April 26, 2021 • 35 mins
Once more, it's time for a weekly dose of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Weirdhouse Cinema listener mail...
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. Listener mail, my name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick. And boy, we've got a good mail
bag for you today. I've noticed. I think this is
bi pure coincidence that today's batch of mail is just
jammed with Danny's. We've got messages from Dan's, Daniells, Danny's
(00:27):
of all sorts, and as far as I can tell,
they are all different people. So so non Danny's. You've
got to step up your mail game, don't. Don't let
the Danni's have it all right? Are you sure this
isn't a male robot error here? This sounds like exactly
the kind of thing that could mean that there's some
sort of underlying programming problem with our mail bot Carney.
Perhaps he is now associated all listeners, um, all individuals
(00:52):
who ride in with the name Dan Carney. What have
you got to say for yourself? Okay, we are assured
that this is on the level. Okay, good, because today's
episode is also going to deal a lot with the
idea of robot air robot law. Yeah, so jumping into
(01:14):
responses to our pair of episodes on on robot law,
robot punishment, and all the questions that are probably gonna
be popping up in the near future about what happens
when robots do wrong. Let's jump right into this first
message from Danny. Danny says, Hi, there, when thinking about
how to best punish robots if they were ever to
(01:36):
commit crimes, I thought about how people treat the character
of Janet on the NBC show The Good Place. If
You're not familiar, Janet is a near godlike AI that
was created to help run an afterlife for humans. She
looks like a normal person, but constantly reminds our main
characters that she is not a person, but rather just
a program written for the inhabitants of the afterlife to use.
(01:59):
Some of the funniest parts of the show come when
the human characters have to reboot Janet, but she is
programmed to beg for her life to dissuade them from
doing so. The closer they get to her reboot switch,
the more she pleads with them to spare her life,
all while also reminding them that she cannot in fact
feel pain or emotions, as she is just an AI.
(02:20):
It raises the point that I think you touched on.
Would it be cruel to program a robot or AI
to feel pain as punishment? And even if we did
program it to do so, would it actually be feeling
pain or would we just be happy with the idea
that we think the bad robot is feeling pain? I
don't know, but I'm certain that The Good Place is
hilarious and Janet is one of the best ais ever created.
(02:43):
Keep up the good work, Danny. Yeah, the the The
Good Place is a terrific show. Did did you ever
watch A Good Place? J Yeah? We uh is it
over now? If it is? We never actually got to
the end of it, but we watched at least part
of it and we liked it. Yeah. I mean, it's
one of those rare shows that they went exactly four
seasons and it's being a pretty pitch perfect in my opinion,
like they got where they wanted to go, they closed
(03:04):
it out, terrific finish and Yeah, Janet both good, Janet Bad, Janet,
various other Janets that appear. They're all terrific, all played
by h Darcy Cardon's American actress and comedian jinks Um.
You can't jinks under a roof. Oh okay, I didn't
know that. Well, that may be a regional rule in
our house. So thinking about whether robots would in fact
(03:29):
be programmed to feel pain, I mean, so as we
talked about in the episode. Obviously, I've got a lot
of questions and skepticism about the underlying justification for punishments
in general. I mean, I guess at bottom, my personal
view of punishments would be partially utilitarian. Like if you
could show that punishing people who harm other people actually
(03:50):
does provide a significant deterrent that prevents them from doing
harmed others in the first place, then I guess in
some cases it would make sense. Uh. Though then you'd
also have to factor in the idea of like individual
rights where like even you know, so like, if you're
to go with a purely utilitarian idea of justice, you
could probably find out that you could achieve overall good
(04:11):
effects by doing like, you know, really unfair things to
like one person in a case, So you'd have to
avoid that kind of thing too. Um. But on the
basic question, I guess I'm just skeptical about how good
the evidence is that there is a strong deterrent effect
across all types of cases, for all types of crimes,
I think it probably would actually vary a lot by
type of crime and situation. For example, you can imagine
(04:34):
a scenario where harsh punishments for harm caused by institutional
actors like the leaders of corporations or governments, might be
more effective as direct deterrence than harsh punishments of individual
behavior would be. But you know that kind of thing.
But I don't know what the actual evidence is or
how strong it would be. But anyway, so directly addressing robots,
(04:55):
assuming it is true that punishments are sometimes effective as
it aterrent that prevents a significant amount of harm from
happening in the first place. In the case of biological
offenders like us, it's just an a priori assumption that
disincentives have to come in the form of suffering, right
We We sort of alluded to this in the episode
because we inherently desire not to have to I don't know,
(05:19):
pay somebody a huge sum of money when it's found
that we hurt them or spend time in jail or
something like that. We don't want to face those outcomes
because those outcomes will cause us to suffer and we're
inherently motivated not to suffer. But robots don't have inherent motivations.
They're motivated by whatever their program to be motivated by.
So the equation of deterrence with suffering is a natural
(05:43):
component of it. To whatever extent and in whichever cases
that is actually effective, it's contingent on the offenders being
biological with inherent motivations against suffering. Robots could be deterred
by things that are not really painful to them in
any way that we would understand pain. They're just motivated
by whatever they're told to be motivated by. Yeah, I mean, ultimately,
(06:06):
you could program them to desire pain, to desire suffering,
and you want to share suffering with everyone and to
to make sure that that all beings attain maximum suffering.
So um, yeah, it's again, this was a fascinating topic
to talk about, just because of all the little nooks
and crannies you find yourself in, uh, contemplating both the
(06:28):
human condition and the idea of creating something comparable to
the human condition in machines. But anyway, Danny, I think
you raise good questions and they can connect back to
a lot of the things we were talking about. I
mean you you can imagine even people desiring robots that
simulate pain, like you're talking about, just to give people
the psychic satisfaction of seeing them punished when they do
(06:52):
wrong or something like that. When really the thing that
if you're like trying to rationally minimize harm, what would
be important would not be the robot feeling pain, but
them being reprogrammed in a way that so that they
don't behave like that in the future, or other robots
of their same kind don't behave that way in the future. Yeah, anyway, Rob,
(07:14):
do you want to look at this next message from Robin? Yes? Uh?
Robin rides high, Rob, Joe and seth Uh. In They
Punished the Machine Part two podcast, Rob mentioned a thought
experiment about an AI train system that accidentally killed a
bunch of people by not having oxygen ready for the arrival.
You could not remember where this particular story came from.
(07:35):
This is true. I could not remember. Um, I think
prior I was actually looking it up deering or prior
to the episode, and I was thinking, um, maybe it's
Max teg Mark uh, And I was looking around for it,
and then I did a like a search or two
and I just could not for the life we remember
where I picked this up. Um, but I was thinking nonfiction.
But Robin straightens me out. Quote. The anecdote you were
(07:57):
remembering is from the Rifters series by Peter Watts. I
believe it was in the first book Starfish. Uh. The
smart gel or head cheese as they call it, was
using a clock to learn when to turn on the
oxygen and the clock broke. There is some delicious AI
Shenanigans speculation in those books, and yes, true enough, this
is exactly what once you pointed out, I'm like, yep, yep,
(08:19):
I remember that totally, because yeah, the uh, these these
neural nets, these smart gels or head cheese as they
they do, play a major role in the plot, and
there's a lot of consideration about how they how they
could they could make ultimately catastrophic decisions that were that
were from their vantage point, the best way to solve
given problems. This makes so much sense thinking about Peter
(08:41):
Watts uh fiction. A lot of what Peter Watts does
is create genuine horror scenarios where the horror is derived
from a failure of human imagination to comprehend other types
of cognition. And reasoning. So there's a kind of cosmic
horror that comes from the human inability to understand what
(09:02):
it's like to think as an alien, or the human
inability to understand what it's like to think as an AI. Yeah. Yeah,
so so definitely. Yeah, Peter Watts, Uh, look up, look
up his work if you're interested. Uh, we're big fans.
