July 21, 2025 • 45 mins
Jason and Rosie are joined by Abu to briefly recap and dive deep into the second episode of Foundation season three. Dusk is getting desperate, we learn more about the Mule’s abilities, and a big reveal at the end shakes up the power dynamics of this universe.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Worry. Today's episode Key Day's spoilish for Foundation season three
episode two. Hello, my name is Jason Concepcion and I'm
(00:22):
Rosday Night, and welcome back to Extra Image of the
podcast where we dive deep into your favorite shows, movies,
comics and pop culture. Company from my Heart podcast, where
we're bringing you three episodes a week every Tuesday and Thursday,
plus the summer's biggest movies every Friday, and news on Saturday,
News on Saturday.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
In today's episode, we are digging deep into Foundations season
three episode two, Shadows in the Math.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Are you ready? Are you ready to see sexy Lee Pace?
Are you ready to see a crazy world which may
be more like us than we want to admit. Well,
we're gonna dig into it, but you'll have some exciting
news for you.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Guys.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
We are going to San Diego Comic Con.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
And you've been saying where are you going to be?
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Well, on Thursday at twelve thirty, our panel with the
Rodenbury Does It Fly Podcast will be in Room twenty
four ABC. That means they've opened up all three rooms,
so make sure you.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Come and join us and fill it up.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Then come join us at Petco Park at four pm
for the chance to bid on real Superman comic original
art from some of the biggest artists in the industry.
And on Saturday, we'll be back at Petco for a
massive Godzilla auction featuring rad stuff from IDW super seven
and me and Jason will be there with some of
our cool friends. And if you want to hang out
(01:40):
with me and Jason, then join us at the Mission
Brewery for a meet and greet. We will post all
of this on our socials and in our discord, of course.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
But first, Foundation all right, Foundation Season three, Episode two,
Shadows in the Math. Let's bring in our resident dunehead,
our resident Foundation freak super producer, Abou. How are you?
Speaker 4 (02:09):
I'm doing great?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
We open on ignis flashback one hundred and fifty one
years ago. The Mentallics are waking Gail from cryo sleep.
They tell her, listen, the plan is going great. It's
going apace. They wake Harry. They both you know, look
at the plans and they're pleased. However, they do note
(02:34):
that there are some there's some deviations sneaking into the mathematics.
All of their waking time, Harry and Gale is spent
doing two things one trying to figure out how do
we get this plan back on course as it tries
to nudge itself off course? And then how do we
teach the mentalics about psychohistory so they can deal with
(02:55):
shit while we're frozen. At a certain point, you know,
once the Foundation goes out of its religious phase, Gail
is like, Hey, guess what, we don't have to do
the gods. You don't have to kneel to me anymore.
We're out of the god phase. It's more of a
managerial phase. Now.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
I do need your OKRs on my desk by Friday
or the next time I wake up, whatever it comes first.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
We're in a new bureaucratic era. Gaiale and Harry pour
over the numbers and what they see is the Mule coming.
Third crisis looming. It's going to be bad. They're updating
their models, they're trying to fix things, to figure out
like how they can predict this, but it's not going well.
Harry comes up with a solution. How about I stay awake.
I will stay awake and age you go to sleep
(03:40):
so that you can be young and fresh when your
confrontation with the Mule appears. They wake up again four
years before the main storyline began. In episode one of
this season, we meet prem Troy Kottzer from Coda. Gail,
upon awakening, is alarmed to realize that Harry's has been
awake this whole time has been up, and she finds
(04:01):
him old and washed as hell, gazing up at a
comet like with his bare eyes staring up at the
at it's the bright sky. He looks like absolute shit,
and he tells Gail, listen, time is more valuable than ever.
The mule is coming. But before we get to that,
(04:23):
check out these statues I carved of Salvoes.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
I love the shows, I will I will say I
love the show's version of Harry Salden because he he
is much more like arrogant and self centered and really
like up his own ass about his own prophecy, like
his own math. He loves himself so much in the show,
which I appreciate. The books kind of glossed over that
version of Harry, and here we get like kind of
(04:53):
kind of a real dighead Harry, which I love.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Actually, he kind of muses with Gail about how it
could be that the plan could be this far off course,
and he wonders if it has something to do with
Gail her safe herself. You know, according to the original
version of the Psychohistory Plan, Gail was supposed to die,
(05:15):
like back when Raychdive was not supposed to be here,
and the fact that she's here with like developing superhuman
powers influencing modern events is perhaps one of the reasons
that the plan is going so off course, they don't
come to a full answer about that. He then takes
(05:39):
out the Prime Radiant and he's like, here's everything I
know about all the Crisses. There's eight Crisises. They're only
heading towards the third one. And he tells her that
everything kind of hinges on the Invictus. Remember the ghost
ship from season one that was integral to the Foundation
defeating the Empire in their first kind of big clash.
(06:02):
It's still out there and it's going to be important
apparently for the future. Harry goes off to rest and
his old friend Cale shows up. Remember Cale got Harry
his new body body Harry. We called this one body Harry.
And then there's you know, there's Harry Hologram Harry's She's
(06:23):
just like in his quarters somehow, and she calls him
out for lying to Gail about what We never get
the answer to that, But what do you think it is?
What do you think he's lying to her about?
Speaker 4 (06:34):
You know, my first instinct was he didn't exactly tell
her that he's about to die. He's going to die,
and I thought that's what Cale was referencing. I thought
Cale was like, oh, you didn't tell her the part
where you're actually about to die and she should say
goodbye to you, and you're not going to give her
the chance to say goodbye to you and get closure
that way. I thought that's what she was criticizing. But
(06:55):
it could also be something about the plan that he
has yet to reveal.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
So then Harry is like, forget that, What about a
new body for me? What about a fresh one? Look
at how look at how wrinkled this one is. I'm
on my last legs. What an ask? Cayla is like, nope,
that was your one reprieve. And then it's just an
amazing turn of events. Her eyes flash, she creates some
(07:21):
kind of portal through space and time. Does it go somewhere?
Harry is amazed, We are amazed. They go through and disappear,
and we're left to wonder who Kyla is. She kind
of intimates in she says something to Harry about being
part of a race of beings who are like energy
(07:42):
and so or don't have bodies, so very interesting. Gail
comes to Harry's office, finds out he's gone. She can
feel it that he's disappeared. Pream comes to see her,
and she's really sad about the fact that he left
without saying by so Preame's like, well, guess what, you
can see him right now? Come see the statue Harry
(08:04):
carved of himself.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I have.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I did. It's so funny and I love that. Harry's
version of humility is he doesn't he shows you the
other three other Yeah, right, he doesn't show you the
one he did of himself later and he'll have his
right hand guy should do that. So anyway, now that
(08:32):
Harry's off, Harry's off the board, Pream becomes Gail's right
hand guy. And it's Spream that wakes Gale up in
the present. She knows immediately that the mule is out there,
that they're out of time. They try to discuss what
to do. They're looking at the calculations and they realize
now that the mule has taken Kalgan. The future is
(08:54):
on them now. It's happening now. The crisis is looming
right now, and the collapse of the Dark Ages aren't
going to take centuries to develop. It's gonna happen right away,
maybe in the next few months. We go to Trantur,
where the Cleons and Demarzel are also looking at the
calculations with her prime radiant. She says that something's been
casting shadows in the math for years. Day takes this
(09:17):
as his cue to be like, well, peace out, guys, deuces,
I'm going back to my sex palace in the garden.
I'll see you later. He leaves. He immediately leaves, which
I love drama. Dosk wonders if Demarzel, aren't you just
(09:37):
aren't you looking forward to the end, like this is
probably great for you, right, you know, no Cleons to
shepherd around anymore. And then he gets to the thing
that he really wants to ask, and has clearly wanted
to ask ever since we saw him in episode one
looking at versions of himself get burnt up and we
(09:58):
all deal with trauma friendly okay, Jay said, and he
basically is like man yea about ascension Day's coming up
in like a week. What if we push that back?
We've got a crisis looming, do we not?
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Is that like a like we have to do it?
