The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat theories of everything as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have large and unpredictable second-order effects.

My new favorite theory of everything is the orality theory of everything. This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were among the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, in which writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and develop ever more complicated ideas that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that form the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking person.

The most enthusiastic modern proponent of the orality theory of everything that I know of is Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lotspodcast. We discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity, brevity, and the goal of making both speakers sound a bit smarter.

-Derek Thompson in The Atlantic