I read Starfish and a couple of the books and
Rifters that followed that. Um, and then what was Blindside
(09:24):
was the other one? Yeah, very scary alien contact novel. Uh.
And we've read some of his short stories. We talked
about one that deals with religious technology that was very
good and very scary. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, look him up.
Great some good reads there can get a bit, you know,
for some taste. It may get a little heady and
a little dark. Though. I think Watts would argue that
(09:47):
the futures that he creates are in many ways less
dark than the realities that we find ourselves in today.
Uh so you know, so consider that as you peruse
his work. Yeah, I would say, overall, just really good
cerebral horror sci fi. All right, Robin has more, though,
Robin says, as a side note, I would like to
(10:08):
thank you folks for doing the crossover episode with Seth.
It got me to look up the Spotify playlist for
Record Store Society, which led me to discover the artist
Do make say think they are fabulous to listen to
as I work, I'm slowly working through that Spotify playlist
and I am rediscovering old and discovering new music that
I enjoy. So thanks to Seth and to you folks
(10:29):
for the musical education. Cheers, Robin, I'll love to hear that. Yeah, absolutely,
Uh yeah, we did a couple of crossovers with with Seth.
We did a Weird House Cinema where where he came
on the show and we talked about weird music videos,
and then we went on to Record Store Society and
talked about just music, cool music videos in general. Uh so, yeah,
hopefully that led a number of people to discover Record
(10:52):
Store Society and uh and even discover some new music
that's awesome totally and if you haven't checked it out yet,
you can look them up there. They're just few weeks
back in our feed now. And of course you can
find Record Store Society wherever you get your podcasts. Okay,
this next message comes from Kenneth. Kenneth says, Hi, Rob
(11:14):
and Joe, thanks for reading out my last email. Kenneth,
I honestly don't remember which one that was. But but
Kenneth says, though if I had known it would make
it on air, I would have waffled a lot less. Again,
don't know what that's referring to. I loved the recent
series of AI themed episodes, and as you discussed what
might be an appropriate sanction for a wayward robot, it
(11:35):
immediately put me in mind of Red Dwarf, the UK
comedy slash sci fi show. In one episode, Crichton, I
hope I'm saying that right. I've never seen this show.
The crews outdated mechanoid is replaced by Hudson ten the
perfect Machine. Unfortunately, in the millions of years he's spent
waiting to be delivered, his sanity chip has worn out,
(11:57):
and he goes on a rampage. He's eventually defeated in
an homage to Captain Kirk murdering supercomputers with paradoxes. When
Crechton tells him that Silicon Heaven doesn't exist, Hudson asks,
but where do all the little calculators go to which
Crechton replies, they just die. Hudson then expires in a
kind of does not compute buzzed kind of way. Uh.
(12:21):
This got me thinking that perhaps positive reinforcement is the
way to go with our future robotic companions. If they
are programmed for a given task, they could be given
rewards of energy, upgrades, repairs, etcetera. If they were good
little robots. It's very transactional, but I could imagine them
striving for rewards that will make them more efficient. I
also really enjoyed the episodes about extraterrestrial machine intelligences, but
(12:46):
I did want to defend the humans and drones of
Ian M Banks culture. They aren't just parasites or pets.
They are an essential part of the good works the
culture undertakes. Interfering to improve other civilizations is what it
considers it's moral right to exist, and the humans and
drones are pretty central to that. I like the idea
(13:06):
of ultra intelligent minds using their power to make the
universe a better place, and banks optimistic take on AI
was always one I found very engaging. On a complete
tangent future episodes discussing mega structures such as Niven rings
Banks orbitals or O'Neill cylinders would be absolutely fascinating. Keep
up the great work, Kenneth well. I I have not
(13:28):
seen Red Dwarf either, but I know that's a show
that's much beloved by many science fiction fans. Um On
on the culture note, Um, I don't remember. Did I
argue that they were parasites or pets? I don't know. Um,
I don't. We made an offhand comparison that maybe maybe
we weren't being super serious about well maybe the confusion.
(13:49):
I might have said something meaning or I might have
meant to state that it's kind of like the opposite,
Like the the culture is essentially machines, it's essentially the minds,
but the humans you could almost see them as pets
at this point that you could almost. I wouldn't maybe
I wouldn't call them parasites per se, but they're this
thing that is kept alive by the by the minds
(14:11):
of the culture because that is, you know, part of
what they do, it's part of their their whole existence,
a mission. Um But that anyway, I mean, ultimately, this
is all expressed in the culture books far better than
I can just summarize here. But he he does. He
did indeed have this wonderful optimistic view of of super
(14:32):
intelligent machines, but with plenty of complications that that make
you know, novels of of adventure and discovery worthwhile. So
they may be sort of the culture's reason for existing,
even if they're not really calling the shots within the culture, right,
which is funny because in that way, I think they
could possibly be compared to consciousness within humans. Right, So
(14:54):
your consciousness is the reason to get out of bed
in the morning, like your conscious experience is the reason
to keep living and keep doing anything. But of course,
a lot of the decisions you make, in actions you perform,
while you might have the illusion that they're driven by
conscious processes, you can actually show that at least in
a lot of cases, maybe in every case, maybe not
in every case, you know, can't know for sure, but
(15:14):
at least in a lot of cases, decisions about what
you your body does are happening sort of upstream of consciousness,
and you're just sort of having the illusion that like, yeah,
I did that with my conscious brain. Yeah. It's just
also point out that in the culture books you'll often
have long stretches where it's just one mind talking to
(15:36):
another one AI talking to another AI or multiple AI
is having a conversation about what's happening or what's going
to happen, and those can be quite amusing, in part
because they all have kind of ridiculous drawn out names
for each other, and they all have different personalities and
different factions. Uh we we actually didn't. So we were
talking in the Machine Lords of Barnard sixty eight episodes
(15:57):
about whether post biological super intelligences would have something that
we would recognize as emotions, and you kind of have
to think if they have personalities, then maybe they would
have something that we recognize as emotions. Do do do
the Uh? I don't know. Do the ais and the
Culture series by Banks have have emotions? Yeah? They they
seem to. I mean it gets kind of complicate. You know.
(16:20):
The machine is capable of of seeming like it has
emotions and realizes there's there's an advantage in portraying emotions
than it is and sometimes it's hard to differentiate that
between genuine emotions or maybe there is no difference. Uh yeah,
And I can't recall this very question may have come
up at some point in the Culture books, and I
(16:40):
just don't remember it, but they seem to have personalities
and emotions. I think some some are a bit more
temperamental and bristly than others, and others are, you know,
a bit eccentric. So so yeah, yeah, I would say so.
(17:02):
All right. The next one comes to us from Joe.
