Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 22: Our Favorite Tech TV Shows

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

In this episode, Bryce and Conor talk about their favorite tech TV shows and more.Date Recorded: 2021-04-17Date Released: 2021-04-23The Marvelous Mrs. MaiselGilmore GirlsConor’s Muffin TweetSilicon ValleyHalt and Catch FireMr. RobotDevsParcs & RecParcs & Rec Cones of Dunshire SceneBlack MirrorAltered CarbonSense8FireflyStargateWestWorldFuturamaFuturama - S03E20 - GodfellasIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

So we watched an episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I do love that show. It's a great show. Oh yeah? Have you watched it? Of course I've watched that show. Welcome to ADSP The Podcast, episode 22, recorded on April 17th, 2021. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we talk about our favorite technology TV shows. One, it's the same folks that created Gilmore Girls, which is a show that I really loved as a kid because it was a show about a single parent, only child,

who lived in Connecticut, and I was a single parent, a single child, an only child, with a single parent that lived in Connecticut. And did, like, ridiculous rich white people stuff, and that was also my childhood. Damn, so this is definitely going in the episode that bryce my my my my mother my mother at this at this junction would uh would feel the need to correct me and say we were never rich bryce we were upper middle class well not mom mom if you're listening to, relative to most of the people in the world, I had a pretty good childhood. Pretty good childhood. So wait, so we did lose all of our audience.

Actually, maybe 10%, 20% know what the Gilmore Girls are. I myself have three sisters. I just thought that you meant that like the quality of our past few episodes oh no no all of our audience i mean they don't know they don't know what you what we are talking about um so bryce would you explain no no no no if you know you you you started on some analogy about your three older sisters i want to hear it go well no all i was going to say is that i know what the gomer girls are because we used to vote as the four children. We would vote on what we were going to watch.

And as a 25% population representing the male children, I consistently always lost. So 4 p.m. was Oprah. I don't know what else we watched. Oh, yeah, Martha Stewart. that didn't turn out too well i know how to make lots of cupcakes though and um and yeah yeah i saw the uh the cupcakes and muffins he sent me a picture of oh yeah on twitter yeah those look good crushed it i was looking i was looking for something to critique and i like couldn't find anything so i'm like connor i want to see the inside i want to make sure that I want to make sure you baked well.

I looked at the inside and I'm like, damn, it did bake well. Your response to words good bake, period. I was just like. I was just like looking for something, anything. What is this, MasterChef? Yeah. But so in a nutshell, in a nutshell, Gilmore Girls is is a is a kitschy show about a a single mother who had a daughter when she was a teenager who unintentionally got pregnant, had a daughter. Now, her daughter is a teenager, too, and they both live in uh connecticut um and if you if you don't live if you're not from connecticut or new england it's kind of hard to understand um uh or appreciate

the show really fully but uh they do like they have a very typical connecticut lifestyle where there's like they have affluent grandparents. They're not super affluent themselves. And the daughter's very smart. And yeah, that's the show. Gets into Yale, correct? Yeah. We just ruined it.

Yeah, and the mother runs an inn. Yeah, and her dad runs, the mother runs an inn. Yeah, and her dad runs like a little coffee shop, right? No, the boyfriend, the boyfriend, the guy becomes a stepdad. I guess that also ruins it. Yeah, sorry, spoiler alert, if you haven't watched Gilmore Girls, we just ruined like two of the three main things that we could spoil. Oh, whoops. Well, I mean, I wouldn't recommend it as a show

because I never really was a big fan. It was a bonding thing from my mom and I. Like when I was like 10 or 11 before she married my stepdad, it was like, I don't know, it was a bonding thing. Well, I mean, we weren't planning on talking about Gilmore Girls. How did that even come up? Oh, because we're talking about Marvelous Miss Maisel. Yeah, the same writer, producer, whose name escapes me,

that I am desperately Googling. uh amy sherman paladino yeah she also created marv bosmas mazel which is about like a jewish female comedian in the like 50s or 60s which is another show that i coming from a family of new york, deeply connect with. Yeah, I feel like the same way when I watch Silicon Valley, I think everyone can watch that show and find it funny. But if you actually do work in tech or adjacent to tech, there's a bunch more jokes in there that might fly over your head. I feel like I watch Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and I find it very, very funny. But there's also a bunch of like other jokes that I

I don't I don't understand that they're happening because I I'm not Jewish and I don't understand like what it means um you know I um there's a show I really dislike in that sort of category of shows about you know tech and science people and nerds and that's the Big Bang Theory I I really dislike that show. And I'll tell you why, because I think it promotes, like, the main characters who are supposed to be these, like, nerdy guys are supposed to be, like, the protagonists of the show. And so in some ways, it's, like, good because, you know, it shows them as being, you know, the main characters of the protagonist.

