Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Neuromancer by William Gibson with John Hill and Jesan Sorrells
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Jesan Sorrells and John Hill dive deep into William Gibson’s Neuromancer, unravelling how this seminal work predicted the psychological and societal ramifications of our fully networked times. They discuss the book’s dystopian tech vision, how its themes shaped tech leadership and culture, and why leaders must now confront meaning, value, and noise in a flattened digital world. Together, they examine Gibson’s influences, the enduring tension between art and commerce, and the urgent leadership challenge of integrating humanity and technology in the 21st century.
  • Book: Neuromancer
  • Author: William Gibson
  • Guests: Jesan Sorrells, John Hill
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Time-Stamped Overview
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00:00 Observing tech use at the store
05:36 Post-Cold War tech realities
11:57 Reflecting on book rereads
17:52 Influence of Gibson on tech leaders
27:13 Gibson's shift from sci-fi
32:45 Struggling with overwhelming concerns
38:31 Sci-fi themes of immortality
43:09 Themes of timeless cultural issues
49:49 Tolkien's Influence on Fantasy Writers
52:51 Reflecting on cyberspace concepts
01:01:13 Discussing Neuromancer's Relevance Today
01:02:47 Discussion on demonizing new trends
01:11:43 Finding time for self-reflection
01:14:47 Discussing hierarchy of meaning
01:21:45 Expanding the franchise legally
01:27:45 Discussing human nature and warfare

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Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan M. Sorrells
Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!
Guest
John Hill aka Small Mountain
Sales doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to make you feel gross.
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells,

and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

Podcast, episode number

203. So today,

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

Instead, our guest co-host today,

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

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

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

Oh, wow. Okay, hold on one second.

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

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

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

very beautiful, very interesting

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

So The sky above the port was the color of television

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

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

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

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

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

2 words in Japanese. And

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

about science fiction and like this pulpy style of

science fiction. It's how hard of a drop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

okay. And it kind

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

absolutely. Now, very interesting experience reading through it

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

Great place to open. Great place to open. And

as a matter of fact, I never read this book

before. We agreed to cover it on the podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

local grocery store and Well, I was pulling

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

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

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

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

probably no more than maybe 3 or 4, walking

behind his parents who were pushing a cart, looking very

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

And this little, this little man, uh, was

holding, clutching underneath his arm quite tightly,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

own communication addiction device either attached to their head or in

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

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

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

just graduated from high school. Right.

And when it did, the internet that our author

envisioned in 1984, that sort of

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

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

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

And The Matrix, at least the original movie, was

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

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

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

of the shot, and many of us ignored it altogether

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

we're in right now.

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

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

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

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

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

Vietnam before them. 37 years later,

however, after all of that has happened, after social

media and 240 characters and cryptocurrency and

self-driving cars, instant shipping, and here we

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

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

realized backwash of the author of our book today's

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

book. And yet, and I

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

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

hand. And I did some data entry today. And

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

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

paper in order to edit things.

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

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

mind-bender of a read in 1983.

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

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

from Neuromancer by

William Gibson.

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

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

the lead today. But leaders, I think that

for the 21st century, we need new myths.

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

forward in history, not myths that

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

back in the '80s or '90s.

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

of that. I already mentioned that our

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

have came out in '84. I mean, I was

probably 13, 14, so

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

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

vein that is more kind of about the character and

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right. Um, but, uh,

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

environment and everything, like, this was

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

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

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

time. More rocket ships, spaceship, we're

colonizing other planets and stuff like this. That felt more

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. And, you know, so

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

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

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

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

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

Johnny Mnemonic, which was just supposed to be a movie

adaptation of a William Gibson thing. And that was

pretty, pretty disappointing in my memory of it.

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

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

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

but also looks cool. Like the tech meets the

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

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

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

was the first guy to use the word web space,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

much, you know? And so I decided to

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

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

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

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

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

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

indicates that a book is like meaty enough, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you know, you're not, you're not reading, you're not reading

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

because it hasn't shown itself to be

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

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

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

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

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

we turned on the recording, the Museum for

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

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

debit cards and credit cards and how all of these science

fiction people in the tapestry of our history

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

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

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

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

gliding or alighting across something that I want to

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

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

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

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

1948, and he began

his writing career in the late '70s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

because he walked out of Blade Runner in like

1982. I presume he was probably on his close to

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

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

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

K. Dick. And the,

the, the thing about Gibson is he was a

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

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

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

highly a highly— what do you call it— a

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

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

Neuromancer. He consciously rejected religion and

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

Burroughs, who wrote Tarzan, and

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

Miller, you know. And now

Neuromancer is an interesting book because it became the first winner

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

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

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

Award. And it eventually sold more than 6.5 million

copies worldwide, right? Elon Musk for

sure read this book. Peter Thiel read this book.

Mark Zuckerberg read this book. Jeff Bezos, when he

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

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

about atomic bomb. This book landed like an atomic

bomb. Marc Andreessen, who

came up with the Netscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

read William Gibson. As a matter of fact, there's a picture of him floating around

on the internet where he like went and had William Gibson sign his copy of

Neuromancer, like back in the day. Everybody, and

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

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

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

Every one of our modern tech titans understands

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

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

long enough, they'll bring up Neurolancer. So this book was

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

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

has been hugely influential in building the thing out that he

was describing, even though he was

speculating about it. People took him seriously, even

more so than they took Asimov seriously, or Bradbury,

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

and they said, we can go build that.

And now,

now we're here. And this is the part

that drives me nuts. This is the part that drives me nuts.

And I'm going to keep coming back to this over and over again, but this

is the part driving us. You said we can only see as far as we

can see. Yeah.

The bad stuff is in the book.

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

wasn't like Gibson just gave us the fantasy and it was like, and everybody lived

happily ever after, the end. No, everybody doesn't live happily ever

after. It's terrible. It's an ambiguous ending. Yeah. But it's

kind of a terrible postmodern nihilistic ending. By the way,

because Gibson doesn't understand the impact of religion and rejected it in his own life,

there's no religious belief system anywhere in this book. Which at least Philip

K. Dick at least gave a nod to that. And he was up until this

point, and we, and we read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? On this podcast.

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

in a dark alley. I thought Philip K. Dick was the most nihilistic science fiction

writer I'd read. No, no. Gibson goes all the way down

into the abyss. He's hanging out down there with Nietzsche, like all the way down

at the bottom, expecting like supermen to rise. Interesting perspective. Yeah. Yeah. Expecting like

supermen to rise. And there's no, there's no Superman

because we can't create our own values out of our own self, no matter how

much we're jacked into the matrix. We just can't. We can't do

it. We don't have the capacity inside of ourselves.

That's not my, my primary knock. That's not my

primary critique against, against the book. My primary critique is

all of the bad stuff is in there.

We have tech leaders that have read it, seem

to have ignored the 90% of the bad stuff and just went,

hey, wouldn't this really be cool if we could, like, jack into the internet and

then, like, run around with no bodies, like hacking

things? Yeah. Okay.

Let's try that. Well, we tried it for— we've tried it for 37 years. We

got— we've got Wade from Kim Possible running around the

dark web stealing everybody's data. Like, like, that's

what we've got. We've got that guy. That guy is here.

We don't— what we don't have is a solution for that

guy. And I'm a solutions-oriented guy. I would

love to have a solution for that guy. Because I think that guy's a real

problem. This is a fascinating conversation to me because the—

what I'm, what I'm hearing from you is that because, because

he talks about the bad things, We should have taken a completely other

route entirely. When have we ever done that?

Yeah. When have we ever looked boldly and

been like, oh, let's discern this and let's look at all the choices and all

the tradeoffs and everything and like, look at it on it. We don't ever do

this, buddy. Like, and so, so, so, so in that mode, the

only way that like these, these things that you're so concerned

about don't come true is like there's no progress.