Uh different Joe. Joe writes, I really enjoyed your two
partner on law enforcement applied to autonomous intelligences. There were
some wonderful explorations of how this relates to enforcing the
law against corporate persons. There's another parallel path where we
as a society had to struggle with how to enforce
(17:23):
the law while also reckoning with a growing understanding of
how the perpetrators are not motivated by what we expect,
not using the same processes to make decisions, and not
as fundamentally culpable as we imagine juvenile law enforcement. I've
been lucky enough to serve in a policy making capacity
as part of a state juvenile justice agency and have
(17:43):
seen firsthand the benefits of this better informed approach. As
everyone who has had a toddler can confirm, children are
capable of tremendous destruction, and as they get older, they
can do and say terrible and harmful things that have
all the appearance of conscious and informed choice. However, as
we've learn more about child brain development, we are moving
towards restorative and corrective models of juvenile justice, rather than
(18:06):
the retributive and punitive systems that have been dominant throughout history.
As you have covered on other episodes, we are beginning
to suspect that human brains, and especially juvenile brains, often
provide illusory surface level rationales for actions that are actually
controlled by obscure, deep seated processes that more closely resemble
machine learning than we care to admit. We've started to
(18:30):
incorporate those lessons into how we handle children who commit
otherwise criminal offenses and have begun reaping the rewards of
healthier and safer communities. I'm optimistic that we will apply
that wisdom to correcting the mistakes of artificial intelligence moving forward,
rather than seeking the primal gratification of knowing some being
has suffered as a consequence of our misfortune. I even
(18:52):
dare to hope that we will someday learn to apply
those lessons to adult human minds, which are often much
less authentically culpable. For a harm they cause. Then we imagine, Joe, Oh,
interesting to hear from somebody who's involved in this field. Yeah,
getting into juvenile criminal justice and all that. That's uh,
I know, that's got to be a really just difficult
area even you know, people motivated with the best of intentions.
(19:16):
Um so, so yeah, it's it's it's good to hear
from somebody who's got first hand experience. Yeah, absolutely, all right,
here's another one for us, Joe, why don't you hit
this one? This one looks like it's a question about
the music. Here's another one from Dan Kind. This one
comes from Danielle. Danielle says, HI was wondering if you
(19:39):
could tell me the name of the music that plays
during the Artifact episodes. Thank you, Danielle. That's it. Well,
I had to check with Seth about this. Uh. This
this was not one of the pieces that that I created.
This was one that Seth got from one of the
one of the deep libraries of stock music that we
have access to here at I heartened me, and so
(20:00):
he dug up the meta. This track is by an
artist named Josh Hyneman. It is called Creeping In, which
we found very funny when he revealed that to us earlier.
And it's from an album called Reality Game Show Too. Uh,
and so you can look that up if you like.
But yeah, it seems like he he sourced it from
a from a library of stock music that's common for
(20:23):
producers to use to create beds underneath the talking in
all of your favorite podcasts. Yeah, it's, you know, a
looping track, you know, so that it doesn't matter how
long the artifact episode goes. Yeah, and some of those
databases can be pretty neat. I remember looking around in
one a while back and noticing that there was some
there was at least like one collection of sounds that
(20:44):
have been created by Alan Howarth, who of course is
known for his musical collaborations with director John Carpenter on
creating helping to create some of the most iconic John
Carpenter movie film scores Chariots of Pumpkins Man. Yeah, great track.
Also for our for our amusement, Seth supplied the keywords
(21:05):
that go along with this track. So it's a slow tempo,
subtle to neutral tension, underscore, drone bed ethereal electronic electronic
soundtrack score, pulsing synth pad pulsing synth bass light, low
fi perk loop, ethereal synth pads, reverse guitar, subtle to
neutral tension. I think it already said that underscore, and
(21:26):
it looks like it's just looping now, which is appropriate
for looping track. All right, here's another one. This one
comes to us from Jeremy. Hello, Joe and Robert. Your
recent fault episodes about Medusa's head and weird House episodes
about detached heads living on reminded me of the detachable
head of the Queen of the Moon played by Valentina
(21:51):
Cortes opposite Robin Williams. Or is that Cortez or Cortez
Cortes Cortez. I'm not familiar with this anyway. Quote which
has an independent life in the classic epic The Adventures
of Baron Muchausen. Although it in no way counts as
a B movie, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen may well
(22:12):
contain enough weirdness for a weird House episode. Many thanks
for the hours of intelligent entertainment. Best regards, and Jeremy, Hey,
that's Terry Gilliam. Yeah, Terry Gilliam is always potentially. It's
anything he creates I would say is potentially weird enough
for weird house cinema, no matter how much money he
had to play with in creating it. Uh, where where
(22:32):
are you on Gilliam? Rob? Because I've got a theory
that nobody is tepid on Terry Gilliam's post Monty Python movies.
People either love them or absolutely hate them. And I
think Gilliam's aesthetics can be kind of challenging sometimes. But
I love the Terry Gilliam movies. Yeah. I haven't sat
down and watched a Terry Gilliam movie and and quite
(22:54):
a spell here at this point, but I I can
say that I love Terry Gilliam movies or I love
to like them. I think some of the more recent
ones I maybe haven't I loved them as much, but
there's always something to love in them, you know. There's
there's an authentic weirdness and authentic Terry Gilliam vibe to them,
where there's something to latch onto there. Yeah. Well, yeah,
(23:18):
I haven't seen all of his more recent movies, but
I'm thinking back at least to the earlier post Python
movies like Time Bandits Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Did he do twelve Monkeys. I think we were talking
about twelve Monkeys if you're in Loathing in Las Vegas. Yeah,
a bunch of good ones. I think we were talking
about Brazil on the show not too long ago because
of some other scene in a movie where they were
(23:40):
just random ducts go all over the place, and that
that's the thing I always think about with Brazil is
just absolutely genius visual representation of the themes of the movie,
Like every room is just crammed full of ducts and
you have no idea why they're there or what they're
taking from one place to the other. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah.
But Brazil's an excellent movie. And in Baron Munchausen, which
(24:02):
I may have seen more recently than other of his films,
which means I saw it at some point in the
last ten years. Uh, it is is a lot of fun.
It's uh it's just got such some rich, rich, old
fashioned fantasy going on in it. Yeah. It's been a
long time for me, but I remember feeling the same. Okay,
(24:27):
you're ready to move on to this next one. I
can do. This message from Jimmy that is about robot
punishment and weird house cinema. Go for it, okay, Jimmy says, Hey, guys,
I love your show. Just started listening to it and
have been really digging the topics. I got pulled in
with the episode on Locks, and I knew I was
going to be a permanent listener when I saw you
had an episode on Gunhead. It's a huge It's a
(24:50):
huge fan of weird movies and D and D, which
you guys have mentioned several times. I knew it was
fate that brought your show to my attention that I had.
I have jump in here, Joe. I. I feel like
like doing an episode on Gunhead is the kind of
thing where you would almost expect someone in the company
and be like, hey, guys, what are you doing doing
an episode on Gunhead? Um? And and now we can
(25:12):
legitimately respond with we are earning permanent listeners by doing
episodes on Gunhead. Otherwise, you know, how would we bring
people in? But that's like every episode we do. It
would be kind of hard to explain to the business division,
why why this episode on Spoons? Why this episode on Gunhead?
So we say you're just gonna have to trust us anyway.
(25:35):
Jimmy goes on in the episode punish the machine. You
talked about how we react negatively to the seeming quote
behavior of inanimate objects, often blaming them for transgressions or failures.
