinks are important. Absolutely.

1080
01:07:24.297 –> 01:07:26.898
Yeah. So if you’re only ever getting the Granbury Gazette,

1081
01:07:28.295 –> 01:07:31.313
right, all of your information is being filtered by someone who

1082
01:07:31.602 –> 01:07:34.653
thinks they know what’s best for you. Right.

1083
01:07:35.440 –> 01:07:38.151
And so what, what I for as much

1084
01:07:39.465 –> 01:07:42.429
garbage of the internet brings, right?

1085
01:07:43.631 –> 01:07:47.172
The idea that I can go find as true

1086
01:07:47.621 –> 01:07:50.489
of a source of information and education

1087
01:07:51.627 –> 01:07:55.457
that as I’m willing to put effort into going to go find is available,

1088
01:07:56.130 –> 01:07:59.975
right? Because like thinking about the

1089
01:08:00.119 –> 01:08:03.629
amount of control that some people would love to have on what

1090
01:08:03.725 –> 01:08:07.401
gets views and eyeballs and attention versus like, well,

1091
01:08:07.513 –> 01:08:10.243
hey, we’re not going to push this. We don’t want this on our platform at

1092
01:08:10.243 –> 01:08:13.711
all. And different things like that. And tied to like a, like a

1093
01:08:13.711 –> 01:08:17.356
non-internet era, right? Where I’m only reading the White Settlement

1094
01:08:18.255 –> 01:08:21.932
Tribune or something else like this, right? Sure. And you might be, you might

1095
01:08:21.948 –> 01:08:25.368
have to go be pretty highfalutin to get the New York Times on your, on

1096
01:08:25.400 –> 01:08:28.274
your front desk, right? To have any other source of news.

1097
01:08:30.153 –> 01:08:33.817
I love having the ability to choose,

1098
01:08:34.572 –> 01:08:37.946
right? Okay. So that again, that I want to wrap up my question. And my

1099
01:08:37.946 –> 01:08:40.116
core question to you is this. How do we

1100
01:08:41.321 –> 01:08:44.599
take that idea of integration of

1101
01:08:44.599 –> 01:08:48.182
technology that expands communication from the printing press

1102
01:08:48.793 –> 01:08:52.248
to books to radio to television?

1103
01:08:52.714 –> 01:08:56.203
All of these technologies we have eaten

1104
01:08:56.477 –> 01:09:00.327
basically as humans. And we’ve, we’ve integrated them for good or ill

1105
01:09:01.696 –> 01:09:05.056
into our existence. But

1106
01:09:06.269 –> 01:09:10.039
to get to that integration required, this is

1107
01:09:10.071 –> 01:09:13.843
where I look at the failure of leadership, to get to that integration required leadership.

1108
01:09:13.891 –> 01:09:17.687
It required people writing and talking about this intelligently. It required

1109
01:09:17.687 –> 01:09:21.175
obviously people experimenting, all these things happening all at once. And then like the

1110
01:09:21.175 –> 01:09:24.681
miasma works. It just all mashes together and it just works. Okay.

1111
01:09:26.395 –> 01:09:29.241
The Matrix movie couldn’t answer this question

1112
01:09:30.260 –> 01:09:31.602
other than going back into the Matrix.

1113
01:09:33.860 –> 01:09:37.708
Neuromancer can’t answer this question other than going

1114
01:09:37.756 –> 01:09:41.379
back into the Matrix. I don’t know that going back into the

1115
01:09:41.379 –> 01:09:44.648
Matrix is the full answer to integration. So I want to know from, from you,

1116
01:09:44.744 –> 01:09:47.852
what do you think the answer is for integration of this thing? Oh, God. Now

1117
01:09:47.981 –> 01:09:51.782
that we are 37 years post, actually

1118
01:09:51.814 –> 01:09:55.646
more than 37 years, but let’s go to Timothy Berners-Lee’s in 1989. We’re

1119
01:09:55.646 –> 01:09:58.868
37 years post turning on this, this new

1120
01:09:58.868 –> 01:10:02.299
technology that has, that seems to

1121
01:10:02.379 –> 01:10:05.970
have from some people’s perspective, and I have a lot of empathy for this

1122
01:10:06.306 –> 01:10:09.978
perspective, seems to have become so ubiquitous,

1123
01:10:10.507 –> 01:10:14.081
so iniquitous, so much noise and not any signal.

1124
01:10:14.723 –> 01:10:18.415
And by the way, No forgiveness, no ability to escape,

1125
01:10:18.897 –> 01:10:22.526
no ability to, to, to measure what’s real or

1126
01:10:22.526 –> 01:10:26.203
what’s not. And by the way, we’re going to layer another layer on top of

1127
01:10:26.203 –> 01:10:30.008
this of not knowing what’s real or what’s not. And we’re going to call

1128
01:10:30.072 –> 01:10:32.192
it all good. And we’re just going to say, well, you all figure it out.