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Day is not involved, right and we need all hands
on deck? So what if I stick around and I
just get that big talent stuff and was like hard, no, sorry,
I'm a clock and uh, you know the timestick. We
go to Calgan. The Mule is living it up. We
get another display of his spooky powers. He's in the
(10:39):
former the late Lord of Kalgan's house, which is at
his house, and as we saw in episode one, he
had kidnapped the lord's daughter and he brings her out
in front of his new staff, this kind of the
new assembled staff of of his that he's trying to
get the loyalty from, and using his powers, he gets
Scarlet the daughter to like put a gun to her
(11:01):
head and he's counting, you know, to three, at which
point she's going to fire. And then a woman in
the in this lineup of servants cries cries out three
before the Mule can get there. And what the Mule
is doing is seeing how his powers are affecting these
different people. To see which of them he really has
(11:22):
to bear down on and which of them he can
just like buy osmosis, suggest stuff to and they will.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Follow these orders, which implies that it takes a toll
on him to use these powers, and so he's being
strategic about how he does.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
He doesn't want to use them all the time, right, Yeah,
it question for both of you. So after this he
dismisses everybody and then he's like, Scarlet, give me the gun,
and she's like, no, he does get it from her,
But what did you make of the fact that Scarlet
kind of resisted him for a little bit here.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
I think she's hart to like compel. I think as
you if we think of it as like a mita
that he asked to charge, it's gonna take more work
to bear down on her. That was my reading of this,
And I also want a cool giant gold gun.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
It was a very cool gun.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
I actually have the exact opposite read of it. I
think that the urge to shoot herself is now buried
somewhere into her psyche, and so she doesn't want to
give him back the gun, Like maybe maybe it's actually
harder for him to undo something he's compelled someone to do.
It only works one way.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Perhaps, And it also is almost like a butterfly effect
thing where if he puts it in your mind, it
could like kind of.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
The seed is planted and it kind of is like
in the back of your mind constantly.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Because he does.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
He has a weird line right after he hands it
back where he's like, you'll have a chance to do
it later or something like that. I'm paraphrasing. I don't
remember the exact line, but that to me implied like
you'll have a chance to shoot yourself later. Just bury
that instinct for now, give me the gun.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
It gonna be Definitely. I love that read because if
he can't undo things he wants to do and that comes, he.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Doesn't want her to kill uself.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah, that could be a really interesting.
Speaker 4 (13:11):
Right, and it opens up like narratively, it opens up
a way to outsmart someone who has such an overpowered skill, right,
and it opens up consequences for using that skill and
a way for someone like Gail to outsmart him and
have it backfire on him.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Another thing I've wondered about, and we don't have to
answer now, but just something I've been thinking about is
how potentially Harry and Gale's interaction with the mentalics started
the ball rolling on the mule and the and the
kind of tidal wave that is the mule because they
(13:49):
have similar powers, and is there some sort of interplay
between those two events. I'm eager to find that out.
We go back to Trantor, where Day is gambling in
the barracks the soldiers. He is putting up a bunch
of like ancient imperious stuff, just like into the pot.
Speaker 5 (14:06):
But it's love, love, love love Day and this is
just like complete, just like having a great time and
just like well fuck it, like and I feel like
that is like a very reasonable and kind of normal
response for what he's going through and kind of the
understanding of his path.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
But there's no need to worry about him losing the stuff,
because we do see that he is cheating, which makes
us wonder what other secrets they might be hiding.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
He's not following the cats.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Certainly not. We meet Torren Marlow, who is a distant
relation to Hobra Malow. He might remember Hobra Malow from
season one, and Torren and his wife Beta are some
kind of like galactic influencers. They're sunbathing when the mule
blocks blocks the rays of the sun, so they get plan.
(15:00):
They start complaining, and later when they go inside, Prichard,
chief spy of the First Foundation, comes to see them
and basically says, hey, you guys have the perfect profile
of spies. We want you to go into the Mules
and the Mules having a party tonight. We want you
to go in there and just tell us what you see.
(15:23):
They agree. We go back to Trantur a day is
in his sex garden. He's doing drugs, he's having sex,
living it up. He's talking about Harry Selden. He's, for one,
is kind of looking forward to the end of the Cleons.
He's like, I think it's gonna be great. Dusk Dusk,
who at this point, I think we can say, is
(15:44):
fully spiraling.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yes, this is like I found this to be kind
of really it's like funny to watch, but it's also
the kind of incredibly existential kind of horror that I
had as a child about die, where like I just
couldn't stop thinking find out about it, and you think
about it all the time, and you think about the
(16:08):
lack of things, You're not going to be able to
do anything.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I was a very depressed child.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
I used to lay in bed with my ears covered
and think like, oh, this is what it's like when
I die, like with my eyes closed. Like I was
thinking it way too much, and that is him, like
he is struggling, and I understand why.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
So Dusk comes up and he's like, hey, Day, what's up? Hey?
Sorry about you know previously? What do you think about
pumping the brakes on a engin day? What if he
don't do it right away?
Speaker 4 (16:46):
I was just walking to the grocery store and not
thinking about death, and I wanted to stop by and
get your thoughts on something.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
I just like having feeling. I was like, wait, maybe.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Said you Day, like some fun?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
How does he how does he feel about that?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Jason? What is they.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Is like, Oh, you care about your body? That's interesting?
And then he just stabs himself in the arm and
slices it down so that the nanits, you know, the
nan Knights, immediately stitch it back up and then like
flicks the knife so that the blood goes on Dusk's face.
And it's basically the most dramatic way to say one
(17:24):
no and then two like get over it, Like you're
so attached to your body we're gonna die, We're closed.
Just stop drama. So now Dusk, having struck out with
Demarzel in the last episode and now uh and Nowaday
goes to see Dawn and he says, listen, I I
can't wait. I am. I am eager to hand over
(17:49):
the reins today as he becomes Dusk, and I promise
to do my best to help him in the very
few days that I have left. That said, Dawn, I
guess something really cool in secret that I've been working
on to show you, and not even Den Rosel knows
about it. And Don's intrigued. Later, Dusk meets with some
(18:10):
of his scientists that he's been working with to create
this secret thing. And the secret thing is the Navacular,
a black hole weapon that he has had manufactured. They
tested on a planet and it just sucks the planet
in And Dusk insists that this weapon is for Dawn
to use only under the worst possible circumstances. What those
(18:32):
will be, we don't know. Later, Dusk and Dawn meet
with Ambassador Quent of the Foundation. They discuss Kalgan, They
discuss Mayor Inber and how the Foundation is in disarray,
about the mule, and about Kalgan and what to do.
Down is concerned that the mule may try to hold
on to the They're very it's troubling that the mule
(18:55):
hasn't just rated Kalgan and left. The fact that he's
staying there seems like a problem. Down leaves this this meeting,
goes to his office, gets something out of a safe,
turns it on and it's a communicator device. And who's
he talking to? He's talking to Gail?
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Door?
Speaker 1 (19:19):
What what? What? What? What?
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Some?
Speaker 1 (19:21):
This is very interesting, guys, huge, huge, huge hutus is
is he really talking to Gail? Do we think? Or
is it like a mule illusion? Can the mule do
this over those kind of distances? I think it is Gail.
I think it's got to be Yale, truly Yale.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
I think it is Gail or it is a I
guess it can't be a recording of Gail because it
responded in real time. I think it's Gail. I don't
think it's any sort of trickery. I think the show
is saying, look, Empire and Foundation working together, common enemy
mule question mark.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
So here we here's where we are after this episode.
The Empire is secretly working with the Traders to undermine
the Foundation. The Second Foundation is secretly working with with
Dawn soon to be Day to take on the Mule
(20:16):
and do what else we don't know. And then the
Mule is out there seemingly by himself, just causing all
kinds of havoc will be interesting to see. Oh and
I forgot. And then the First Foundation is working with
its own independently sourced spies against the judgment of its
own leadership in Mayor inber to investigate what the Mule
(20:39):
is up to. So currently three parties at work here,
all working at cross purposes.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Also, this is definitely coming again from my perspective from
outside of the Deep Foundation foundom but like to me,
after this episode, what does it seem like The likelihood
to me is the Mule is going to want to
stay on Kalgan with Scarlet. That feels like what's gonna happen,
And I'm interested to see if they go that route,
(21:08):
especially after a Booze read on the Seed kind of
being in there. I feel like that Mule and Scarlet
relationship could go somewhere really interesting.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
Well, Rosie, two episodes in what do you think the
Mule's motivations are.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
I honestly like couldn't tell you.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
It's one of the things that's been really interesting to
me about the show is that I feel like we're
getting into again tropiness some sci fi stories. You know,
you're Darth Fade or something. When it's happening, you just
don't know why they're bad, why they're evil, right, But
I feel like with the Mule, there is a much
(21:45):
more interesting exploration of his powers, how he uses them,
why he uses them. So I do feel like there's
some kind of and if I'm looking at what I
feel like are quite heavy influences on like Dune, I
feel like the connection and the question that Jason asked about,
like the mentaalics and the way that that potentially influenced
(22:08):
or created the meal could be a really interesting way
to explore that story further. But so that's kind of
my read on it right now.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
Yeah, that's fair. Well, sorry, Can I also nitpick one
more thing before we wrap up? Yeaheah, I hated the navacular.
