Sonic Echo: 605 Sci Fi: I. Robot

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Welcome to Sonic Echo. I'm your host, Jeff Billard. And today we're taking a look at the 2017 BBC radio adaptation of Isaac Asimov's iRobot.

But first, we have to bring in my amigos. I'm going to start with one of the best robot players out there, and that would be Jack Ward. Hi, Jack. Did you guys put me to sleep or something? I feel like seven years has passed. Since the last time we've done this show. Is something going on here?

we don't talk about that every podcast you listen to says i'm sorry i haven't been here but it works very well with this show he was out for seven years seven years in hospital we'll get to that how are you doing brother Fantastic. Fantastic. So glad to be here talking about some IRO. And notice I said robot. So here we go. And next is our amigo.

Lothar Toppin! Hey, Lothar! I just wanted to let everybody know the Oak Neo-Luddite Rebellion meeting will be happening right after this podcast. Bring your old-fashioned slug throwers and, um... Tin can with strings so we can communicate because we don't want the AI to have any control over anything. I think it's time to recreate Magnus Robot Fighter. Remember that comic? Alright, let's do it. Oh, that's amazing. I don't know what that is, but I'm up for it.

Well, let's just start out, because I'm really interested. And then we'll talk a little bit about the show and go from there. So, Lothar, what do you think about this BBC adaptation? I really liked it, especially because I've never been a big fan of Asimov's fiction writing. I think he's a brilliant nonfiction writer, but I find his prose style to just be boring to me.

This is one of those like foundational science fiction books that I've never read. And then when I looked into it, it's a collection of his short stories that were sort of linked together, kind of like Bradbury's Martian. And as I'm looking into the history, I'm like, wow, they took a lot of liberties and changed a lot to make this BBC audio drama.

So I didn't have to work against the faithfulness of the source material. I really liked it. I thought they did a great job. I hope that anybody who read the actual stories would feel the same, but I really liked it. obviously have the same BBC production values they always have, which are just excellent. How about you, Jack? I'm sorry, I have to agree entirely with Lothar. This doesn't happen very often, but yeah, I'm the same thing. I find Asimov's writing style.

a little too um dry for me often and very technical for the most part there are exceptions his foundation series was a lot better and i hadn't read the irobot series as well and i all i knew was that the The movie that they had with Will Smith wasn't based on basically anything. It was just like taking the name of it for that reason. But I really, really enjoyed this. I listened to it again just a day.

oh man this is good it's be good to be able to go through and talk about the specifics of it and how they put it together He wrote a lot of those stories between 1940 and 1950, which means he wrote them while he was still an undergraduate. So he was pretty young when he wrote those, and then they got put into the collection that was called iRobot. But Asimov didn't want it to be called iRobot because it was already something called.

Yeah, by the benders, right? Yes, yes, exactly. But the editors did that. And you're right, Lothar, they changed quite a bit. And if you know the stories, if you know the stories I've read... I still enjoyed it, you know, because I thought the changes they made, I thought a lot of them were quite good. A lot of them originally appeared in like super science stories.

science fiction stories, magazines that he wrote for. It came out in 1950. The book came out. Didn't he do an update at some point? Did he rewrite some of them at some point? Did I see that or am I... He may have. I know he wrote a screenplay with Harlan Ellis. That would have been cool. I just wanted to squeeze in the fact that he wanted to, he didn't want to write, he didn't want the name iRobot because Binder done...

Yeah, we just mentioned that. No, been there, done that. It was a joke anyway. If I have to explain it, it was too bad. So let's just forget that. Good night, everybody. Thank you very much. I'm tired, folks. I'm very tired. I'll blame it on my earpiece. I just didn't hear you. Okay, we'll say that.

One thing that was interesting about Asimov, I don't know if you guys knew that, he was scheduled to go up in the Challenger. He decided he couldn't because he was afraid of heights. Good call on his part. Fear of heights saves your life. In this case. Yeah, yeah. He was supposed to go up there. They wanted him to be in space. And everybody wanted to do it. And he had to back out and said he couldn't do it. For those who might be too young, the Challenger exploded on tape.

Something like that, yeah. I saw it, I was in the middle.

Crazy. Anyway, I didn't want to bring everybody down for that, but he wrote a lot of actual science too, right? Yeah, that's why I find his nonfiction to be absolutely fascinating. Got enough of a fiction writer in him to make that stuff less dry, but he doesn't have enough... Pro-style, really. at least to my taste. Yeah, it's not an easy read. It's very dense. And then I think, I thought Foundation was too, you know, I think it's cool.

Robert Heinlein is a good counterpoint because he gets very technical with his stuff too, but it's fascinating. Even in his juvenilia, he brings in like astrogation. their stuff and you read that and you go like, wow, that's really cool. I want to be a physicist for the next 30 seconds. And then you go, ah, maybe not. But, you know, you get that excitement. You know they were best friends, right, Heinlein?

a month. It doesn't surprise me. They call it gear porn. Everybody at that time, it was a very small circle of sci-fi people who got along. Him and Moorcock and Frank Herbert and all those guys and Dick, you know, Philip K. Dick. I had to point that out. Yeah, they all got together and did a lot. They even put up with L. Ron Hubbard. Gordon Dixon. Oh my God. Here's Anthony. Oh boy. Moving on. All right. That's right.

The reason that I chose this is I was looking, you know, we're doing all these cool science fiction shows and we've done some really awesome stuff that I've loved. But I was looking for some, I guess maybe the term is hard science fiction. Yeah. So I was thinking, to me, everything comes back to Asimov. Not that I'm an expert. He's who you hear a long time, and it's a really cool name.

That's how I choose my literature. So I was looking, and I was looking at all the old-time radio stuff that we normally use. run and love and i just wasn't finding anything that i mean i we had you know we did see shoot which was fantastic but i was kind of like It's hard. It's hard to find hard sci-fi, for pun intended, I guess. There's not a whole lot out there. And so I found that out. I didn't know going in. I thought it would be easy. But then I listened to this.

BBC show. And I just was blown away by that. I was blown away. And I recognized the two main actors from their voices. The woman, Hermione Norris. She's a prolific British TV film and stage. And she was in a show I love from like 2014 called Crimson Field. And it was by the people that did Downton Abbey. And it was only on one year because I guess it was really expensive to make. But it was a World War I hospital, a British hospital field. And some of the Downton Abbey people were in.

She played the head nurse. She was fantastic. And then Brendan Coyle was, if you are a Downton Abbey fan. He played Bates in Downton Abbey. Oh, cool. Yeah. I think he was about my favorite. So I recognized those voices, so I knew it was not him.