1129
01:10:33.669 –> 01:10:37.410
What’s the leadership? What’s, what’s the lead? What’s the way to integrate this? That’s

1130
01:10:37.458 –> 01:10:40.975
my, that’s, that’s the question everybody’s asking, I guess. What’s the way to integrate this?

1131
01:10:41.953 –> 01:10:44.373
Well, I think it goes back to a thing we were talking about before we,

1132
01:10:44.662 –> 01:10:47.964
before we turned on the recording, right? Because I was asking you a question and

1133
01:10:47.964 –> 01:10:51.603
you were like, I don’t have any confidence in the group. I

1134
01:10:51.635 –> 01:10:55.258
will be fine. I can figure things out for myself, right?

1135
01:10:55.418 –> 01:10:59.233
Yeah. And I think that that’s the bigger kind of idea here. There’s always

1136
01:10:59.330 –> 01:11:03.145
gonna be people with other ideas, right? And this goes to the

1137
01:11:03.193 –> 01:11:05.726
other thing we were talking about a second ago. You need to go be clean

1138
01:11:05.822 –> 01:11:09.284
and clear enough on your own signal on what matters to you,

1139
01:11:09.525 –> 01:11:13.228
right? Like, you and I are both reading Seneca, right? I think

1140
01:11:13.228 –> 01:11:16.118
Seneca is the guy who talks about that the worst place to be before you

1141
01:11:16.118 –> 01:11:19.538
know who you are is in a crowd. Right. And the worst place to be

1142
01:11:19.554 –> 01:11:22.604
after you know who you are is in that crowd. It’s in that crowd. And

1143
01:11:22.604 –> 01:11:26.425
so I think it’s imperative on the individual to really go.

1144
01:11:27.340 –> 01:11:31.161
Now, this also means you have to go find time to disconnect from all these

1145
01:11:31.370 –> 01:11:34.501
things, right? Because one of the things that I did not appreciate is like how

1146
01:11:34.790 –> 01:11:38.482
easy it is to create, to shove

1147
01:11:38.482 –> 01:11:42.255
and load things into your day-to-day so that way you don’t have a break.

1148
01:11:42.737 –> 01:11:46.175
Right. Yeah. You get in the car, you listen to a podcast, you’re at work,

1149
01:11:46.191 –> 01:11:48.857
you’ve got your music on at lunch, you’re going to go eat and you’ll be

1150
01:11:48.857 –> 01:11:52.632
around other, other— like, where are you going to find the time

1151
01:11:52.632 –> 01:11:56.375
to figure out what the hell matters to you? Right. You’re always around all

1152
01:11:56.407 –> 01:11:59.394
these people and they’re, and they’re bludgeoning you and stuff like this. And even if

1153
01:11:59.443 –> 01:12:03.137
you’re in community, you might be being washed over with aspects of the

1154
01:12:03.137 –> 01:12:06.799
community message that don’t really appeal to you. But because you’re not spending any time

1155
01:12:06.912 –> 01:12:10.349
for yourself sitting in silence and solitude, reflecting on these ideas,

1156
01:12:10.704 –> 01:12:14.399
maybe journaling, you know, different things like this. You, you,

1157
01:12:14.496 –> 01:12:18.063
you have to take it all. You don’t have to take it all, right?

1158
01:12:18.515 –> 01:12:22.275
You can like the internet and hate billionaires, right? You can like aspects of AI

1159
01:12:22.323 –> 01:12:26.116
and think that there better be, or there needs to be better safeguards around it,

1160
01:12:26.261 –> 01:12:28.779
right? But the bigger concern for me is that,

1161
01:12:30.387 –> 01:12:33.880
and maybe this is a thing that I get to see because I’m getting older

1162
01:12:33.880 –> 01:12:37.678
and I’ve done this for myself, is like, I took a

1163
01:12:37.678 –> 01:12:41.291
lot of time during the pandemic, and I’m glad now that I was forced

1164
01:12:41.291 –> 01:12:44.759
away and everything, because, man, I don’t know that I would have made this shift.

