Sid talks with Lawrence Quill, one of the most brilliant and inventive of thinkers, whose inquiries run from the use of nostalgia in politics to governments' recourse to secrecy. Professor of Political Science at San Jose State University, Lawrence has been a Technology and Democracy Fellow at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and the Humanities at Cambridge University. He is also the Co-Director of the (wonderfully named) Loneliness Project at his university. The discussion ranges from the idea that our so-called reality might just be a simulation, to the pleasure of having conversations not just with the living but with the dead as well. Quill's inspiration here was Machiavelli's "Letter to Vettori" of 1513.