And then because, so we're going to do this a little different for people who usually listen. Usually we talk, we do this talking and we play the show and then we do a lot of talking.

Due to copyright infringement issues, we're not going to do that. But if you go to YouTube and just put in 2017 BBC audio drama iRobot, effect it'll come up about 10 places i actually went to bbc uh sounds or i think they changed that to something else now but uh this morning just to double check that they were no longer available

and they're there but then there's a thing that says these are unavailable so if you go to youtube you can listen to the whole thing it's an hour and five minutes long because it originally was five 15 minute And then when they were done with that, they put them all together in one. They called it the omnibus. And so that's where it comes. So that's what we're going to do this time.

Too bad we don't have any of that, like, you know, please wait for a few minutes music that used to be on, like, broadcast TV back in the... If I had only known. You have great ideas.

there's uh i i noticed that in the show there's like a blip in one spot in the one that i that we listened to from the youtube and it's uh it almost sounds like it's like it's not break but there's i and the music and well maybe it was my just me listening to it but that's what i got and uh and so i wonder how the cuts are because for the most part like the cuts were like it sounded like

I can tell it was episodic, but it felt very connected. I was really impressed by the writing and the acting and the direction to where it does feel like one long story, even though I can tell that it was episodically done. It was really... Should we just assume that everybody has listened now and keep going? I think we're past that point now. Oh, Richard, I have his name right here. Richard Curti was the one who...

Oh, very nice. Some of the differences, and you guys can chime in, but they focus it around the character of Stevie Briarley, who's a woman in this. If you go read the story, Steve in. a male so they they changed the gender on that and they took there was different characters although some show up a few of the stories. They kind of framed it all around this one Stevie Brierley character. And then Brendan Coyle plays Francis Quinn, yeah.

He's got the law firm that she works at. She's a psychological lawyer. But in the stories, the original stories, Stephen Briarley's running for office. And Quinn is... they mashed it all up and they did i think they did a really great job yeah doing that making it making it unified because they put that the classic story i think most people know the robbie story yeah you know where she's the child minder yeah They just made her be that kid.

So they did a nice job of putting it all together. I'm not a sci-fi expert, but I find Asimov stuff very foundational.

Is that a, you probably maybe already said it. It's huge. I mean, with his three laws of robotics, right, I think everybody in the world has used those in science fiction. You know, Condorciro does in the 40s. There's three of them, but the main one is, right, robots may not injure human beings or by inaction allow a human being to be injured. Two more. One is the second one. Just for those people who know, a robot must obey the orders given it by humans.

and the last one is a robot must protect its own so and and the biggest mistake sorry to interrupt but the biggest mistake that I find people make nowadays.

you know i hear all these tech bros go like well we'll just give them the three laws of robotics you haven't read his series Because he puts them up there to show how they can be twisted and turned and modified in such a way as they're not counting. The idea that we should just give everybody the three laws of robotics and have at it. is the end of human civilization. And that comes up in the story, Little Lost Robot.

which is the one with the Nester 10, like the third one maybe. Right. You know, where she says the general or colonel or whatever, you know, and they say, well, we just, you know, kind of tweaked it a little bit. You know, and she goes, you can't do that because now you're opening it all up. And we find that in, I mean, we just finished recording the Defenders, a little X-1, and that's in the Defenders as well.

And that's Philip K. Deck. So it's interesting. Lothar, any thoughts on anything? Yeah, quite a bit, actually. I thought that was interesting, and this ties in a little bit with the Third Laws, is that even though Asimov was writing some cautionary... and doing a very good job of it at the time. It's amazing how naive he and the culture was then. And we see that in this, in the opening, you know, talk between George and Gracie, the parents of Stevie, which I think is...

Great, because those aren't the names from the original stories, and I'm wondering if that's a nod to George and Gracie. I was wondering, yeah. I bet it is. George Bernard Gracie Allen. George Bernard Gracie Allen. But they're talking about it, and there's a couple of things that come up. One, it's the future. Okay, yeah, people obviously do that. They want to have the newest toys and be on the bleeding edge.

But two things, strict legislation and the three laws, and actually a third thing, where they talk about how finally manual labor jobs are being replaced. And it's like, now look at what's actually happened. Strict legislation, that doesn't help. Look at how many class action lawsuits. It's like people break the laws all the time and they just apologize and corporations don't have to do anything but pay a fine. So that would not stop anybody from controlling.

The way that, you know, AI or robots or anything like that is going to do, you know, jobs are being replaced as like first thing out of the box. And, you know, we got the three laws. It's like, yeah, you know, this is going to be.

place was because that legislation is going to be so it's like you know that that um naivete i thought was interesting because even though even in that world it leads to a very potentially dystopic situation, I think it would be a lot more advanced and accelerated in our own. And we might be seeing that start to happen right now. There's a question, Lothar. Do you think that part of that is, at the time that he was writing, it's sort of the same with Ray Bradbury and this...

They had no idea the lengths and reach and power that corporations and megagor... that mostly at that time they were very much more limited comparative to now and a lot more controlled by governments and the government Yeah, I'm sure there was. I think the IBM might be the only one that I can think of that would have been sort of internationally known to such, and it still hadn't built up its... experience. Except they were also known as Nazi sympathizers. belief in them. Oh, for sure.

You know, but I think there was a couple of things going on. One, absolutely, you're right. There was a lot more regulation at the time and it was working to some degree. The other thing, but we did have, you know, Eisenhower with the whole military industrial complex warning.

was a little of that um and then there was also like you know and we can tell very strongly in this adaptation there was no internet right right there wasn't even the combination or the conception of the sort of integration You only start to really pop up in pop culture fiction in the 80s with the cyber...

And then, you know, beyond that. So, you know, that's where we get the things like the one robot going like, well, I don't believe that you made me. Well, if he had access to the Internet, he'd be able to probably very quickly deduce what. was instead of physically having to read books. All the robots had to actually physically read books the same way a human being did. So that was an interesting acronym.