1165
01:12:44.807 –> 01:12:48.484
I don’t know that I would have come to grips with

1166
01:12:48.838 –> 01:12:52.306
the things that matter to me and the peace that I think about

1167
01:12:52.450 –> 01:12:56.288
in my decisions, the way that they come to me, because it does take a

1168
01:12:56.288 –> 01:12:59.098
while, right? And in the beginning, like,

1169
01:13:00.383 –> 01:13:03.803
and looking back on that time, I didn’t, I didn’t

1170
01:13:04.172 –> 01:13:07.830
realize that I was not creating space to go figure out

1171
01:13:07.830 –> 01:13:11.310
things for myself and to sit with these ideas and figure out what matters to

1172
01:13:11.310 –> 01:13:15.030
me. It’s just always something to do, right? And smart

1173
01:13:15.030 –> 01:13:18.090
people are smart people and smart people have great ideas. And if they’re smart over

1174
01:13:18.090 –> 01:13:21.150
here, then they must be smart over here. And every martial artist who’s been in

1175
01:13:21.150 –> 01:13:23.450
martial arts for a while knows that just because you’re good at martial arts doesn’t

1176
01:13:23.450 –> 01:13:27.230
mean you’re a great human being. No, no, right? No. There’s many,

1177
01:13:27.350 –> 01:13:29.070
many black belts who are not a black belt at life. They may be a

1178
01:13:29.070 –> 01:13:31.750
black belt at the yard, but they’re— oh yeah, good Lord, they’re white belts at

1179
01:13:31.750 –> 01:13:35.390
everything else. Absolutely. Absolutely right. And so

1180
01:13:35.390 –> 01:13:39.057
that, that whole baby with the bathwater and taking that time, but But this

1181
01:13:39.073 –> 01:13:42.246
does go back to reinforcing your big problem. Like, since this thing is always in

1182
01:13:42.358 –> 01:13:45.963
my pocket and always there, right? And I like to think I do a fairly

1183
01:13:45.963 –> 01:13:49.265
good job of turning off all my notifications. I don’t let things come

1184
01:13:49.313 –> 01:13:53.095
find me the way that other people do. And, you

1185
01:13:53.095 –> 01:13:56.508
know, whenever I try to be thoughtful when I engage with my device, what do

1186
01:13:56.524 –> 01:14:00.113
I want to go look at? What is important to me? How in touch am

1187
01:14:00.210 –> 01:14:04.007
I? Or am I just allowing myself to be served whatever

1188
01:14:04.623 –> 01:14:07.383
It wants to serve me kind of situation.

1189
01:14:10.589 –> 01:14:13.556
There’s a bunch of other stuff in here in Neuromancer. There is.

1190
01:14:14.475 –> 01:14:17.620
I want to be very clear. I’m not knocking it as a book that lacks

1191
01:14:17.620 –> 01:14:20.859
depth. I’m not saying that. I merely say

1192
01:14:21.390 –> 01:14:25.157
my— so

1193
01:14:25.752 –> 01:14:28.972
one of the challenges that is going to be— I’ll frame it this way. One

1194
01:14:28.973 –> 01:14:31.533
of the challenges I think that’s going to be coming down the pike And this

1195
01:14:31.533 –> 01:14:34.883
is why, as a social and cultural

1196
01:14:34.883 –> 01:14:38.441
phenomenon, transgenderism and transhumanism is interesting to me.

1197
01:14:39.611 –> 01:14:42.994
Combine that with the parallel track of AI.

1198
01:14:43.811 –> 01:14:47.578
I think those 2 tracks run in parallel. Mm-hmm. And I don’t

1199
01:14:47.578 –> 01:14:50.239
think those 2 tracks running in parallel

1200
01:14:51.072 –> 01:14:54.919
serves the individual well. I

1201
01:14:54.919 –> 01:14:58.349
don’t think so. For a whole variety of reasons.

1202
01:14:58.847 –> 01:15:02.360
That don’t have anything to do with the actual

1203
01:15:02.392 –> 01:15:06.162
tactile material nature of those 2 tracks. I

1204
01:15:06.162 –> 01:15:09.755
think it has to do with other things that are represented underneath those tracks in

1205
01:15:09.755 –> 01:15:13.349
a particular hierarchy, a hierarchy of value and a hierarchy of

1206
01:15:13.381 –> 01:15:17.119
meaning. And I think that that’s about to

1207
01:15:17.135 –> 01:15:20.921
get— those 2 tracks, we’re actually watching those get layered on top of the internet,

1208
01:15:21.322 –> 01:15:24.867
again, a place where meaning has sort of been diffused.

1209
01:15:25.477 –> 01:15:29.186
Right. Um, and, and then occasionally it

1210
01:15:29.186 –> 01:15:32.719
comes back around to the group when something traumatic, like we were talking about before

1211
01:15:32.719 –> 01:15:36.139
we hit record, when something traumatic or really shocking

1212
01:15:36.155 –> 01:15:39.752
happens, but then it’s diffused back out. Yeah. There’s,

1213
01:15:39.944 –> 01:15:43.188
and I think the challenge I would, I would say

1214
01:15:43.702 –> 01:15:47.298
from my perspective in this integration question is

1215
01:15:48.037 –> 01:15:48.711
how do we

1216
01:15:52.131 –> 01:15:55.359
Not reassert. We’re going to build a hierarchy.

