Speaker 1: Worry. Today's episode Key Day's spoilish for Foundation season three
Speaker 1: episode two. Hello, my name is Jason Concepcion and I'm
Speaker 1: Rosday Night, and welcome back to Extra Image of the
Speaker 1: podcast where we dive deep into your favorite shows, movies,
Speaker 1: comics and pop culture. Company from my Heart podcast, where
Speaker 1: we're bringing you three episodes a week every Tuesday and Thursday,
Speaker 1: plus the summer's biggest movies every Friday, and news on Saturday,
Speaker 1: News on Saturday.
Speaker 2: In today's episode, we are digging deep into Foundations season
Speaker 2: three episode two, Shadows in the Math.
Speaker 3: Are you ready? Are you ready to see sexy Lee Pace?
Speaker 3: Are you ready to see a crazy world which may
Speaker 3: be more like us than we want to admit. Well,
Speaker 3: we're gonna dig into it, but you'll have some exciting
Speaker 3: news for you.
Speaker 1: Guys.
Speaker 2: We are going to San Diego Comic Con.
Speaker 1: And you've been saying where are you going to be?
Speaker 2: Well, on Thursday at twelve thirty, our panel with the
Speaker 2: Rodenbury Does It Fly Podcast will be in Room twenty
Speaker 2: four ABC. That means they've opened up all three rooms,
Speaker 2: so make sure you.
Speaker 1: Come and join us and fill it up.
Speaker 2: Then come join us at Petco Park at four pm
Speaker 2: for the chance to bid on real Superman comic original
Speaker 2: art from some of the biggest artists in the industry.
Speaker 2: And on Saturday, we'll be back at Petco for a
Speaker 2: massive Godzilla auction featuring rad stuff from IDW super seven
Speaker 2: and me and Jason will be there with some of
Speaker 2: our cool friends. And if you want to hang out
Speaker 2: with me and Jason, then join us at the Mission
Speaker 2: Brewery for a meet and greet. We will post all
Speaker 2: of this on our socials and in our discord, of course.
Speaker 1: But first, Foundation all right, Foundation Season three, Episode two,
Speaker 1: Shadows in the Math. Let's bring in our resident dunehead,
Speaker 1: our resident Foundation freak super producer, Abou. How are you?
Speaker 4: I'm doing great?
Speaker 1: We open on ignis flashback one hundred and fifty one
Speaker 1: years ago. The Mentallics are waking Gail from cryo sleep.
Speaker 1: They tell her, listen, the plan is going great. It's
Speaker 1: going apace. They wake Harry. They both you know, look
Speaker 1: at the plans and they're pleased. However, they do note
Speaker 1: that there are some there's some deviations sneaking into the mathematics.
Speaker 1: All of their waking time, Harry and Gale is spent
Speaker 1: doing two things one trying to figure out how do
Speaker 1: we get this plan back on course as it tries
Speaker 1: to nudge itself off course? And then how do we
Speaker 1: teach the mentalics about psychohistory so they can deal with
Speaker 1: shit while we're frozen. At a certain point, you know,
Speaker 1: once the Foundation goes out of its religious phase, Gail
Speaker 1: is like, Hey, guess what, we don't have to do
Speaker 1: the gods. You don't have to kneel to me anymore.
Speaker 1: We're out of the god phase. It's more of a
Speaker 1: managerial phase. Now.
Speaker 4: I do need your OKRs on my desk by Friday
Speaker 4: or the next time I wake up, whatever it comes first.
Speaker 1: We're in a new bureaucratic era. Gaiale and Harry pour
Speaker 1: over the numbers and what they see is the Mule coming.
Speaker 1: Third crisis looming. It's going to be bad. They're updating
Speaker 1: their models, they're trying to fix things, to figure out
Speaker 1: like how they can predict this, but it's not going well.
Speaker 1: Harry comes up with a solution. How about I stay awake.
Speaker 1: I will stay awake and age you go to sleep
Speaker 1: so that you can be young and fresh when your
Speaker 1: confrontation with the Mule appears. They wake up again four
Speaker 1: years before the main storyline began. In episode one of
Speaker 1: this season, we meet prem Troy Kottzer from Coda. Gail,
Speaker 1: upon awakening, is alarmed to realize that Harry's has been
Speaker 1: awake this whole time has been up, and she finds
Speaker 1: him old and washed as hell, gazing up at a
Speaker 1: comet like with his bare eyes staring up at the
Speaker 1: at it's the bright sky. He looks like absolute shit,
Speaker 1: and he tells Gail, listen, time is more valuable than ever.
Speaker 1: The mule is coming. But before we get to that,
Speaker 1: check out these statues I carved of Salvoes.
Speaker 4: I love the shows, I will I will say I
Speaker 4: love the show's version of Harry Salden because he he
Speaker 4: is much more like arrogant and self centered and really
Speaker 4: like up his own ass about his own prophecy, like
Speaker 4: his own math. He loves himself so much in the show,
Speaker 4: which I appreciate. The books kind of glossed over that
Speaker 4: version of Harry, and here we get like kind of
Speaker 4: kind of a real dighead Harry, which I love.