I'm so annoyed this fucking death Star thing is in
this show.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
I was gonna say, it's so death Star coded.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
I didn't even bring it.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
I didn't even say it like.
Speaker 4 (22:34):
Well it doesn't exist in the books. As the problem is,
like the Empire at this stage in this story should
not have this technology, right, Like a huge theme is
that Empire is degrading. It has been one hundred and
fifty plus years of Empire's technology degrading and Foundation's technology evolving,
and Foundation has overtaken Empire at this point in the books,
(22:57):
like they forget how to use new clear nuclear weapons
and like nucleics, and like they revert back to like
oil as a power source because Empire has stagnated so much.
I just don't feel like we're seeing enough stagnation in
the show for Empire. It's this feels like the same
Empire that we knew in episode one, season one, but.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
They have to use mass transit. Now, sure they don't
have their own ships, but they're creating Themsell. Will you
go on Expedia and find out when the next transport, Yeah, Ignus.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Is and then can you make it like a zillow
so we can find a secret place to get up
put a secret black hole.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
Yeah, So that that is my I just wanted to
nitpick that this one tiny thing about this episode. I
was extremely bothered by the navacular. I don't think it
makes sense. It's too Star Wars coded. I'm not sure
what the creative choice here is.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Does it does it also set up like an Ope
situation when now that too that overpowered because they do
have like a Black Cole creation machine that can destroy planets.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
I think what it's setting up is like, oh no,
the mule has taken over the navacular, what are we
gonna do? I think it's setting up like big steaks
for the Mule fight. But I feel like there's already
stakes with the Mule fight. I didn't need a planet
strawing weapon thrown into the mix as well.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
I'm just confused about what Dusk listen. I think that
the navacular, while whatever he means for it, you don't
create that and then go get vaporized. He's gonna scound
Dusk is not going anywhere. Okay.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
He made so like and then showed it to Dawn
and was like some and it's like, yeah, the west
Poncipal circumstances fit Dusk.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Right now, I'm.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Getting vaporized, So he's going to be using it.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
It'll be fascinating to see what he does, because again
I do not believe that you make that and then
go okay, bye, see you later, and which leads me
to just wonder, like what he I don't know that
we know what he intends to aim that at, so
I'm very interested to see that. Welcome to another edition
(25:35):
of the Omnibus, where lore, analysis and understanding come together.
Today we're talking about predicting the future. A history of
real life psychohistories foundation. The television show begins with the
brilliant mathematician Harry Selden defending himself in Imperial court on
charges of accurately predicting the fall of the Empire using psychohistory,
(26:00):
which is Harry's patented mix of math, sociology, and whatever
other kind of genius wizardry he's sprinkled in. There, Seldon
sees the fall of empire and an age of societal
collapse and violent chaos known as the Dark Ages, all
of which is looming unless steps are taken to lesson
(26:22):
its impact. Selden's fictional trial is, in a way the
culmination of the work of non fictional people and the
deeply human urge of all kinds of folks from different
walks of life, from ancient hunter gatherers to classical era
(26:45):
prophesiers and seers to modern day scientists, all trying to
do the same thing, which is figure out what happens
next and plan accordingly. Let's start approximately twenty thousand years ago.
Paleolithic hunter gatherers, using pain derived from ochre heematite and charcoal,
decorated caves in what is now Spain in France with
images of animals. You've seen these, probably they're beautiful. These
(27:09):
grand creations are dominated by depictions of prey animals bison, deer,
and so on, and archaeologists and scientists have long wondered
about these peculiar markings that are next to these herds
of animals. There are like little dots and little lines.
Could these have been some early form of writing, an
(27:34):
early form of religious ritual? Unknown? However, a recent hypothesis
published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal in twenty twenty three
asserts with I think some pretty compelling evidence that these
marks actually correspond to months. In essence, if this paper
(27:54):
titled in Upper Paleolithic proto Writing System and Archaeological Calendar
is correct, what these ancient hunters were trying to do
was communicate to others when the animal depicted next to
the dot and line would migrate or mate, thus telling
(28:15):
future generations how to hunt successfully and creating again if correct.
Perhaps the earliest known example of humans predicting the cycles
of nature and predicting the future. Let's fast forward now
to ancient Greece the eighth century BC. Politicians, generals, and
even everyday folks probably trek to Delfi's Temple of Apollo,
(28:39):
where the Pythia, the high priestess there, would breathe in
some form of mystical fumes, possibly ethylene released from nearby
chasms deep chasms in the earth, and then speak prophecies
in cryptic stone verses. The oracle was consulted often in
(28:59):
times of dire crisis when no one could figure out
what the next move should be, but unsurprisingly, the answers
were ambiguous. The classic tale comes to us from Herodotus.
Can Crocius of Lydia asks the Pythia if he should
attack Persia, and the oracle replies, if you cross the river,
a great empire will fall and you can figure out
(29:21):
what happens next. Cross is like, yeah, I'm going to
attack Persia. But spoiler alerted, it was his empire that
fell apart. This is herodotous, though, so we don't know
how much of that is legit. Across the ancient world,
humans tried every method imaginable to glimpse the future. Babylonian
astrologers mapped the night sky, believing the motion of the
(29:42):
planets its stars foretold events on Earth. We're still doing that.
If Mars rose in a certain constellation, maybe a king
would die or a war would be born. These Babylonian
priests were essentially the first data analysts, collecting celestial observations
on clay tablets looking for Meanwhile, in ancient China, diviners
(30:03):
heated tortoise shells until they cracked to read the patterns there.
In ancient Rome, augurs watched the flight of birds past
windows and sacrificed animals to inspect their entrails to decide
if the future would be favorable or not. The idea
was that there are clues everywhere in the world, in
the universe and the natural world, if you know where
(30:24):
to look. And let's not forget that magicians and seers
beyond official priesthoods were also at play, working with the
common people. Every culture had soothsayers, and visionaries. The Bible
talks about Joseph interpret interpreting Pharaoh's dreams of skinny cows
and fat cows in order to predict famine. In myth
(30:47):
and legend, we hear of seers like Cassandra from Troy,
from ancient Troy, who was cursed to predict true futures
that no one would believe. Fast forward to the Renaissance
and you get figures like Nostradamus, the sixteenth century French
apothecary guy who published cryptic poems in the form of quatrains,
(31:08):
these kind of foe lined poems that, according to later
people who studied this, predicted everything from the rise of
Napoleon to great famines to the appearance of Hitler. In reality,
I mean, go read them. You can't figure you can't
(31:28):
really figure out what those things are. But the fact
is that we love this stuff, and people throughout history,
ancient people and people today, and people certainly for as
long as there are human beings, will love and will
subscribe to the idea that somehow someone might have figured
out how to predict the future. If there's one thing, well,
(31:50):
let me take that again. However, it's one thing to
ask about how the market's going to move, or whether
we should go to war, or whether we should harvest.
It's another thing to predict the end of the world entirely,
and of course this is something that generation after generation
people have tried to do. A veritable parade of Harry
Selden's can be found all throughout the pages of history
(32:13):
and all around the world, often as evidenced by the
fact that we're still here. These end of time dates
come and go or get pushed back continually because what
happens nothing really happens, and many people are left disappointed.
Medieval Europe had waves of apocalyptic fever throughout history, often
(32:38):
around New Year's that turned from to big round numbers,
you know, from year nine to ninety nine to year
one thousand. We can jump to the nineteenth century to
see more modern day versions of this. There was a
guy named William Miller, preacher from up state New York,
who predicted that Jesus would return on October twenty second,
(32:58):
eighteen forty four. The I love the details. Thousands of
his followers, the Millerites got ready, They prayed, they gave
away their money, They made white robes with which to
float up to heaven in and then than Avin. The
day became known as the Great Disappointment to the Miller Rights.
(33:20):
People wept, some lost faith, some recalculated, and this pattern
is repeated all throughout the twentieth In the twenty first centuries,
some of us might remember the twenty twelve Mayan calendar hype.