Right. And, and, and, and the line in Oppenheimer, which I keep going back to

that movie because that, that, I mean, Christopher Nolan sort of

nailed it with this. The line from Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer when

he's in the scene. I don't know if you've seen the movie. I have seen

it. Okay. So, you know, the scene where he goes and all of the,

all of the communist or

communist-coded scientists are having the meeting about whether or not they

should keep working on the bomb. And they're all like having this existential

crisis because we beat— we already beat the Germans and we were building the bomb

to drop on the Germans. And now we don't have to do it because like

we're going to eventually beat the Japanese. Yeah.

Okay. Spoken as people, by the way, who didn't have to like go into murder

holes with the Japanese, purely like didn't have to do that at all or

island hopping. Okay. Okay. So you're speaking from your own little

window in your own little house. In a lab. Yeah. In a lab, right? And

what is it that he says? He says,

our fantasies, our dreams are their

horrors, but they won't know that until we

use it. They won't know to be horrified

until we use it. That's the only way they're going to

know. And by they, he means average Joe Schmo public who's not

smart enough to be in the lab with him. He also said earlier in the

movie, my other favorite line, which I always say on this podcast, I love this

line, at a certain point you have to move from theory to practice. You got

to move from the mathematics on the board to actually being out in the real

world. Mm-hmm. It

isn't like, again, it isn't as if, if I had Gibson on the

show, I think Gibson would agree with me. It isn't as if he

didn't write about the downsides in Neuromancer. He did. He absolutely, I don't blame

him at all. I don't, I don't lay— he did exactly what he was supposed

to do as a writer. He laid out a fully realized world, and I think

that's where people— what people really like is that it's a fully realized world

that seems— that logically is consistent all the way to the end,

which is good. Okay.

And I've always been this way. Like, when I was in art school, I never

really had a problem with Pablo Picasso, although

Over the course of time, I've had more and more of a problem with that

guy. Um, at a human level, not at an artistic level.

Artistically, I think that's a whole other kind of thing, but at just a human

being level, he was, he was not a good human being. Um,

but the, the challenge is with the people who come after

him, the people who look at what he did or do

shop, right? And they go, oh, it was an

upside down urinal. So now I can put a shark in like formaldehyde and call

that art. And I'm not saying a shark from formaldehyde is not art. I'm just

saying like, that's where you get to, right? Or, you know,

we can have a, we can have a, we can have a

virgin. Yeah, a Virgin Mary made out of poo and

call that art. Made out of cow dung. Like, we can have that. That's fine.

Yeah. It's almost as if the followers

miss the joke. And I think the followers of Gibson,

the readers of Gibson, miss the joke.

And I don't know if this is the perennial tension. So you

and I were talking about this a little bit in a different context, but maybe

there's the perennial tension here between art and commerce. Maybe

this is part of that tension as well. Mm-hmm. Or maybe it's the perennial

tension at a deeper level between art and the viewer.

Or the reader of the art. Because once you put something out there,

like I know this, I've written 3 books, I'm working on a 4th one right

now. The second you put a book out in the world, it's out of your

control. Yeah. You have no control over what people are going

to think about that book. Um, and that's frustrating to me as an

artist because I know what I wanted to put in that book and I tried

my hardest to put it into the book or put it into my art or

whatever, film, whatever. But then they're running around

interpreting things all kinds of different ways, and I have zero control over that.

And that, that bothers you? As a, as a,

as a Type A, as a Type AD

artist? Yeah, yeah, it bothers me a little bit. I'm not gonna lie, it does.

It bothers me. But there's a— but like, I do up to 200-some-odd episodes of

this podcast. I have no idea what people think about every single episode. Yeah.

That's fair. And, but I can kind of like let it go with this,

but like if I'm making prints or I'm writing books, it seems more personal to

me. And thus I, you know, I don't know. It's a weird sort of

emotional, you know, like— I think, I think that's a, like,

that's fascinating. Like to me, content is content, right?

If I'm, if I'm writing a post to put on social versus

like publishing a book or putting out an episode of my thing,

I, I think it's kind of my duty to be more or less the same

person. in all those lanes?

Oh, I show up as the same person. Mm-hmm. Um,

however, where— what I've had to do just for myself, what I've

had to do, and I don't— and I think Gibson eventually got to this point

too, because he doesn't really talk about Neuromancer anymore.

He's almost gotten to the point where he's like, actually, I think he has gotten

to the point, um, where, because he's a— he sort of

abandoned the science fiction genre because he wants to go off and do other different

and has gone off and done other different things, particularly, and we just talked about

Cosmopolis. written by Don DeLillo on our last

episode, which was written,

written, gosh, right after 9/11 and then published like in

2003. 9/11 for

Gibson was a linchpin moment where,

and I think he's been quoted as saying this, if I remember correctly, when I

was looking at his bio, basically everything changed for him then

because he was like, science fiction doesn't This doesn't mean anything. We need to be

dealing with like the real world. Oh, wow.

And that I understand as a, as an artist,

but I, and I also understand, and this is how sort of I deal with

attention, the idea of,

yes, what you see on the podcast or what you read in a LinkedIn

post from me or what you read on a blog post from me or what

you read in my book, that's my voice. That's me. That's all me, right?

I sometimes compare when I used to tweet regularly. I, I

said, I've always said this, about 26% of my tweets will get me canceled.

That's about the number. It's about 26%. They're gonna piss off somebody

like they just are. And if somebody comes

back to me and is like, yeah, I

absolutely thought that on that day at that time.

Well, you want to explain yourself? No, I don't owe you an explanation

because see, the Hasan you get is that Hasan right there in the tweet. That's

the Hasan you get. You don't get to get the other Hasan. You don't

have, you don't have permission to get the other Hasan. So the Hasan that you

get on the podcast, which by the way is the same as my other Hasan,

but like it's the same person, but you get it in this context. You don't

get it over there. You mentioned this in another way, and I

thought it was super interesting actually. You said this line that That, uh,

that I owe you the performance. I don't, I don't, I don't owe you.

How did you phrase that? Because, because I think you got it as a line

from someone else, like from Sinatra. Sinatra. Yeah. What's the line? All I

owe you is a good show. I don't owe you anything else. That's all. I

don't, I don't owe you anything else. But we now live in, because of

the William Gibson Neuromancer reality we all live in now,

we think we owe either, either we fully lean into the show

Right. And that's where you have fake people running around all over the place

doing stuff. Oh yeah. Fully have leaned into the show. Or you have people who

struggle with cognitive dissonance who will,

you know, protest for what we were just

talking about, racial issues before we hit the, before we hit the,

before we hit the button. They'll protest against racial issues, you know, in

1 hour, but then they'll go sign up to

be, they'll go, they'll go fill out an application to work as a, as a

consultant at McKinsey. Like, you know, they'll talk

about queering the Intifada at Columbia, but then they're gonna like go want to work

at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Mm-hmm. And they don't seem to, they don't seem to

recognize the cognitive dissonance there. And

we have a lot of that. I think, I think part of that is because

of the internet. And it's part of that ability. It's part of that, that inability

of people to connect the thing they're doing

with the thing they're saying, to your point about content. And then trying to figure

out what's owed there. I don't think people are working through that.

