Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• On space exploration:
  • “I think it’s a thing that people need to do because they want to do it as opposed to there being a sound business argument for it”
• We’re currently living through the worst-case scenario of how social media might play out
• Good storytellers are capable of developing a sense of empathy and putting themselves in the shoes of the reader
• “Dystopia is an interesting idea because a lot of times, what science fiction writers are really doing is writing a kind of metaphorical story about the present. I think that we’re in a dystopia now in a lot of ways. A lot of things have gotten better, but what’s happening politically right now, what’s happening socially, is definitely trending in a dystopian way. That’s what we should be concerned about right now.”

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org



Subscribe to the Conversations with Tyler Podcast

If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he’s created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-world progress in crypto, social networks, and the creation of the web itself. Though Stephenson insists he’s more often wrong than right, his technical sharpness has even led to a half-joking suggestion that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of bitcoin. His latest novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, involves a more literal sort of brain-picking, exploring what might happen when digitized brains can find a second existence in a virtual afterlife.

So what’s the implicit theology of a simulated world? Might we be living in one, and does it even matter? Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the book and more, including the future of physical surveillance, how clothing will evolve, the kind of freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today’s media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph, whether we’re in a permanent secular innovation starvation, Leibniz as a philosopher, Dickens and Heinlein as writers, and what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions.

Transcript and links

Follow Neal on Twitter

Follow Tyler on Twitter

More CWT goodness:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Email