I think, plays into the ontology of the story very strongly. The plot would not have gone the way that it did, except for the fact that there wasn't this intercommunication of data. including the robots. That's sort of like a highlight of 1950s science fiction altogether is the misunderstanding of the interconnectivity of the internet and how you don't see that.

which is very interesting. Well, it hadn't happened yet, and they hadn't conceived of it, which I think is interesting. Well, that's what I mean. They hadn't even conceived of that idea. The best thing you would get is, like, vid phones and stuff like that, where people could see... zoom right now but they wouldn't consider like the data interactions and stuff like that even things like star trek in the 1960s never

yeah i always thought and and i mean in star wars what are they doing right the plans on a floppy disk or you know or whatever you know that or whatever it is you know what i mean it's like on a usb drive or something you know it's like you can't just beam it to the you know

He wouldn't have a story, so I understand why. Although Asimov, I read somewhere that Asimov did It's not in his stories, but he did say way back when that there's going to be a conglomeration of information that you're going to be able to access instantaneously. you know and so that's interesting but it's not in the story you're 100 right and it's also interesting the robots right if you think of it there's no silicon chips yet there's so

They're running on like pistons and you know what I mean? And that's how we get all those sounds, right? Yeah, vacuum tubes and things like that, right? And you wouldn't get it now. And it's interesting too that I do want to...

Just come back around for a second because I don't want to forget this. And that is, I did mention RUR in America. We call it Rossum's Universal Robot. it's by a czechoslovakian uh playwright named carl uh chapik and The interesting thing, and that's where the term robots come from, because in Czech, Rob... R-A-B means slave. But it's interesting that his version of the robot was more like maybe an android. Like there was biological stuff to it.

metal man. As Shakespeare would say, aye, there's the rub. Oh, man. I thought I'd throw that in for you, Jeff, there. Wow. That's amazing. Thank you. Shakespeare and Asimov. I didn't realize that it meant slave. That's good. It's R-A-B-R-O-B. I just read that. I didn't know that either. I'm no, I'm no professor.

I just know how to read. So it's just interesting. What else? I've got some interesting questions and thoughts for you around the idea of personhood. Before we get into that, I just want a small thing on that first story.

i just want to talk i want to ask you guys i i found the robot voice of robbie really compelling because it kind of like morphed and went faster and slower and i wondered how they did it like i mean i we could do it through warbling through gold wave and stuff like that too to a certain degree but it was very controlled

And I found that, like, how would you do that, Lothar, if you were going to do that kind of robot voice? Probably, I'd probably start playing with a vocoder and then go from there. Yeah, yeah, okay. And the vocoder stuff has been, you know... analog uh you know way before we got the digital stuff so they probably had the you know a vocoder you know plug it

or something like that that they could do, but I'm guessing. It's really cool because if you look at it, at least if you listen to the sounds in the story after story after story, they almost get better and better and better. as time goes by. So you get those different ideas that the new versions are even better in the way that they speak. So I thought that...

Yeah, Susie was pretty much just human. Exactly. With a little echo on her voice. And, you know, it wasn't the, ah, ah, ah. That was a very funny pun, Jack Ward. Ah, ah, ah. Exactly. I will say this, though. This had a... This did have a robot actor in it. Really? One of the robots in the background was a robot. Oh my god. Really? Yeah. Did he get scale? I guess, yeah.

Paid in robot lubricants. Oh, yeah. They don't need them anymore. That's right. Poor guy. They're all plastic. My favorite line in that first story was, on paper, paper is a fragile medium. I love that line for some reason. I just thought it was really well put. Again, I want to get into the deep stuff that Lothar wants to talk about, but there were just little things that got me like...

I notice and I think all of us sort of shun narration when we're writing our stuff for the most part. But let's be honest, so many of the most popular stuff have narration. and so what are we gonna do about that well this was also really this was really good though because her narration was not narration it was character development

we got to see her character develop through that narration that was brilliantly written. Yeah, it was designed to connect the five stories together that way. Oh, yeah. brilliantly delivered I mean she was amazing and right from the start right this is the last you know will and testament of Stevie Brierley And if my story, if you don't like it, you know, I don't apologize for it. You know, and whatever she said, she said it better than that. But right from the beginning.

grabs you and i i'm not a fan of narration at all but man in this case or like a noir story yep you know there's something there's something about it and she was She was so amazing. You brought up a really good point, Jeff, in that this is her last testament, that she... tells in the story to Quinn that she's going to reveal to everybody. So in a weird sort of way, this is like the reverse of Chekhov's gun.

in that it's at the end of the story instead of the beginning, but it's an actual object within the story, if we want to think, you know, from an object. It's not just a narration outside. It's a diegetic. entity thank you yes that is a great point it is and and you know when she even says she goes when i'm dead and my body's atomized because that's what happens in the their bodies atomized and so you know because she's really

In this case, she's really a robot. Much of her, right? Much of her. Spoilers! But you've all listened to it and watched it. You've all listened to it. This was a conversation that I had with Bill. Bill a lot where I can see a value in certain genres in audio. having narration compared to other genres because of the need.

certain fantastical worlds. So sci-fi, fantasy, and just through the history of the noir, I think are the top three genres that I'm much more forgiving about narration than anything else. Bill, of course, is like, no, never. It's great. Bill had his ideas. God love him. And that's fine. And everybody's right to that. But I did notice as I was listening.

a lot too with fantasy it's really difficult to paint a beautiful picture um even even robert e howard had his oh no no oh prince you know sort of setting the scene so it doesn't strike me as out of place just because Yeah, well, to give Bill props, I thought, you know, he did an excellent job in this as early on in his career with Grog and Griffin. Oh, God, yeah. He did a whole lot of world building in that and gave a whole lot of detail, and it was all through dialogue. Yeah, it really was.

That was a high-speed show, baby. That was awesome. So what were some of your questions, Lothar? Okay, so one of the things that comes up, I think, even now, and this is where it pertains to current... personhood and what is a person when does something enter that state and you know humanity

In general, despite what people might think today, especially in a very materialistic, scientistic, technological Western culture, we are still very animistic. And at some point, and maybe even unconsciously so in animism. aren't aware. It's a belief system that falls into different spiritual and religious camps that everything is alive to some degree.

be rocks trees there are spirits the air has thing you can see that a lot Indigenous belief systems where they address physical things as if they're like an entity to be interacting with. And... while a lot of people poo-poo that and they go away from that.

how many times does somebody maybe like they try and start their car and it doesn't and you talk to your car like it's a person please come on just come on you know or you curse out your alarm clock or something breaks you go you're stupid you know whatever it is We unconsciously do little tiny things like this, and at the same time we get something to where if it portrays it...

And it says, I, we're going to maybe unconsciously treat it like a person. Whether it be chat GPT or whatever, on some level, we feel like we're interacting with something as opposed to just getting data from a tool. Things can be programmed to say, I don't feel that way, or I don't think that, or I made a mistake, or whatever, but that could just be an algorithm, and that's what it's been programmed to do. So at what point could something...