Speaker 1: Actually, he kind of muses with Gail about how it
Speaker 1: could be that the plan could be this far off course,
Speaker 1: and he wonders if it has something to do with
Speaker 1: Gail her safe herself. You know, according to the original
Speaker 1: version of the Psychohistory Plan, Gail was supposed to die,
Speaker 1: like back when Raychdive was not supposed to be here,
Speaker 1: and the fact that she's here with like developing superhuman
Speaker 1: powers influencing modern events is perhaps one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that the plan is going so off course, they don't
Speaker 1: come to a full answer about that. He then takes
Speaker 1: out the Prime Radiant and he's like, here's everything I
Speaker 1: know about all the Crisses. There's eight Crisises. They're only
Speaker 1: heading towards the third one. And he tells her that
Speaker 1: everything kind of hinges on the Invictus. Remember the ghost
Speaker 1: ship from season one that was integral to the Foundation
Speaker 1: defeating the Empire in their first kind of big clash.
Speaker 1: It's still out there and it's going to be important
Speaker 1: apparently for the future. Harry goes off to rest and
Speaker 1: his old friend Cale shows up. Remember Cale got Harry
Speaker 1: his new body body Harry. We called this one body Harry.
Speaker 1: And then there's you know, there's Harry Hologram Harry's She's
Speaker 1: just like in his quarters somehow, and she calls him
Speaker 1: out for lying to Gail about what We never get
Speaker 1: the answer to that, But what do you think it is?
Speaker 1: What do you think he's lying to her about?
Speaker 4: You know, my first instinct was he didn't exactly tell
Speaker 4: her that he's about to die. He's going to die,
Speaker 4: and I thought that's what Cale was referencing. I thought
Speaker 4: Cale was like, oh, you didn't tell her the part
Speaker 4: where you're actually about to die and she should say
Speaker 4: goodbye to you, and you're not going to give her
Speaker 4: the chance to say goodbye to you and get closure
Speaker 4: that way. I thought that's what she was criticizing. But
Speaker 4: it could also be something about the plan that he
Speaker 4: has yet to reveal.
Speaker 1: So then Harry is like, forget that, What about a
Speaker 1: new body for me? What about a fresh one? Look
Speaker 1: at how look at how wrinkled this one is. I'm
Speaker 1: on my last legs. What an ask? Cayla is like, nope,
Speaker 1: that was your one reprieve. And then it's just an
Speaker 1: amazing turn of events. Her eyes flash, she creates some
Speaker 1: kind of portal through space and time. Does it go somewhere?
Speaker 1: Harry is amazed, We are amazed. They go through and disappear,
Speaker 1: and we're left to wonder who Kyla is. She kind
Speaker 1: of intimates in she says something to Harry about being
Speaker 1: part of a race of beings who are like energy
Speaker 1: and so or don't have bodies, so very interesting. Gail
Speaker 1: comes to Harry's office, finds out he's gone. She can
Speaker 1: feel it that he's disappeared. Pream comes to see her,
Speaker 1: and she's really sad about the fact that he left
Speaker 1: without saying by so Preame's like, well, guess what, you
Speaker 1: can see him right now? Come see the statue Harry
Speaker 1: carved of himself.
Speaker 2: I have.
Speaker 1: I did. It's so funny and I love that. Harry's
Speaker 1: version of humility is he doesn't he shows you the
Speaker 1: other three other Yeah, right, he doesn't show you the
Speaker 1: one he did of himself later and he'll have his
Speaker 1: right hand guy should do that. So anyway, now that
Speaker 1: Harry's off, Harry's off the board, Pream becomes Gail's right
Speaker 1: hand guy. And it's Spream that wakes Gale up in
Speaker 1: the present. She knows immediately that the mule is out there,
Speaker 1: that they're out of time. They try to discuss what
Speaker 1: to do. They're looking at the calculations and they realize
Speaker 1: now that the mule has taken Kalgan. The future is
Speaker 1: on them now. It's happening now. The crisis is looming
Speaker 1: right now, and the collapse of the Dark Ages aren't
Speaker 1: going to take centuries to develop. It's gonna happen right away,
Speaker 1: maybe in the next few months. We go to Trantur,
Speaker 1: where the Cleons and Demarzel are also looking at the
Speaker 1: calculations with her prime radiant. She says that something's been
Speaker 1: casting shadows in the math for years. Day takes this
Speaker 1: as his cue to be like, well, peace out, guys, deuces,
Speaker 1: I'm going back to my sex palace in the garden.
Speaker 1: I'll see you later. He leaves. He immediately leaves, which
Speaker 1: I love drama. Dosk wonders if Demarzel, aren't you just
Speaker 1: aren't you looking forward to the end, like this is
Speaker 1: probably great for you, right, you know, no Cleons to
Speaker 1: shepherd around anymore. And then he gets to the thing
Speaker 1: that he really wants to ask, and has clearly wanted
Speaker 1: to ask ever since we saw him in episode one
Speaker 1: looking at versions of himself get burnt up and we
Speaker 1: all deal with trauma friendly okay, Jay said, and he
Speaker 1: basically is like man yea about ascension Day's coming up
Speaker 1: in like a week. What if we push that back?
Speaker 1: We've got a crisis looming, do we not?
Speaker 4: Is that like a like we have to do it?
Speaker 1: Day is not involved, right and we need all hands
Speaker 1: on deck? So what if I stick around and I
Speaker 1: just get that big talent stuff and was like hard, no, sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm a clock and uh, you know the timestick. We
Speaker 1: go to Calgan. The Mule is living it up. We
Speaker 1: get another display of his spooky powers. He's in the
Speaker 1: former the late Lord of Kalgan's house, which is at
Speaker 1: his house, and as we saw in episode one, he
Speaker 1: had kidnapped the lord's daughter and he brings her out
Speaker 1: in front of his new staff, this kind of the
Speaker 1: new assembled staff of of his that he's trying to
Speaker 1: get the loyalty from, and using his powers, he gets
Speaker 1: Scarlet the daughter to like put a gun to her
Speaker 1: head and he's counting, you know, to three, at which
Speaker 1: point she's going to fire. And then a woman in
Speaker 1: the in this lineup of servants cries cries out three
Speaker 1: before the Mule can get there. And what the Mule
Speaker 1: is doing is seeing how his powers are affecting these
Speaker 1: different people. To see which of them he really has
Speaker 1: to bear down on and which of them he can
Speaker 1: just like buy osmosis, suggest stuff to and they will.