But I also think it, like, promotes a lot of, like, negative stereotypes because, like, not everybody who is in science or academia or tech is, you know, this awkward sort of nerd type. And the main character, Leonard, he's like the most, I'm going to say, quote unquote, normal of the group. And he like dates the, you know, the waitress character. And sort of, he's supposed to be like the most common man of the group. But like under the hood, he's like very much a sort of this stereotypical nerd too so I

feel like the show sort of promotes this stereotype that like oh yeah everybody's like really smart and tech is sort of like the stereotypical geek who wears glasses and even the ones that sort of seem normal like under the hood this is who they are whereas silicon valley i feel like there's a lot more depth to the characters um and i feel like they do a much better job of capturing both the ridiculous stuff that goes on in silicon valley but also of making um you know of making all the making it clear that like not everybody who's in tech is just you know the stereotypical nerd um i mean the the the ceo character in silicon valley he has like a lot of the you know socially awkward problems too but like he there's a lot of depth to his character throughout the show um we can uh we can talk about tv shows for a bit if you want because i

basically watch every tech tv show i will say though like i i'm not a big fan of big bang although in general i'm not a big fan of like the 30 minute sitcom kind of shows but yeah i've never i've never really liked that show for the same for the same reasons um have you seen the show have you speaking of 30 minutes it comes have you seen the tv show weeds no i've not um okay so so weeds is a show about a widowed mother who uh becomes a pot dealer um and it's uh very violent and sexually explicit. And I tell you those two things because that's the context you need for this next story, which is I'm on our Passover family Zoom call with my whole family and my grandparents, who are like 92 and 88.

And we're talking about TV shows, and they mentioned that they've started watching Weeds. And everybody just falls silent. And it would be as if your grandparents had said like, they're like, you know, they're watching the same, you know, raunchy, you know, sexually explicit movie that you've watched is a guilty pleasure. And it was just like a super awkward conversation.

Anyways, TV shows, tech TV shows. Have you seen Halt and Catch Fire? Oh my goodness. So, okay. This, this episode is definitely, we can record two right now if you want, but this one's definitely going to be called like, I don't know, TV shows or tech TV shows. So I'll let you say whatever you're about to say about Halt and Catch Fire. But like, so I'll go through my top,

I think there's like eight tech TV shows that I really, really like. And I'm not sure if it's number one, but Halt and Catch Fire is definitely top three. And it's a TV show that I found that like the most number of like folks haven't heard about it. It's like everyone's heard of Mr. Robot.

Everyone's heard of Silicon Valley. But a large number of folks haven't heard of Halt and Catch Fire. It's four seasons. I've actually seen it twice because I enjoyed it so much. And just last week, I was talking to a guy who was responsible for all of like the code and a lot of the like any code that you would see on screen and any scenes that were very like code driven, he was responsible for. And he drove like a lot of the subplots with respect to like the technology stories. And he asked me at the beginning of the call, he's like, oh, have you ever have you ever seen a show called Halt and Catch Fire? And I was like, have I seen it?

Like, that's like one of my favorite TV shows ever. And he's like, oh, like I wrote all the code for that. And I was like, what? Anyways. Now, I have a feeling I'm not the only person who does this whenever there's a show a scene in a tv show where there's like code or on the screen or there's some like panel that has information or like even if it's like a document i will pause it to go and i will pause it right there so that I can go see if it's bullshit or not.

And it's like it's interesting for the code. It's very oftentimes very bullshitty. One of the nice things about Halt and Catch Fire and Mr. Robot is they both don't put complete gibberish up. But we should also explain. So Halt and Catch Fire is a show set in. Is it the 80s or the the late 70s early 80s it's it's uh it starts around the time that like home computers and like uh bring home computers and i believe that's like late 70s yeah it's like it's at it's a show that starts engineers and tech business folks who, you know, try to launch the next big revolutionary product sort of in that time period.