Could we determine that something has gone from I'm just programming and I'm pretending to be a person to they actually have some... and they actually have something that is closer to what our experience is, or something completely different that is still a person, but is something so alien to us that we may not recognize it that way. And that reminded me of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner.

where they did that weird test to see if someone's a replicant or not in a weird sort of other way. How would we even begin to make a test that we could run something through and go, oh, you're just a bunch of algorithms that are pretending to be a human, and that's really cute, and you're a nice tool and toy, to you're actually a...

My mother? Let me tell you about my mother. Remember that line from Blade Runner? Oh, right. Yes. Oh, right, right. That's the very beginning. I thought you were talking about your mother. I was like, well, where? But again, with like the internet and you've got like, you know, you can ask chat GPT to, you know, or whatever chat bot that you want to use to say, you know, Hey, write me something like this. And it has access to everything.

and it can pop stuff out so you know that even the void conf test from blade runner is a little um you know anachronistic and simplistic at this time to where it's like yeah i think you know none of that would would really work Um, but I'm just, I'm curious and what your guys' thoughts on personhood and robots and AI and all that. I think it's even weirder than...

So I recently, I've been reading up on people who claim I'm putting up quotes here. claim that they, that the AI can pull information Or there are things that happen which feed AI information that is beyond the physical, beyond their programming. So a guy, for example, claims that he had a long-form conversation. asking to take on the personage of Abe Lincoln. And he was coming up with answers that couldn't be effectively programmed into him.

So the argument being is like somewhere if there is a spiritual realm, it could effectively... Change. the dice throw of whatever comes out of chat GPT if the proper request is made, and something almost in the same way as a seance, a divination comes out of that whole kind of thing.

Just for interest's sake, yesterday, while I was doing some other stuff, I brought up Deep Seek, which is the big Chinese one, which, as you know, is a big disaster for a lot of the audio drama stuff, as we've talked about. And I said, okay, I'd like you to take on the personage of my grandfather and tell me about my grandfather. And it said, well, I can't do that. And I said, I know, but let's just play this.

And it asks me for information because it doesn't know anything about me in that respect. And I went, no, no, no, no. All you need to know is his name. And startlingly, I came back with like 70% correct of his personality. And I never fed it any information if it was right or wrong, because it kept coming back with like, I'm just shooting in the dark here, but it was really funny how it was responding.

And then I said, well, and how does he feel about his wife, Nan? And then it was responding to that. And then how many children do I have? Now, I just got the children completely wrong. I had said three and one had died.

one sister sibling but in the end it was interesting because i said so what what made you think and i didn't tell it was right or wrong because it just kept asking how how close am i and it said well Considering he was your grandfather, the name Jack... represents kind of like a blue-collar name and then it just synthesized everything from finding considering my grandfather would be a blue-collar worker which he was um and so the question becomes like how much of this

is put together based on a dozen different algorithms that we don't even understand the people who created it. And this goes back to Alan Turing, because if you read Alan Turing... I was going to mention the Turing test. Yeah, but he goes even deeper, and he says... that you really will never get a human-like robot, because Turing actually believed in an extra-century perception.

in humans. And he said that if a robot demonstrates extrasensory perception, that will be the definitive final frontier. So it was interesting to hear the Susie story for that reason, right? So, like, all of these things are really fascinating to me. Well, to piggyback on what you just mentioned about, like, the various weird numinous areas of knowledge that people...

There are a number of people in the various occult worlds, shamanic worlds, neo-shamanic worlds, that recognize that the machine space is an actual place you can go, and it feels different. Their opinion is that it's very cold, it's very alien, but it's there. So from that point of view, those people would basically say these are very, almost like new spirits or new collective consciousness. binding together and I've never even considered any of this.

I really don't like the whole personhood. I'm going to have to think about that. I had to bring in some woo-woo stuff just to bring down the hard sci-fi part. I love it. I love that stuff. And I'm going... I think they say it in this audio drama that when the... robots took over the manual jobs that was okay but when they branched out into other areas then the people became

And started to say, okay, this has got to stop. But, you know, as she says in the end, she goes, we've gone past the tipping. when she wakes him up in that last story, we've gone past the tipping point now. So, you know, you can't, there's no going back. I also liked how very early on they talked about driving being more active. Yes. Right? And it's like, yeah, not really. Not really. I think part of the interesting... human or, let's say, animal ability to react.

in crisis situations and that seems to still be a part of the how much does things like that what we would consider personhood because we're, we're all basing this off ourselves, right? We're going to be very anthropocentric. Sure. You know, we have no, there's a great quote from, uh, uh,

when he had to resubmit The Call of Cthulhu to Weird Tales. He did it once, he got rejected, he resend it again, he has this great letter, and one of the things that he talks about... brilliant approach, which was that he really hated it when there were stories about life.

seemed human. He goes, that is the most arrogant thing possible. You know, life on other places are going to be so completely different that the only reason that humanity or human concern should be brought in is when you're talking about humans. That's something.

machine life if it gets to that point would be why would we we have no other option but to use our own but how flawed would that, how in its original term would that be problematic in the sense of our outcomes would be wrong because our... I think the issue there is how are you using aliens? So much of my science fiction stuff that I write, it's a way to hold a mirror back upon humanity. and either ones that are highlighted or ones that are deleted.

So they become, for me at least, morality tales of one way or another to describe. what we're missing as a human species or what we have to be aware of or what we should be concerned about when we're dealing with AI or with aliens or those kinds of things. And for me, it's an object of humor.

I've done that a couple of times. Alien Invasion Cancel comes to mind. Where the ridiculousness of human society and social media... comes up against an alien species that could be a thousand years ahead of us. oh look at these monkeys playing with their poo you know like it's just the same kind of weirdness that happens I understand Lovecraft's perspective. But he's that.

That's why it works so well with horror when you take a look at it. I was bringing that up specifically though to talk about, he was saying that that was about what he believed real life to be. And so my question was bringing that, let's say that is true. Why would we assume, outside of stories and metaphor, which I completely agree with, I think science fiction is beautiful for reflecting upon the human condition, but in a real-world setting...

Why would we automatically assume that any life would be like us? And if it's different, how could we determine if something is alive? This is what drives me crazy about any conversations with scientists today. So there's like, well, you know, we haven't found any radio waves. So, you know, aliens would have like, who says say they use radio? If the universe is this large, or the SETI project and all these different stuff, what if they never go a technological direction?

What if there are like a dolphin species in the water that doesn't engage in any of the stuff that we engage in as hairless apes, but they're so far beyond us? You know what I mean? But there's so many different ways of doing that. But we're stuck on this track as human beings in science that we assume that we're the apex predator. And it drives me nuts. Yeah, I agree with that.