Being a fan of D and D, I immediately thought
of dice shaming, dice jails, and the acts of player
might perform when their dice roll poorly, from the aforementioned
(25:57):
examples to throwing dice, banishing them back into the bag,
admonishing the di verbally, or deciding that a particular D
twenty has quote used up it's good roles for the
session and is now useless. I kept hoping it would
be mentioned in the episode. Uh, you know, I think
it did come to mind when we were doing it,
(26:19):
and I just uh ended up not not bringing it
up because I was thinking about Uh, I've never actually
punished dice before, but I know i've I've spoken with
people who have, or no people that have. You know
that the dice wasn't performing properly, it would be shamed
or put away um or even discarded. I think the
closest thing for me is that for a long time
I had two different D twenties in my bag of dice.
(26:42):
One was a black D twenty that matched the rest
of my dice, and the other one was like this
random kind of amber colored D twenty And I have
no idea where it came from, but for some reason
or another, I was for a while I was using
both of them, and I it seemed like the brown
dice was out the brown D twenty was outperforming the
black one, and so I ended up just sticking with
(27:04):
the brown one. And eventually I think I gave the
black one away to uh, to a child, uh so
they could play D N D. May you absorb the
curse of luck of this this item, yeah, which is
of course it's all ridiculous because these are exactly the same.
There's no difference. They're not, you know, waited differently, they
don't have different energies, etcetera. And I'm not even particularly
(27:26):
I mean aesthetically, I I would have to say, I
would prefer the one that matches the rest of uh
my set, But you know, the brown one was performing better,
so that's the one I kept. Uh this is funny
because I was just playing D and D last night. Actually,
we were talking before we started recording that we both
played DN D virtually last night, and UH so the
character I'm playing right now, is is a rogue. If
(27:49):
you're not familiar with D n D, he's he's got
low constitution, low armor class. So it means like, you
know a couple of bad roles and you're very low.
You're very close to death. Um and and one of
the closest calls of my campaign right now is was
literally from repeatedly rolling a one to to check my
ability at walking up a hill in the snow. Uh.
(28:10):
And so the dice can really do you dirty and
you can get mad at him. Yeah, yeah, get another
character to help you next time, and then you get
an advantage on that roll to help me walking. Yes,
help an old man up the hill. Anyway, we should
go on with Jimmy's message. Jimmy picks up. However, the
thing that compelled me to write in was your Weird
(28:32):
House Cinema episode on frogs, which I really enjoyed. Your
prompt for other Nature and Revolt movies was a call
to action, as I immediately thought of phase for a
film in which a couple of scientists study a group
of strangely behaving ants that are plaguing the countryside and
building bizarre hives. It gets very out there with concepts
(28:53):
and features some really awesome and also horrifying scenes of ants.
It's definitely weird, and whether or not you feature it
in an episode, it is certainly worth a watch. A
second suggestion for a uniquely bizarre film is The Visitor.
I know this one. A truly strange film about cosmic
entities in a struggle of good versus evil, throwing killerbirds,
(29:16):
trippy art house cinema visuals, a girl with mental powers,
and it turns into a heck of a ride. It's
got Lance Hendrickson, Glenn Ford, John Houston, and a cameo
by Franco Nero as Space Jesus. Anyway, I am truly
enjoying your show and can't wait to dig through the
back catalog. Keep up the great work. Thank you for
your time, Jimmy. Well, thanks for this message, Jimmy, And
(29:39):
oh yeah, we've seen The Visitor. You may not know this,
but we of course live in the Atlanta area and
The Visitor was filmed in Atlanta in the seventies or
seventies or eighties I think seventies, uh, and so like.
There are recognizable roads and landmarks in it, but it
is also just a it is so odd. It has
a kind of Spaghetti West turned thing going on, which
(30:01):
is and by that I mean like it's an Italian
film filmed in the United States with primarily US actors
and uh, and there's a certain I don't know that,
there's a certain shadow quality to it that is very
engrossing and very alienating at the same time. Yeah, it's
a it's it's a it's a lot of fun. Though
(30:21):
A lot of the fun I had with it was
just the fact that it was filmed in Atlanta back
in the day, so you can see various landmarks of
Atlanta there. It doesn't hide it's Atlantic nous, and its
Atlanta nous is not subtle. So it's not like Free
Jack where they just they're filming it in Atlanta pretending
it's something else. Um, and you have to look closely
to catch it. No, it's it's very Atlanta. As for
(30:44):
Phase four, I haven't seen this one. I'm vaguely aware
of it because it's kind of late for a giant
ant movie, uh in cinematic history. But I'd be interested
to check it out. Is it giant ants? I thought
it was normal sized and normal ants. Well, I haven't
seen it, so we will have to find out the
ant looks big on the poster, but then again that
the frog looks big on the poster for frog. So
(31:06):
it could be the same marketing gimmick where it's like,
we can't put a normal size frog on this poster.
It needs to be huge, and it needs to be
a person's arm sticking out of it. If we're gonna
put an on this poster, it needs to be larger
than a human hand. I think that's very plausible. All right,
here's another one. You want to take? This one Joe
from Brandon. Sure, Brandon says, Hi, guys, I have a
(31:29):
suggestion for weird house cinema. One of my all time
favorites Shachma. It is a nineties B movie about a
genetically altered baboon that terrorizes a group of med students
that are LARPing D and D. Also, it has Roddy McDowell.
I think you would like this odd treat. Keep up
the great work, Brandon. I don't remember much about this movie,
(31:52):
but I did watch part of it long ago at
a friend's house, and it was at least from the
parts I saw the best killer baboon Bottle episode movie
B I've ever seen the trailer for it is amazing,
So see the trailer if nothing else, because the trailer
has this wonderful intense narration that gets it just gets
more intense, and it keeps saying Shakma, shakma till at
(32:12):
the very end there's the baboon leaps at the camera
and the narrator just goes shakma and then it ends.
I think Shaka is the baboon's name. I think so. Yeah.
And of course this is also like, this is the
sort of trailer where they just say the name of
the film so many times and I missed that, Like
I wish they did that more. Yeah, gabbo gabbo gabbo. Uh, Rob,
(32:42):
do you want to read our last transmission from Planet Daniel? Yes,
all right, Daniel riots Hey, y'all just listen to the
Mad Love episode and wanted to add to the voices
in support of all of your amazing dives into these
curious and overlooked films. The Weird House Cinema episodes are
a great source of education, well, okay, and entertainment. Uh.
I guess they are educational in their own way. Sometimes
(33:05):
I miss visiting art house theaters and peeping whatever strange
film they've unearthed and are eager to share. Your podcast
brings a similar sense of wonder. So for that, I'm
very appreciative. Thank you and keep doing amazing work. Daniel,
Oh too kind, Daniel, Well, thank you and thanks for
writing in. Okay, should we wrap it up there? I
guess so. Yeah. We generally once we get into the
(33:26):
weird houses, we're uh, we're done. I think we're out
of time, but we thank everybody for writing in, you know,
if you if we just bear in mind, you know,
we don't always get to respond to email. We rarely
get to respond to email, and we only get to
read some of it on here, despite the weekly format.
But we do read uh in our own head silently
or maybe sometimes mumbling out loud, I don't know, but
(33:48):
we do read it all. So if you write into us,
we will read it, We will try and respond if
we have time, or we'll you know, if we'll try
and feature some of it on the listener mail. But
just keep it coming, because it's great to to know
what everybody else out there is thinking, what you're you know,
your your own expertise or experience, says about a given
topic and uh and also it's a great place to
(34:10):
make suggestions for the future, so keep it coming. Should
we tell you to hold off for a couple of weeks,
if your name is any variation on Dan is that no, no,
don't don't limit the dance, let the let's, let's unleash
the dance, kick it up, dance, Dan's, Danny's, Danielle's, Daniel's,
just just come on in anyway. Huge thanks as always
(34:31):
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production
(34:53):
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. Listener mail, my name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick. And boy, we've got a good mail
bag for you today. I've noticed. I think this is
bi pure coincidence that today's batch of mail is just
jammed with Danny's. We've got messages from Dan's, Daniells, Danny's
(00:27):
of all sorts, and as far as I can tell,
they are all different people. So so non Danny's. You've
got to step up your mail game, don't. Don't let
the Danni's have it all right? Are you sure this
isn't a male robot error here? This sounds like exactly
the kind of thing that could mean that there's some
sort of underlying programming problem with our mail bot Carney.