And there's a various series of different companies and startups that they do and there's like there's sort of like one character who's sort of like a steve jobs-esque um uh marketing guy i don't really know if there's like a wozniak equivalent yeah yeah i don't i don't remember his name but like the main the main uh engineer that is like becomes really good friends with joe i'm terrible oh yeah yeah that's the thing is though like a lot of the characters like are are loosely molded after like actual people in history but like a lot of them they fuse like characteristics of like a few different people so it's it's not it's not based on a true story but it is based on like true

history um and yeah i checked up the wik Wikipedia and it says it takes place over the 80s and the early 90s, over the dawn of like, yeah, personal computing. And interestingly, and I wonder when the show came out, what they, sort of the main, the one who I would argue is the most like, technical, like the engineer,

the one who's like the technical whiz kid is this, like, female hacker, which I... Cameron. Yeah, Cameron, yeah. I liked that the show did not... Like, I liked that the show chose to not, like not have an all-male cast. Although now that I'm looking at when it was produced, it was produced in 2014, so it's not super surprising that they were thinking of that. But it's a show where they very easily could have just had no women in the show, but they chose to make one of the main female characters,

one of the main female characters, one of the main characters female, and it adds a lot of interesting dynamics to the show. Yeah, apparently, so the same individual I mentioned that wrote all the code, apparently Cameron was originally written as male, and he, like, pushed to have it changed, which I think is, like, she's one of my favorite characters in the whole show.

Yeah. A part of her character is like navigating because she's ends up being like the tech lead on both her like first software project and then on her future projects when they're like building out their companies. And there's like a dynamic there of like her having to manage, you know, just basically a fraternity of guys. Yeah. Which is I think it makes the show so much more interesting yeah and it's it's interesting because there's you know there's there's she's definitely like harassed at certain points in the show and like has to deal with a lot of bullshit and um i like that the show does a a good job like the show isn't just like a glorification of the culture of like that late 70s early 80s um uh era like it does a good job of exposing some of the warts of that time period i think um and i think they wouldn't do as effective a job if if cameron had been cast as a

male character um now the mr robot i i, I actually didn't have that on my list because I think of that a little bit less in this category of Silicon Valley and Halt and Catch Fire because it's not about the tech industry itself necessarily. But I really like that show, and I think I like it for the same reason I like Silicon Valley is that I think the protagonist in Mr. Robot is not presented as sort of the stereotypical nerd. And in fact, he's presented as another sort of archetype from the tech world that I think most people outside of the tech world maybe aren't familiar with, which is sort of the hacker or the programmer who has a strong, who does what they do out of strong moral

convictions, you know, sort of that they're maybe like hacker activist is the term. Although I guess in his case, maybe he's more on the hacker terrorist side of things. But I think it does a really good job of portraying somebody that's in tech, that's a hacker who is motivated by, you know, he's not somebody who's going and playing Dungeons and Dragons on the weekend. Like, that's not what gets him up every day. Like, he wants to go and fight the evils in the world and do good. Yeah. do good um yeah yeah mr robot it starts off in the first season with like more tech focused and like hacker focused but then in the later seasons honestly it becomes more like like there's a whole economic like subplot with cryptocurrencies and corporations and income inequality but yeah mr mr robot's fantastic yeah and just to revisit halt and

catch fire so yeah there's uh joe mcmillan is like the steve jobs character gordon clark is the engineer which is quote unquote steve wozniak ish uh cameron howe is the lead female engineer but then also donna clark is gordon clark's wife i completely forgot about and she's like she also plays like a massive like they're the four main characters of the whole show and so uh and i think she's like so well acted in that yeah i mean all of it is amazing but her character like it shows her like uh like they're raising a family they're having marital problems but then also she is like a brilliant engineer and at times is basically providing like Gordon with the solutions to like their problems.