This was big for young people of my generation who
would go to raves and stuff. You know, you'd eat
(33:40):
some mushrooms or smoke some hash and then be talking
about it. And the next thing you know, some guy
with dreadlocks and crystals is telling you how the Mayans
predicted the end of everything and it was coming. This is,
of course, a misinterpretation of the mind cycles that somehow
convinced folks that the world would end. On December twenty first,
twenty twelve, new agers held countdown parties. There was a
(34:03):
big budget disaster movie. You may remember, but what happened,
Nothing happened, We're fine. Or about Harold Camping. Some might
remember Harold Camping. He was an American radio evangelist who
confidently broadcast the Judgment Day would happen on May twenty first,
twenty eleven. Followers spent their life savings, buying billboards, trying
(34:29):
to warn people the end is coming, the end is coming.
Then nothing happened, he missed. He then recalculated, Okay, sorry
I did, I didn't carry the one or whatever. October
twenty first, twenty eleven, when that date also passed uneventally uneventfully,
Camping said, quote, we humbly acknowledged we were wrong about
(34:52):
the timing. Eventually, a new idea in this kind of
prediction to science to cold and that was that maybe
it was a science. Maybe using the knowledge we unearthed
(35:15):
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the Enlightenment, the
industrial evolution, and the new scientific discoveries, maybe using the
techniques learned in that era, we could actually predict with
some accuracy the future of Newton's laws for instance, for instance,
could break the motions of planets and bodies in space.
(35:36):
Why could we not find laws that predict the motion
of history. One of these people was August Compti. He
was in nineteenth century French philosopher often credited as being
the father of sociology family. He famously said the goal
of knowledge is quote to predict in order to control
(35:57):
which sounds. Admittedly, like us super villain motto. But I
think a lot of these kind of urges to predict
the future do have that kind of evil undertone to it.
But Comti was absolutely serious. He envisioned a physics of society,
a science of human behavior that would be as predictive
(36:17):
as any other science. But of course humans are much
much trickier than planets. I mean, consider the fact that
you are you and nobody knows you better than you.
But do you even know yourself? Like we have to
go to therapy to figure that out. So how could
August Comti or anybody else figure out? It's very difficult.
At the same time, there was Thomas Malthus, an English
(36:40):
economists and preacher who in seventeen ninety eight kind of
looked around the globe at population growth and in balance
with available resources and saw doom. He thought that populations
because they tend to increase exponentially while food production is available.
(37:01):
But as fruit production grows slower, the rate of population
increase gets slower as well. He extrapulated this. He extrapolated
this trend and concluded that we're headed for a mass
famine point at some point in the future. His warning
was very influential. You might have heard the term Malthusian collapse.
(37:22):
It comes from him, and his ideas kicked off a
lot of debates. It They influenced Charles Darwin on his
ideas of survival of the fittest, and for a while
in the eighteen hundreds it really looked like, hey, maybe
Malthus was right. There were famines, most famously the devastating
Irish potato familine, which seemed to validate his theories, but
(37:43):
overall it didn't happen. Why Because science created new fertilizers
that would enable us to grow more food, because of
developments in medical technology, etc. Maltheus didn't foresee these things.
So his nineteenth century prophecy of inevitable famine turned out
to be a bit like a wrong equation, or perhaps
(38:05):
a right equation missing some crucial variables, much like Harry
Seldon's psychohistory, which it's impossible not to note every time
he pops out of cryo sleep, it's like, oops, the
math is wrong. Still, Maltheus deserves a shout out as
an Enlightenment era attempt to scientifically predict the future of society.
(38:27):
He took prediction out of the realm of you know,
strange inhaled gases and crystal balls and actually tried to
make something real and coherent out of it. And in
a way he was doing the kind of trend line
extrapolation that modern data analysts do. The futurists of the
twentieth century. If the eighteen hundreds got the ball rolling
(38:50):
on scientific prediction, the twentieth century kicked it into overdrive.
And in fact, I think you'll find that we use
these predictive technologies every day, all the time. After two
world wars, entering a Cold war, prediction became kind of
a matter of global survival. Now that weapons of mass
destruction were capable of taking out the entire planet were
(39:12):
in play, governments and institutions poured resources into anything that
could give them the edge on whatever's coming around the corner.
And this is the era when futurists became an actual profession.
The think tank guy, the researcher. Most famous, perhaps in
the United States, is the Rand Corporation. Originally formed after
(39:32):
w after World War II to advise the Air Force.
Rand basically became a factory of future scenarios. They pioneered
pioneered techniques like scenario planning, systematically exploring how possible futures
might unfold. What if the Soviets invade Germany? What do
we do? What if the Soviets Launchanuka at England? What
(39:53):
do we do? They even developed something called the Delphi method,
a structured way of polling expert researchers elite opinion makers
to make forecasts about the future, and funnily enough, they
named it Delphi after the ancient oracle at Delphi. No
goat entrails, just questionnaires, which is a bit more boring
(40:15):
than pytheis transport, perhaps more reliable. Rand analysts also used
the earliest versions of computers to run war games and simulations,
basically trying to map out the future in much the
way Doctor Strange in Infinity War scan through fourteen million
different possible outcomes to try and give us the most
(40:35):
likely path to success. They always get it right now,
but the idea was if you consider enough possibilities, maybe
you won't get caught off guard. But outside the military
industrial complex, others were also trying to predict futures for humanity.
In nineteen seventy two, a group of MIT scientists working
for the Club of Rome released a bombshell study called
(40:57):
The Limits to Growth. They built off one of the
first computer models of the entire global economy and crunched
the numbers and figured out that in a business as
usual kind of scenario, if we were running the global
economy the same exact way after year after year, there
(41:19):
would come a point where we would hit a wall
somewhere in the twenty first century, around twenty fifty twenty seventy,
which would lead to a collapse of population, collapse of
industrial output, collapse of economies, and probably warfamine, all the
other kind of Harry Seldon esque stuff. The report was
a bestseller, sparked a lot of debate that we're still
(41:41):
debating it today. Over the decades, people have checked in
just to see, well, how good did that? How good
was that model? And depending on who you ask, the
Limits to Growth was either remarkably accurate some of its findings,
like the curves in the CO two emissions, seem right
(42:04):
on track, or it's too simplistic. But the legacy of
it is huge, and here we are in the twenty
first century where prediction is basically like every day, in
your pocket, do you check the weather. You're checking some
kind of complex simulation that it crunches insane amounts of
(42:25):
data to tell you if it's going to be sunny,
or if it's going to rain, or what the air
quality is going to be. Scroll through TikTok your YouTube,
you're getting delivered content based on an algorithm that learned
from you the kind of stuff you like. You ever
wonder why the videos you see at two am when
you reach for your phone are not the videos you
see at ten am or at eleven thirty am when
(42:47):
you're taking a break from work. It's because the algorithm
is trying to predict what you like, and it's probably
pretty good at it. On a much more ominous and
serious note, algorithms are now being used in policing and
criminal justice and for the observation and subjugation of mass
(43:09):
peoples and eerily reminiscent events and an event eerily reminiscent
to minority report. So called predictive policing software takes crime
stats and tries to forecast, like where crimes are likely
to happen so the police can deploy resources there. You
(43:29):
don't have to be a Harry Seldon to kind of
figure out all the ways that this could go awry,
but more on that hopefully actually hopefully much less on
that in the future. So at the end of this
World Wind tour, let's bring it back to Foundation and
Harry Seldon. After all this effort, Are we any good
(43:51):
at this? It certainly seems like we're good in the
short term, right. We're very good with algorithm that predict
what you might want to do in the next twenty
minutes or might want to see next, And we're good
at the very long term. We're probably very good at saying, Okay,
in ten thousand years, the earth will look like this,
(44:14):
But in terms of the medium term trying to figure
out what's going to happen in the next three, five,
twenty years, not so much. On this week's episodes of
Extra Vision, we're diving into Marvel's first family, the Fantastic Four.
We have two prep episodes for you Tuesday and Thursday,
and then our instant reactions to the film on Friday.