Perhaps he is now associated all listeners, um, all individuals
(00:52):
who ride in with the name Dan Carney. What have
you got to say for yourself? Okay, we are assured
that this is on the level. Okay, good, because today's
episode is also going to deal a lot with the
idea of robot air robot law. Yeah, so jumping into
(01:14):
responses to our pair of episodes on on robot law,
robot punishment, and all the questions that are probably gonna
be popping up in the near future about what happens
when robots do wrong. Let's jump right into this first
message from Danny. Danny says, Hi, there, when thinking about
how to best punish robots if they were ever to
(01:36):
commit crimes, I thought about how people treat the character
of Janet on the NBC show The Good Place. If
You're not familiar, Janet is a near godlike AI that
was created to help run an afterlife for humans. She
looks like a normal person, but constantly reminds our main
characters that she is not a person, but rather just
a program written for the inhabitants of the afterlife to use.
(01:59):
Some of the funniest parts of the show come when
the human characters have to reboot Janet, but she is
programmed to beg for her life to dissuade them from
doing so. The closer they get to her reboot switch,
the more she pleads with them to spare her life,
all while also reminding them that she cannot in fact
feel pain or emotions, as she is just an AI.
(02:20):
It raises the point that I think you touched on.
Would it be cruel to program a robot or AI
to feel pain as punishment? And even if we did
program it to do so, would it actually be feeling
pain or would we just be happy with the idea
that we think the bad robot is feeling pain? I
don't know, but I'm certain that The Good Place is
hilarious and Janet is one of the best ais ever created.
(02:43):
Keep up the good work, Danny. Yeah, the the The
Good Place is a terrific show. Did did you ever
watch A Good Place? J Yeah? We uh is it
over now? If it is? We never actually got to
the end of it, but we watched at least part
of it and we liked it. Yeah. I mean, it's
one of those rare shows that they went exactly four
seasons and it's being a pretty pitch perfect in my opinion,
like they got where they wanted to go, they closed
(03:04):
it out, terrific finish and Yeah, Janet both good, Janet Bad, Janet,
various other Janets that appear. They're all terrific, all played
by h Darcy Cardon's American actress and comedian jinks Um.
You can't jinks under a roof. Oh okay, I didn't
know that. Well, that may be a regional rule in
our house. So thinking about whether robots would in fact
(03:29):
be programmed to feel pain, I mean, so as we
talked about in the episode. Obviously, I've got a lot
of questions and skepticism about the underlying justification for punishments
in general. I mean, I guess at bottom, my personal
view of punishments would be partially utilitarian. Like if you
could show that punishing people who harm other people actually
(03:50):
does provide a significant deterrent that prevents them from doing
harmed others in the first place, then I guess in
some cases it would make sense. Uh. Though then you'd
also have to factor in the idea of like individual
rights where like even you know, so like, if you're
to go with a purely utilitarian idea of justice, you
could probably find out that you could achieve overall good
(04:11):
effects by doing like, you know, really unfair things to
like one person in a case, So you'd have to
avoid that kind of thing too. Um. But on the
basic question, I guess I'm just skeptical about how good
the evidence is that there is a strong deterrent effect
across all types of cases, for all types of crimes,
I think it probably would actually vary a lot by
type of crime and situation. For example, you can imagine
(04:34):
a scenario where harsh punishments for harm caused by institutional
actors like the leaders of corporations or governments, might be
more effective as direct deterrence than harsh punishments of individual
behavior would be. But you know that kind of thing.
But I don't know what the actual evidence is or
how strong it would be. But anyway, so directly addressing robots,
(04:55):
assuming it is true that punishments are sometimes effective as
it aterrent that prevents a significant amount of harm from
happening in the first place. In the case of biological
offenders like us, it's just an a priori assumption that
disincentives have to come in the form of suffering, right
We We sort of alluded to this in the episode
because we inherently desire not to have to I don't know,
(05:19):
pay somebody a huge sum of money when it's found
that we hurt them or spend time in jail or
something like that. We don't want to face those outcomes
because those outcomes will cause us to suffer and we're
inherently motivated not to suffer. But robots don't have inherent motivations.
They're motivated by whatever their program to be motivated by.
So the equation of deterrence with suffering is a natural
(05:43):
component of it. To whatever extent and in whichever cases
that is actually effective, it's contingent on the offenders being
biological with inherent motivations against suffering. Robots could be deterred
by things that are not really painful to them in
any way that we would understand pain. They're just motivated
by whatever they're told to be motivated by. Yeah, I mean, ultimately,
(06:06):
you could program them to desire pain, to desire suffering,
and you want to share suffering with everyone and to
to make sure that that all beings attain maximum suffering.
So um, yeah, it's again, this was a fascinating topic
to talk about, just because of all the little nooks
and crannies you find yourself in, uh, contemplating both the
(06:28):
human condition and the idea of creating something comparable to
the human condition in machines. But anyway, Danny, I think
you raise good questions and they can connect back to
a lot of the things we were talking about. I
mean you you can imagine even people desiring robots that
simulate pain, like you're talking about, just to give people
the psychic satisfaction of seeing them punished when they do
(06:52):
wrong or something like that. When really the thing that
if you're like trying to rationally minimize harm, what would
be important would not be the robot feeling pain, but
them being reprogrammed in a way that so that they
don't behave like that in the future, or other robots
of their same kind don't behave that way in the future. Yeah, anyway, Rob,
(07:14):
do you want to look at this next message from Robin? Yes? Uh?
Robin rides high, Rob, Joe and seth Uh. In They
Punished the Machine Part two podcast, Rob mentioned a thought
experiment about an AI train system that accidentally killed a
bunch of people by not having oxygen ready for the arrival.
You could not remember where this particular story came from.
(07:35):
This is true. I could not remember. Um, I think
prior I was actually looking it up deering or prior
to the episode, and I was thinking, um, maybe it's
Max teg Mark uh, And I was looking around for it,
and then I did a like a search or two
and I just could not for the life we remember
where I picked this up. Um, but I was thinking nonfiction.
But Robin straightens me out. Quote. The anecdote you were
(07:57):
remembering is from the Rifters series by Peter Watts. I
believe it was in the first book Starfish. Uh. The
smart gel or head cheese as they call it, was
using a clock to learn when to turn on the
oxygen and the clock broke. There is some delicious AI
Shenanigans speculation in those books, and yes, true enough, this
is exactly what once you pointed out, I'm like, yep, yep,
(08:19):
I remember that totally, because yeah, the uh, these these
neural nets, these smart gels or head cheese as they
they do, play a major role in the plot, and
there's a lot of consideration about how they how they
could they could make ultimately catastrophic decisions that were that
were from their vantage point, the best way to solve
given problems. This makes so much sense thinking about Peter
(08:41):
Watts uh fiction. A lot of what Peter Watts does
is create genuine horror scenarios where the horror is derived
from a failure of human imagination to comprehend other types
of cognition. And reasoning. So there's a kind of cosmic
horror that comes from the human inability to understand what
(09:02):
it's like to think as an alien, or the human
inability to understand what it's like to think as an AI. Yeah. Yeah,
so so definitely. Yeah, Peter Watts, Uh, look up, look
up his work if you're interested. Uh, we're big fans.