And like really she's the hero of the day, but she's behind the scenes. But that ends up – anyways, I don't want to give away the whole show. But highly recommend Halt and Catch Fire. I think it's like probably, like I said, the number one least well-known tech show. And I don't know what my full rankings are devs also is a new um tv show by alex garland he's the director behind ex machina oh man it's so um i absolutely it's like an eight episode or ten episode single season show and it stars uh what's his name from parks and rec yeah nick offerman and speaking of speaking

of well here's a tiny tangent i said that i'm not a big fan of like sitcoms like 30 you know 30 minute sitcom shows the one sitcom that i am a massive fan of and that i watched all the seasons of was parks and rec and that's because for whatever percentage of our audience watched parks and rec there's uh once again i'm not gonna remember his name um he's an accountant and he plays the have you seen parks and rec yeah yeah of course what's you know the accountant's name that is the husband or works up to being the husband of yeah um yeah i want i want to say scott uh but that's definitely not it here cast and characters um yeah ben ben wyatt yeah adam scott is the actor's name and ben wyatt plays this accountant and so the tiny context is that i i started my career as an actuary which is like

a more mathematical nerdier version of an accountant and ben wyatt in this tv show he shows up in like the third season and his like recurring joke is that he's always going and like interviewing at this one accounting office um and and you know we just finished saying how we don't like uh stereotypes being promoted but and this is what this sort of subplot does. And so Ben Wyatt is viewed as this like really, really cool accountant, that like whenever he goes and interviews at this office, all these sort of older, nerdier accountants think he's just like the coolest guy ever. And like the apex or the epitome of the joke is that he designed this

game called the cones of Dunshire that is like super mathematical and that everyone thinks is lame but he brings it to the accounting office or somehow and it ended up being like the number one uh game recommended by accountants and they actually had a copy and then he was like you guys have cones of dunshire the hell they're playing cones of dunshire hey you invented that game. Um, excuse me. How did you guys get your hands on this game? Someone sent it to us. Have you played it? I invented Cones of Dunshire.

You're the architect? Yeah, right. And I'm the alchemist of the Hinterlands. Can't be an alchemist of the Hinterlands. The Hinterlands is a shadow kingdom that can only sustain a provost or a denier. He's right. Hey, how about this? Let's play. If I win, you give me another shot at free wireless for Pawnee.

Have a seat. You want to be corporal or a warrior? Neither. I'm the Maverick. Looks like someone's out of resource gems. Uh-oh. You made one crucial mistake. You forgot about the essence of resource gems. Uh-oh. You made one crucial mistake. You forgot about the essence of the game. It's about the cones.

Move my abbot to the ocean hex, which moves my brinkspan to the devil's lair and pushes my farmer, yes, my humble farmer,in to the devil's lair and pushes my farmer yes my humble farmer directly into the central cone anyways it's probably that nobody thought that was entertaining but just like i i i really identified with ben wyatt because i always thought of myself as like the cool actuary but like amongst normal folks that aren't nerds you know they're it's they're still pretty you know not that funny or cool but then in their little circle you feel cool um anyways nick offerman and a tangent plays uh this like billionaire person and devs i won't say more um and it's based it's based on it's

based in san francisco slash silicon valley and, and it is all about, like, quantum theory. I don't even – it's, like, it's above my head. But it's, like, you know, the – what do they call it? The multiple worlds, and they're playing off of, like, you know, is it possible to go back in time? Oh, wow. That's not a lot of what I expected. I guess I'll have to add it to my list of stuff to watch. Yeah, it's crazy like that's the thing is it's based on it's a startup called amaya and they have this like special part department of their company and then a bunch

of stuff ensues anyways so yeah mr robot halt and catch fire silicon valley devs you know the the whole family dynamic with um uh donna and the the husband his name i'm not gonna remember in halt and catch fire gordon yeah that's one of the things that i uh like about that show that i dislike about silicon valley and um and uh the big bang theory for silicon valley i sort of understand it they're it. They're trying to portray the typical startup, which is a bunch of 25-year-old something guys. But I think it's bad for our industry if the perception is that everybody in tech and everybody that works at an early phase phase startup is a 25 year old something that you know doesn't have a family or kids um and like throughout that entire show they're always like working under these crazy deadlines and they're spending like all their time working on you know on the uh on the startup and at no point is there really any character where that has a family and where

sort of the trade-off of um like work-life balance is portrayed in that show um and like the reality is that most people in tech aren't a 22 year old um uh guy that's living in, you know, some tech incubator with a bunch of other 22 year old guys, like most people in tech probably have a family, you know, probably have kids, probably have a life outside of their work. And I wish we had more TV shows that portrayed that and that portrayed the, um, the challenge between, um, you know, uh, balancing, you know, your commitment to work that you're really passionate about and your commitment to your family. Yeah. It's, it's a, it's an amazing show for, for so many reasons. And that's the thing is like, based on that explanation, it sounds like sort of like, oh, it's like a family.