(44:37):
That's it. That's it for this episode. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 4 (44:39):
Every Ready, Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
X ray Vision is hosted by Jason Sepsion and rosday
Night and is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Our executive producers are Joe Alminique.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
And Aaron Koleman. Our supervising producer is Abusa.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Par All produces A Calm Laurent Dean Jonathan and Bay Wack.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
A theme song is by Brian Vasquez, with alternate theme
songs by Aaron Kaufman.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Special thanks to Soul Rubin, Chris Lord, Kenny Goodman and
Heide our discord moderator
Worry. Today's episode Key Day's spoilish for Foundation season three
episode two. Hello, my name is Jason Concepcion and I'm
(00:22):
Rosday Night, and welcome back to Extra Image of the
podcast where we dive deep into your favorite shows, movies,
comics and pop culture. Company from my Heart podcast, where
we're bringing you three episodes a week every Tuesday and Thursday,
plus the summer's biggest movies every Friday, and news on Saturday,
News on Saturday.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
In today's episode, we are digging deep into Foundations season
three episode two, Shadows in the Math.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Are you ready? Are you ready to see sexy Lee Pace?
Are you ready to see a crazy world which may
be more like us than we want to admit. Well,
we're gonna dig into it, but you'll have some exciting
news for you.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Guys.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
We are going to San Diego Comic Con.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
And you've been saying where are you going to be?
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Well, on Thursday at twelve thirty, our panel with the
Rodenbury Does It Fly Podcast will be in Room twenty
four ABC. That means they've opened up all three rooms,
so make sure you.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Come and join us and fill it up.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Then come join us at Petco Park at four pm
for the chance to bid on real Superman comic original
art from some of the biggest artists in the industry.
And on Saturday, we'll be back at Petco for a
massive Godzilla auction featuring rad stuff from IDW super seven
and me and Jason will be there with some of
our cool friends. And if you want to hang out
(01:40):
with me and Jason, then join us at the Mission
Brewery for a meet and greet. We will post all
of this on our socials and in our discord, of course.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
But first, Foundation all right, Foundation Season three, Episode two,
Shadows in the Math. Let's bring in our resident dunehead,
our resident Foundation freak super producer, Abou. How are you?
Speaker 4 (02:09):
I'm doing great?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
We open on ignis flashback one hundred and fifty one
years ago. The Mentallics are waking Gail from cryo sleep.
They tell her, listen, the plan is going great. It's
going apace. They wake Harry. They both you know, look
at the plans and they're pleased. However, they do note
(02:34):
that there are some there's some deviations sneaking into the mathematics.
All of their waking time, Harry and Gale is spent
doing two things one trying to figure out how do
we get this plan back on course as it tries
to nudge itself off course? And then how do we
teach the mentalics about psychohistory so they can deal with
(02:55):
shit while we're frozen. At a certain point, you know,
once the Foundation goes out of its religious phase, Gail
is like, Hey, guess what, we don't have to do
the gods. You don't have to kneel to me anymore.
We're out of the god phase. It's more of a
managerial phase. Now.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
I do need your OKRs on my desk by Friday
or the next time I wake up, whatever it comes first.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
We're in a new bureaucratic era. Gaiale and Harry pour
over the numbers and what they see is the Mule coming.
Third crisis looming. It's going to be bad. They're updating
their models, they're trying to fix things, to figure out
like how they can predict this, but it's not going well.
Harry comes up with a solution. How about I stay awake.
I will stay awake and age you go to sleep
(03:40):
so that you can be young and fresh when your
confrontation with the Mule appears. They wake up again four
years before the main storyline began. In episode one of
this season, we meet prem Troy Kottzer from Coda. Gail,
upon awakening, is alarmed to realize that Harry's has been
awake this whole time has been up, and she finds
(04:01):
him old and washed as hell, gazing up at a
comet like with his bare eyes staring up at the
at it's the bright sky. He looks like absolute shit,
and he tells Gail, listen, time is more valuable than ever.
The mule is coming. But before we get to that,
(04:23):
check out these statues I carved of Salvoes.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
I love the shows, I will I will say I
love the show's version of Harry Salden because he he
is much more like arrogant and self centered and really
like up his own ass about his own prophecy, like
his own math. He loves himself so much in the show,
which I appreciate. The books kind of glossed over that
version of Harry, and here we get like kind of
(04:53):
kind of a real dighead Harry, which I love.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Actually, he kind of muses with Gail about how it
could be that the plan could be this far off course,
and he wonders if it has something to do with
Gail her safe herself. You know, according to the original
version of the Psychohistory Plan, Gail was supposed to die,
(05:15):
like back when Raychdive was not supposed to be here,
and the fact that she's here with like developing superhuman
powers influencing modern events is perhaps one of the reasons
that the plan is going so off course, they don't
come to a full answer about that. He then takes
(05:39):
out the Prime Radiant and he's like, here's everything I
know about all the Crisses. There's eight Crisises. They're only
heading towards the third one. And he tells her that
everything kind of hinges on the Invictus. Remember the ghost
ship from season one that was integral to the Foundation
defeating the Empire in their first kind of big clash.
(06:02):
It's still out there and it's going to be important
apparently for the future. Harry goes off to rest and
his old friend Cale shows up. Remember Cale got Harry
his new body body Harry. We called this one body Harry.
And then there's you know, there's Harry Hologram Harry's She's
(06:23):
just like in his quarters somehow, and she calls him
out for lying to Gail about what We never get
the answer to that, But what do you think it is?
What do you think he's lying to her about?
Speaker 4 (06:34):
You know, my first instinct was he didn't exactly tell
her that he's about to die. He's going to die,
and I thought that's what Cale was referencing. I thought
Cale was like, oh, you didn't tell her the part
where you're actually about to die and she should say
goodbye to you, and you're not going to give her
the chance to say goodbye to you and get closure
that way. I thought that's what she was criticizing. But
(06:55):
it could also be something about the plan that he
has yet to reveal.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
So then Harry is like, forget that, What about a
new body for me? What about a fresh one? Look
at how look at how wrinkled this one is. I'm
on my last legs. What an ask? Cayla is like, nope,
that was your one reprieve. And then it's just an
amazing turn of events. Her eyes flash, she creates some
(07:21):
kind of portal through space and time. Does it go somewhere?
Harry is amazed, We are amazed. They go through and disappear,
and we're left to wonder who Kyla is. She kind
of intimates in she says something to Harry about being
part of a race of beings who are like energy
(07:42):
and so or don't have bodies, so very interesting. Gail
comes to Harry's office, finds out he's gone. She can
feel it that he's disappeared. Pream comes to see her,
and she's really sad about the fact that he left
without saying by so Preame's like, well, guess what, you
can see him right now? Come see the statue Harry
(08:04):
carved of himself.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I have.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I did. It's so funny and I love that. Harry's
version of humility is he doesn't he shows you the
other three other Yeah, right, he doesn't show you the
one he did of himself later and he'll have his
right hand guy should do that. So anyway, now that
(08:32):
Harry's off, Harry's off the board, Pream becomes Gail's right
hand guy. And it's Spream that wakes Gale up in
the present. She knows immediately that the mule is out there,
that they're out of time. They try to discuss what
to do. They're looking at the calculations and they realize
now that the mule has taken Kalgan. The future is
(08:54):
on them now. It's happening now. The crisis is looming
right now, and the collapse of the Dark Ages aren't
going to take centuries to develop. It's gonna happen right away,
maybe in the next few months. We go to Trantur,
where the Cleons and Demarzel are also looking at the
calculations with her prime radiant. She says that something's been
casting shadows in the math for years. Day takes this
(09:17):
as his cue to be like, well, peace out, guys, deuces,
I'm going back to my sex palace in the garden.
I'll see you later. He leaves. He immediately leaves, which
I love drama. Dosk wonders if Demarzel, aren't you just
(09:37):
aren't you looking forward to the end, like this is
probably great for you, right, you know, no Cleons to
shepherd around anymore. And then he gets to the thing
that he really wants to ask, and has clearly wanted
to ask ever since we saw him in episode one
looking at versions of himself get burnt up and we
(09:58):
all deal with trauma friendly okay, Jay said, and he
basically is like man yea about ascension Day's coming up
in like a week. What if we push that back?
We've got a crisis looming, do we not?
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Is that like a like we have to do it?