You know, and, you know, I mean, a lot of Lovecraft stuff was actually more science fiction than horror. It just was a very dark science fiction, like the color out of space. a fascinating sci-fi tale. Wow, yeah. But, you know, it is horrific. But again, we get this concept where he's playing around with an alien form that we can't even comprehend because how the hell can a color be an alien?

an alien, you know, spacefaring species, excuse me, you know, that sort of thing, and at the Mountains of Madness. Spoiler alert, we are basically the cast-off remnants from the Elder Things that made Shoggoths, and they left some biomatter behind, and that became all of terrestrial life. And that's where a lot of the alien astronaut people in the 70s came from. It's like, yeah, they actually read a lot of Pulp Fiction and a lot of Lovecraft and just sort of twisted it around.

that's awesome and you know you mentioned the dolphins yeah the dolphins yeah exactly the dolphins it not to bring the conversation down too low but it reminds me of one of my favorite titles of a book and it's So long and thanks for all the fish. And the dolphins are smart enough to be flying up into the air. They're leaving. They're out of here. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is actually the audio drama script is easier and better to read than the actual novel.

He was amazing. He wrote a lot of Doctor Who episodes, and his name just went right out of my head. What's his name? Douglas Adams. He wrote a bunch of Doctor Whos, the old 70s ones with Tom Baker. I was just listening to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the other day, and that's probably where I got the idea for one of the reasons I got the idea to write the murder mystery thing on a spaceship.

The collection of his radio scripts is right up here on my bookshelf with all my other audio drama books. He's my intravenous drug that got me into doing audio. they put it in canada i this i did the interview was it was like the biggest interview for me because as a younger kid cbc radio got the rights to do hitchhiker So every morning, weekly mornings, they were doing another episode, another episode. So I was listening to it real time. And I interviewed Chris.

who was the guy who got he and his friends got five tapes from bbc because it was all tapes stack of tape His friend went to England and they all paid him money just to bring back something cool. So he brought it back. He was listening in his studio because he was working for CBC in Vancouver. And a producer came by and went, what is that?

and he told him so he the producer went and got the rights for canada and did it and i'm sitting here talking to this guy i'm like do you realize that you are the reason why i'm here right now so yeah no it's just like in in the states it was very much NPR Star Wars for people oh NPR Star Wars it was you know blew your mind i we love the old stuff but the fact that this was done such like a move

And I'm so glad that the BBC did this, you know, because there's so many of the, it must not pay or whatever, because so many of, you know, studios have abandoned the art form in a commercial. But, you know, so the BBC is, you know, like, let's do, you know, iRobot. And they're even considering kicking an audio drama radio. All right.

There's some controversy going on around that. I'm sorry to hear that. I'm bringing it back to the story for a second and taking it to a sociopolitical... I think it was interesting in the part about the nesters, where the reason for overriding the first law was because humans had to go into danger.

and the robots were pulling them out and this was, you know, inefficient. Now, let's extrapolate that and say, let's say we have some robots with that particular law written the way it worked and that it works the way that it was intended. How many of our current job roles, like people working on assembly lines, people working...

where the unions have had to fight for years about the on-the-job injuries and stuff happening. If we had robots all over the place, how many of our jobs that we do every day would actually be like, oh, the robots say that's unsafe. And we would think about, like, how many times are we going to be, for the sake of a prophet, be thrust into a situation that is...

untenable for some reason. Yeah. It's like, oh, we didn't really want them to show a mirror to the corporate overlords quite like this. Let's modify that rule now because we're getting an egg on. like ethics always comes up against profit every single time and always loses I don't think of any time where it does Even at least once. Let's say it ends up killing a ton of people, then they'll change the rule. But generally, things don't change unless people die.

which is where we're at right now. We're so close to having everything pulled out from our rungs with AI. And until something goes really massive... They're not putting on their brakes. AI has already started talking to itself in different languages. There's AI that connects with each other, and we don't know what they're saying, and we can't stop them. Kind of crazy.

I'm just here to bring everybody up. Let's go back and talk about dolphins again. No. Just put your hands in the air and ask for the dolphin to take you with you. Or wave your towel or something. I don't know.

And all the people losing their jobs, you know, as things get out and they're not going to have other ones and we're not going to have some sort of weird semi techno socialist utopia where everything is paid for and they get to do art in their, you know, in their thing. So it's like, we're going to have.

you know, physical problems and crime's going to increase and all that stuff. You know, and this is what is so brilliant about science fiction and to bring, you know, Jack, your point again of using it as a reflection of the human condition and the cautionary. and all that stuff. It's predictive, and that's the unfortunate part, but it'd be nice if people saw it and went, hey, actually, let's go away from that.

And you hit it on the head there. It's predictive. I mean, you had Bradbury saying it, right? We did 451, right? We did all that stuff. You know, all the stuff we've talked about. That's the word for it. It's predictive. This is going to happen. But they never seem to do anything. So it's going to happen. And it's happening now, like Jack said. Well, it's human ego, right? It's human ego that thinks that, yeah, it'll happen, but I...

It's not going to happen to me. Let's just say, because ego is just self-conception, let's take it even a step further and say just human arrogance and hubris. Let's bring it back to Shakespeare, hubris. Bring it back to the Greek. Exactly, yeah, absolutely, Homer. I mean, nothing changes, right? Yeah, this is our fatal flaw, you know? So what if we designed AI because we can't rule?

and you have to have some some benevolent king that does it and ai does it just like they do in iRobot there. Yeah, but you still get coercive stuff. We go back to our early tribal stage, our early primate state. We don't want that benevolent dictator. That's still a modern concept of political... I don't think any one of us three would, but there's a sizable percentage of people in the population that want a benefit.

At least they're the vocal majority. They're the ones online talking about stuff. But I think in the U.S., I think most of the flyover states...

You'd get people going, no, and I got guns to fight against it. Well, maybe or maybe not. There was a really great book, and I can't remember the title of it, but it basically said they did a study and they found out that democracy... and everything goes through, you know, if you have to vote for everything, and then you have to care about all that stuff, and you have to go on, people prefer actually a benevolent mono.

That's not going to give them problems. It's going to let them do what they do on their day-to-day basis. That's going to take care of them. But if you have to let people actually spend the time governing themselves... That's too much effort, that's too much difficulty, that's why people don't even come to

You know, municipal elections, they don't come to the mayor meetings, you know, to come to City Hall unless they're ticked off about something enough to come to do it. I'm with you, Lothar. Like I said, I don't think anyone of us... What you just described is Poli Sci 101. It's a thought experiment. And it's, you know, yes, a benevolent dictator is the most efficient form of government. You can actually get things done. What I'm saying is that I think when you have as soon as you have.

too large of a space where we are now, especially in North America. You have too many different interests. You're not going to have that one way of a benevolent dictator. Maybe the AI would find a way to do it.

to where you're going to be able to make everybody have that, you know, this is easy and it's working. So as soon as you have, let's say, a little imbalance of like, yeah, that's working for, let's say, California, New York, because they're the most vocal of preferences in the United States. And then you've got everybody in the middle where they're like, yeah, that doesn't work for us. I think we've got too many regions with too many different areas. If each region has...