It's, it's not at all. Like it's, it it's just a show it's like probably one of the most techie shows in terms of um the subplots and stuff and and the code and the projects that they're developing um but it just it doesn't cut out all the rest of the stuff that actually happens in like real life um and they don't they don't just they don't just add it in because that's the other thing is there's some shows these days that are just trying to check boxes. And so they'll add some character or they'll add some subplot just to check a box. Like this show doesn't do that at all. Like it integrates everything and all of it is just fantastic. Like, I mean, yeah, there's one scene in that show where like he's trying to get home and needs to buy some,

I can't remember if it's a gift for a birthday, but it's some doll that like his daughters want or one of his daughters wants. And he's like trying to get something done at work and then ends up you know, it's the long weekend and he's like driving around, you know, late and all the stores are closed. Anyways, there's just something very like there's something very like, oh, yeah, like that's a real thing where you're trying to do two things work and then balance something else and then something slips and it shows like how he's just so frustrated about the whole thing because it's not that. Yeah. Anyways, it's. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, like I'm sure most of us in tech have have had to deal with those, you know, those struggles. You know, I remember that that very vividly from what catch fire because I mean, I don't have kids, but they live in a neighborhood in Florida where all of their friends are retired.

And I go and visit them every now and then. introduced to one of their friends and when I'm I say what I do like it is it's fairly common that somebody will be like oh you're like Sheldon on Big Bang Theory or something like that and like that could not be further from the truth because like one I'm not even that like deeply technical of a person um like these days, my job is mostly, you know, roadmap and vision and, you know, enabling other folks to do stuff. Like my skillset is not going and hacking a bunch of code. Like my primary skillset, I think,

is like enabling other folks, mentoring other folks, and having like, building like a long-term vision for things. And it really bothers me that very often when I'm talking to somebody that's not in tech, that's just the perception that a lot of people outside of tech tend to have of us, that, oh, it's all, you know, 20-something white guys with glasses who are nerds. I'm like, that's not true. Yeah.

Yeah, I gave, I mean, I had this issue back when I was an actuary because a lot of folks never heard of that profession. So, like, yeah, it was impossible to explain. I would just say, like, insurance statistics. But, yeah, now I try not, yeah. You inevitably try to explain, oh, you work on, you know, an open source project. Like most, most people that aren't in tech haven't heard of that. And it's actually become easier now that I work at NVIDIA because everybody knows the name NVIDIA now because we've done real,

like the stock has done really well over the past few years. So back when I worked at Lawrence Berkeley Labs and somebody asked me what I'd do, I'd have to say I work at Lawrence Berkeley Labs and then they'd ask me more questions and then I'd try to explain and they'd be confused. And like my family would always ask me,

oh, well, what should I tell people you do? And I could never give them a good answer. But now I don't have to do that because I can just say I work at NVIDIA and people don't ask a lot of questions outside of that because they know what NVIDIA is at least. Yeah, I was getting delivery the other day or a couple of weeks ago

and the person from whatever app that was dropping off the food and I happened to be wearing my NVIDIA t-shirt and was like, oh, you work at NVIDIA? And I was like, yeah. And he's like, I have their products. It's the best. And I was like, that's cool when you work for a company

that people associate with them, I don't know, doing cool things. I've had that happen once when I was on a plane where somebody was really excited that I worked at NVIDIA because their kid really enjoyed our gaming products. Okay, okay, but one more TV slash movie related thing, which is I've recently been re-watching Terminator. And, you know, the first Terminator movie came out in like 19... Oh, God, when?

I think it was in the 80s. Because the second one came out in like 92 um uh hang on i'll google it 1984 that's what i thought and i think it's really interesting um like movies of that era just to see how the impact of um uh of like AV tech on the story writing. So in the original Terminator, they've got these robots that look like humans. And like, that's like some pretty like next generation technology. But like, think about like, why did they do that? Why didn't they, you know, they only introduced the idea of like the Terminators that could change shape in the next movie, because by that time they had CGI or sufficient CGI to be able to do it. But in the first movie, they have this Terminator who looks like a human. It can mimic human voices. Again, pretty easy effect to do, the mimicking voices. But they couldn't really show too much of Arnold's exoskeleton. They couldn't really do a really good job of that because they didn't have the technology for it um and and like if if you know if you made that movie today if you made the terminator today

maybe you wouldn't have had the terminators look like humans maybe you would have just like had them be like you know scary robots that you sent back in time um like like what what why should it need to disguise itself like it's a big killer. I can just go kill all the things. Um, but because of the, uh, constraints of the era, they had to, uh,

to make that choice. And, uh, I, it's, I like when, when I'm watching movies of like that era or like star Wars. Yeah.