Well, have you seen The Good Place? I've heard of it, and

people tell me about it, but I've never seen it. Oh man, one of my—

like, and I was super resistant to watching this show, and then I, and then

I just sat down and watched it. I think it should be next on

your list, right? The Good Place? Okay. Yeah, because it

talks about this very concept. It talks about the idea that, like, it's kind of

hard to know if you're doing good, right? Because I'm not gonna buy from

this company. I'm gonna buy from this company. Oh, well, it turns out that the

people at the head of this company do this and this and this and rah,

rah, rah. And since most companies are only owned

by like a handful of like leadership teams and roll-ups anyway and

stuff like this, it's always, you know, but The Good Place

as a show talks about this idea that like

everything you do has a value, right? Either positive or negative and everything. And so,

well, if you just go do the right things, you will end up in the

good place. Right. But

what if there is no one right, good way of doing

these things? Because everything has trade-offs, everything has constraints and stuff like that. And the

show does a really interesting job about that. And Kristen Bell is hilarious

and Ted Danson is amazing. And I think you would probably really geek out on

it. Because yeah, like, you

know, it's hard to know

how to vote with your feet. Right. And I talk about this all the time.

Like, I don't really care what words

you say, right? Like, on some level, I'm going to pay

attention to them and everything else like this. But the thing I'm more focused on,

and this comes from like, like a martial arts thing, if I'm watching someone

and they're going to teach me a martial arts thing, I'm not listening to what

you were saying. I'm looking for like your, your elbows and your knees and where

they are in relation to it. Like, I'm looking for other points, I

could— you could be silent for all I care. Just show it to me. I'm

going to be able to figure it out, right? Right. If anything, it's probably more

helpful if you don't come up with some weird metaphor to try to land this

for me. Just show me what it looks like. We'll figure it out. And so,

like, I don't do all the

performative stuff, right? I'm so mad. I'm so mad. But not

taking any action bothers me, right? And stuff like that.

And that's my, my biggest frustration right now is that because there are so many

things to care about, and maybe this is me being

way too idealistic, and I'm curious as to your position on this. There's so many

things to care about that it's hard to like really pick up something

that has the weight for you to go have the impact, to go be

like actually in the community standing up for what is right, because

now there's 50 things to be worried about and everything. And like, okay,

you know, what are your thoughts on that idea? Is it, is it harder to

be, uh, like a, like a caring citizen and being thoughtful?

I think it's harder because the level of— we talked about noise, right? The

noise-to-signal ratio is all off in everybody's life.

It's not just our social media feeds, it's our lives. The noise-to-signal ratio is off.

So, yeah, if,

if I'm, if I'm an adult human

living and or married with another adult human, In in a in a

square footage building called a house with a

bunch of other small humans, you know, and

each one of us as humans all has a device

like this—a small triangle in our

hand—that delivers

us noise

24/7/365. Every single time we

unlock it, there's noise flooding after us.

And there's noise coming at us from that big square box on

our wall that used to be called a television. It's probably running

24/7 now. Probably running 24/7. Oh yeah, for sure.

And we have the internet in our refrigerators,

in our stoves. I mean, we have the internet. There's

no place where we are left

alone, which is why Things like hiking and

backpacking and outdoor stuff has become huge because that's the one place

left, which is nature, where you could be left alone to actually do the thing

you're talking about, which is have enough

space, mental space, to create a judgment,

discernment between what signal for yourself, what signal and

what's noise, right? Yeah. So is it harder?

Yeah, it's harder because the signal to noise ratio is off.

Oh. But it's also harder because— here's the

other thing— it's also harder because,

and this is what you see with Case in the book, yeah, he's

an addict, yeah, he's unreliable.

Gibson started with the— with, with an unreliable

addict. Gibson didn't start with

a middle-class person Yeah. Just hanging out,

living their life. An addict— and I've

known addicts in my time. Same. I have known serious

addicts in my time. A serious addict has

absolutely zero problem distinguishing signal from

noise. Zero problem.

They have zero problem because the signal is the drug.

The noise is everything else around the drug, from interpersonal relationships to how you

get the drug yourself. And you see this in Neuromancer too, when he's, when he

goes to the resort, which we'll talk about that in just a second. When he

goes to the resort and he's actually hanging out in the real world with people

and he's like, what the hell is this? You know, because it's all noise. All

of that stuff is noise, but that's an addict's brain.

Well, the— And we don't, we don't, we still have enough people in this

society. We're just actually talking a little bit about substances before we also came on

the show. You have enough people still left in our society

who recognize the dopaminergic nature

of our reactions with the internet and who are actively

seeking to pull away from that. But it's hard because it

is everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere. Which again, the

everywhere lesson is the lesson that everybody learned from Cory Doctorow to

Jeff Bezos. They learned the everywhere lesson. They

didn't learn the signal-to-noise lesson. What I

find funny is like, I not really thought about the impact

that this book has had on, you know, some of the people that I

wish were broke. Let's just put it that way, right? Yeah.

But like, it's funny because like you were, you were talking about that and I

was like, well, that's the same thing as The Wolf of Wall Street, right? I

can't tell you how many people watch that movie and they're like, Oh yeah, I

want to be just like that. And I'm like, how much bigger do they have

to paint the picture that this is not like an aspirational

story? Right? Right. He even says that he was

wrong and he shouldn't have done these things and stuff like this. But there's still

going to be that. And this is, this is my, this is the same thing

that I have against like Stoicism, right? Like, like

this, like the sociopathic bros that want to kind of like

cherry-pick some of the aspects of it and everything. And so if,

you know, thinking about guys like Musk and like them reading this book and then

being like, oh, well, look how smart he is. He's not a

hero though, like in any way, shape, or form. Like he's barely

like making it through. But because he finishes the story, it's super easy to be

like, well, you put me in there, right? And this is,

in my opinion, the wrong with being too aspirational about yourself. It's going to be

different for me. Right? You give me this tech, you give me this,

this capability, and I'm— it's not going to corrupt me. It's going to be different

for me because my choices are accurate, right?

And to me, that was the thing that I thought was like so interesting, and

it kind of opened me up to this like perspective that is, is like a

common kind of a recurring theme in like a lot of sci-fi

books that I read. It's about this like, we want to live

forever because we know the right way to do things. Right? And this

is in Neuromancer. This is in— I mean, this is in Altered Car. I mean,

I have seen it. I've seen every ilk of this idea, right? And it's around

this idea that, like, like, I, I'm a big, huge

believer in a good idea, right? Like, I'm a planner myself, you

know, but you got to check back in occasionally, I would say, and be

like, hey, is this, is this going according to plan? Are we hitting our goals?

Are we doing— are we— were we right? Right? And

I love when they're talking about just how

long this trajectory has been going with the family and the,

and the sleep cycles and all of this other, like, in like reading

it, I'm just like, they think they're right. Oh

yeah. And again, I want to be very clear, I am not knocking

Gibson. I think that he laid out, at least has laid out a

cautionary tale here. When I got to the end of Neuromancer,

I didn't feel good. When I got to the end of Neuromancer, I was like,

what the hell am I supposed to take from that? And it took me a

while to sort of get on, get on the idea

that I'm on today. Mm-hmm. Because it was the only conclusion I

could come to because otherwise Neuromancer is the kind of book,

again, reading it in 2026, not reading it in

1986. Not reading it even in 1996,

reading it in 2026. Yeah. This is the kind of

book that lands, again, for me,

flat and cold, and will go right back on my shelf and I'll never open

it again because I don't need to. I'm in it.

Give me something I can use, Bill. But you

couldn't. You couldn't because you wrote it in 1984 and you're not going to go

back and revisit it. I get it. Absolutely. I understand. It's like asking

I picked on Picasso. Let me pick on somebody else. It's like asking Jackson

Pollock to, like, not paint with house paint on, like, canvas anymore. Like,

paint something else, Jackson, right? Okay, Jackson Pollock's not gonna do that.

I don't have the expectation that William Gibson will. This is one of those books

to me, and this is again why I'm surprised by the Apple TV show being

done now. This is one of those books that's frozen in time to me.