1217
01:15:56.242 –> 01:15:59.919
We just are. People are going to build hierarchies. There are going to be hierarchies

1218
01:15:59.935 –> 01:16:03.531
internally, to your point about getting space to actually think and figure out what’s on

1219
01:16:03.531 –> 01:16:06.662
top and then what’s number 2 and what’s number 3 and all the turtles all

1220
01:16:06.679 –> 01:16:10.452
the way down. And of course, the deeper you go down, the

1221
01:16:10.532 –> 01:16:14.065
better your hierarchy will be and the more clear you’ll be whenever it is signal

1222
01:16:14.065 –> 01:16:15.975
comes in versus noise. Mm-hmm.

1223
01:16:18.974 –> 01:16:22.792
But if you’ve never had the opportunity because it’s always

1224
01:16:22.889 –> 01:16:26.699
been diffused, then you have no internal hierarchy,

1225
01:16:27.364 –> 01:16:29.956
and thus anything can be layered on top of you. You become a,

1226
01:16:31.395 –> 01:16:35.244
you become a malleable man. And I mean malleable human, not a

1227
01:16:35.600 –> 01:16:37.690
male, but a malleable human, right?

1228
01:16:39.497 –> 01:16:42.914
I have zero problem with people’s identities. Call yourself whatever you want.

1229
01:16:43.403 –> 01:16:47.163
Be whatever you want to be. Cool. Go ahead. However,

1230
01:16:47.179 –> 01:16:50.681
understand that there’s hierarchies

1231
01:16:50.729 –> 01:16:54.539
involved in this, and if we’ve never taken the time to examine those

1232
01:16:54.555 –> 01:16:58.014
hierarchies of meaning because we haven’t had the space to, if we’ve just been shoved

1233
01:16:58.014 –> 01:16:59.896
into things or we’ve just gone along with the flow,

1234
01:17:06.815 –> 01:17:09.458
like I said, we don’t have a good tail. A good. I use the word

1235
01:17:09.490 –> 01:17:13.116
theology. The better word is teleology. We don’t have a good

1236
01:17:13.164 –> 01:17:15.535
teleology of

1237
01:17:16.913 –> 01:17:20.663
what that means. We also don’t have a good eschatology,

1238
01:17:21.176 –> 01:17:24.669
meaning a good idea of how that ends, how that is

1239
01:17:24.765 –> 01:17:28.338
resolved, right? Is it resolved into nothing and we just

1240
01:17:28.466 –> 01:17:31.687
diffuse, which is of course nihilistic and what happens to Case at the end of,

1241
01:17:32.152 –> 01:17:35.901
at the end of, at the end of Neuromancer, which I think Gibson was

1242
01:17:35.917 –> 01:17:39.571
like, the only solution is just to diffuse back into the machine. Which is

1243
01:17:39.763 –> 01:17:43.147
ultimately where The Matrix winds up at too, the movie. Like, it just fuses back

1244
01:17:43.147 –> 01:17:46.900
into the machine. Yeah, but like very different realms, I would say,

1245
01:17:47.124 –> 01:17:50.588
right? Whereas Case kind of seems like

1246
01:17:50.588 –> 01:17:54.373
he’s— it’s like, I don’t like the ending of the book at all.

1247
01:17:54.437 –> 01:17:57.821
Like, I feel like it’s too easy. I feel like it’s too

1248
01:17:57.965 –> 01:18:00.932
blasé. I feel like it’s just kind of like

1249
01:18:02.119 –> 01:18:05.841
it didn’t really feel like he was Thinking about what

1250
01:18:05.841 –> 01:18:09.132
the ending could be. He was just like, here’s an ending, deal with it. I

1251
01:18:09.196 –> 01:18:11.058
got to get out of this, or I got to get out of this. I

1252
01:18:11.058 –> 01:18:13.675
got to get out of this, this manuscript somehow. I got to get out of

1253
01:18:13.675 –> 01:18:17.223
this book. Yeah. And I’m reading it. It almost felt like, like,

1254
01:18:17.528 –> 01:18:21.285
like a Neal Stephenson ending, just kind of like, and moving on kind of thing

1255
01:18:21.333 –> 01:18:23.934
is what it felt like. And I’m not a big fan of how Neal Stephenson

1256
01:18:24.030 –> 01:18:27.803
writes or wraps up his books either. So I am— Well, and

1257
01:18:27.819 –> 01:18:31.239
he’s also writing, you know, like 900-page tomes for like— Oh yeah, dude.