Speaker 4: Follow these orders, which implies that it takes a toll
Speaker 4: on him to use these powers, and so he's being
Speaker 4: strategic about how he does.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want to use them all the time, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it question for both of you. So after this he
Speaker 1: dismisses everybody and then he's like, Scarlet, give me the gun,
Speaker 1: and she's like, no, he does get it from her,
Speaker 1: But what did you make of the fact that Scarlet
Speaker 1: kind of resisted him for a little bit here.
Speaker 2: I think she's hart to like compel. I think as
Speaker 2: you if we think of it as like a mita
Speaker 2: that he asked to charge, it's gonna take more work
Speaker 2: to bear down on her. That was my reading of this,
Speaker 2: And I also want a cool giant gold gun.
Speaker 1: It was a very cool gun.
Speaker 4: I actually have the exact opposite read of it. I
Speaker 4: think that the urge to shoot herself is now buried
Speaker 4: somewhere into her psyche, and so she doesn't want to
Speaker 4: give him back the gun, Like maybe maybe it's actually
Speaker 4: harder for him to undo something he's compelled someone to do.
Speaker 4: It only works one way.
Speaker 2: Perhaps, And it also is almost like a butterfly effect
Speaker 2: thing where if he puts it in your mind, it
Speaker 2: could like kind of.
Speaker 4: The seed is planted and it kind of is like
Speaker 4: in the back of your mind constantly.
Speaker 1: Because he does.
Speaker 4: He has a weird line right after he hands it
Speaker 4: back where he's like, you'll have a chance to do
Speaker 4: it later or something like that. I'm paraphrasing. I don't
Speaker 4: remember the exact line, but that to me implied like
Speaker 4: you'll have a chance to shoot yourself later. Just bury
Speaker 4: that instinct for now, give me the gun.
Speaker 2: It gonna be Definitely. I love that read because if
Speaker 2: he can't undo things he wants to do and that comes, he.
Speaker 1: Doesn't want her to kill uself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that could be a really interesting.
Speaker 4: Right, and it opens up like narratively, it opens up
Speaker 4: a way to outsmart someone who has such an overpowered skill, right,
Speaker 4: and it opens up consequences for using that skill and
Speaker 4: a way for someone like Gail to outsmart him and
Speaker 4: have it backfire on him.
Speaker 1: Another thing I've wondered about, and we don't have to
Speaker 1: answer now, but just something I've been thinking about is
Speaker 1: how potentially Harry and Gale's interaction with the mentalics started
Speaker 1: the ball rolling on the mule and the and the
Speaker 1: kind of tidal wave that is the mule because they
Speaker 1: have similar powers, and is there some sort of interplay
Speaker 1: between those two events. I'm eager to find that out.
Speaker 1: We go back to Trantor, where Day is gambling in
Speaker 1: the barracks the soldiers. He is putting up a bunch
Speaker 1: of like ancient imperious stuff, just like into the pot.
Speaker 5: But it's love, love, love love Day and this is
Speaker 5: just like complete, just like having a great time and
Speaker 5: just like well fuck it, like and I feel like
Speaker 5: that is like a very reasonable and kind of normal
Speaker 5: response for what he's going through and kind of the
Speaker 5: understanding of his path.
Speaker 1: But there's no need to worry about him losing the stuff,
Speaker 1: because we do see that he is cheating, which makes
Speaker 1: us wonder what other secrets they might be hiding.
Speaker 2: He's not following the cats.
Speaker 1: Certainly not. We meet Torren Marlow, who is a distant
Speaker 1: relation to Hobra Malow. He might remember Hobra Malow from
Speaker 1: season one, and Torren and his wife Beta are some
Speaker 1: kind of like galactic influencers. They're sunbathing when the mule
Speaker 1: blocks blocks the rays of the sun, so they get plan.
Speaker 1: They start complaining, and later when they go inside, Prichard,
Speaker 1: chief spy of the First Foundation, comes to see them
Speaker 1: and basically says, hey, you guys have the perfect profile
Speaker 1: of spies. We want you to go into the Mules
Speaker 1: and the Mules having a party tonight. We want you
Speaker 1: to go in there and just tell us what you see.
Speaker 1: They agree. We go back to Trantur a day is
Speaker 1: in his sex garden. He's doing drugs, he's having sex,
Speaker 1: living it up. He's talking about Harry Selden. He's, for one,
Speaker 1: is kind of looking forward to the end of the Cleons.
Speaker 1: He's like, I think it's gonna be great. Dusk Dusk,
Speaker 1: who at this point, I think we can say, is
Speaker 1: fully spiraling.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is like I found this to be kind
Speaker 2: of really it's like funny to watch, but it's also
Speaker 2: the kind of incredibly existential kind of horror that I
Speaker 2: had as a child about die, where like I just
Speaker 2: couldn't stop thinking find out about it, and you think
Speaker 2: about it all the time, and you think about the
Speaker 2: lack of things, You're not going to be able to
Speaker 2: do anything.
Speaker 1: I was a very depressed child.