Oh. Like, there are certain books that are just like Frozen in time. So

you and I did Ben-Hur. Yeah. I think that

the themes in Ben-Hur are going to be applicable

across time. Now, will people cotton

to those or pick the same things up from those themes across time?

No. Neuromancer,

I'm not quite sure that people in 100 years are going to be reading this

book. But I'm pretty sure that people in 100 years will still be reading. It

was easy for me to pick on Ben-Hur. Let me pick another one. I'm pretty

sure that people in 100 years will still be reading Shakespeare. And everybody goes, oh,

well, yeah, because it's Shakespeare. Don't dismiss that.

That's actually really hyper important. And I'm not saying that every single

author that we bring on here was writing books for perpetuity. Mm-hmm. But I am

saying that some books, just like some movies, for

instance, Casablanca. Casablanca is a movie that can never, can

never actually be remade. Never. It's frozen in time.

It is so hyper-specific, that movie. It is so

hyper-specific that, that subject matter, Humphrey Bogart, all

of it, it's so hyper-specific to that time. You can't go back and remake

that movie. Another movie that can't be remade, although someone will try,

is The Godfather. That also, that movie is frozen in time.

By the way, just as a, as a side note on our other project, I

actually went home and I realized, oh my God, I do have a copy of

Godfather. Sitting right there on my shelf. I just never look on that

shelf. We're gonna have to get another one. Actually, we are good.

But like, so there are certain things, there are certain types of art that are

frozen in time, and that's okay. And I

gotta— okay, I have a bone to pick with you though. Yeah, go ahead.

Okay. I'm only as good as my sparring partners, so go ahead. That's

fair. Let's go, baby. I'm gonna try to be the best sparring partner you

can have then. Okay. Because here's the thing, you read

non-business books to look for business themes to apply for business. Okay. I

do. And you're telling me that this book doesn't have any themes that are themes

that are going to stand the test of time, right? Let's look at

the over-indexation on tools. Let's

look at the over-indexation on our plan is the right plan. And as long as

we stay in power, everything is going to be okay because like we know what

we're doing. Let's talk about the, the, the coping

mechanisms, right, of like how, how just culture

can get super weird in the body modification culture that

talks about in that book of like chasing ideals of perfection

that like, you know, to me there's like— it would be

super easy to read the book, in my opinion, and be like, ah, I

hate this because I'm living in it. Okay, cool. I can respect that.

But The idea that, like, and I'm

just arguing about this one thing, that this book won't be here in 100 years

because it's not deep enough, big

enough, enough to me, I'm like, well,

I think if it's made it this far, I think I'd bet the other way.

Okay. Personally, because I think we can, I

mean, I, you know, we talked about being kind of like

devil's advocate, right? And professional red team. I could argue that

any book we have read probably shouldn't be in the topic or

in the tapestry of our culture and stuff like this. Like, 2

people have come up to me since we did Ben-Hur, right? And

they're like, oh my God, how did you make it through this book, dude? And

I'm like, oh, you having fun? You know? And they're like, I

mean, Jon, you're not even a super religious person and you read this book. Right.

So I was like, if Jon can read it. And I'm like, oh, I'm like,

you know, you forgot the other part I'm actually a reader. Like, I

do the work, right? I don't have to like it to read it, you know,

kind of situation. Right. And so it's, it's,

it's very interesting to me around this idea that like, because we are

living in this version, right, or a version of it that is not super

great, right? And we can see it here. Like, I don't know, man.

Like, to me, that makes it that it should stand out more. It should be

a word of warning. It should be required reading. It should be a thing that

everybody is reading. So that way, like, hey, Look what happened when we had a

generation of guys that all thought they were too smart to be

corrupted, read a book like this, and now look what's happening, right?

Like, I mean, it should be a warning more than anything else.

So let's pick up another section from the book. Let's do that. So let's, I

don't know, let's see. Let's go to,

so I want to, there's another point I want to bring up. Part 2, maybe.

Okay. Let's pick up something in Part 2.

Pick anything. The parts in this book, as I was

reading through it this time and how he parsed things and how

he separated them, right? So Part 2, The Shopping

Expedition. This to me was probably

the most confusing part of it, right? Because it seems

like he's trying to force like a version of our

normal geography into this future version of it. And

it felt like a big freaking slog, if I'm being honest,

right? Because he's like, he's trying to make transportation more effortless.

And so you can go from Boston down to Atlanta and it's just like a

hop, skip. And I'm like, like, I couldn't go with him on that stuff, right?

Right. Because that, because that is the other interesting part of this is about reading

science fiction out of time. You're like, nope, still haven't figured that out.

Look how dumb you were, right?

Again, I still have to load the dishwasher by hand, Bill. Yep.

And I love, I love that, I love that you and the venerable William Gibson

are close enough you can just call him Bill. Like, I love, I love that

you guys are just on a first name basis about that. Let's

see here. That is gonna be

way too in the weeds. But hold on a second. There was a part in

here that I thought was interesting.

Got it. Yeah, I think that this will be interesting to read.

Let's go into this. Okay, you ready? All right.

So picking up in the second part of this book, right, this

part I thought was interesting. Once they entered the bazaar,

the Finn brightened noticeably as though he were comforted

by the crowd density and the sense of enclosure. They walked with

the Armenian along a broad concourse beneath soot-stained sheets of plastic and

green-painted ironwork out of the age of steel. steam.

A thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered. Hey,

Christ, the Finn said, taking Case's arm. Look at that. He

pointed. It's a horse, man. You ever see a horse?

Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was

displayed on a sort of pedestal near the entrance to a place that sold birds

and monkeys. The thing's legs had been worn black and

hairless by decades of passing hands. Saw one in Maryland

once, the Finn said. And that was a good 3 years after the

pandemic. There's Arabs still trying to code them up from the

DNA, but they always croak.

Right? Like, the idea that, like, a

horse is such, like, a rare instance,

right? Yes. And, you know, the concept that they're talking about a

pandemic and that things were significantly different

after that and stuff like that, which is kind of, like, interesting. But, like, this

idea that, like, I love when a book can take a thing

like that, that is so like, I mean, I'm from Texas. You live

in Texas, right? Horses are everywhere, right? When I tell people that I've never ridden

a horse and they're from Texas, I get weird

looks, right? Yeah. I've never ridden a horse, right? So like, it's just part of

the culture, right? So the idea that like you would only ever never see one

outside of a museum, never see one not embalmed, was kind of like a very

interesting attempt to build the world.

Right? Because this is the thing I really appreciate about, like, really great

writing is the world building is—

you don't have to do it. Right. Right? So the idea that you're

choosing to do it, I wonder, I wonder how

long he had to sit and kind of think about, like, how do I really

seal how far ahead this is? Oh, a dead horse, right? Like, to

me, that is very fascinating because I mean, with a,

with a book like this, and there's so much content and there's so many ideas

and everything, he didn't have to go into the worldbuilding the way that he

did, right? So the choice to do so, I think, is really interesting.

Well, it's interesting. So I'm always fascinated, and this is sort of a

Minority Report idea. I kind of brought it up

earlier with, with sort of his opposition to, to religious

themes and to religion. Okay.

I find it interesting what the writer leaves or what the, what the person, the

artist leaves in and what the artist,

you know, ignores, right? So I was kind of thinking a little bit about this

this weekend, a different kind of context, but it works for this. So when you

think about sort of the sci-fi that's at, or the fantasy

that's at the top of the mountain, right? So

Tolkien, please, let's, let's just be real. Okay,

everybody, even Stephen King said this. Everybody is

trying to climb to the top of the hill, top of the mountain to take

on Tolkien because Tolkien as a

linguist understood at a deep level,

as a philology professor, sorry, and a linguist

understood at a very deep level how

myths and language and ideas all click together in a hierarchy.