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Day is not involved, right and we need all hands
on deck? So what if I stick around and I
just get that big talent stuff and was like hard, no, sorry,
I'm a clock and uh, you know the timestick. We
go to Calgan. The Mule is living it up. We
get another display of his spooky powers. He's in the
(10:39):
former the late Lord of Kalgan's house, which is at
his house, and as we saw in episode one, he
had kidnapped the lord's daughter and he brings her out
in front of his new staff, this kind of the
new assembled staff of of his that he's trying to
get the loyalty from, and using his powers, he gets
Scarlet the daughter to like put a gun to her
(11:01):
head and he's counting, you know, to three, at which
point she's going to fire. And then a woman in
the in this lineup of servants cries cries out three
before the Mule can get there. And what the Mule
is doing is seeing how his powers are affecting these
different people. To see which of them he really has
(11:22):
to bear down on and which of them he can
just like buy osmosis, suggest stuff to and they will.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Follow these orders, which implies that it takes a toll
on him to use these powers, and so he's being
strategic about how he does.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
He doesn't want to use them all the time, right, Yeah,
it question for both of you. So after this he
dismisses everybody and then he's like, Scarlet, give me the gun,
and she's like, no, he does get it from her,
But what did you make of the fact that Scarlet
kind of resisted him for a little bit here.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
I think she's hart to like compel. I think as
you if we think of it as like a mita
that he asked to charge, it's gonna take more work
to bear down on her. That was my reading of this,
And I also want a cool giant gold gun.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
It was a very cool gun.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
I actually have the exact opposite read of it. I
think that the urge to shoot herself is now buried
somewhere into her psyche, and so she doesn't want to
give him back the gun, Like maybe maybe it's actually
harder for him to undo something he's compelled someone to do.
It only works one way.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Perhaps, And it also is almost like a butterfly effect
thing where if he puts it in your mind, it
could like kind of.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
The seed is planted and it kind of is like
in the back of your mind constantly.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Because he does.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
He has a weird line right after he hands it
back where he's like, you'll have a chance to do
it later or something like that. I'm paraphrasing. I don't
remember the exact line, but that to me implied like
you'll have a chance to shoot yourself later. Just bury
that instinct for now, give me the gun.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
It gonna be Definitely. I love that read because if
he can't undo things he wants to do and that comes, he.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Doesn't want her to kill uself.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah, that could be a really interesting.
Speaker 4 (13:11):
Right, and it opens up like narratively, it opens up
a way to outsmart someone who has such an overpowered skill, right,
and it opens up consequences for using that skill and
a way for someone like Gail to outsmart him and
have it backfire on him.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Another thing I've wondered about, and we don't have to
answer now, but just something I've been thinking about is
how potentially Harry and Gale's interaction with the mentalics started
the ball rolling on the mule and the and the
kind of tidal wave that is the mule because they
(13:49):
have similar powers, and is there some sort of interplay
between those two events. I'm eager to find that out.
We go back to Trantor, where Day is gambling in
the barracks the soldiers. He is putting up a bunch
of like ancient imperious stuff, just like into the pot.
Speaker 5 (14:06):
But it's love, love, love love Day and this is
just like complete, just like having a great time and
just like well fuck it, like and I feel like
that is like a very reasonable and kind of normal
response for what he's going through and kind of the
understanding of his path.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
But there's no need to worry about him losing the stuff,
because we do see that he is cheating, which makes
us wonder what other secrets they might be hiding.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
He's not following the cats.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Certainly not. We meet Torren Marlow, who is a distant
relation to Hobra Malow. He might remember Hobra Malow from
season one, and Torren and his wife Beta are some
kind of like galactic influencers. They're sunbathing when the mule
blocks blocks the rays of the sun, so they get plan.
(15:00):
They start complaining, and later when they go inside, Prichard,
chief spy of the First Foundation, comes to see them
and basically says, hey, you guys have the perfect profile
of spies. We want you to go into the Mules
and the Mules having a party tonight. We want you
to go in there and just tell us what you see.
(15:23):
They agree. We go back to Trantur a day is
in his sex garden. He's doing drugs, he's having sex,
living it up. He's talking about Harry Selden. He's, for one,
is kind of looking forward to the end of the Cleons.
He's like, I think it's gonna be great. Dusk Dusk,
who at this point, I think we can say, is
(15:44):
fully spiraling.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yes, this is like I found this to be kind
of really it's like funny to watch, but it's also
the kind of incredibly existential kind of horror that I
had as a child about die, where like I just
couldn't stop thinking find out about it, and you think
about it all the time, and you think about the
(16:08):
lack of things, You're not going to be able to
do anything.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I was a very depressed child.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
I used to lay in bed with my ears covered
and think like, oh, this is what it's like when
I die, like with my eyes closed. Like I was
thinking it way too much, and that is him, like
he is struggling, and I understand why.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
So Dusk comes up and he's like, hey, Day, what's up? Hey?
Sorry about you know previously? What do you think about
pumping the brakes on a engin day? What if he
don't do it right away?
Speaker 4 (16:46):
I was just walking to the grocery store and not
thinking about death, and I wanted to stop by and
get your thoughts on something.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
I just like having feeling. I was like, wait, maybe.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Said you Day, like some fun?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
How does he how does he feel about that?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Jason? What is they.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Is like, Oh, you care about your body? That's interesting?
And then he just stabs himself in the arm and
slices it down so that the nanits, you know, the
nan Knights, immediately stitch it back up and then like
flicks the knife so that the blood goes on Dusk's face.
And it's basically the most dramatic way to say one
(17:24):
no and then two like get over it, Like you're
so attached to your body we're gonna die, We're closed.
Just stop drama. So now Dusk, having struck out with
Demarzel in the last episode and now uh and Nowaday
goes to see Dawn and he says, listen, I I
can't wait. I am. I am eager to hand over
(17:49):
the reins today as he becomes Dusk, and I promise
to do my best to help him in the very
few days that I have left. That said, Dawn, I
guess something really cool in secret that I've been working
on to show you, and not even Den Rosel knows
about it. And Don's intrigued. Later, Dusk meets with some
(18:10):
of his scientists that he's been working with to create
this secret thing. And the secret thing is the Navacular,
a black hole weapon that he has had manufactured. They
tested on a planet and it just sucks the planet
in And Dusk insists that this weapon is for Dawn
to use only under the worst possible circumstances. What those
(18:32):
will be, we don't know. Later, Dusk and Dawn meet
with Ambassador Quent of the Foundation. They discuss Kalgan, They
discuss Mayor Inber and how the Foundation is in disarray,
about the mule, and about Kalgan and what to do.
Down is concerned that the mule may try to hold
on to the They're very it's troubling that the mule
(18:55):
hasn't just rated Kalgan and left. The fact that he's
staying there seems like a problem. Down leaves this this meeting,
goes to his office, gets something out of a safe,
turns it on and it's a communicator device. And who's
he talking to? He's talking to Gail?
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Door?
Speaker 1 (19:19):
What what? What? What? What?
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Some?
Speaker 1 (19:21):
This is very interesting, guys, huge, huge, huge hutus is
is he really talking to Gail? Do we think? Or
is it like a mule illusion? Can the mule do
this over those kind of distances? I think it is Gail.
I think it's got to be Yale, truly Yale.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
I think it is Gail or it is a I
guess it can't be a recording of Gail because it
responded in real time. I think it's Gail. I don't
think it's any sort of trickery. I think the show
is saying, look, Empire and Foundation working together, common enemy
mule question mark.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
So here we here's where we are after this episode.
The Empire is secretly working with the Traders to undermine
the Foundation. The Second Foundation is secretly working with with
Dawn soon to be Day to take on the Mule
(20:16):
and do what else we don't know. And then the
Mule is out there seemingly by himself, just causing all
kinds of havoc will be interesting to see. Oh and
I forgot. And then the First Foundation is working with
its own independently sourced spies against the judgment of its
own leadership in Mayor inber to investigate what the Mule
(20:39):
is up to. So currently three parties at work here,
all working at cross purposes.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Also, this is definitely coming again from my perspective from
outside of the Deep Foundation foundom but like to me,
after this episode, what does it seem like The likelihood
to me is the Mule is going to want to
stay on Kalgan with Scarlet. That feels like what's gonna happen,
And I'm interested to see if they go that route,
(21:08):
especially after a Booze read on the Seed kind of
being in there. I feel like that Mule and Scarlet
relationship could go somewhere really interesting.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
Well, Rosie, two episodes in what do you think the
Mule's motivations are.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
I honestly like couldn't tell you.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
It's one of the things that's been really interesting to
me about the show is that I feel like we're
getting into again tropiness some sci fi stories. You know,
you're Darth Fade or something. When it's happening, you just
don't know why they're bad, why they're evil, right, But
I feel like with the Mule, there is a much
(21:45):
more interesting exploration of his powers, how he uses them,
why he uses them. So I do feel like there's
some kind of and if I'm looking at what I
feel like are quite heavy influences on like Dune, I
feel like the connection and the question that Jason asked about,
like the mentaalics and the way that that potentially influenced
(22:08):
or created the meal could be a really interesting way
to explore that story further. But so that's kind of
my read on it right now.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
Yeah, that's fair. Well, sorry, Can I also nitpick one
more thing before we wrap up? Yeaheah, I hated the navacular.