I read Starfish and a couple of the books and
Rifters that followed that. Um, and then what was Blindside
(09:24):
was the other one? Yeah, very scary alien contact novel. Uh.
And we've read some of his short stories. We talked
about one that deals with religious technology that was very
good and very scary. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, look him up.
Great some good reads there can get a bit, you know,
for some taste. It may get a little heady and
a little dark. Though. I think Watts would argue that
(09:47):
the futures that he creates are in many ways less
dark than the realities that we find ourselves in today.
Uh so you know, so consider that as you peruse
his work. Yeah, I would say, overall, just really good
cerebral horror sci fi. All right, Robin has more, though,
Robin says, as a side note, I would like to
(10:08):
thank you folks for doing the crossover episode with Seth.
It got me to look up the Spotify playlist for
Record Store Society, which led me to discover the artist
Do make say think they are fabulous to listen to
as I work, I'm slowly working through that Spotify playlist
and I am rediscovering old and discovering new music that
I enjoy. So thanks to Seth and to you folks
(10:29):
for the musical education. Cheers, Robin, I'll love to hear that. Yeah, absolutely,
Uh yeah, we did a couple of crossovers with with Seth.
We did a Weird House Cinema where where he came
on the show and we talked about weird music videos,
and then we went on to Record Store Society and
talked about just music, cool music videos in general. Uh so, yeah,
hopefully that led a number of people to discover Record
(10:52):
Store Society and uh and even discover some new music
that's awesome totally and if you haven't checked it out yet,
you can look them up there. They're just few weeks
back in our feed now. And of course you can
find Record Store Society wherever you get your podcasts. Okay,
this next message comes from Kenneth. Kenneth says, Hi, Rob
(11:14):
and Joe, thanks for reading out my last email. Kenneth,
I honestly don't remember which one that was. But but
Kenneth says, though if I had known it would make
it on air, I would have waffled a lot less. Again,
don't know what that's referring to. I loved the recent
series of AI themed episodes, and as you discussed what
might be an appropriate sanction for a wayward robot, it
(11:35):
immediately put me in mind of Red Dwarf, the UK
comedy slash sci fi show. In one episode, Crichton, I
hope I'm saying that right. I've never seen this show.
The crews outdated mechanoid is replaced by Hudson ten the
perfect Machine. Unfortunately, in the millions of years he's spent
waiting to be delivered, his sanity chip has worn out,
(11:57):
and he goes on a rampage. He's eventually defeated in
an homage to Captain Kirk murdering supercomputers with paradoxes. When
Crechton tells him that Silicon Heaven doesn't exist, Hudson asks,
but where do all the little calculators go to which
Crechton replies, they just die. Hudson then expires in a
kind of does not compute buzzed kind of way. Uh.
(12:21):
This got me thinking that perhaps positive reinforcement is the
way to go with our future robotic companions. If they
are programmed for a given task, they could be given
rewards of energy, upgrades, repairs, etcetera. If they were good
little robots. It's very transactional, but I could imagine them
striving for rewards that will make them more efficient. I
also really enjoyed the episodes about extraterrestrial machine intelligences, but
(12:46):
I did want to defend the humans and drones of
Ian M Banks culture. They aren't just parasites or pets.
They are an essential part of the good works the
culture undertakes. Interfering to improve other civilizations is what it
considers it's moral right to exist, and the humans and
drones are pretty central to that. I like the idea
(13:06):
of ultra intelligent minds using their power to make the
universe a better place, and banks optimistic take on AI
was always one I found very engaging. On a complete
tangent future episodes discussing mega structures such as Niven rings
Banks orbitals or O'Neill cylinders would be absolutely fascinating. Keep
up the great work, Kenneth well. I I have not
(13:28):
seen Red Dwarf either, but I know that's a show
that's much beloved by many science fiction fans. Um On
on the culture note, Um, I don't remember. Did I
argue that they were parasites or pets? I don't know. Um,
I don't. We made an offhand comparison that maybe maybe
we weren't being super serious about well maybe the confusion.
(13:49):
I might have said something meaning or I might have
meant to state that it's kind of like the opposite,
Like the the culture is essentially machines, it's essentially the minds,
but the humans you could almost see them as pets
at this point that you could almost. I wouldn't maybe
I wouldn't call them parasites per se, but they're this
thing that is kept alive by the by the minds
(14:11):
of the culture because that is, you know, part of
what they do, it's part of their their whole existence,
a mission. Um But that anyway, I mean, ultimately, this
is all expressed in the culture books far better than
I can just summarize here. But he he does. He
did indeed have this wonderful optimistic view of of super
(14:32):
intelligent machines, but with plenty of complications that that make
you know, novels of of adventure and discovery worthwhile. So
they may be sort of the culture's reason for existing,
even if they're not really calling the shots within the culture, right,
which is funny because in that way, I think they
could possibly be compared to consciousness within humans. Right, So
(14:54):
your consciousness is the reason to get out of bed
in the morning, like your conscious experience is the reason
to keep living and keep doing anything. But of course,
a lot of the decisions you make, in actions you perform,
while you might have the illusion that they're driven by
conscious processes, you can actually show that at least in
a lot of cases, maybe in every case, maybe not
in every case, you know, can't know for sure, but
(15:14):
at least in a lot of cases, decisions about what
you your body does are happening sort of upstream of consciousness,
and you're just sort of having the illusion that like, yeah,
I did that with my conscious brain. Yeah. It's just
also point out that in the culture books you'll often
have long stretches where it's just one mind talking to
(15:36):
another one AI talking to another AI or multiple AI
is having a conversation about what's happening or what's going
to happen, and those can be quite amusing, in part
because they all have kind of ridiculous drawn out names
for each other, and they all have different personalities and
different factions. Uh we we actually didn't. So we were
talking in the Machine Lords of Barnard sixty eight episodes
(15:57):
about whether post biological super intelligences would have something that
we would recognize as emotions, and you kind of have
to think if they have personalities, then maybe they would
have something that we recognize as emotions. Do do do
the Uh? I don't know. Do the ais and the
Culture series by Banks have have emotions? Yeah? They they
seem to. I mean it gets kind of complicate. You know.
(16:20):
The machine is capable of of seeming like it has
emotions and realizes there's there's an advantage in portraying emotions
than it is and sometimes it's hard to differentiate that
between genuine emotions or maybe there is no difference. Uh yeah,
And I can't recall this very question may have come
up at some point in the Culture books, and I
(16:40):
just don't remember it, but they seem to have personalities
and emotions. I think some some are a bit more
temperamental and bristly than others, and others are, you know,
a bit eccentric. So so yeah, yeah, I would say so.
(17:02):
All right. The next one comes to us from Joe.
Uh different Joe. Joe writes, I really enjoyed your two
partner on law enforcement applied to autonomous intelligences. There were
some wonderful explorations of how this relates to enforcing the
law against corporate persons. There's another parallel path where we
as a society had to struggle with how to enforce
(17:23):
the law while also reckoning with a growing understanding of
how the perpetrators are not motivated by what we expect,
not using the same processes to make decisions, and not
as fundamentally culpable as we imagine juvenile law enforcement. I've
been lucky enough to serve in a policy making capacity
as part of a state juvenile justice agency and have
(17:43):
seen firsthand the benefits of this better informed approach. As
everyone who has had a toddler can confirm, children are
capable of tremendous destruction, and as they get older, they
can do and say terrible and harmful things that have
all the appearance of conscious and informed choice. However, as
we've learn more about child brain development, we are moving
towards restorative and corrective models of juvenile justice, rather than
(18:06):
the retributive and punitive systems that have been dominant throughout history.