And then from there, everything else spreads out like a tree with just multiple

branches, and you could just keep going and going and going. That's why, you know,

Tolkien was working on Lord of the Rings for his entire life.

Like, that was the whole thing. He didn't need anything else, right?

Yeah. That is fundamentally, though, intimidating

if you're a writer like Stephen King, right? Like, I'm, I'm a huge fan of

the Dark Tower series. I think that that's That's one of the, one of the

things that he actually has done, done well. But even the Dark Tower

series, even the Dark

Tower— I'm not going to go down Stephen King road. Please, somebody,

somebody— I'm going to whisper this very softly to the internet. Somebody take away his

cell phone and stop him from tweeting, please. Somebody.

We did not really— I've not seen his tweets. Oh, Lord. We did not really

need to know what was in that man's mind anyway. The books are enough, Stephen.

Really? We got it. Thank you. But like for Dark Tower,

even like that book, that book

series sort of starts to peter out right around with Song of

Susanna, book 4. And then he, he's like, I have to finish

it. And so he's like pushing it, right? But the world building has stopped, right?

But he needed multiple volumes to get there. Or the example that

proves the rule, and we haven't talked about this guy on this show

ever up until now, which is kind of surprising, um, George

R.R. Martin. Like Game of Thrones will never,

ever be done. The worst thing that ever happened to him was

HBO. Like it just was. On

the one hand, sure, you got famous and more people read the books. But then

on the other hand, what is it? Song of Fire and Ice will never be

done. The world building's over because the

visuals came in. And this is the, this is the thing of a movie. Oh

yeah. The visuals came in and killed it for you. Now, as a writer,

you're stuck. Because how do you overcome those visuals that are already all in everybody's

brain? Dude, oh my gosh. Okay, so

reading this, this time I had this moment of feeling

so like— because the thing I was looking forward to

was like getting back into how they talk about

cyberspace and the concept of ICE and, you know,

viruses and how, how they interface with it and everything. Because

like as a kid reading this, I thought it did a

beautiful job about building that world. Now

reading it this time, I was kind of— I was like, man, where's the depth?

Where's this thing? And I had just enough presence of mind to be like,

I wonder if I can appreciate this because this was a

version of the internet and I'm used to our current version of the

internet and stuff like this. And so this just feels, you know, a

bridge too far, a bridge to nowhere kind of thing. is where I

was thinking about that. But I had this very specific kind

of like idea of being let down about that

side of it. And honestly, you

know, as I was reading this, I was like, man, I want to go back

and I'm going to rewatch like Hackers because it's been a very long time since

I watched Hackers. And now after finishing it, I'm like, I don't think I want

to go back and watch that movie, right? Because like, I don't think any of

the cyber stuff, the computer stuff, the technical stuff, it'd be like going back

and watching like Tron now, right? Like, I mean,

The Matrix doesn't hold up, and I loved that movie. It just doesn't

hold up. It still does for me. It doesn't hold up for me, dude. Like,

I— like, it might be more in the realm of nostalgia.

Maybe I'll grant you that. I mean, so for me, the movie that holds up

that was also released the same year, which everybody forgets, this is Fight Club.

Fight Club holds up, and Fight Club holds up for a whole variety of different

reasons. In The Matrix, it's comparing apples and oranges. Yeah. And yet They

both came out in that year. Also, by the way, American Beauty, another movie that

doesn't hold up, came out in that year. Right? So you have

American Beauty, which won a bunch of Oscars and everybody loved it.

Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening doesn't hold up. Like the

themes in that movie, every— you can't make that movie

now. You know, the old guy who quits and then like he's hitting on

the little girl and you forget it. You can't make that movie now. Yeah.

Fight Club, weirdly enough, holds up because— I don't think you

could make that movie now. I think you would have to make— I think you'd

have to make like a, like a such a— because like, to me,

the beauty of that movie is the juxtaposition, right? Reading the book

is tough. Oh, reading the book is hard. Oh yeah. Yeah, reading the book is

really, really, really tough. I don't, I don't suggest that for most people. But like

reading the— or I'm sorry, watching the movie, the thing about it is you get

to see the juxtaposition and like that kind of seals it at the end. If

they were going to make that now, The Tyler Durden version of

today would be such a

caricature. He'd be Andrew Tate, basically.

Times 10. Like, times 10. Like, Grant Cardone, Andrew Tate come

together, they have offspring. That, that's what that would be. It would be a

nightmare. Oh my God. Which is one of those reasons why I say

Fight Club holds up, but because of the internet and because we

live after 9/11, think about the last scene in the movie,

there's all kinds of disjunctions in with that. Mm-hmm. Matrix,

for me anyway, this is, this is my, this is my mileage, right? For me,

I go back, like, I watch— I think I watched it like, uh, maybe 3

or 4 months ago again, and I barely got through half

of it because I was like, okay, the martial arts stuff is cool

because I'm a martial arts guy just like you, but like, after that

Like you, so, so here's the thing. Here's the thing. The guy who was,

who was, who was pulled out of the internet, the— Cypher. Cypher, right?

The, the, and I'm not the original, the originator of this

idea. The point of The

Matrix, just like the point, weirdly enough, I think of Neuromancer, because look at

where we get to at the end of Neuromancer. At the end of Neuromancer, Case

is not trying to live in the real world. Case is trying to get back

into the machine. Same thing with The

Matrix. And I heard that this is in the 4th movie that they just

released like a couple of years ago, which I will not touch. I will not

go back and I won't watch that at all. I don't, I don't want to

watch it. I didn't know there was a 4th. I don't think— Oh yeah, yeah,

with Keanu Reeves. And they dug up Carrie-Anne Moss from somewhere. She still looks good.

But she does. She looks good. Like, she looks good. He looks good. They don't

look old. Like, it's amazing. Right? Um, they look

exactly the same as they did in 1999, which is shocking. Um,

but the thing with The Matrix is— the original Matrix is

just like with Cypher. Who

really wants to be in the real world eating sludge at the bottom of an

abyss in a burned-out planet? That's why Cypher

wants to get back into The Matrix. Wait, what? wants to

go back into the matrix. Case wants to go back into the matrix because

in the section, I believe it's not the shopping expedition, but this is a good

example. In the shopping expedition where he goes and looks at the horse, the

horse doesn't have any meaning for him. The real world has

no meaning. And I think that's just another interesting point that Gibson put in there

and the why he focused on the horse, because that example of natural beauty,

just like when he goes to the vacation spot. And all these kids are

jumping off and it's not real or it's partially real, but not fully real.

Like there's no connection to actual reality

because, and this is not a knock on either Case or

Cypher. I think they're correct. The real world

sucks. The Matrix is better.

And that is the thing we're struggling with now with the internet.

The internet is better. Outside of

the internet, I wrote a blog post one time. You have the problem

of poopy people. You have to deal with your body.

You have to deal with your obsessions and your appetites. You have to deal with

consequences. You have to have conversations with people who, I mean,

we're going back and forth. We're sparring partners, but like the conversations you have with

people in your family who don't accept your identity or, or don't understand you.

Like, we have all of this out here in the real world. And so of

course people jack into the internet via their phones,

via their devices. Of course they do. And now this goes back,

of course, to what I'm— the point I made at the beginning with the 4-year-old

with the tablet. And we're getting younger and younger people in there.

I mean, a 4-year-old with a tablet? Dear God. Like, I remember going

to Disney World years and years and years ago, and I'm on the train. there

with my kids. And I'm looking at everybody on the train

in Disney World and all of the little 3 and 4-year-olds

are on there on iPhones. And I looked at my wife and I went,

this is not good. This is not, this, this, this is

not going to have a good outcome. And this was years ago. Now those 3

and 4-year-olds are now 18, 19, and 20. Oh

yeah. Full on phone addictions. Full on phone addiction, full

on in the internet. Because the internet is better.