I'm so annoyed this fucking death Star thing is in
this show.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
I was gonna say, it's so death Star coded.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
I didn't even bring it.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
I didn't even say it like.
Speaker 4 (22:34):
Well it doesn't exist in the books. As the problem is,
like the Empire at this stage in this story should
not have this technology, right, Like a huge theme is
that Empire is degrading. It has been one hundred and
fifty plus years of Empire's technology degrading and Foundation's technology evolving,
and Foundation has overtaken Empire at this point in the books,
(22:57):
like they forget how to use new clear nuclear weapons
and like nucleics, and like they revert back to like
oil as a power source because Empire has stagnated so much.
I just don't feel like we're seeing enough stagnation in
the show for Empire. It's this feels like the same
Empire that we knew in episode one, season one, but.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
They have to use mass transit. Now, sure they don't
have their own ships, but they're creating Themsell. Will you
go on Expedia and find out when the next transport, Yeah, Ignus.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Is and then can you make it like a zillow
so we can find a secret place to get up
put a secret black hole.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
Yeah, So that that is my I just wanted to
nitpick that this one tiny thing about this episode. I
was extremely bothered by the navacular. I don't think it
makes sense. It's too Star Wars coded. I'm not sure
what the creative choice here is.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Does it does it also set up like an Ope
situation when now that too that overpowered because they do
have like a Black Cole creation machine that can destroy planets.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
I think what it's setting up is like, oh no,
the mule has taken over the navacular, what are we
gonna do? I think it's setting up like big steaks
for the Mule fight. But I feel like there's already
stakes with the Mule fight. I didn't need a planet
strawing weapon thrown into the mix as well.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
I'm just confused about what Dusk listen. I think that
the navacular, while whatever he means for it, you don't
create that and then go get vaporized. He's gonna scound
Dusk is not going anywhere. Okay.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
He made so like and then showed it to Dawn
and was like some and it's like, yeah, the west
Poncipal circumstances fit Dusk.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Right now, I'm.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Getting vaporized, So he's going to be using it.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
It'll be fascinating to see what he does, because again
I do not believe that you make that and then
go okay, bye, see you later, and which leads me
to just wonder, like what he I don't know that
we know what he intends to aim that at, so
I'm very interested to see that. Welcome to another edition
(25:35):
of the Omnibus, where lore, analysis and understanding come together.
Today we're talking about predicting the future. A history of
real life psychohistories foundation. The television show begins with the
brilliant mathematician Harry Selden defending himself in Imperial court on
charges of accurately predicting the fall of the Empire using psychohistory,
(26:00):
which is Harry's patented mix of math, sociology, and whatever
other kind of genius wizardry he's sprinkled in. There, Seldon
sees the fall of empire and an age of societal
collapse and violent chaos known as the Dark Ages, all
of which is looming unless steps are taken to lesson
(26:22):
its impact. Selden's fictional trial is, in a way the
culmination of the work of non fictional people and the
deeply human urge of all kinds of folks from different
walks of life, from ancient hunter gatherers to classical era
(26:45):
prophesiers and seers to modern day scientists, all trying to
do the same thing, which is figure out what happens
next and plan accordingly. Let's start approximately twenty thousand years ago.
Paleolithic hunter gatherers, using pain derived from ochre heematite and charcoal,
decorated caves in what is now Spain in France with
images of animals. You've seen these, probably they're beautiful. These
(27:09):
grand creations are dominated by depictions of prey animals bison, deer,
and so on, and archaeologists and scientists have long wondered
about these peculiar markings that are next to these herds
of animals. There are like little dots and little lines.
Could these have been some early form of writing, an
(27:34):
early form of religious ritual? Unknown? However, a recent hypothesis
published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal in twenty twenty three
asserts with I think some pretty compelling evidence that these
marks actually correspond to months. In essence, if this paper
(27:54):
titled in Upper Paleolithic proto Writing System and Archaeological Calendar
is correct, what these ancient hunters were trying to do
was communicate to others when the animal depicted next to
the dot and line would migrate or mate, thus telling
(28:15):
future generations how to hunt successfully and creating again if correct.
Perhaps the earliest known example of humans predicting the cycles
of nature and predicting the future. Let's fast forward now
to ancient Greece the eighth century BC. Politicians, generals, and
even everyday folks probably trek to Delfi's Temple of Apollo,
(28:39):
where the Pythia, the high priestess there, would breathe in
some form of mystical fumes, possibly ethylene released from nearby
chasms deep chasms in the earth, and then speak prophecies
in cryptic stone verses. The oracle was consulted often in
(28:59):
times of dire crisis when no one could figure out
what the next move should be, but unsurprisingly, the answers
were ambiguous. The classic tale comes to us from Herodotus.
Can Crocius of Lydia asks the Pythia if he should
attack Persia, and the oracle replies, if you cross the river,
a great empire will fall and you can figure out
(29:21):
what happens next. Cross is like, yeah, I'm going to
attack Persia. But spoiler alerted, it was his empire that
fell apart. This is herodotous, though, so we don't know
how much of that is legit. Across the ancient world,
humans tried every method imaginable to glimpse the future. Babylonian
astrologers mapped the night sky, believing the motion of the
(29:42):
planets its stars foretold events on Earth. We're still doing that.
If Mars rose in a certain constellation, maybe a king
would die or a war would be born. These Babylonian
priests were essentially the first data analysts, collecting celestial observations
on clay tablets looking for Meanwhile, in ancient China, diviners
(30:03):
heated tortoise shells until they cracked to read the patterns there.
In ancient Rome, augurs watched the flight of birds past
windows and sacrificed animals to inspect their entrails to decide
if the future would be favorable or not. The idea
was that there are clues everywhere in the world, in
the universe and the natural world, if you know where
(30:24):
to look. And let's not forget that magicians and seers
beyond official priesthoods were also at play, working with the
common people. Every culture had soothsayers, and visionaries. The Bible
talks about Joseph interpret interpreting Pharaoh's dreams of skinny cows
and fat cows in order to predict famine. In myth
(30:47):
and legend, we hear of seers like Cassandra from Troy,
from ancient Troy, who was cursed to predict true futures
that no one would believe. Fast forward to the Renaissance
and you get figures like Nostradamus, the sixteenth century French
apothecary guy who published cryptic poems in the form of quatrains,
(31:08):
these kind of foe lined poems that, according to later
people who studied this, predicted everything from the rise of
Napoleon to great famines to the appearance of Hitler. In reality,
I mean, go read them. You can't figure you can't
(31:28):
really figure out what those things are. But the fact
is that we love this stuff, and people throughout history,
ancient people and people today, and people certainly for as
long as there are human beings, will love and will
subscribe to the idea that somehow someone might have figured
out how to predict the future. If there's one thing, well,
(31:50):
let me take that again. However, it's one thing to
ask about how the market's going to move, or whether
we should go to war, or whether we should harvest.
It's another thing to predict the end of the world entirely,
and of course this is something that generation after generation
people have tried to do. A veritable parade of Harry
Selden's can be found all throughout the pages of history
(32:13):
and all around the world, often as evidenced by the
fact that we're still here. These end of time dates
come and go or get pushed back continually because what
happens nothing really happens, and many people are left disappointed.
Medieval Europe had waves of apocalyptic fever throughout history, often
(32:38):
around New Year's that turned from to big round numbers,
you know, from year nine to ninety nine to year
one thousand. We can jump to the nineteenth century to
see more modern day versions of this. There was a
guy named William Miller, preacher from up state New York,
who predicted that Jesus would return on October twenty second,
(32:58):
eighteen forty four. The I love the details. Thousands of
his followers, the Millerites got ready, They prayed, they gave
away their money, They made white robes with which to
float up to heaven in and then than Avin. The
day became known as the Great Disappointment to the Miller Rights.
(33:20):
People wept, some lost faith, some recalculated, and this pattern
is repeated all throughout the twentieth In the twenty first centuries,
some of us might remember the twenty twelve Mayan calendar hype.