Um, that's what I was thinking. Star Wars earlier generation. It's just, it's interesting how the limitations of uh of visual and audio effects um uh led to innovation um in sort of in the storytelling itself yeah that that uh that's what i was thinking of star wars whenever you go back and watch it it's it's amazing to like you watch it and you're like yeah this is clearly effects and stuff but for the time it's still pretty impressive um and watching how that stuff

changes so let's let's do like a because i still there's a couple tv shows that i want to start or start like star trek the fact that like so many humans in star trek look um or that so that so many races in star trek look humanoid well the very simple explanation was it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper to cast humans that you put a little makeup on and so they had to like they had to um world build around that restriction anyways yeah we should we should we should well no so let's let's do like a rapid because i just want to throw other tv show names out there and then uh potentially choose one non-tech one uh for folks so the rest on my list are definitely top three has got to be black mirror i absolutely love black mirror i mean skip in my opinion skip season one episode one that one's

absolutely awful but all the other episodes are amazing not super tech related and it's honestly not the best tv show but altered carbon i liked season one i was not happy with season two i loved season one and i was very disappointed with season two as well it basically deals with i don't know several hundred years into the future you're able to you know copy your brain onto something called a stack and so you can switch sleeves, which are just human bodies. But the more interesting part of the show that I find is it has a version of extreme income inequality, where literally the wealthy live up above the clouds, and then the rest of society is down in the earth level.

And that's kind of interesting. There's a couple other I'm i'm missing and i'm going to be disappointed that i haven't thought of them but um i guess if they weren't at the the top of my head the one non-tech tv show that i would recommend if you haven't watched it it's not for everyone but it's one of my favorite tv shows of all time is called sense eight it's by the wachowski sisters they made the matrix and so they're a directing uh pair and it's a tv show that i think is like a decade ahead of its time it's shot across the globe in like eight different locations including like a couple different sites in north america um there's one site in africa there's one

site in seoul korea there's a couple in like iceland and Europe and they actually like shoot on location and all these so like like from a cinematography angle it's absolutely beautiful but I just it's a very very progressive show that is just I don't it's like it the plot is amazing but the way that like they actually have like a diverse set of like cast and sort of characters in their show is I think like the blueprint for like future shows and it's also just like the best story ever with action and whatnot and they canceled it because it was too expensive and not enough people watched it um because you can imagine flying a cast of you know whatever double digit number of people constantly around the globe so like they

have to shoot it all eight or ten episodes per season, like out of order, because the way it is, is like these eight people can share basically skills and they share sort of one brain. And so one of the like there's a white guy that's a cop. There's a Korean woman who's like a martial arts expert. They're all in these individual scenarios in their own locations. But when they run into things they can like oh i need to beat someone up so i tap into the korean ladies like you know

martial arts skills and the way that they shoot it is just unbelievable um anyways what are your your rapid that was not super rapid what are your i think uh i think for me so obviously firefly but i think that's like that's got to be on a lot of a lot of people's lists um I really like Stargate that's out of like all of the sci-fi tv series that had like multiple series and like I had a really long run which is like I think like it's like Stargate, Star Trek, Star Wars although admittedly Stargate's not as big as those are the two. I think Stargate's maybe my favorite. And I don't know, it competes with Star Wars. I'm a really big Star Wars fan. So tell me this.

I tried to get, I tried to look into getting into Stargate, but like when you go to the, the, like the, you know, different series and TV, there's like an intro TV show, then like three different series and there's like an intro tv show then like three different series across like what what is like how does one start watching stargate if they haven't so watched it i i would typically if you google there's like there's viewing orders um and it's the viewing orders are complicated because two of the tv series overlapped with each other and had crossover between the two um uh So you have to watch like eight seasons of SG-1 and then switch over to watch like three seasons of Atlantis and then

switch back over. So if you Google for Stargate viewing order, there is like, there are some pretty good resources for it. We'll put it in the show notes. We'll put it in the show notes. I generally recommend you start with the movie and then you start with SG-1 and then you start watching Atlantis at the same time. But the reason that I like Stargate is it's a sci-fi TV show, but it's actually really just about anthropology and archaeology. Every episode is like they go to some planet and they do some anthropology or archaeology like that is primarily the tv show yeah there's like some parts where they're like shooting at aliens um and there's like parasitic worms that are trying to take over the galaxy but primarily it's let's go to this planet and learn about their culture.