1258
01:18:31.658 –> 01:18:35.471
You know, dude, like, come on. I started reading Seveneves and I never got

1259
01:18:35.471 –> 01:18:37.701
to the end of it. I was just like, dude, it’s good. It’s good. I

1260
01:18:37.701 –> 01:18:40.383
can’t get to the end of this. I can’t get to the end. I liked

1261
01:18:40.383 –> 01:18:44.076
it. But I

1262
01:18:44.367 –> 01:18:47.386
think there has to be— human beings in the real world

1263
01:18:47.806 –> 01:18:51.583
need better answers than just diffusion or nothing

1264
01:18:52.484 –> 01:18:56.333
in order to have the meaning of the hierarchy make sense. It’s so funny

1265
01:18:56.333 –> 01:18:59.600
because like you were You know, I was trying to think of like an easy

1266
01:18:59.600 –> 01:19:02.380
answer to the first question. How do we fix this? How do we fix this?

1267
01:19:02.380 –> 01:19:05.240
How do we integrate it? Yeah. And my, and my number one thing, and because

1268
01:19:05.240 –> 01:19:08.260
I’m such a nerd, is like standards, right? But like, here’s the thing,

1269
01:19:08.260 –> 01:19:12.080
standards, you know, people don’t like standards, right? Because— According to who,

1270
01:19:12.080 –> 01:19:15.360
right? By whose authority? Exactly. Because we’re after, we’re after all of that sort of

1271
01:19:15.360 –> 01:19:19.000
thing. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and so it’s like, you

1272
01:19:19.000 –> 01:19:22.260
know, if this is an opinion, should be clearly labeled as an opinion. Like

1273
01:19:22.260 –> 01:19:26.035
much of much of the public have lost what the concept of

1274
01:19:26.035 –> 01:19:29.885
an editorial is. Oh my gosh, yes. So they just read everything

1275
01:19:29.933 –> 01:19:33.254
as fact, right? And this hot take from a

1276
01:19:33.319 –> 01:19:37.041
journalist is accepted at the same weight and level

1277
01:19:37.795 –> 01:19:41.324
as their, like, actual journalistic body of

1278
01:19:41.324 –> 01:19:44.950
work, which then just means that, like, every journalist

1279
01:19:44.950 –> 01:19:48.352
gets graded at the same, which is stupid and absurd and everything, which is why,

1280
01:19:48.881 –> 01:19:52.690
like, People are like, oh, Rogan is doing great work on the show. No,

1281
01:19:52.690 –> 01:19:56.310
he’s not. Let’s just be honest about it. Or Stephen A. Smith can run for

1282
01:19:56.310 –> 01:19:59.330
president. Yes. Like, oh God. Oh, please, dear

1283
01:19:59.330 –> 01:20:02.910
God. Okay. Yeah, go ahead. I mean, anybody can, I guess, in America. It’s fine.

1284
01:20:02.910 –> 01:20:06.280
Sure. Go ahead. Anybody can. So don’t, so don’t object.

1285
01:20:06.670 –> 01:20:10.330
Don’t object when like the host of Call Her Daddy runs for president. Just don’t

1286
01:20:10.330 –> 01:20:13.950
object. I don’t want to hear any objections. Yep. None. You have no room to

1287
01:20:13.950 –> 01:20:17.430
talk. That’s not okay. Yeah.

1288
01:20:17.430 –> 01:20:21.170
Yeah. Okay, sure. Like, because like, that’s the thing that I’m going

1289
01:20:21.170 –> 01:20:23.960
to, right? Because, you know, I don’t know if this is where you were going,

1290
01:20:24.330 –> 01:20:27.790
but like the minute somebody has something implanted and we have like

1291
01:20:27.790 –> 01:20:31.490
cyborgs, like, think about, think about all the cultures that

1292
01:20:31.490 –> 01:20:35.310
are going to get upgraded out of the basement, right? So like trans people,

1293
01:20:35.310 –> 01:20:39.130
they’re going to get, they’re finally going to get some, some room and some space

1294
01:20:39.130 –> 01:20:42.890
to just be themselves because now we have this new culture class

1295
01:20:42.890 –> 01:20:46.010
to go after and demonize and they’re the worst things ever and stuff like this,

1296
01:20:46.010 –> 01:20:48.490
right? Yeah. And then everybody is going to get like a little like kind of

1297
01:20:48.490 –> 01:20:51.879
leg up because we have this new enemy. to all hate on and rail

1298
01:20:51.911 –> 01:20:55.138
against and stuff like this. And it’s like, to me,

1299
01:20:56.086 –> 01:20:59.714
I’m like, I want to fix that pattern. I want to fix

1300
01:20:59.795 –> 01:21:03.070
that thing. I want to fix that idea that newest,

1301
01:21:03.086 –> 01:21:06.795
smallest group, ah, let’s make them the enemy so everyone can all pile on.

