📚 15 Books mentioned in "Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #240" of Lex Fridman Podcast

the um i i did a lot of not a lot but i did some some reading of husserole when i was writing anathem um and he's a you know 20th century phenomenologist and he's writing in the he's writing at the same time as as scientists are starting to understand atoms and and becoming aware that that when we look at this table it's really just a slab of almost entirely vacuum

Neal Stephenson mentions reading Husserl while writing his book 'Anathem'.

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you write both historical fiction like world war ii in kryptonomicon and science fiction looking both into the past and the future so let me ask does history repeat itself

The host mentions 'Cryptonomicon' as an example of Neal Stephenson's historical fiction.

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but it's also a story of of bravery of of love of brother brotherhood and sisterhood and basically survival you have like a man search for meaning which is the stories of uh the story of a man in a concentration camp basically finding beauty in life even under uh most extreme conditions

The host mentions 'Man's Search for Meaning' and describes its theme.

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so there's definitely that there's you know i circle back to moby dick a lot um because we read it in a uh a really great english class i had in high school and i came in with an oppositional stance because i thought that the teacher was going to try to talk me into having all kinds of highfalutin ideas about allegory

Neal Stephenson mentions 'Moby Dick' as a book he often revisits, first read in high school.

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and but it was like they would do the count of money christo you know moby dick you know robert louis stevenson robinson crusoe you know all the sort of classic books

Neal Stephenson mentions 'Robinson Crusoe' as one of the books adapted into 'classics comics', attributing it to Robert Louis Stevenson.

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it's a it's a hard one to answer maybe seven eaves because it's got big themes um it's you know it's about heavy heavy things happening to the human race

Neal Stephenson suggests 'Seveneves' as a possible good introduction to his work.

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the following is a conversation with neil stephenson a legendary science fiction writer exploring ideas in mathematics science cryptography money linguistics philosophy and virtual reality from his early book snow crash to his new one called termination shock

The host introduces Neal Stephenson and mentions his early book 'Snow Crash'.

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then uh reem d um is one of those and termination shock um is is definitely one of those um so it just depends on on uh what people like

Neal Stephenson recommends 'Reamde' for readers who like techno-thrillers set in a modern day setting.

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the following is a conversation with neil stephenson a legendary science fiction writer exploring ideas in mathematics science cryptography money linguistics philosophy and virtual reality from his early book snow crash to his new one called termination shock

The host introduces Neal Stephenson and mentions his new book 'Termination Shock'.

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and but it was like they would do the count of money christo you know moby dick you know robert louis stevenson robinson crusoe you know all the sort of classic books

Neal Stephenson mentions 'The Count of Monte Cristo' as one of the books adapted into 'classics comics'.

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yeah that that sounds like an easy thing but it's actually from an absolutely very difficult i mean this is the theme of a book i wrote called the diamond age which you know talks about a book that essentially does that and i've been sort of watching people try to come at the the problem of building that thing uh from different directions for ever since the book came out basically

Neal Stephenson mentions 'The Diamond Age' as a book he wrote about a similar concept.

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gravitation you know is one of those or another one is um the road to reality by roger penrose which is just incredibly deep it starts with like two plus two equals four

Neal Stephenson mentions 'The Road to Reality' by Roger Penrose as an incredibly deep book.

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and one of the reasons i like david deutsch in particular his book the beginning of infinity um is that he talks about the power of explanations and the fact that um most civilizations are static that they've got a set of dogmas that they arrive at somehow and they just pass those on from one uh generation to the next

Neal Stephenson mentions 'The Beginning of Infinity' by David Deutsch as a book he likes for its ideas about explanations.

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i read a good chunk of the gulag archipelago when i was a teenager um because my my grandfather had it in his house because he was one of these americans who was obsessed with the soviet union and the soviet threat and and wanted people to to be aware of some of what what had happened

Neal Stephenson mentions reading 'The Gulag Archipelago' by Solzhenitsyn as a teenager.

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so i read a lot of that stuff uh for sure the annotated sherlock holmes um you you mentioned david deutsche as an inspiration for some of your work

Neal Stephenson mentions reading 'The Annotated Sherlock Holmes'.

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