Speaker 2: I used to lay in bed with my ears covered
Speaker 2: and think like, oh, this is what it's like when
Speaker 2: I die, like with my eyes closed. Like I was
Speaker 2: thinking it way too much, and that is him, like
Speaker 2: he is struggling, and I understand why.
Speaker 1: So Dusk comes up and he's like, hey, Day, what's up? Hey?
Speaker 1: Sorry about you know previously? What do you think about
Speaker 1: pumping the brakes on a engin day? What if he
Speaker 1: don't do it right away?
Speaker 4: I was just walking to the grocery store and not
Speaker 4: thinking about death, and I wanted to stop by and
Speaker 4: get your thoughts on something.
Speaker 1: I just like having feeling. I was like, wait, maybe.
Speaker 3: Said you Day, like some fun?
Speaker 1: How does he how does he feel about that?
Speaker 2: Jason? What is they.
Speaker 1: Is like, Oh, you care about your body? That's interesting?
Speaker 1: And then he just stabs himself in the arm and
Speaker 1: slices it down so that the nanits, you know, the
Speaker 1: nan Knights, immediately stitch it back up and then like
Speaker 1: flicks the knife so that the blood goes on Dusk's face.
Speaker 1: And it's basically the most dramatic way to say one
Speaker 1: no and then two like get over it, Like you're
Speaker 1: so attached to your body we're gonna die, We're closed.
Speaker 1: Just stop drama. So now Dusk, having struck out with
Speaker 1: Demarzel in the last episode and now uh and Nowaday
Speaker 1: goes to see Dawn and he says, listen, I I
Speaker 1: can't wait. I am. I am eager to hand over
Speaker 1: the reins today as he becomes Dusk, and I promise
Speaker 1: to do my best to help him in the very
Speaker 1: few days that I have left. That said, Dawn, I
Speaker 1: guess something really cool in secret that I've been working
Speaker 1: on to show you, and not even Den Rosel knows
Speaker 1: about it. And Don's intrigued. Later, Dusk meets with some
Speaker 1: of his scientists that he's been working with to create
Speaker 1: this secret thing. And the secret thing is the Navacular,
Speaker 1: a black hole weapon that he has had manufactured. They
Speaker 1: tested on a planet and it just sucks the planet
Speaker 1: in And Dusk insists that this weapon is for Dawn
Speaker 1: to use only under the worst possible circumstances. What those
Speaker 1: will be, we don't know. Later, Dusk and Dawn meet
Speaker 1: with Ambassador Quent of the Foundation. They discuss Kalgan, They
Speaker 1: discuss Mayor Inber and how the Foundation is in disarray,
Speaker 1: about the mule, and about Kalgan and what to do.
Speaker 1: Down is concerned that the mule may try to hold
Speaker 1: on to the They're very it's troubling that the mule
Speaker 1: hasn't just rated Kalgan and left. The fact that he's
Speaker 1: staying there seems like a problem. Down leaves this this meeting,
Speaker 1: goes to his office, gets something out of a safe,
Speaker 1: turns it on and it's a communicator device. And who's
Speaker 1: he talking to? He's talking to Gail?
Speaker 2: Door?
Speaker 1: What what? What? What? What?
Speaker 3: Some?
Speaker 1: This is very interesting, guys, huge, huge, huge hutus is
Speaker 1: is he really talking to Gail? Do we think? Or
Speaker 1: is it like a mule illusion? Can the mule do
Speaker 1: this over those kind of distances? I think it is Gail.
Speaker 1: I think it's got to be Yale, truly Yale.
Speaker 4: I think it is Gail or it is a I
Speaker 4: guess it can't be a recording of Gail because it
Speaker 4: responded in real time. I think it's Gail. I don't
Speaker 4: think it's any sort of trickery. I think the show
Speaker 4: is saying, look, Empire and Foundation working together, common enemy
Speaker 4: mule question mark.
Speaker 1: So here we here's where we are after this episode.
Speaker 1: The Empire is secretly working with the Traders to undermine
Speaker 1: the Foundation. The Second Foundation is secretly working with with
Speaker 1: Dawn soon to be Day to take on the Mule
Speaker 1: and do what else we don't know. And then the
Speaker 1: Mule is out there seemingly by himself, just causing all
Speaker 1: kinds of havoc will be interesting to see. Oh and
Speaker 1: I forgot. And then the First Foundation is working with
Speaker 1: its own independently sourced spies against the judgment of its
Speaker 1: own leadership in Mayor inber to investigate what the Mule
Speaker 1: is up to. So currently three parties at work here,
Speaker 1: all working at cross purposes.
Speaker 2: Also, this is definitely coming again from my perspective from
Speaker 2: outside of the Deep Foundation foundom but like to me,
Speaker 2: after this episode, what does it seem like The likelihood
Speaker 2: to me is the Mule is going to want to
Speaker 2: stay on Kalgan with Scarlet. That feels like what's gonna happen,
Speaker 2: And I'm interested to see if they go that route,
Speaker 2: especially after a Booze read on the Seed kind of
Speaker 2: being in there. I feel like that Mule and Scarlet
Speaker 2: relationship could go somewhere really interesting.
Speaker 4: Well, Rosie, two episodes in what do you think the
Speaker 4: Mule's motivations are.
Speaker 1: I honestly like couldn't tell you.