As you have covered on other episodes, we are beginning
to suspect that human brains, and especially juvenile brains, often
provide illusory surface level rationales for actions that are actually
controlled by obscure, deep seated processes that more closely resemble
machine learning than we care to admit. We've started to
(18:30):
incorporate those lessons into how we handle children who commit
otherwise criminal offenses and have begun reaping the rewards of
healthier and safer communities. I'm optimistic that we will apply
that wisdom to correcting the mistakes of artificial intelligence moving forward,
rather than seeking the primal gratification of knowing some being
has suffered as a consequence of our misfortune. I even
(18:52):
dare to hope that we will someday learn to apply
those lessons to adult human minds, which are often much
less authentically culpable. For a harm they cause. Then we imagine, Joe, Oh,
interesting to hear from somebody who's involved in this field. Yeah,
getting into juvenile criminal justice and all that. That's uh,
I know, that's got to be a really just difficult
area even you know, people motivated with the best of intentions.
(19:16):
Um so, so yeah, it's it's it's good to hear
from somebody who's got first hand experience. Yeah, absolutely, all right,
here's another one for us, Joe, why don't you hit
this one? This one looks like it's a question about
the music. Here's another one from Dan Kind. This one
comes from Danielle. Danielle says, HI was wondering if you
(19:39):
could tell me the name of the music that plays
during the Artifact episodes. Thank you, Danielle. That's it. Well,
I had to check with Seth about this. Uh. This
this was not one of the pieces that that I created.
This was one that Seth got from one of the
one of the deep libraries of stock music that we
have access to here at I heartened me, and so
(20:00):
he dug up the meta. This track is by an
artist named Josh Hyneman. It is called Creeping In, which
we found very funny when he revealed that to us earlier.
And it's from an album called Reality Game Show Too. Uh,
and so you can look that up if you like.
But yeah, it seems like he he sourced it from
a from a library of stock music that's common for
(20:23):
producers to use to create beds underneath the talking in
all of your favorite podcasts. Yeah, it's, you know, a
looping track, you know, so that it doesn't matter how
long the artifact episode goes. Yeah, and some of those
databases can be pretty neat. I remember looking around in
one a while back and noticing that there was some
there was at least like one collection of sounds that
(20:44):
have been created by Alan Howarth, who of course is
known for his musical collaborations with director John Carpenter on
creating helping to create some of the most iconic John
Carpenter movie film scores Chariots of Pumpkins Man. Yeah, great track.
Also for our for our amusement, Seth supplied the keywords
(21:05):
that go along with this track. So it's a slow tempo,
subtle to neutral tension, underscore, drone bed ethereal electronic electronic
soundtrack score, pulsing synth pad pulsing synth bass light, low
fi perk loop, ethereal synth pads, reverse guitar, subtle to
neutral tension. I think it already said that underscore, and
(21:26):
it looks like it's just looping now, which is appropriate
for looping track. All right, here's another one. This one
comes to us from Jeremy. Hello, Joe and Robert. Your
recent fault episodes about Medusa's head and weird House episodes
about detached heads living on reminded me of the detachable
head of the Queen of the Moon played by Valentina
(21:51):
Cortes opposite Robin Williams. Or is that Cortez or Cortez
Cortes Cortez. I'm not familiar with this anyway. Quote which
has an independent life in the classic epic The Adventures
of Baron Muchausen. Although it in no way counts as
a B movie, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen may well
(22:12):
contain enough weirdness for a weird House episode. Many thanks
for the hours of intelligent entertainment. Best regards, and Jeremy, Hey,
that's Terry Gilliam. Yeah, Terry Gilliam is always potentially. It's
anything he creates I would say is potentially weird enough
for weird house cinema, no matter how much money he
had to play with in creating it. Uh, where where
(22:32):
are you on Gilliam? Rob? Because I've got a theory
that nobody is tepid on Terry Gilliam's post Monty Python movies.
People either love them or absolutely hate them. And I
think Gilliam's aesthetics can be kind of challenging sometimes. But
I love the Terry Gilliam movies. Yeah. I haven't sat
down and watched a Terry Gilliam movie and and quite
(22:54):
a spell here at this point, but I I can
say that I love Terry Gilliam movies or I love
to like them. I think some of the more recent
ones I maybe haven't I loved them as much, but
there's always something to love in them, you know. There's
there's an authentic weirdness and authentic Terry Gilliam vibe to them,
where there's something to latch onto there. Yeah. Well, yeah,
(23:18):
I haven't seen all of his more recent movies, but
I'm thinking back at least to the earlier post Python
movies like Time Bandits Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Did he do twelve Monkeys. I think we were talking
about twelve Monkeys if you're in Loathing in Las Vegas. Yeah,
a bunch of good ones. I think we were talking
about Brazil on the show not too long ago because
of some other scene in a movie where they were
(23:40):
just random ducts go all over the place, and that
that's the thing I always think about with Brazil is
just absolutely genius visual representation of the themes of the movie,
Like every room is just crammed full of ducts and
you have no idea why they're there or what they're
taking from one place to the other. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah.
But Brazil's an excellent movie. And in Baron Munchausen, which
(24:02):
I may have seen more recently than other of his films,
which means I saw it at some point in the
last ten years. Uh, it is is a lot of fun.
It's uh it's just got such some rich, rich, old
fashioned fantasy going on in it. Yeah. It's been a
long time for me, but I remember feeling the same. Okay,
(24:27):
you're ready to move on to this next one. I
can do. This message from Jimmy that is about robot
punishment and weird house cinema. Go for it, okay, Jimmy says, Hey, guys,
I love your show. Just started listening to it and
have been really digging the topics. I got pulled in
with the episode on Locks, and I knew I was
going to be a permanent listener when I saw you
had an episode on Gunhead. It's a huge It's a
(24:50):
huge fan of weird movies and D and D, which
you guys have mentioned several times. I knew it was
fate that brought your show to my attention that I had.
I have jump in here, Joe. I. I feel like
like doing an episode on Gunhead is the kind of
thing where you would almost expect someone in the company
and be like, hey, guys, what are you doing doing
an episode on Gunhead? Um? And and now we can
(25:12):
legitimately respond with we are earning permanent listeners by doing
episodes on Gunhead. Otherwise, you know, how would we bring
people in? But that's like every episode we do. It
would be kind of hard to explain to the business division,
why why this episode on Spoons? Why this episode on Gunhead?
So we say you're just gonna have to trust us anyway.
(25:35):
Jimmy goes on in the episode punish the machine. You
talked about how we react negatively to the seeming quote
behavior of inanimate objects, often blaming them for transgressions or failures.
Being a fan of D and D, I immediately thought
of dice shaming, dice jails, and the acts of player
might perform when their dice roll poorly, from the aforementioned
(25:57):
examples to throwing dice, banishing them back into the bag,
admonishing the di verbally, or deciding that a particular D
twenty has quote used up it's good roles for the
session and is now useless. I kept hoping it would
be mentioned in the episode. Uh, you know, I think
it did come to mind when we were doing it,
(26:19):
and I just uh ended up not not bringing it
up because I was thinking about Uh, I've never actually
punished dice before, but I know i've I've spoken with
people who have, or no people that have. You know
that the dice wasn't performing properly, it would be shamed
or put away um or even discarded. I think the
closest thing for me is that for a long time
I had two different D twenties in my bag of dice.