1302
01:21:06.924 –> 01:21:10.713
Like when they’re just like trying to figure it out in their own unique way.

1303
01:21:11.917 –> 01:21:12.881
Well, and we’ve got

1304
01:21:16.667 –> 01:21:20.470
We’ve got— so, DeRolo Nixon, when

1305
01:21:20.470 –> 01:21:24.177
he comes in, talks about the Constitution with me. One of the interesting things about

1306
01:21:24.177 –> 01:21:27.741
the American Constitution, and we gotta turn the corner and wrap up, and this isn’t

1307
01:21:27.741 –> 01:21:30.712
what— this is way beyond where we were gonna go in the

1308
01:21:31.374 –> 01:21:34.587
script. So we’ve kind of actually been winging it for the last 45 minutes anyway,

1309
01:21:34.603 –> 01:21:38.150
so it’s fine. But he talks about— This is the best one we’ve done.

1310
01:21:38.541 –> 01:21:42.368
Yeah, it is the best one we’ve done, actually. Your

1311
01:21:42.368 –> 01:21:45.935
view count on this is going to way surpass Ben-Hur, bro. It’s going to

1312
01:21:46.016 –> 01:21:47.118
rock it.

1313
01:21:50.226 –> 01:21:53.623
He talks a lot about expanding the franchise from

1314
01:21:54.267 –> 01:21:57.987
a legal perspective. So what the Constitution is as a

1315
01:21:58.035 –> 01:22:01.694
document in America, unlike other legal

1316
01:22:01.694 –> 01:22:05.505
founding documents for other countries, is it allows

1317
01:22:05.633 –> 01:22:08.524
for, it’s elastic enough to allow for

1318
01:22:09.294 –> 01:22:12.532
the ability of people to vote, which the, the, the,

1319
01:22:13.622 –> 01:22:16.700
the 18th century Enlightenment, yes, white men

1320
01:22:17.309 –> 01:22:21.044
thought that that was the biggest thing ever, was allowing people to vote

1321
01:22:21.300 –> 01:22:25.132
because civic duty mattered. Okay. Civic duty

1322
01:22:25.148 –> 01:22:28.867
was how you proved your value as a citizen. And I think at a

1323
01:22:28.867 –> 01:22:32.554
certain level, that actually is true. I think that’s a bedrock reality,

1324
01:22:32.682 –> 01:22:34.269
converse reality,

1325
01:22:36.129 –> 01:22:39.770
fact that is actually built into not only our

1326
01:22:39.770 –> 01:22:43.540
structure, but I actually think it’s built into reality. Because if you don’t have a

1327
01:22:43.684 –> 01:22:47.196
way to participate in civic life, then you’re just a slave. You’re a slave of

1328
01:22:47.196 –> 01:22:50.902
tyrants. Well, so I have a question about

1329
01:22:50.902 –> 01:22:54.174
this idea for you. Okay. Hold on. Hold on to it. I’m just going to

1330
01:22:54.174 –> 01:22:57.189
say this. So when you expand the franchise and you allow

1331
01:22:57.542 –> 01:23:01.167
everybody and everybody continues to expand out and expand out and

1332
01:23:01.167 –> 01:23:03.930
expand out over the course of time, at least it has in America. You allow

1333
01:23:04.123 –> 01:23:07.909
everybody the opportunity to participate at the bare minimum, which is what

1334
01:23:07.909 –> 01:23:09.792
it’s become in our time, civic life,

1335
01:23:11.635 –> 01:23:14.998
which also means they have the ability to not participate at the bare minimum in

1336
01:23:15.046 –> 01:23:18.829
civic life, which many folks don’t participate in the bare minimum. I’m not talking about

1337
01:23:18.829 –> 01:23:22.414
voting for president. Forget that. Just your school council, just your city

1338
01:23:22.430 –> 01:23:25.949
council, your school board. I mean, less than 2, less than 1% of the

1339
01:23:25.981 –> 01:23:29.794
available voting population shows up to vote for school board. That’s the lowest level

1340
01:23:29.826 –> 01:23:32.893
you can get at, right? And it has the most impact because it’s in your

1341
01:23:32.941 –> 01:23:36.650
local community. These are people you see at H-E-B or, you know, Kroger

1342
01:23:36.650 –> 01:23:40.166
or whatever. Like, you could vote for these people. They— you could have real

1343
01:23:40.166 –> 01:23:43.843
impact. Okay. As we’ve expanded the franchise,

1344
01:23:44.020 –> 01:23:47.777
though, this idea, what has wound up happening is