Speaker 2: It's one of the things that's been really interesting to
Speaker 2: me about the show is that I feel like we're
Speaker 2: getting into again tropiness some sci fi stories. You know,
Speaker 2: you're Darth Fade or something. When it's happening, you just
Speaker 2: don't know why they're bad, why they're evil, right, But
Speaker 2: I feel like with the Mule, there is a much
Speaker 2: more interesting exploration of his powers, how he uses them,
Speaker 2: why he uses them. So I do feel like there's
Speaker 2: some kind of and if I'm looking at what I
Speaker 2: feel like are quite heavy influences on like Dune, I
Speaker 2: feel like the connection and the question that Jason asked about,
Speaker 2: like the mentaalics and the way that that potentially influenced
Speaker 2: or created the meal could be a really interesting way
Speaker 2: to explore that story further. But so that's kind of
Speaker 2: my read on it right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's fair. Well, sorry, Can I also nitpick one
Speaker 4: more thing before we wrap up? Yeaheah, I hated the navacular.
Speaker 4: I'm so annoyed this fucking death Star thing is in
Speaker 4: this show.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, it's so death Star coded.
Speaker 2: I didn't even bring it.
Speaker 1: I didn't even say it like.
Speaker 4: Well it doesn't exist in the books. As the problem is,
Speaker 4: like the Empire at this stage in this story should
Speaker 4: not have this technology, right, Like a huge theme is
Speaker 4: that Empire is degrading. It has been one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty plus years of Empire's technology degrading and Foundation's technology evolving,
Speaker 4: and Foundation has overtaken Empire at this point in the books,
Speaker 4: like they forget how to use new clear nuclear weapons
Speaker 4: and like nucleics, and like they revert back to like
Speaker 4: oil as a power source because Empire has stagnated so much.
Speaker 4: I just don't feel like we're seeing enough stagnation in
Speaker 4: the show for Empire. It's this feels like the same
Speaker 4: Empire that we knew in episode one, season one, but.
Speaker 1: They have to use mass transit. Now, sure they don't
Speaker 1: have their own ships, but they're creating Themsell. Will you
Speaker 1: go on Expedia and find out when the next transport, Yeah, Ignus.
Speaker 2: Is and then can you make it like a zillow
Speaker 2: so we can find a secret place to get up
Speaker 2: put a secret black hole.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So that that is my I just wanted to
Speaker 4: nitpick that this one tiny thing about this episode. I
Speaker 4: was extremely bothered by the navacular. I don't think it
Speaker 4: makes sense. It's too Star Wars coded. I'm not sure
Speaker 4: what the creative choice here is.
Speaker 2: Does it does it also set up like an Ope
Speaker 2: situation when now that too that overpowered because they do
Speaker 2: have like a Black Cole creation machine that can destroy planets.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I think what it's setting up is like, oh no,
Speaker 4: the mule has taken over the navacular, what are we
Speaker 4: gonna do? I think it's setting up like big steaks
Speaker 4: for the Mule fight. But I feel like there's already
Speaker 4: stakes with the Mule fight. I didn't need a planet
Speaker 4: strawing weapon thrown into the mix as well.
Speaker 1: I'm just confused about what Dusk listen. I think that
Speaker 1: the navacular, while whatever he means for it, you don't
Speaker 1: create that and then go get vaporized. He's gonna scound
Speaker 1: Dusk is not going anywhere. Okay.
Speaker 2: He made so like and then showed it to Dawn
Speaker 2: and was like some and it's like, yeah, the west
Speaker 2: Poncipal circumstances fit Dusk.
Speaker 1: Right now, I'm.
Speaker 2: Getting vaporized, So he's going to be using it.
Speaker 1: It'll be fascinating to see what he does, because again
Speaker 1: I do not believe that you make that and then
Speaker 1: go okay, bye, see you later, and which leads me
Speaker 1: to just wonder, like what he I don't know that
Speaker 1: we know what he intends to aim that at, so
Speaker 1: I'm very interested to see that. Welcome to another edition
Speaker 1: of the Omnibus, where lore, analysis and understanding come together.
Speaker 1: Today we're talking about predicting the future. A history of
Speaker 1: real life psychohistories foundation. The television show begins with the
Speaker 1: brilliant mathematician Harry Selden defending himself in Imperial court on
Speaker 1: charges of accurately predicting the fall of the Empire using psychohistory,
Speaker 1: which is Harry's patented mix of math, sociology, and whatever
Speaker 1: other kind of genius wizardry he's sprinkled in. There, Seldon
Speaker 1: sees the fall of empire and an age of societal
Speaker 1: collapse and violent chaos known as the Dark Ages, all
Speaker 1: of which is looming unless steps are taken to lesson
Speaker 1: its impact. Selden's fictional trial is, in a way the
Speaker 1: culmination of the work of non fictional people and the
Speaker 1: deeply human urge of all kinds of folks from different
Speaker 1: walks of life, from ancient hunter gatherers to classical era
Speaker 1: prophesiers and seers to modern day scientists, all trying to
Speaker 1: do the same thing, which is figure out what happens
Speaker 1: next and plan accordingly. Let's start approximately twenty thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Paleolithic hunter gatherers, using pain derived from ochre heematite and charcoal,
Speaker 1: decorated caves in what is now Spain in France with
Speaker 1: images of animals. You've seen these, probably they're beautiful. These
Speaker 1: grand creations are dominated by depictions of prey animals bison, deer,
Speaker 1: and so on, and archaeologists and scientists have long wondered
Speaker 1: about these peculiar markings that are next to these herds
Speaker 1: of animals. There are like little dots and little lines.