It's better than the real world, even though

both cases point. And what does Cypher say in The Matrix? I

know this steak isn't real. I know this wine isn't real

and I don't care. Yeah. That's the thing. Ignorance is

bliss. That's the thing we are, we're, we're struggling

to overcome and we don't have a compelling, I'm going to use a big religious

word here. We don't have a compelling eschatology or

theology of reality for people

for whom the Matrix, for whom the internet, for whom all of that is better.

We just don't have a compelling one because we never thought we would have to

develop one until something came along that

competed at a better level. And by the way, this is even before AI.

Oh boy. Oh boy. Some of the things I've seen with AI, some of the

things you've seen with AI, And this is the

thing we're all worried about, but we don't know how to wrap our arms around

it and get a solution. And by the way, Gibson doesn't offer a solution either.

He just says— and neither does The Matrix,

neither does any of science fiction. They just go, well, here's your options,

and then sort of shrug our shoulders and walk away. Mm-hmm. I don't think the

shrugging our shoulders and walking away part

is a good use of art at this moment.

I think it's a fine use of art at the moment he wrote that book.

And that's another reason why I don't think it ages well, because I don't think,

I don't think any Gen Zer who's like 18 or 19 reading

Neuromancer, if they're going to read Neuromancer, or

watching the Apple TV show, which is probably more likely than not, is going to

go, oh, hey, there's got to be a better solution for this. I think they're

going to go, yeah, of course it's great. Like, what's the critique here? I don't

understand. And so I think we're in this

weird cul-de-sac culturally and societally, mostly in

America, where we don't— we can create,

we can clone Dolly the sheep, or we can create a genetically engineered

horse, but we can't give it any meaning

for people who are looking for meaning.

And that's what Case is looking for. That's what Cypher is looking for. Looking for

meaning. Uh,

interesting. So in—

I don't think,

I don't think the case for Cypher is looking for meaning personally, right? I think

Cypher, I think Cypher is looking for ease, right? And I,

and I think that that's like, in my opinion, the bigger part of this thing,

right? The internet provides a great place to like not

deal with your own problems. Okay. Yeah. But before the internet— That's what

makes it better. That's part of what makes it better. There was sports, right?

Like you could, you know, there was family. There's always been things of,

you know, not looking at the horror

and getting very fixated on the, on the things that you want to go do,

right? The internet is a version of that. And because it is so

wide and because there's so many people that have a voice in it, there's, I

would say, a lot more more of opportunity for it not to be aligned

with any one person's ideas and thoughts and beliefs, right? But

like, like the thing I always go back to is like way back in the

day, uh,

and I, and I forget if it was, if it was

books or if it was chess, but it was one of these two things. And

they were, even that, they were looking for a reason to demonize it, to

say that it's gonna, it's gonna pull focus away. It's going to make people

dumber, right? And like, you know, we've heard that about TV,

we've heard that about the internet, we've heard that about, about all of these things,

right? And what I, what I'm fascinated by is like the historical precedence, right?

Anything new, there's a lot of room for people to just like hate on it,

cherry-pick things that make it bad, and to try to turn away from it and

everything. Like, and if we're going to say that like books are going to make

you dumber or chess is going to make you dumb, like, let's just, let's just

call it for what it is. Right? Like most people don't actually know

the impact of what they're labeling as as positive or negative, and

this is why the look back I think is is so important. How are we

measuring any of these things? Right? So

okay, so I have a question for you. Sure. So here's the question. Please.

How do we then

chart a course?

Hmm. Out, not necessarily even out of, how do

we chart a course of integration? There we go.

Because the technologies you've mentioned,

and I've said this before on the show, I want to be very clear. I

want to be very transparent, consistent, right? Want to be consistent and transparent.

I have said on this show, the same arguments we have about the internet as

a technology, Are the exact same things that medieval— same arguments that medieval

peasants were having in the 15th and 16th century about the book.

Except the outcome of that was, and we all get

head up about this, about there being the religious part, but it actually wasn't the

religious part. What drove the religious, the religious

wars of the 16th and 17th century that, by the way, ultimately led to the

Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and then the Enlightenment ultimately.

which we're all post-Enlightenment creatures now, all of us.

The technology that drove that was the book.

Without the book, Martin Luther doesn't get anywhere.

Without the book, the Catholic Church doesn't get threatened.

Without the book, hell, without the printing press, medieval

peasants are not freed from having to know Latin

and having to go talk to somebody about a book, which, by the way, if

you were a medieval peasant, the likelihood of you seeing a book in your

lifetime before the printing press, dead

minimal. What a beautiful reminder,

right? Because, like, my book collection is

astounding. Like, I had to redo my, like,

my particular, like, not even the main bookshelf, right? Like, I've got

mine for the books that my wife doesn't want to display in

our big shared one. And I was redoing that and like,

man, I'm surrounded by all these books and like, I can't even, I can't even

fathom in existence that

like the ability to self-serve. Right. Right. And

to me, I think, I think this is the, I think this is the most

interesting thing because the coolest thing to me about the internet is

around like lanes of information exchange.

Right. I live in Fort Worth, Texas, and there's this little bitty

area here, and it's called White Settlement, right? And I hate the

name. I've always hated the name. It's, you know, it's every, you know, kind of

thing. But I think about— By the way, just as a side note before he

continues, there are a lot of Black people in White Settlement. Just— There

are, right? Yes, for sure. There are a lot. And I think they voted to

change the name like a few years ago. I heard this before when I moved

here, like they voted to change the name, and apparently everybody was like, no, we're

just going to keep it. It's fine. Yeah, I, I've never heard about that

part of it, right? But like, I'm, I'm just always thinking about, and not so

much in the name of it being white, I'm just thinking small town Texas. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. There's, there's one probably small

newspaper. Yeah, right. And it is going to

disseminate the ideas that it thinks are important. Absolutely.

Yeah. So if you're only ever getting the Granbury Gazette,

right, all of your information is being filtered by someone who

thinks they know what's best for you. Right.

And so what, what I for as much

garbage of the internet brings, right?

The idea that I can go find as true

of a source of information and education

that as I'm willing to put effort into going to go find is available,

right? Because like thinking about the

amount of control that some people would love to have on what

gets views and eyeballs and attention versus like, well,

hey, we're not going to push this. We don't want this on our platform at

all. And different things like that. And tied to like a, like a

non-internet era, right? Where I'm only reading the White Settlement

Tribune or something else like this, right? Sure. And you might be, you might

have to go be pretty highfalutin to get the New York Times on your, on

your front desk, right? To have any other source of news.

I love having the ability to choose,

right? Okay. So that again, that I want to wrap up my question. And my

core question to you is this. How do we

take that idea of integration of

technology that expands communication from the printing press

to books to radio to television?

All of these technologies we have eaten

basically as humans. And we've, we've integrated them for good or ill

into our existence. But

to get to that integration required, this is

where I look at the failure of leadership, to get to that integration required leadership.

It required people writing and talking about this intelligently. It required

obviously people experimenting, all these things happening all at once. And then like the

miasma works. It just all mashes together and it just works. Okay.

The Matrix movie couldn't answer this question

other than going back into the Matrix.

Neuromancer can't answer this question other than going

back into the Matrix. I don't know that going back into the

Matrix is the full answer to integration. So I want to know from, from you,

what do you think the answer is for integration of this thing? Oh, God. Now

that we are 37 years post, actually

more than 37 years, but let's go to Timothy Berners-Lee's in 1989. We're

37 years post turning on this, this new

technology that has, that seems to

have from some people's perspective, and I have a lot of empathy for this

perspective, seems to have become so ubiquitous,

so iniquitous, so much noise and not any signal.