Yeah, that's the thing. AI would work regionally because it's so much smarter than us. It wouldn't have to be a universal... way it could work with community community and sit there and go well in jack's muscadabic community this is how people or in this so and so and then how does that all tie together you know in the larger scale of municipality and then the larger scale of state slash province

and a larger scale of countries, and then a larger scale of nations and a larger scale of the world working together so that the big brain AI can operate on a one-to-one basis. And one to all. And it scares the living delights out of me, that kind of part. I'm just glad I'll probably be dead before we get to that point. I'm glad you added that last sentence, because I was not going to be your friend anymore. I don't want it, but I can see it.

I can see it, and I don't want it in any way, shape or form. I mean, Philippa Graves is all about that. My show, Philippa Graves, is in 2016. And it's after it's a dystopian where all the countries are corporations. They're all owned by corporations. And it's in the collapse of this time of how AI and stuff like that has not worked out and has caused all kinds of problems.

but now they don't know how to go back to it. So there are massive people out of work, massive people doing sort of currency of backwater dealings of things that are outside of what's allowed. It's really lawless in many ways, which is actually someplace I think many of us would feel a lot more comfortable working one-on-one with people, except for the fact that all the structures, all the supply chains and all that are terminally... So so now everybody is stuck

just dealing with what you have. But in her world, there is no public anything, which means the police force, there's three or four police forces that are all private, and they'll solve a murder for you if you can pay for it. Unless it's a... that's a great world for a detective a noir detective which tends to be a bit of a libertarian in the first place. A lot of detectives are not your optimistic people. They're pessimistic individuals.

which work really well. They're willing to be so individual that they're barely able to stay alive. They don't have a... And they're just barely able to keep the... The office open that they're probably sleeping in because they may not even have an apartment and they're sleeping in their rumpled suit. Yeah. Yeah. No, she's, she's, she's got a room. Damn it. I'm going to stay an individual. She's got a room. She's got a room in, in like a broken down mall that nobody has used before.

It's like a mall that's closed down and one of the back offices is where she works. Yeah, no, those kind of things are great for story, but terrible for humor. Yeah I agree. And that's the thing. It's like the cyberpunk stuff was so brilliantly written and so wonderful. And it's like, why did all of the tech people in our generation and maybe even a little bit old.

not see this as cautionary. Why did you actually make this happen? Why are we living in the cyberpunk dystopia we all read about 30 years ago? Well, it makes you wonder. 40 years ago at this point. I don't want to get political, but people like Elon Musk, it makes you wonder if he's actually more robot than human because...

He claims to have read all of this science fiction stuff, and yet he's going headlong into all the most dangerous things, right? You know, he wants to do computer interfaces, biological interfaces with, you know, human beings and robots.

like as if as if the reverse you know of that couldn't be the worst possible thing you know To answer you and also my rhetorical question, I think it's the same problem we have with politicians and people at the C-levels in corporations, which is in order to get to a certain level, you have to believe in the system.

otherwise you're either going to be ejected by self-selection and go I don't want to do this or someone else saying you're a danger to our system so we're going to get rid of you so by the time you get someone who's a world leader they believe in the current government

They think this is actually something good that they believe in. Same thing for the C-suites to where they believe in the corporate structure if they're going to get that high. And for someone to become a tech bro, they're going to believe in, they're going to be a technocrat. They're going to think that that...

Valid philosophy for we are going to build things into a better future and solve all our problems with technology people don't realize that's everything in community so that you know when you're in a group of any community Vietnam. an ideological community of one way or another, you are in there with people who agree. or else they wouldn't be there. Unless you're really, really careful to make sure you bring people who think differently.

And it's so easy to become in a silo wherever you are, no matter what level you are economically, socially. If you're spending time with certain amounts of people and you like who they are, it's because they don't challenge you. And that's a scary thing to me. Even at a meta point of view, what you're describing, which I agree with, and that's one of the reasons why you and I get along so well, because we can disagree and enjoy.

is that we are self-selecting. We are self-selecting the type of people that could have those discussions without getting offended. And so we are still self-selecting. Our group is just at a slightly different level than the ideological level.

What do you think, Jeff? I agree. I try to... I'm glad you brought that up, Jack, because I really try. It's getting harder and harder. But... I tried to interact with as wide a circle as I possibly can. It was one of the things that I loved when I went to college. I went to a big school, and I came from a small town in Massachusetts. 95 98 percent white and i go to this big university and all of a sudden i'm around The entire world.

my original roommate was from burma and you know he didn't even speak english that's when i really you know as a person really opened up and i was like this is amazing And so I understand 100% what you're saying. It's getting harder and harder as we seem to be getting more and more polarized. At least in the United States. I don't know about Canada, but... Well, it's become that way, especially with this election. It is, okay.

As we become more polarized and more kind of secular in art, you know, okay, I'm blue and you're red and whatever, whatever. I'm a star-bellied snitch. To bring in Dr. Seuss. Good for you. I like that. I like that. I got that. We're all Dr. Seuss. You know, and I'm as blue as they come. I have a friend of mine who's not. He's not a Trumper, but he's that. Very conservative. And we have great discussions with you. about skills and we don't agree and I think that's great because

Because I don't think you need to agree with everybody. You just need to be yourself. But I think the art of communication is expressing yourself without getting defensive, without getting aggressive, without getting... You know what I mean? You're talking about the issue, not the person. You know what I mean? So, Jack, if you and I disagree, we're disagreeing about an issue, not disagreeing about you as a person or Lothar as a person.

the issue and if you can keep that kind of mindset and discuss the issue and maybe you got something but unfortunately in this country the way we've gone now and is you know it's it's not that in so many ways and well the algorithm is designed I always tell people, look, I'm not interested in personalities, I'm interested in policies. That's what my argument is all the time. So if I do that, then I can escape the blue versus... I try.