1345
01:23:47.809 –> 01:23:50.667
the base of the hierarchical structure has expanded

1346
01:23:51.727 –> 01:23:55.337
and the top has gotten narrower and narrower. And I think

1347
01:23:55.337 –> 01:23:59.119
that are sharper and sharper. And I think that’s also what people are

1348
01:23:59.119 –> 01:24:02.804
objecting to. And we don’t know a way to move more

1349
01:24:02.804 –> 01:24:06.633
people from the bottom of this expanding hierarchy further up

1350
01:24:06.633 –> 01:24:09.966
the chain. There’s material ways to do it. This is where

1351
01:24:10.174 –> 01:24:13.219
affordability, and I’m not going to get into politics on this, but this is where

1352
01:24:13.219 –> 01:24:16.407
affordability becomes the thing or ownership or whatever.

1353
01:24:17.048 –> 01:24:20.573
But we’re not talking about identity moving up the

1354
01:24:20.573 –> 01:24:23.666
hierarchy, weirdly enough. We’re not talking about that.

1355
01:24:24.259 –> 01:24:27.560
Instead, we’re talking about materialism moving up the

1356
01:24:27.560 –> 01:24:31.005
hierarchy and identity just being hitched to that.

1357
01:24:31.726 –> 01:24:35.060
And that’s fascinating to me because what the internet does

1358
01:24:35.492 –> 01:24:38.986
is it flattens all hierarchies, just fundamentally. It just lays

1359
01:24:39.162 –> 01:24:42.335
waste to them like an atomic bomb. Mm-hmm. And you see this in

1360
01:24:42.383 –> 01:24:45.908
Neuromancer. Everything is flattened. There’s no difference between the

1361
01:24:45.908 –> 01:24:48.745
teenagers who are on drugs, and

1362
01:24:49.738 –> 01:24:53.232
the girl that he goes back to the hotel room with, and the girl

1363
01:24:53.424 –> 01:24:57.014
who’s the assassin who’s helping him hack in, and

1364
01:24:57.286 –> 01:25:01.068
weirdly enough, the computer program who’s working for him and the

1365
01:25:01.068 –> 01:25:04.449
computer program who’s working against him, who’s also trying to manipulate him

1366
01:25:04.737 –> 01:25:07.782
because it’s trying to say that it was the manipulator all along. It was the

1367
01:25:07.782 –> 01:25:11.436
sort of God figure, right? Mm-hmm. All along. Everything is

1368
01:25:11.532 –> 01:25:13.823
flattened, and so nothing has meaning.

1369
01:25:15.847 –> 01:25:19.274
Yeah. And I don’t think humans in the real world can

1370
01:25:19.581 –> 01:25:22.929
deal with that. Interesting.

1371
01:25:24.823 –> 01:25:28.530
I think we have psychological and spiritual struggles when we wind up in

1372
01:25:28.530 –> 01:25:32.069
that space. Well, this is

1373
01:25:32.085 –> 01:25:35.689
interesting because, you know, we’ve had a number of religious conversations. And one of the

1374
01:25:35.689 –> 01:25:39.068
things that I think about a lot, and I don’t know where I read this,

1375
01:25:40.012 –> 01:25:43.561
was around this idea that like the curse

1376
01:25:43.834 –> 01:25:47.509
of being an atheist is you don’t have anyone else

1377
01:25:47.557 –> 01:25:51.394
to put it on. So therefore the weight all comes to you, right? Sure.

1378
01:25:51.474 –> 01:25:55.150
And I think about that idea like a lot, honestly. Right. But

1379
01:25:55.150 –> 01:25:58.986
changing topics, I do not remember which author it was that put this

1380
01:25:59.082 –> 01:26:01.393
idea in my head, but I read this as a little kid and it might

1381
01:26:01.393 –> 01:26:05.117
have been Heinlein, it could have been Garold, it could have been someone else. Right.

1382
01:26:05.518 –> 01:26:08.937
But in their version of the future, you could only vote if you’ve been in

1383
01:26:08.969 –> 01:26:12.497
the military. Like, you had to actually— like, the

1384
01:26:12.561 –> 01:26:16.151
concept— That sounds like Heinlein. That sounds like Starship Troopers. Yeah. Like, yes.