Speaker 1: Could these have been some early form of writing, an
Speaker 1: early form of religious ritual? Unknown? However, a recent hypothesis
Speaker 1: published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal in twenty twenty three
Speaker 1: asserts with I think some pretty compelling evidence that these
Speaker 1: marks actually correspond to months. In essence, if this paper
Speaker 1: titled in Upper Paleolithic proto Writing System and Archaeological Calendar
Speaker 1: is correct, what these ancient hunters were trying to do
Speaker 1: was communicate to others when the animal depicted next to
Speaker 1: the dot and line would migrate or mate, thus telling
Speaker 1: future generations how to hunt successfully and creating again if correct.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the earliest known example of humans predicting the cycles
Speaker 1: of nature and predicting the future. Let's fast forward now
Speaker 1: to ancient Greece the eighth century BC. Politicians, generals, and
Speaker 1: even everyday folks probably trek to Delfi's Temple of Apollo,
Speaker 1: where the Pythia, the high priestess there, would breathe in
Speaker 1: some form of mystical fumes, possibly ethylene released from nearby
Speaker 1: chasms deep chasms in the earth, and then speak prophecies
Speaker 1: in cryptic stone verses. The oracle was consulted often in
Speaker 1: times of dire crisis when no one could figure out
Speaker 1: what the next move should be, but unsurprisingly, the answers
Speaker 1: were ambiguous. The classic tale comes to us from Herodotus.
Speaker 1: Can Crocius of Lydia asks the Pythia if he should
Speaker 1: attack Persia, and the oracle replies, if you cross the river,
Speaker 1: a great empire will fall and you can figure out
Speaker 1: what happens next. Cross is like, yeah, I'm going to
Speaker 1: attack Persia. But spoiler alerted, it was his empire that
Speaker 1: fell apart. This is herodotous, though, so we don't know
Speaker 1: how much of that is legit. Across the ancient world,
Speaker 1: humans tried every method imaginable to glimpse the future. Babylonian
Speaker 1: astrologers mapped the night sky, believing the motion of the
Speaker 1: planets its stars foretold events on Earth. We're still doing that.
Speaker 1: If Mars rose in a certain constellation, maybe a king
Speaker 1: would die or a war would be born. These Babylonian
Speaker 1: priests were essentially the first data analysts, collecting celestial observations
Speaker 1: on clay tablets looking for Meanwhile, in ancient China, diviners
Speaker 1: heated tortoise shells until they cracked to read the patterns there.
Speaker 1: In ancient Rome, augurs watched the flight of birds past
Speaker 1: windows and sacrificed animals to inspect their entrails to decide
Speaker 1: if the future would be favorable or not. The idea
Speaker 1: was that there are clues everywhere in the world, in
Speaker 1: the universe and the natural world, if you know where
Speaker 1: to look. And let's not forget that magicians and seers
Speaker 1: beyond official priesthoods were also at play, working with the
Speaker 1: common people. Every culture had soothsayers, and visionaries. The Bible
Speaker 1: talks about Joseph interpret interpreting Pharaoh's dreams of skinny cows
Speaker 1: and fat cows in order to predict famine. In myth
Speaker 1: and legend, we hear of seers like Cassandra from Troy,
Speaker 1: from ancient Troy, who was cursed to predict true futures
Speaker 1: that no one would believe. Fast forward to the Renaissance
Speaker 1: and you get figures like Nostradamus, the sixteenth century French
Speaker 1: apothecary guy who published cryptic poems in the form of quatrains,
Speaker 1: these kind of foe lined poems that, according to later
Speaker 1: people who studied this, predicted everything from the rise of
Speaker 1: Napoleon to great famines to the appearance of Hitler. In reality,
Speaker 1: I mean, go read them. You can't figure you can't
Speaker 1: really figure out what those things are. But the fact
Speaker 1: is that we love this stuff, and people throughout history,
Speaker 1: ancient people and people today, and people certainly for as
Speaker 1: long as there are human beings, will love and will
Speaker 1: subscribe to the idea that somehow someone might have figured
Speaker 1: out how to predict the future. If there's one thing, well,
Speaker 1: let me take that again. However, it's one thing to
Speaker 1: ask about how the market's going to move, or whether
Speaker 1: we should go to war, or whether we should harvest.
Speaker 1: It's another thing to predict the end of the world entirely,
Speaker 1: and of course this is something that generation after generation
Speaker 1: people have tried to do. A veritable parade of Harry
Speaker 1: Selden's can be found all throughout the pages of history
Speaker 1: and all around the world, often as evidenced by the
Speaker 1: fact that we're still here. These end of time dates
Speaker 1: come and go or get pushed back continually because what
Speaker 1: happens nothing really happens, and many people are left disappointed.
Speaker 1: Medieval Europe had waves of apocalyptic fever throughout history, often
Speaker 1: around New Year's that turned from to big round numbers,
Speaker 1: you know, from year nine to ninety nine to year
Speaker 1: one thousand. We can jump to the nineteenth century to
Speaker 1: see more modern day versions of this. There was a
Speaker 1: guy named William Miller, preacher from up state New York,
Speaker 1: who predicted that Jesus would return on October twenty second,
Speaker 1: eighteen forty four. The I love the details. Thousands of
Speaker 1: his followers, the Millerites got ready, They prayed, they gave
Speaker 1: away their money, They made white robes with which to
Speaker 1: float up to heaven in and then than Avin. The
Speaker 1: day became known as the Great Disappointment to the Miller Rights.
Speaker 1: People wept, some lost faith, some recalculated, and this pattern
Speaker 1: is repeated all throughout the twentieth In the twenty first centuries,
Speaker 1: some of us might remember the twenty twelve Mayan calendar hype.