And by the way, No forgiveness, no ability to escape,

no ability to, to, to measure what's real or

what's not. And by the way, we're going to layer another layer on top of

this of not knowing what's real or what's not. And we're going to call

it all good. And we're just going to say, well, you all figure it out.

What's the leadership? What's, what's the lead? What's the way to integrate this? That's

my, that's, that's the question everybody's asking, I guess. What's the way to integrate this?

Well, I think it goes back to a thing we were talking about before we,

before we turned on the recording, right? Because I was asking you a question and

you were like, I don't have any confidence in the group. I

will be fine. I can figure things out for myself, right?

Yeah. And I think that that's the bigger kind of idea here. There's always

gonna be people with other ideas, right? And this goes to the

other thing we were talking about a second ago. You need to go be clean

and clear enough on your own signal on what matters to you,

right? Like, you and I are both reading Seneca, right? I think

Seneca is the guy who talks about that the worst place to be before you

know who you are is in a crowd. Right. And the worst place to be

after you know who you are is in that crowd. It's in that crowd. And

so I think it's imperative on the individual to really go.

Now, this also means you have to go find time to disconnect from all these

things, right? Because one of the things that I did not appreciate is like how

easy it is to create, to shove

and load things into your day-to-day so that way you don't have a break.

Right. Yeah. You get in the car, you listen to a podcast, you're at work,

you've got your music on at lunch, you're going to go eat and you'll be

around other, other— like, where are you going to find the time

to figure out what the hell matters to you? Right. You're always around all

these people and they're, and they're bludgeoning you and stuff like this. And even if

you're in community, you might be being washed over with aspects of the

community message that don't really appeal to you. But because you're not spending any time

for yourself sitting in silence and solitude, reflecting on these ideas,

maybe journaling, you know, different things like this. You, you,

you have to take it all. You don't have to take it all, right?

You can like the internet and hate billionaires, right? You can like aspects of AI

and think that there better be, or there needs to be better safeguards around it,

right? But the bigger concern for me is that,

and maybe this is a thing that I get to see because I'm getting older

and I've done this for myself, is like, I took a

lot of time during the pandemic, and I'm glad now that I was forced

away and everything, because, man, I don't know that I would have made this shift.

I don't know that I would have come to grips with

the things that matter to me and the peace that I think about

in my decisions, the way that they come to me, because it does take a

while, right? And in the beginning, like,

and looking back on that time, I didn't, I didn't

realize that I was not creating space to go figure out

things for myself and to sit with these ideas and figure out what matters to

me. It's just always something to do, right? And smart

people are smart people and smart people have great ideas. And if they're smart over

here, then they must be smart over here. And every martial artist who's been in

martial arts for a while knows that just because you're good at martial arts doesn't

mean you're a great human being. No, no, right? No. There's many,

many black belts who are not a black belt at life. They may be a

black belt at the yard, but they're— oh yeah, good Lord, they're white belts at

everything else. Absolutely. Absolutely right. And so

that, that whole baby with the bathwater and taking that time, but But this

does go back to reinforcing your big problem. Like, since this thing is always in

my pocket and always there, right? And I like to think I do a fairly

good job of turning off all my notifications. I don't let things come

find me the way that other people do. And, you

know, whenever I try to be thoughtful when I engage with my device, what do

I want to go look at? What is important to me? How in touch am

I? Or am I just allowing myself to be served whatever

It wants to serve me kind of situation.

There's a bunch of other stuff in here in Neuromancer. There is.

I want to be very clear. I'm not knocking it as a book that lacks

depth. I'm not saying that. I merely say

my— so

one of the challenges that is going to be— I'll frame it this way. One

of the challenges I think that's going to be coming down the pike And this

is why, as a social and cultural

phenomenon, transgenderism and transhumanism is interesting to me.

Combine that with the parallel track of AI.

I think those 2 tracks run in parallel. Mm-hmm. And I don't

think those 2 tracks running in parallel

serves the individual well. I

don't think so. For a whole variety of reasons.

That don't have anything to do with the actual

tactile material nature of those 2 tracks. I

think it has to do with other things that are represented underneath those tracks in

a particular hierarchy, a hierarchy of value and a hierarchy of

meaning. And I think that that's about to

get— those 2 tracks, we're actually watching those get layered on top of the internet,

again, a place where meaning has sort of been diffused.

Right. Um, and, and then occasionally it

comes back around to the group when something traumatic, like we were talking about before

we hit record, when something traumatic or really shocking

happens, but then it's diffused back out. Yeah. There's,

and I think the challenge I would, I would say

from my perspective in this integration question is

how do we

Not reassert. We're going to build a hierarchy.

We just are. People are going to build hierarchies. There are going to be hierarchies

internally, to your point about getting space to actually think and figure out what's on

top and then what's number 2 and what's number 3 and all the turtles all

the way down. And of course, the deeper you go down, the

better your hierarchy will be and the more clear you'll be whenever it is signal

comes in versus noise. Mm-hmm.

But if you've never had the opportunity because it's always

been diffused, then you have no internal hierarchy,

and thus anything can be layered on top of you. You become a,

you become a malleable man. And I mean malleable human, not a

male, but a malleable human, right?

I have zero problem with people's identities. Call yourself whatever you want.

Be whatever you want to be. Cool. Go ahead. However,

understand that there's hierarchies

involved in this, and if we've never taken the time to examine those

hierarchies of meaning because we haven't had the space to, if we've just been shoved

into things or we've just gone along with the flow,

like I said, we don't have a good tail. A good. I use the word

theology. The better word is teleology. We don't have a good

teleology of

what that means. We also don't have a good eschatology,

meaning a good idea of how that ends, how that is

resolved, right? Is it resolved into nothing and we just

diffuse, which is of course nihilistic and what happens to Case at the end of,

at the end of, at the end of Neuromancer, which I think Gibson was

like, the only solution is just to diffuse back into the machine. Which is

ultimately where The Matrix winds up at too, the movie. Like, it just fuses back

into the machine. Yeah, but like very different realms, I would say,

right? Whereas Case kind of seems like

he's— it's like, I don't like the ending of the book at all.

Like, I feel like it's too easy. I feel like it's too

blasé. I feel like it's just kind of like

it didn't really feel like he was Thinking about what

the ending could be. He was just like, here's an ending, deal with it. I

got to get out of this, or I got to get out of this. I

got to get out of this, this manuscript somehow. I got to get out of

this book. Yeah. And I'm reading it. It almost felt like, like,

like a Neal Stephenson ending, just kind of like, and moving on kind of thing

is what it felt like. And I'm not a big fan of how Neal Stephenson

writes or wraps up his books either. So I am— Well, and

he's also writing, you know, like 900-page tomes for like— Oh yeah, dude.

You know, dude, like, come on. I started reading Seveneves and I never got

to the end of it. I was just like, dude, it's good. It's good. I

can't get to the end of this. I can't get to the end. I liked

it. But I

think there has to be— human beings in the real world

need better answers than just diffusion or nothing

in order to have the meaning of the hierarchy make sense. It's so funny

because like you were You know, I was trying to think of like an easy

answer to the first question. How do we fix this? How do we fix this?