I can sit there and say, I like this idea. And I try to go in with the expectation that I am not the best person in it. I know that. But I also know that this person grew up with an entirely... And deep down, they still want the same things as I do as a human being. the question is how do they get to

And how do they think it's right? Now, we can argue that like super wealthy people maybe are stripped from that. But I'm talking about the average individual person who's just trying to get by, who has a family, you know, who love. or her parents or whatever. There are ways that I can sit there and say, look, I would never choose what you've just chosen, but I can understand. and it's oftentimes it can be about simply ignorance this person doesn't know

And I have had that experience. And who am I to sit there and say, just because I've been to Mexico and Europe and I've seen other cultures and stuff like that face first, that I'm a better person. He or she just hasn't had that opportunity to the same degree. And maybe they would. It's hard, man. Have I mentioned the organization Braver Angels on the show yet? No. Braver Angels is something that my wife, Jan, is very much a part of, which is they came out during, I think, like 20...

Team 2017, at least that's when they showed up on our radar, which is specifically to get people from across the different political to talk amongst each other, to reteach how to listen, how to have a communication that is a more egalitarian in the sense of like, I'm actually going to listen to you instead of just waiting for my opportunity to talk. And...

One of the things that comes out of these discussions is because they have debates on there and they have people brought in is that you can start to learn that in addition to what Jack said, which I agree with, in addition to that, there's times where it's like neither one of us.

objectively right or wrong, and maybe we need to respect each other's opinions on that. Your idea... current problem is different than mine but just because that's what i think is right doesn't mean that objectively yours is worse than mine and maybe i need to be aware of that and be able to accept that until we try them out we're not really going to know which one And I think you did mention that we did talk.

remember now. I just didn't recognize the name. And I think it's great. I think it comes down to it. And I think we said this at the time. show that we were doing we need to listen to understand or listen to comprehend rather than listen spawned i had a guy that i was talking to a week or two ago and he had a he had a red hat on you know he's a nice enough guy and we

He asked me what I did before I retired. I told him I was a college professor. And he looked right at me. He goes, oh, you must be a snowflake then. And I just looked at him. I said, what? Like that? I said, you don't even know me. You just make that assumption that because I was a college student, and he's not, I mean, I'm... You don't know me. You don't know who I am. But feel free to blurt this out at me as I don't even know you.

But, I mean, it's that kind of a thing that people feel like they have the agency to say shit. Why are you even saying that? Yeah. You know who changed my mind about a lot of this stuff? I've always... But Daryl Davis, Daryl Davis is my hero, my modern day hero. You can go find him. He's a black African-American. I think you've mentioned him to me before. He's an African-American jazz player. who just befriended White Nash.

KKK members, literal KKK members. Yeah, now I know who you're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. He's fantastic. And what's stunning is that because he just treats them as a regular person and talks to them. They show up at his door and give him their whole white pajamas thing, hat and everything. They're like, I can't belong to this.

He's got like 150 hoods and robes in his closet. He goes, I've never asked them for this. I don't understand why they want to give it to me. But the truth is, is that what they're saying is, you changed me. And you don't even know.

and there's like video you can see a video of like one of the like the grand wizards who's telling everybody in the crowd like this guy daryl's a better friend to me than any of you guys have been but it's it's that you you you you change people from the inside You never... And that made me realize that all the shaming, all the talking, all that kind of stuff, it would never make somebody change their mind. But if I could get in there and let them know that I was just another dude.

that they might somewhere down the line. It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow. Some of these things took years for this to happen. But for some reason, that was in his personality. Let's just thank you. I'm not gonna... I'm just gonna treat this person who I'm... He's no... Obviously, he's no KKK lover himself. But he's just gonna treat him on a human level. And that's how you create...

And I want my life to be like that. And part of the reason why I made Mutual is because I want every... I don't know if it's work. I was going to bring it back just so people can sum up. We've gone very far afield from robots, but, you know. If you listen to it, I hope that people listening to this went and listened to it.

They took five stories out of it. The first one's Robbie. about the uh robot childminder second one is reason and that's the one with cutie or kitty as they as they call it and that was a difficult one really how do you how do you reason those people out right those robots out Yeah, and she becomes the prophet of the master who is the force that runs the ship, right?

Because they say, right, I mean, it's so evident in a lot of it. Focuses the energy. Yeah. That you can't, how could you make me when you're inferior? Right. She says, and that's that dichotomy that's happening. And then there was Little Lost Robot, and that was the Nestor 10 that Lofar was talking about. Then there's Liar, where they go, Susie.

The telepathic robot. Oh, it's interesting. How did you feel about the way, and this is a Stevie Brierley took out Susie. Yeah. Which says a lot when you talk about the end. Right, because Susie knows, right? Because she's clairvoyant, right? She knows that Stevie Barley is robotic. And so then you see Stevie for one of the first times get like, you're not going to tell me one, are you? Right? And then what does she do?

tells it, right? By playing on its... I think the Robin Hood's ancestor is Susie. I mean, Stevie. She Captain Kirk's it. You know? she does a big what does that mean exactly For sure. Which is obviously where they got that from. How many times has Kirk... No, you don't know. How many times has Captain Kirk destroyed a robot or a computer by giving it an impossible choice? Oh, I don't know. It did with M5 computer in Star Trek.

so the ultimate computer he did it with norman and imud right norman you know i i am not programmed to respond in that area he says to norman and norman's like how can you be programmed that you are not a human and i'm like back and forth and then it burns out Yeah, you gotta watch those old... So all the Star Trek writers had been reading Asimov. 100%.

I mean, Stevie, because she knows that Quinn is suspicious. Right? She put him into a coma. for seven years seven years yeah right and and justifies it by going it's for the you know the good of everything of the world control center doesn't that sound benign and and she sounds so like so like put upon whenever he's explaining to her like what did you do it's like

I'm just doing the best that this has made the world a better place. Go live your life, Quinn. If you don't do this, things will be very difficult for you personally. Is that a threat? No, it's just a... I'm just letting you know. You got him. It'd be a shame for something to happen to it. Yeah, pretty much. That's the American version. No, but when you don't even think of it.

It's great because she's got this beautiful, beautiful voice and this lovely lilt and this beautiful British accent. And, you know, and it's just... well, things could get bad for you, you know, like they were before. Concern trolling, as they call it nowadays. Concern? I've never heard that in my life. Oh, yeah, it's a social media term, whereas the idea is that you're faking concerns for somebody. Oh, so I can get followers. So, you know.

Well, no, so that you, it's very, very much paternalistic, right? So somebody says something absolutely insane on, for example, a political thing. one of our Canadians. I'll go, oh, please call 911. I'm afraid you've hit your head. and that usually shuts them up but that's my that's my little concern trolling because it's like absolutely bananas what they've just written about you know is there anything about any of those stories that we left out You know, you want to bring up.