1385
01:26:16.809 –> 01:26:19.133
And I think it came from that idea. But like, it wasn’t just in a

1386
01:26:19.149 –> 01:26:22.900
one-off book. It was a recurring idea that showed up in a

1387
01:26:22.980 –> 01:26:26.779
lot of his ideas right around this idea that like, if you wanted to vote,

1388
01:26:26.907 –> 01:26:30.594
you needed to actually like participate. Like, you had to earn the

1389
01:26:30.674 –> 01:26:33.896
right to vote. Right. And obviously that idea could be

1390
01:26:33.896 –> 01:26:37.477
co-opted and manipulated and stuff like this. Right. But man,

1391
01:26:37.978 –> 01:26:41.616
there’s a lot of people who do not use

1392
01:26:41.616 –> 01:26:45.189
these rectangular devices to go educate and

1393
01:26:45.189 –> 01:26:48.832
inform themselves and everything else like this. They fall into the groupthink, they fall into

1394
01:26:48.881 –> 01:26:52.310
the 24-hour news rotation and things like that.

1395
01:26:54.074 –> 01:26:57.769
So just as an idea, should there be

1396
01:26:57.898 –> 01:27:01.077
like some sort of intelligence, like,

1397
01:27:02.255 –> 01:27:06.025
quiz to vote? to participate in these ideas that have

1398
01:27:06.025 –> 01:27:08.577
such big, huge impact on our day-to-day lives?

1399
01:27:13.065 –> 01:27:16.369
I’m going to let that question hang. Okay.

1400
01:27:17.255 –> 01:27:19.592
And we’re going to have to, we’re going to have to close our episode today.

1401
01:27:20.140 –> 01:27:23.234
Not because I don’t have an answer to that question. I have an idea of

1402
01:27:23.282 –> 01:27:26.440
where that question can go, where the answer to that question can go. And I’m

1403
01:27:26.440 –> 01:27:30.001
not dodging it. I legitimately have to leave the studio because I’ve got to go

1404
01:27:30.066 –> 01:27:32.419
look at a piece of land that I I’m not going to be able to

1405
01:27:32.419 –> 01:27:32.517
buy.

1406
01:27:37.510 –> 01:27:41.152
We don’t need to let the people know. Just, I mean, I’m probably not gonna.

1407
01:27:41.234 –> 01:27:42.263
It’s gonna be a thing.

1408
01:27:45.645 –> 01:27:47.286
But that is an excellent question

1409
01:27:49.570 –> 01:27:52.900
that goes to, I think, the core of

1410
01:27:55.043 –> 01:27:58.170
combining the flat, the expansion of the franchise

1411
01:27:58.835 –> 01:28:02.104
The flattening of hierarchies and the innate human need to build one

1412
01:28:02.861 –> 01:28:06.469
on any available territory possible. And if the

1413
01:28:06.469 –> 01:28:09.847
civic territory isn’t available, and if the economic

1414
01:28:09.847 –> 01:28:13.498
territory isn’t available, and if the technological territory is too

1415
01:28:13.546 –> 01:28:17.245
flat and moving too fast, humans got to build somewhere.

1416
01:28:18.460 –> 01:28:19.602
And the thing that is

1417
01:28:21.674 –> 01:28:25.522
unfortunately, tragically. The continuing

1418
01:28:25.554 –> 01:28:28.879
circumstance throughout all human existence is, and

1419
01:28:29.042 –> 01:28:32.867
Hyland gets to this in Starship Troopers, and you see a touch

1420
01:28:32.867 –> 01:28:35.170
of it here in Neuromancer, but not a lot of it.

1421
01:28:36.651 –> 01:28:40.081
The thing that is, that is consistent across all human times

1422
01:28:40.822 –> 01:28:44.542
is, quite frankly, war. It’s quite frankly

1423
01:28:44.622 –> 01:28:47.875
warfare, which is interesting. When John will be joining us

1424
01:28:48.004 –> 01:28:51.664
next, we will be discussing Erwin Rommel’s book on infantry

1425
01:28:51.664 –> 01:28:55.455
attacks. Mm-hmm. So perhaps we will pick up the answer

1426
01:28:55.455 –> 01:28:59.065
to this question then. Epic. I would like to

1427
01:28:59.146 –> 01:29:02.660
thank my friend, John, for coming on the show today. This was a wide-ranging

1428
01:29:02.692 –> 01:29:06.463
conversation. Um, rarely do I have a conversation with John where we

1429
01:29:06.463 –> 01:29:09.352
don’t resolve anything. We don’t have a top 5 at the end, but we don’t

1430
01:29:09.352 –> 01:29:12.625
have a top 5 at the end today. We didn’t resolve anything. All we did

1431
01:29:12.625 –> 01:29:16.139
was bring more questions. And so as a leader, go read Neuromancer

1432
01:29:16.894 –> 01:29:20.394
and go figure some things out for yourself. Go have questions for yourself. I

1433
01:29:20.428 –> 01:29:23.636
encourage you to do that. And with that, well,

1434
01:29:25.734 –> 01:29:26.160
we’re out.