How do we integrate it? Yeah. And my, and my number one thing, and because

I'm such a nerd, is like standards, right? But like, here's the thing,

standards, you know, people don't like standards, right? Because— According to who,

right? By whose authority? Exactly. Because we're after, we're after all of that sort of

thing. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and so it's like, you

know, if this is an opinion, should be clearly labeled as an opinion. Like

much of much of the public have lost what the concept of

an editorial is. Oh my gosh, yes. So they just read everything

as fact, right? And this hot take from a

journalist is accepted at the same weight and level

as their, like, actual journalistic body of

work, which then just means that, like, every journalist

gets graded at the same, which is stupid and absurd and everything, which is why,

like, People are like, oh, Rogan is doing great work on the show. No,

he's not. Let's just be honest about it. Or Stephen A. Smith can run for

president. Yes. Like, oh God. Oh, please, dear

God. Okay. Yeah, go ahead. I mean, anybody can, I guess, in America. It's fine.

Sure. Go ahead. Anybody can. So don't, so don't object.

Don't object when like the host of Call Her Daddy runs for president. Just don't

object. I don't want to hear any objections. Yep. None. You have no room to

talk. That's not okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, sure. Like, because like, that's the thing that I'm going

to, right? Because, you know, I don't know if this is where you were going,

but like the minute somebody has something implanted and we have like

cyborgs, like, think about, think about all the cultures that

are going to get upgraded out of the basement, right? So like trans people,

they're going to get, they're finally going to get some, some room and some space

to just be themselves because now we have this new culture class

to go after and demonize and they're the worst things ever and stuff like this,

right? Yeah. And then everybody is going to get like a little like kind of

leg up because we have this new enemy. to all hate on and rail

against and stuff like this. And it's like, to me,

I'm like, I want to fix that pattern. I want to fix

that thing. I want to fix that idea that newest,

smallest group, ah, let's make them the enemy so everyone can all pile on.

Like when they're just like trying to figure it out in their own unique way.

Well, and we've got

We've got— so, DeRolo Nixon, when

he comes in, talks about the Constitution with me. One of the interesting things about

the American Constitution, and we gotta turn the corner and wrap up, and this isn't

what— this is way beyond where we were gonna go in the

script. So we've kind of actually been winging it for the last 45 minutes anyway,

so it's fine. But he talks about— This is the best one we've done.

Yeah, it is the best one we've done, actually. Your

view count on this is going to way surpass Ben-Hur, bro. It's going to

rock it.

He talks a lot about expanding the franchise from

a legal perspective. So what the Constitution is as a

document in America, unlike other legal

founding documents for other countries, is it allows

for, it's elastic enough to allow for

the ability of people to vote, which the, the, the,

the 18th century Enlightenment, yes, white men

thought that that was the biggest thing ever, was allowing people to vote

because civic duty mattered. Okay. Civic duty

was how you proved your value as a citizen. And I think at a

certain level, that actually is true. I think that's a bedrock reality,

converse reality,

fact that is actually built into not only our

structure, but I actually think it's built into reality. Because if you don't have a

way to participate in civic life, then you're just a slave. You're a slave of

tyrants. Well, so I have a question about

this idea for you. Okay. Hold on. Hold on to it. I'm just going to

say this. So when you expand the franchise and you allow

everybody and everybody continues to expand out and expand out and

expand out over the course of time, at least it has in America. You allow

everybody the opportunity to participate at the bare minimum, which is what

it's become in our time, civic life,

which also means they have the ability to not participate at the bare minimum in

civic life, which many folks don't participate in the bare minimum. I'm not talking about

voting for president. Forget that. Just your school council, just your city

council, your school board. I mean, less than 2, less than 1% of the

available voting population shows up to vote for school board. That's the lowest level

you can get at, right? And it has the most impact because it's in your

local community. These are people you see at H-E-B or, you know, Kroger

or whatever. Like, you could vote for these people. They— you could have real

impact. Okay. As we've expanded the franchise,

though, this idea, what has wound up happening is

the base of the hierarchical structure has expanded

and the top has gotten narrower and narrower. And I think

that are sharper and sharper. And I think that's also what people are

objecting to. And we don't know a way to move more

people from the bottom of this expanding hierarchy further up

the chain. There's material ways to do it. This is where

affordability, and I'm not going to get into politics on this, but this is where

affordability becomes the thing or ownership or whatever.

But we're not talking about identity moving up the

hierarchy, weirdly enough. We're not talking about that.

Instead, we're talking about materialism moving up the

hierarchy and identity just being hitched to that.

And that's fascinating to me because what the internet does

is it flattens all hierarchies, just fundamentally. It just lays

waste to them like an atomic bomb. Mm-hmm. And you see this in

Neuromancer. Everything is flattened. There's no difference between the

teenagers who are on drugs, and

the girl that he goes back to the hotel room with, and the girl

who's the assassin who's helping him hack in, and

weirdly enough, the computer program who's working for him and the

computer program who's working against him, who's also trying to manipulate him

because it's trying to say that it was the manipulator all along. It was the

sort of God figure, right? Mm-hmm. All along. Everything is

flattened, and so nothing has meaning.

Yeah. And I don't think humans in the real world can

deal with that. Interesting.

I think we have psychological and spiritual struggles when we wind up in

that space. Well, this is

interesting because, you know, we've had a number of religious conversations. And one of the

things that I think about a lot, and I don't know where I read this,

was around this idea that like the curse

of being an atheist is you don't have anyone else

to put it on. So therefore the weight all comes to you, right? Sure.

And I think about that idea like a lot, honestly. Right. But

changing topics, I do not remember which author it was that put this

idea in my head, but I read this as a little kid and it might

have been Heinlein, it could have been Garold, it could have been someone else. Right.

But in their version of the future, you could only vote if you've been in

the military. Like, you had to actually— like, the

concept— That sounds like Heinlein. That sounds like Starship Troopers. Yeah. Like, yes.

And I think it came from that idea. But like, it wasn't just in a

one-off book. It was a recurring idea that showed up in a

lot of his ideas right around this idea that like, if you wanted to vote,

you needed to actually like participate. Like, you had to earn the

right to vote. Right. And obviously that idea could be

co-opted and manipulated and stuff like this. Right. But man,

there's a lot of people who do not use

these rectangular devices to go educate and

inform themselves and everything else like this. They fall into the groupthink, they fall into

the 24-hour news rotation and things like that.

So just as an idea, should there be

like some sort of intelligence, like,

quiz to vote? to participate in these ideas that have

such big, huge impact on our day-to-day lives?

I'm going to let that question hang. Okay.

And we're going to have to, we're going to have to close our episode today.

Not because I don't have an answer to that question. I have an idea of

where that question can go, where the answer to that question can go. And I'm

not dodging it. I legitimately have to leave the studio because I've got to go

look at a piece of land that I I'm not going to be able to

buy.

We don't need to let the people know. Just, I mean, I'm probably not gonna.

It's gonna be a thing.

But that is an excellent question

that goes to, I think, the core of

combining the flat, the expansion of the franchise

The flattening of hierarchies and the innate human need to build one

on any available territory possible. And if the

civic territory isn't available, and if the economic

territory isn't available, and if the technological territory is too

flat and moving too fast, humans got to build somewhere.

And the thing that is

unfortunately, tragically. The continuing

circumstance throughout all human existence is, and

Hyland gets to this in Starship Troopers, and you see a touch

of it here in Neuromancer, but not a lot of it.

The thing that is, that is consistent across all human times

is, quite frankly, war. It's quite frankly

warfare, which is interesting. When John will be joining us

next, we will be discussing Erwin Rommel's book on infantry

attacks. Mm-hmm. So perhaps we will pick up the answer

to this question then. Epic. I would like to

thank my friend, John, for coming on the show today. This was a wide-ranging

conversation. Um, rarely do I have a conversation with John where we

don't resolve anything. We don't have a top 5 at the end, but we don't

have a top 5 at the end today. We didn't resolve anything. All we did

was bring more questions. And so as a leader, go read Neuromancer

and go figure some things out for yourself. Go have questions for yourself. I

encourage you to do that. And with that, well,

we're out.