This was big for young people of my generation who
would go to raves and stuff. You know, you'd eat
(33:40):
some mushrooms or smoke some hash and then be talking
about it. And the next thing you know, some guy
with dreadlocks and crystals is telling you how the Mayans
predicted the end of everything and it was coming. This is,
of course, a misinterpretation of the mind cycles that somehow
convinced folks that the world would end. On December twenty first,
twenty twelve, new agers held countdown parties. There was a
(34:03):
big budget disaster movie. You may remember, but what happened,
Nothing happened, We're fine. Or about Harold Camping. Some might
remember Harold Camping. He was an American radio evangelist who
confidently broadcast the Judgment Day would happen on May twenty first,
twenty eleven. Followers spent their life savings, buying billboards, trying
(34:29):
to warn people the end is coming, the end is coming.
Then nothing happened, he missed. He then recalculated, Okay, sorry
I did, I didn't carry the one or whatever. October
twenty first, twenty eleven, when that date also passed uneventally uneventfully,
Camping said, quote, we humbly acknowledged we were wrong about
(34:52):
the timing. Eventually, a new idea in this kind of
prediction to science to cold and that was that maybe
it was a science. Maybe using the knowledge we unearthed
(35:15):
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the Enlightenment, the
industrial evolution, and the new scientific discoveries, maybe using the
techniques learned in that era, we could actually predict with
some accuracy the future of Newton's laws for instance, for instance,
could break the motions of planets and bodies in space.
(35:36):
Why could we not find laws that predict the motion
of history. One of these people was August Compti. He
was in nineteenth century French philosopher often credited as being
the father of sociology family. He famously said the goal
of knowledge is quote to predict in order to control
(35:57):
which sounds. Admittedly, like us super villain motto. But I
think a lot of these kind of urges to predict
the future do have that kind of evil undertone to it.
But Comti was absolutely serious. He envisioned a physics of society,
a science of human behavior that would be as predictive
(36:17):
as any other science. But of course humans are much
much trickier than planets. I mean, consider the fact that
you are you and nobody knows you better than you.
But do you even know yourself? Like we have to
go to therapy to figure that out. So how could
August Comti or anybody else figure out? It's very difficult.
At the same time, there was Thomas Malthus, an English
(36:40):
economists and preacher who in seventeen ninety eight kind of
looked around the globe at population growth and in balance
with available resources and saw doom. He thought that populations
because they tend to increase exponentially while food production is available.
(37:01):
But as fruit production grows slower, the rate of population
increase gets slower as well. He extrapulated this. He extrapolated
this trend and concluded that we're headed for a mass
famine point at some point in the future. His warning
was very influential. You might have heard the term Malthusian collapse.
(37:22):
It comes from him, and his ideas kicked off a
lot of debates. It They influenced Charles Darwin on his
ideas of survival of the fittest, and for a while
in the eighteen hundreds it really looked like, hey, maybe
Malthus was right. There were famines, most famously the devastating
Irish potato familine, which seemed to validate his theories, but
(37:43):
overall it didn't happen. Why Because science created new fertilizers
that would enable us to grow more food, because of
developments in medical technology, etc. Maltheus didn't foresee these things.
So his nineteenth century prophecy of inevitable famine turned out
to be a bit like a wrong equation, or perhaps
(38:05):
a right equation missing some crucial variables, much like Harry
Seldon's psychohistory, which it's impossible not to note every time
he pops out of cryo sleep, it's like, oops, the
math is wrong. Still, Maltheus deserves a shout out as
an Enlightenment era attempt to scientifically predict the future of society.
(38:27):
He took prediction out of the realm of you know,
strange inhaled gases and crystal balls and actually tried to
make something real and coherent out of it. And in
a way he was doing the kind of trend line
extrapolation that modern data analysts do. The futurists of the
twentieth century. If the eighteen hundreds got the ball rolling
(38:50):
on scientific prediction, the twentieth century kicked it into overdrive.
And in fact, I think you'll find that we use
these predictive technologies every day, all the time. After two
world wars, entering a Cold war, prediction became kind of
a matter of global survival. Now that weapons of mass
destruction were capable of taking out the entire planet were
(39:12):
in play, governments and institutions poured resources into anything that
could give them the edge on whatever's coming around the corner.
And this is the era when futurists became an actual profession.
The think tank guy, the researcher. Most famous, perhaps in
the United States, is the Rand Corporation. Originally formed after
(39:32):
w after World War II to advise the Air Force.
Rand basically became a factory of future scenarios. They pioneered
pioneered techniques like scenario planning, systematically exploring how possible futures
might unfold. What if the Soviets invade Germany? What do
we do? What if the Soviets Launchanuka at England? What
(39:53):
do we do? They even developed something called the Delphi method,
a structured way of polling expert researchers elite opinion makers
to make forecasts about the future, and funnily enough, they
named it Delphi after the ancient oracle at Delphi. No
goat entrails, just questionnaires, which is a bit more boring
(40:15):
than pytheis transport, perhaps more reliable. Rand analysts also used
the earliest versions of computers to run war games and simulations,
basically trying to map out the future in much the
way Doctor Strange in Infinity War scan through fourteen million
different possible outcomes to try and give us the most
(40:35):
likely path to success. They always get it right now,
but the idea was if you consider enough possibilities, maybe
you won't get caught off guard. But outside the military
industrial complex, others were also trying to predict futures for humanity.
In nineteen seventy two, a group of MIT scientists working
for the Club of Rome released a bombshell study called
(40:57):
The Limits to Growth. They built off one of the
first computer models of the entire global economy and crunched
the numbers and figured out that in a business as
usual kind of scenario, if we were running the global
economy the same exact way after year after year, there
(41:19):
would come a point where we would hit a wall
somewhere in the twenty first century, around twenty fifty twenty seventy,
which would lead to a collapse of population, collapse of
industrial output, collapse of economies, and probably warfamine, all the
other kind of Harry Seldon esque stuff. The report was
a bestseller, sparked a lot of debate that we're still
(41:41):
debating it today. Over the decades, people have checked in
just to see, well, how good did that? How good
was that model? And depending on who you ask, the
Limits to Growth was either remarkably accurate some of its findings,
like the curves in the CO two emissions, seem right
(42:04):
on track, or it's too simplistic. But the legacy of
it is huge, and here we are in the twenty
first century where prediction is basically like every day, in
your pocket, do you check the weather. You're checking some
kind of complex simulation that it crunches insane amounts of
(42:25):
data to tell you if it's going to be sunny,
or if it's going to rain, or what the air
quality is going to be. Scroll through TikTok your YouTube,
you're getting delivered content based on an algorithm that learned
from you the kind of stuff you like. You ever
wonder why the videos you see at two am when
you reach for your phone are not the videos you
see at ten am or at eleven thirty am when
(42:47):
you're taking a break from work. It's because the algorithm
is trying to predict what you like, and it's probably
pretty good at it. On a much more ominous and
serious note, algorithms are now being used in policing and
criminal justice and for the observation and subjugation of mass
(43:09):
peoples and eerily reminiscent events and an event eerily reminiscent
to minority report. So called predictive policing software takes crime
stats and tries to forecast, like where crimes are likely
to happen so the police can deploy resources there. You
(43:29):
don't have to be a Harry Seldon to kind of
figure out all the ways that this could go awry,
but more on that hopefully actually hopefully much less on
that in the future. So at the end of this
World Wind tour, let's bring it back to Foundation and
Harry Seldon. After all this effort, Are we any good
(43:51):
at this? It certainly seems like we're good in the
short term, right. We're very good with algorithm that predict
what you might want to do in the next twenty
minutes or might want to see next, And we're good
at the very long term. We're probably very good at saying, Okay,
in ten thousand years, the earth will look like this,
(44:14):
But in terms of the medium term trying to figure
out what's going to happen in the next three, five,
twenty years, not so much. On this week's episodes of
Extra Vision, we're diving into Marvel's first family, the Fantastic Four.
We have two prep episodes for you Tuesday and Thursday,
and then our instant reactions to the film on Friday.
(44:37):
That's it. That's it for this episode. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 4 (44:39):
Every Ready, Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
X ray Vision is hosted by Jason Sepsion and rosday
Night and is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Our executive producers are Joe Alminique.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
And Aaron Koleman. Our supervising producer is Abusa.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Par All produces A Calm Laurent Dean Jonathan and Bay Wack.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
A theme song is by Brian Vasquez, with alternate theme
songs by Aaron Kaufman.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Special thanks to Soul Rubin, Chris Lord, Kenny Goodman and
Heide our discord moderator
Hosts And Creators
Jason Concepcion
Rosie Knight
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