Speaker 1: This was big for young people of my generation who
Speaker 1: would go to raves and stuff. You know, you'd eat
Speaker 1: some mushrooms or smoke some hash and then be talking
Speaker 1: about it. And the next thing you know, some guy
Speaker 1: with dreadlocks and crystals is telling you how the Mayans
Speaker 1: predicted the end of everything and it was coming. This is,
Speaker 1: of course, a misinterpretation of the mind cycles that somehow
Speaker 1: convinced folks that the world would end. On December twenty first,
Speaker 1: twenty twelve, new agers held countdown parties. There was a
Speaker 1: big budget disaster movie. You may remember, but what happened,
Speaker 1: Nothing happened, We're fine. Or about Harold Camping. Some might
Speaker 1: remember Harold Camping. He was an American radio evangelist who
Speaker 1: confidently broadcast the Judgment Day would happen on May twenty first,
Speaker 1: twenty eleven. Followers spent their life savings, buying billboards, trying
Speaker 1: to warn people the end is coming, the end is coming.
Speaker 1: Then nothing happened, he missed. He then recalculated, Okay, sorry
Speaker 1: I did, I didn't carry the one or whatever. October
Speaker 1: twenty first, twenty eleven, when that date also passed uneventally uneventfully,
Speaker 1: Camping said, quote, we humbly acknowledged we were wrong about
Speaker 1: the timing. Eventually, a new idea in this kind of
Speaker 1: prediction to science to cold and that was that maybe
Speaker 1: it was a science. Maybe using the knowledge we unearthed
Speaker 1: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the Enlightenment, the
Speaker 1: industrial evolution, and the new scientific discoveries, maybe using the
Speaker 1: techniques learned in that era, we could actually predict with
Speaker 1: some accuracy the future of Newton's laws for instance, for instance,
Speaker 1: could break the motions of planets and bodies in space.
Speaker 1: Why could we not find laws that predict the motion
Speaker 1: of history. One of these people was August Compti. He
Speaker 1: was in nineteenth century French philosopher often credited as being
Speaker 1: the father of sociology family. He famously said the goal
Speaker 1: of knowledge is quote to predict in order to control
Speaker 1: which sounds. Admittedly, like us super villain motto. But I
Speaker 1: think a lot of these kind of urges to predict
Speaker 1: the future do have that kind of evil undertone to it.
Speaker 1: But Comti was absolutely serious. He envisioned a physics of society,
Speaker 1: a science of human behavior that would be as predictive
Speaker 1: as any other science. But of course humans are much
Speaker 1: much trickier than planets. I mean, consider the fact that
Speaker 1: you are you and nobody knows you better than you.
Speaker 1: But do you even know yourself? Like we have to
Speaker 1: go to therapy to figure that out. So how could
Speaker 1: August Comti or anybody else figure out? It's very difficult.
Speaker 1: At the same time, there was Thomas Malthus, an English
Speaker 1: economists and preacher who in seventeen ninety eight kind of
Speaker 1: looked around the globe at population growth and in balance
Speaker 1: with available resources and saw doom. He thought that populations
Speaker 1: because they tend to increase exponentially while food production is available.
Speaker 1: But as fruit production grows slower, the rate of population
Speaker 1: increase gets slower as well. He extrapulated this. He extrapolated
Speaker 1: this trend and concluded that we're headed for a mass
Speaker 1: famine point at some point in the future. His warning
Speaker 1: was very influential. You might have heard the term Malthusian collapse.
Speaker 1: It comes from him, and his ideas kicked off a
Speaker 1: lot of debates. It They influenced Charles Darwin on his
Speaker 1: ideas of survival of the fittest, and for a while
Speaker 1: in the eighteen hundreds it really looked like, hey, maybe
Speaker 1: Malthus was right. There were famines, most famously the devastating
Speaker 1: Irish potato familine, which seemed to validate his theories, but
Speaker 1: overall it didn't happen. Why Because science created new fertilizers
Speaker 1: that would enable us to grow more food, because of
Speaker 1: developments in medical technology, etc. Maltheus didn't foresee these things.
Speaker 1: So his nineteenth century prophecy of inevitable famine turned out
Speaker 1: to be a bit like a wrong equation, or perhaps
Speaker 1: a right equation missing some crucial variables, much like Harry
Speaker 1: Seldon's psychohistory, which it's impossible not to note every time
Speaker 1: he pops out of cryo sleep, it's like, oops, the
Speaker 1: math is wrong. Still, Maltheus deserves a shout out as
Speaker 1: an Enlightenment era attempt to scientifically predict the future of society.
Speaker 1: He took prediction out of the realm of you know,
Speaker 1: strange inhaled gases and crystal balls and actually tried to
Speaker 1: make something real and coherent out of it. And in
Speaker 1: a way he was doing the kind of trend line
Speaker 1: extrapolation that modern data analysts do. The futurists of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. If the eighteen hundreds got the ball rolling
Speaker 1: on scientific prediction, the twentieth century kicked it into overdrive.
Speaker 1: And in fact, I think you'll find that we use
Speaker 1: these predictive technologies every day, all the time. After two
Speaker 1: world wars, entering a Cold war, prediction became kind of
Speaker 1: a matter of global survival. Now that weapons of mass
Speaker 1: destruction were capable of taking out the entire planet were
Speaker 1: in play, governments and institutions poured resources into anything that
Speaker 1: could give them the edge on whatever's coming around the corner.
Speaker 1: And this is the era when futurists became an actual profession.