I'm interested, I want to talk about the thing, and I didn't quite catch what it was, but they were trying to find, she was trying to find the faker in the 32, and I didn't.

63 okay um 63 something like that and they were going one of them had been uh reprogrammed from the three laws and they had to figure out what They put the doctor in some kind of dangerous situation and I didn't catch exactly like he was gonna fall or something and they had to catch him or no they're gonna drop a large object okay that's what

And the only robot that delayed was Nestor 10. Nestor 10 ended up being the one who was there because he didn't react quite as quickly as the rest of the robots. And then he tried to escape. And then he ran away. And that was interesting. Yeah. No, they were gonna do the Acme big anvil dropping down, you know, they had the Wile E. Coyote there, cut the strand.

But that's an interesting point that you bring up, because when the colonel, or whoever it was, who I thought was kind of an irritating voice. Intentionally so. Yeah, I think so. But when she goes, well, why don't you do it, Briarley? Well, I can't. You know, and she can't do it because she's a robot, right? Yeah, that was a really nice little subtle bit in there, yeah. She said for reasons I can't explain, yeah.

It's for legal reasons. You wouldn't get it. That's right. Yeah, legal reasons, right. I thought that was beautifully done. And then the guy said, oh, I'll do it. I'm the one who told him to get lost. But it's interesting that, you know, it says something about the robots, right? When she's like, well, what did you say? Well, I, you know, I broke a thing and I got mad. What did you say? That's all they got lost. Oh, yeah.

It's getting lost. I was like, this is really, this is good stuff. Like, you know, I wrote that. Was that your favorite of the five? I was going to ask, which is your favorite of the five? They're all good. I really think the last one's my favorite. It's the showdown between Quinn and Briarley, and they added the thing where he's in love with her. And it's funny that... Susie brought it up. Susie? Susie lies to you. Right? Because she can't.

She can only talk to one person because she can only tell that person what, you know, because she's got to take care of the humans, right? And that's, so it's more, it makes the laws more than just physical.

psychological too right but you can't hurt somebody psychologically so he tells her he knows that he's in love with her so she says oh she loves you too which she You know, there's no evidence that you know there's the lies that are happening very very you know interesting and but i kind of like the last one because it's just that that showdown and and it's so well acted and it's got so to the point you know and she like you said jack when she Just live your life. And it's just going to happen.

How about you? I think I'm with you as well. I love them all. Think about the one bringing up Robbie.

Susie, that's been done a number of times, so I was familiar with that. I was caught completely... how she had turned into a robot so that for me was a great twist in the end and like I said it buttoned up the entire story and made more sense as to why she ended up killing wanting to find out who the fake nester was and you know all that stuff it makes a lot more sense and then why she sort of built her way into running the whole world and and kept hitting

And changing, I love changing the line to, well, it's not that we won't kill a human, but we won't kill humanity, right? Just the slight little modifications there. What about you, Brother Lothar? Well, it's hard for me not to see the whole thing as one But if I had to pick one, I'd pick the Robbie one. And the reason why is that it's the least plot-driven. And it's the one that's more emotion-driven. the different characterizations, and I thought it was the one that approached

It broke out of the mold of genre fiction and adopted more of what we would arrogantly call literary fiction. But some of the things I like about literary fiction is just how it reflects on the human condition. I thought the characterization of the mother and her jealousy. the father and his love of his daughter and also his position of being in there.

his love of, we're just going to do the new technological thing and keep up with the Joneses and all that. I thought there was a lot of emotional and character richness in that one that was less present in the others because the others were very... and i i'm glad you brought that up because i was gonna bring up the fact that gracie the way they identify gracie and her motivation

is much more classical looking at a mother in many ways. I'm not saying all mothers, but it's much more of a, I hate the word pro, but you know what I mean, more of a stereotypical way of looking at the mother that she needs. control it actually kind of reminded me of when uh my first wife i i was going to be a stay home father for my second son column and she couldn't take it i stayed it lasted a couple of weeks and then she to work because she felt like she wasn't a good

because I was doing all the stuff at home kind of thing. And so there is that aspect that some people feel that way. So it was interesting to see that kind of characterization. You would never have that character. Nowadays, you would never have that female character in a story because it comes across as too stereotypical. I need to go get my positronic brain worked on, so we're going to have to wrap this up. But I think it's a positronic brain. I think it's me next time, right?

Yeah, it is. But one thing about the positronic brain I read, because I read his... I read iAsimov. by his autobiography and uh He was asked about the positronic brain. He goes, I don't know, it's just a name I made up one day. You know what I mean? He goes, everybody puts all this stuff, too. He goes, I don't know. or not. Of course. Once again, Star Trek used it in Next Generation, right? Yeah. Data uses the positronic, right? Oh, he is? Oh, I didn't know that. It's just funny.

I just made it up one day. I needed a word.

And so it was funny. But anyway, yeah, Lotha, you're up next. Yeah, and I've been looking for another Cheery Writer's stuff. We're going to do some Philip K. deck. I actually found I actually found I think there's either five or six Old-time radio shows of some of his earlier fiction, so we're not going to get into his weirder stuff of Valus or anything like that, but there's a number of them. I'm going to select mine probably within the next week at the latest, maybe this weekend.

or next weekend, and then we'll schedule the next show. But yeah, we're going to do some Philip K. Dick. I'd love to do these sooner if we can, because I'd like to do a zero... Oh, fantastic. Zero hour. That's great. I've been immersed in Philip Kajak with the Defenders, and you guys were too. So amazing. Send me the whole, send the whole list of what you found. Yeah, I definitely will. Absolutely. You know, and, and, and, uh, I, I just, I love Philip K. Dick.

My favorite. I recommend to everybody to watch Electric Dreams, the anthology of... it's on. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's interesting. They did for the most part, it was really fantastic and a good update. Some of his stuff would have been a little too dated if they hadn't updated it the way they did. It was.

Thank you very much. There we go. Thank you guys. That was fantastic. I hope the audience liked that. I hope they went and listened. And there's a lot of great stuff on the BBC.

great stuff. Like you said, Lothar at the top is just top quality stuff. It's always so good. Thank you, gentlemen. It's always a pleasure to sit down with you via Zoom and do our... think about all these thoughts and now my brain hurts and um i gotta go for a walk on the beach all right so thank you guys all right This has been ¡Adiós! Sunday Showcase on the Mutual O- series of dramatic theatrical live radio drama.

feed every day for the world's largest curated collection of audio drama or find the Monday matinee See you tomorrow at the matinee, and thanks so much for listening. The Mutual Audio Network. Listening and imagining together.