Welcome to the After-On podcast. I'm your host, Rob Reed.

And this is a series of conversations with thinkers, founders, and scientists.

Take a little time and stretch out because these talks are unhurry and meant to bring you

to a top percentile understanding of something important.

Also, whether you're ready to start up square ideas, a techie or a lit major, take your

time, engage your mind, and you'll be glad you did.

Especially this week when we'll be talking to...

Me again, kind of, as well as John Hodgman, Sean Cannon, Tom Merritt, January Levoix,

Jesse Cox, and Falee should day and roughly that order.

Like my last episode, which was posted 10 days ago, this one is excerpted from my recent

audiobook, and it's extremely free-standing and that there's no need to listen to

or read the rest of the novel to make sense of it, to hopefully laugh at certain parts

of it and or to have your thoughts provoked.

It's also entirely spoiler free for reasons that I'll explain in a moment.

I decided to create these two episodes partly so as to retain my own sanity during the

holiday season as my normal episodes take me upwards of 40 hours to produce.

But also as a way to introduce those of you who are interested to the novel that catalyzed

this podcast series, because as long time listeners know, this began as a limited eight

episode series exploring the science, tech, and sociological issues that run deep in the

novel after on.

But then I kept it up because it's fun, and I'm learning a lot from doing it.

As for what we'll be hearing today, although about three quarters of the novel follows a fairly

...