Speaker 1: The think tank guy, the researcher. Most famous, perhaps in
Speaker 1: the United States, is the Rand Corporation. Originally formed after
Speaker 1: w after World War II to advise the Air Force.
Speaker 1: Rand basically became a factory of future scenarios. They pioneered
Speaker 1: pioneered techniques like scenario planning, systematically exploring how possible futures
Speaker 1: might unfold. What if the Soviets invade Germany? What do
Speaker 1: we do? What if the Soviets Launchanuka at England? What
Speaker 1: do we do? They even developed something called the Delphi method,
Speaker 1: a structured way of polling expert researchers elite opinion makers
Speaker 1: to make forecasts about the future, and funnily enough, they
Speaker 1: named it Delphi after the ancient oracle at Delphi. No
Speaker 1: goat entrails, just questionnaires, which is a bit more boring
Speaker 1: than pytheis transport, perhaps more reliable. Rand analysts also used
Speaker 1: the earliest versions of computers to run war games and simulations,
Speaker 1: basically trying to map out the future in much the
Speaker 1: way Doctor Strange in Infinity War scan through fourteen million
Speaker 1: different possible outcomes to try and give us the most
Speaker 1: likely path to success. They always get it right now,
Speaker 1: but the idea was if you consider enough possibilities, maybe
Speaker 1: you won't get caught off guard. But outside the military
Speaker 1: industrial complex, others were also trying to predict futures for humanity.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy two, a group of MIT scientists working
Speaker 1: for the Club of Rome released a bombshell study called
Speaker 1: The Limits to Growth. They built off one of the
Speaker 1: first computer models of the entire global economy and crunched
Speaker 1: the numbers and figured out that in a business as
Speaker 1: usual kind of scenario, if we were running the global
Speaker 1: economy the same exact way after year after year, there
Speaker 1: would come a point where we would hit a wall
Speaker 1: somewhere in the twenty first century, around twenty fifty twenty seventy,
Speaker 1: which would lead to a collapse of population, collapse of
Speaker 1: industrial output, collapse of economies, and probably warfamine, all the
Speaker 1: other kind of Harry Seldon esque stuff. The report was
Speaker 1: a bestseller, sparked a lot of debate that we're still
Speaker 1: debating it today. Over the decades, people have checked in
Speaker 1: just to see, well, how good did that? How good
Speaker 1: was that model? And depending on who you ask, the
Speaker 1: Limits to Growth was either remarkably accurate some of its findings,
Speaker 1: like the curves in the CO two emissions, seem right
Speaker 1: on track, or it's too simplistic. But the legacy of
Speaker 1: it is huge, and here we are in the twenty
Speaker 1: first century where prediction is basically like every day, in
Speaker 1: your pocket, do you check the weather. You're checking some
Speaker 1: kind of complex simulation that it crunches insane amounts of
Speaker 1: data to tell you if it's going to be sunny,
Speaker 1: or if it's going to rain, or what the air
Speaker 1: quality is going to be. Scroll through TikTok your YouTube,
Speaker 1: you're getting delivered content based on an algorithm that learned
Speaker 1: from you the kind of stuff you like. You ever
Speaker 1: wonder why the videos you see at two am when
Speaker 1: you reach for your phone are not the videos you
Speaker 1: see at ten am or at eleven thirty am when
Speaker 1: you're taking a break from work. It's because the algorithm
Speaker 1: is trying to predict what you like, and it's probably
Speaker 1: pretty good at it. On a much more ominous and
Speaker 1: serious note, algorithms are now being used in policing and
Speaker 1: criminal justice and for the observation and subjugation of mass
Speaker 1: peoples and eerily reminiscent events and an event eerily reminiscent
Speaker 1: to minority report. So called predictive policing software takes crime
Speaker 1: stats and tries to forecast, like where crimes are likely
Speaker 1: to happen so the police can deploy resources there. You
Speaker 1: don't have to be a Harry Seldon to kind of
Speaker 1: figure out all the ways that this could go awry,
Speaker 1: but more on that hopefully actually hopefully much less on
Speaker 1: that in the future. So at the end of this
Speaker 1: World Wind tour, let's bring it back to Foundation and
Speaker 1: Harry Seldon. After all this effort, Are we any good
Speaker 1: at this? It certainly seems like we're good in the
Speaker 1: short term, right. We're very good with algorithm that predict
Speaker 1: what you might want to do in the next twenty
Speaker 1: minutes or might want to see next, And we're good
Speaker 1: at the very long term. We're probably very good at saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: in ten thousand years, the earth will look like this,
Speaker 1: But in terms of the medium term trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what's going to happen in the next three, five,
Speaker 1: twenty years, not so much. On this week's episodes of
Speaker 1: Extra Vision, we're diving into Marvel's first family, the Fantastic Four.
Speaker 1: We have two prep episodes for you Tuesday and Thursday,
Speaker 1: and then our instant reactions to the film on Friday.
Speaker 1: That's it. That's it for this episode. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 4: Every Ready, Bye bye.
Speaker 1: X ray Vision is hosted by Jason Sepsion and rosday
Speaker 1: Night and is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Joe Alminique.
Speaker 1: And Aaron Koleman. Our supervising producer is Abusa.
Speaker 2: Par All produces A Calm Laurent Dean Jonathan and Bay Wack.
Speaker 1: A theme song is by Brian Vasquez, with alternate theme
Speaker 1: songs by Aaron Kaufman.
Speaker 2: Special thanks to Soul Rubin, Chris Lord, Kenny Goodman and
Speaker 2: Heide our discord moderator