And, like, to some degree, Star Trek does that. But this does it in, like, a much more direct way because part of the idea of the show is that all, like, there's these humans that are interspersed all throughout the galaxy that were, like, seeded by these all-powerful aliens. And a lot of them have cultures that are similar to cultures on earth um and uh and yeah so so it's just like i i just i like how it's it's another example of how like they used a really innovative um story mechanism to make it easy for them to produce the show because like inherent to that world is the idea that, yeah, there are aliens. But also there's just a lot of humans that are distributed across the galaxy. And shooting an episode where you've got a bunch of humans is a lot easier than when you've got a bunch of aliens. Yeah, so I really like that show.

And I really love Westworld. Oh, yeah, yeah. Westworld, sorry. Way up there. Way up there. Way up there. I think Westworld's probably up there for like, it's got to be, it's probably my favorite TV show at least in the past decade. Really? I really love that show.

Yeah. What, without spoiling it, although I'm sure there's going to be some people that start watching it because of this. How did you feel about season three? I liked season three. I know some people didn't like season three. But I very much liked it. I enjoyed seeing a wider world than in season one and two. The, yeah, I liked it.

And it had an ending where I was like, yeah, I thought it was all well done. Did you actually, and once again, without, because I have to say, just I asked that question because season one and two I thought were amazing. And then season three, without giving anything away, it took it sort of in a new direction. And I missed sort of the feel of season one and two.

And once again, yeah, without giving anything away, did you follow? It's clear by the end of season one or two like what was going on in season one but like i was so not following uh like i was enjoying the show and and i thought it was amazing and then when i got to like a certain point in the show i realized like the actual how do i say this without giving stuff away like this the storyline mechanics like were you tracking that the whole time because i was not and then when i when i found out what was going on i was like wow where are all my iq points

like how have i not noticed one of the things that i like about the show is that it has um enough complexity to it that i can't always guess where exactly it's going to go and uh i think the third i i i have like many tv shows i like but i think the third show i'd i'd i'd say is um futurama um which is uh it's like an it's sort of like the simpsons it's like an animated 30 minute um uh series and it's like a comedy show and it's set in the future um and it's usually like mostly a comedy show except there's actually a lot of like really deep um uh there's a lot of really deep content there sort of under the surface um uh it's actually like there's a lot of like uh college classes uh on film get taught and use some Futurama episodes as examples. It may be the show

that I've rewatched the most times. Yeah. I'm trying to get the story on... I personally have not watched Futurama. I've seen a couple episodes. The humor is not really my style, and I'm

pretty sure there's a bunch of folks listening being like, what? It's the best. But, like, who created it? Aren't they like, it's some crazy like Harvard geniuses or something? Um, I don't know. One of the things that I appreciated about it is

it's created by Matt Groening, the same guy who did The Simpsons. One of the reasons that I appreciate about it is, you know, it's created by Matt Groening, the same guy who did The Simpsons. One of the reasons that I like it as a show is because it definitely has, like, two levels of viewing it. You can watch it solely as a, like, a light comedy show but then there's also like a lot of episodes also have like a much like deeper um uh meaning like it's it's like a show that's like like there are episodes of futurama that will like make me emotional um and and i think that that it's pretty impressive for a comedy show to have such breath that to be able to do that yes so here from the wikipedia page it says the writing staff held three phd's seven master's degree and cumulatively more than

50 years at harvard university series writer varone stated we're easily we were easily the most over-educated cartoon writers in history yeah so yeah that's i don't know i don't know a ton about the backstory about the backstory but i know that uh there's a lot of years of education and that's the thing is that like there's one episode that sort of went viral that was about like quantum realms and stuff or some theory and it went viral because they were like this is a better demonstration of this theory than like has ever been sort of uh demonstrated before yeah i'll try and find that episode and put a link to it if folks are yeah my definitely my my favorite episode is uh uh is one called godfellas

season 3 episode 20 thanks for listening we hope you enjoyed and have a great day