(26:42):
One was a black D twenty that matched the rest
of my dice, and the other one was like this
random kind of amber colored D twenty And I have
no idea where it came from, but for some reason
or another, I was for a while I was using
both of them, and I it seemed like the brown
dice was out the brown D twenty was outperforming the
black one, and so I ended up just sticking with
(27:04):
the brown one. And eventually I think I gave the
black one away to uh, to a child, uh so
they could play D N D. May you absorb the
curse of luck of this this item, yeah, which is
of course it's all ridiculous because these are exactly the same.
There's no difference. They're not, you know, waited differently, they
don't have different energies, etcetera. And I'm not even particularly
(27:26):
I mean aesthetically, I I would have to say, I
would prefer the one that matches the rest of uh
my set, But you know, the brown one was performing better,
so that's the one I kept. Uh this is funny
because I was just playing D and D last night. Actually,
we were talking before we started recording that we both
played DN D virtually last night, and UH so the
character I'm playing right now, is is a rogue. If
(27:49):
you're not familiar with D n D, he's he's got
low constitution, low armor class. So it means like, you
know a couple of bad roles and you're very low.
You're very close to death. Um and and one of
the closest calls of my campaign right now is was
literally from repeatedly rolling a one to to check my
ability at walking up a hill in the snow. Uh.
(28:10):
And so the dice can really do you dirty and
you can get mad at him. Yeah, yeah, get another
character to help you next time, and then you get
an advantage on that roll to help me walking. Yes,
help an old man up the hill. Anyway, we should
go on with Jimmy's message. Jimmy picks up. However, the
thing that compelled me to write in was your Weird
(28:32):
House Cinema episode on frogs, which I really enjoyed. Your
prompt for other Nature and Revolt movies was a call
to action, as I immediately thought of phase for a
film in which a couple of scientists study a group
of strangely behaving ants that are plaguing the countryside and
building bizarre hives. It gets very out there with concepts
(28:53):
and features some really awesome and also horrifying scenes of ants.
It's definitely weird, and whether or not you feature it
in an episode, it is certainly worth a watch. A
second suggestion for a uniquely bizarre film is The Visitor.
I know this one. A truly strange film about cosmic
entities in a struggle of good versus evil, throwing killerbirds,
(29:16):
trippy art house cinema visuals, a girl with mental powers,
and it turns into a heck of a ride. It's
got Lance Hendrickson, Glenn Ford, John Houston, and a cameo
by Franco Nero as Space Jesus. Anyway, I am truly
enjoying your show and can't wait to dig through the
back catalog. Keep up the great work. Thank you for
your time, Jimmy. Well, thanks for this message, Jimmy, And
(29:39):
oh yeah, we've seen The Visitor. You may not know this,
but we of course live in the Atlanta area and
The Visitor was filmed in Atlanta in the seventies or
seventies or eighties I think seventies, uh, and so like.
There are recognizable roads and landmarks in it, but it
is also just a it is so odd. It has
a kind of Spaghetti West turned thing going on, which
(30:01):
is and by that I mean like it's an Italian
film filmed in the United States with primarily US actors
and uh, and there's a certain I don't know that,
there's a certain shadow quality to it that is very
engrossing and very alienating at the same time. Yeah, it's
a it's it's a it's a lot of fun. Though
(30:21):
A lot of the fun I had with it was
just the fact that it was filmed in Atlanta back
in the day, so you can see various landmarks of
Atlanta there. It doesn't hide it's Atlantic nous, and its
Atlanta nous is not subtle. So it's not like Free
Jack where they just they're filming it in Atlanta pretending
it's something else. Um, and you have to look closely
to catch it. No, it's it's very Atlanta. As for
(30:44):
Phase four, I haven't seen this one. I'm vaguely aware
of it because it's kind of late for a giant
ant movie, uh in cinematic history. But I'd be interested
to check it out. Is it giant ants? I thought
it was normal sized and normal ants. Well, I haven't
seen it, so we will have to find out the
ant looks big on the poster, but then again that
the frog looks big on the poster for frog. So
(31:06):
it could be the same marketing gimmick where it's like,
we can't put a normal size frog on this poster.
It needs to be huge, and it needs to be
a person's arm sticking out of it. If we're gonna
put an on this poster, it needs to be larger
than a human hand. I think that's very plausible. All right,
here's another one. You want to take? This one Joe
from Brandon. Sure, Brandon says, Hi, guys, I have a
(31:29):
suggestion for weird house cinema. One of my all time
favorites Shachma. It is a nineties B movie about a
genetically altered baboon that terrorizes a group of med students
that are LARPing D and D. Also, it has Roddy McDowell.
I think you would like this odd treat. Keep up
the great work, Brandon. I don't remember much about this movie,
(31:52):
but I did watch part of it long ago at
a friend's house, and it was at least from the
parts I saw the best killer baboon Bottle episode movie
B I've ever seen the trailer for it is amazing,
So see the trailer if nothing else, because the trailer
has this wonderful intense narration that gets it just gets
more intense, and it keeps saying Shakma, shakma till at
(32:12):
the very end there's the baboon leaps at the camera
and the narrator just goes shakma and then it ends.
I think Shaka is the baboon's name. I think so. Yeah.
And of course this is also like, this is the
sort of trailer where they just say the name of
the film so many times and I missed that, Like
I wish they did that more. Yeah, gabbo gabbo gabbo. Uh, Rob,
(32:42):
do you want to read our last transmission from Planet Daniel? Yes,
all right, Daniel riots Hey, y'all just listen to the
Mad Love episode and wanted to add to the voices
in support of all of your amazing dives into these
curious and overlooked films. The Weird House Cinema episodes are
a great source of education, well, okay, and entertainment. Uh.
I guess they are educational in their own way. Sometimes
(33:05):
I miss visiting art house theaters and peeping whatever strange
film they've unearthed and are eager to share. Your podcast
brings a similar sense of wonder. So for that, I'm
very appreciative. Thank you and keep doing amazing work. Daniel,
Oh too kind, Daniel, Well, thank you and thanks for
writing in. Okay, should we wrap it up there? I
guess so. Yeah. We generally once we get into the
(33:26):
weird houses, we're uh, we're done. I think we're out
of time, but we thank everybody for writing in, you know,
if you if we just bear in mind, you know,
we don't always get to respond to email. We rarely
get to respond to email, and we only get to
read some of it on here, despite the weekly format.
But we do read uh in our own head silently
or maybe sometimes mumbling out loud, I don't know, but
(33:48):
we do read it all. So if you write into us,
we will read it, We will try and respond if
we have time, or we'll you know, if we'll try
and feature some of it on the listener mail. But
just keep it coming, because it's great to to know
what everybody else out there is thinking, what you're you know,
your your own expertise or experience, says about a given
topic and uh and also it's a great place to
(34:10):
make suggestions for the future, so keep it coming. Should
we tell you to hold off for a couple of weeks,
if your name is any variation on Dan is that no, no,
don't don't limit the dance, let the let's, let's unleash
the dance, kick it up, dance, Dan's, Danny's, Danielle's, Daniel's,
just just come on in anyway. Huge thanks as always
(34:31):
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production
(34:53):
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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