Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 264: 🇦🇺 Aphantasia, Anendophasia & the Future with Kevlin Henney

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

In this episode, Conor interviews Kevlin Henney about aphantasia, anendophasia, synesthesia, future and more!Link to Episode 264 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)SocialsADSP: The Podcast: TwitterConor Hoekstra: LinkTree / BioAbout the Guest:Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant, speaker, writer and trainer. His software development interests are in programming, practice and people. He has been a columnist for various magazines and websites. He is the co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series, and editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know and co-editor of 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know.Show NotesDate Recorded: 2025-12-11Date Released: 2025-12-12YOW Conferences!ADSP Episode 190: C++, Python and More with Kevlin Henney97 Things Every Programmer Should KnowDeclarative thinking, declarative practice - Kevlin Henney - Meeting C++ 2017AphantasiaAnendophasiaSynesthesiaRutherford & Fry: The Case of the Blind Mind's EyeWhat Do You Mean? - Kevlin Henney [ACCU 2019]The Way the Future Was • Kevlin Henney & James Lewis • GOTO 2025Overton WindowDarth Jar Jar - Star Wars TheoryIntro 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

Technoautism still exists, but I want to say that it was more of a default. It was the idea that the future means progress. The 21st century is somehow, if we can just get past this small issue of maybe wiping ourselves out, if we can get past that, then the 21st century, maybe we grow up. It's a kind of a Star Trek universe. It's like we get to a point and all of the potential is unleashed, all of these possibilities. And this is not just sort of saying, you know, flying cars and stuff. like that is it's much deeper in terms of like thinking about utopias and along those lines

and there was genuinely a sense in the 70s and 80s I can't speak for the 60s I was not really there only vaguely present but 50s and 60s you know the Jets and view of the future and you just see it in the science fiction of the time welcome to a ADSP, the podcast, episode 264 recorded on December 11, 2025. My name is Connor, and today I chat with Kevlin Henney live from Yao 2025 in Sydney, Australia. We chat about aphantasia, anendophanesia, synesthesia, techno-optimism, the future, and more. All right, we are here. I actually don't remember what episode this will be.

I think it's episode 264. The last time you heard from us, folks, it was October 10th. We've been releasing episodes for weeks now. And it is now December 11th, soon to be released on December 12th. So you went from very stale audio or recordings to now fresh. And we're here with four-time guests, I think. We cut your last episode in the four parts with Kevlin Henney. and we are, we just both finished speaking for, uh, what was the third installation of three different

conferences. We were at Yao, 2025. We were first in Melbourne, then we were in Brisbane or as been, I've been told, Brizzy. That's how they call it. And now we're in Sydney. And we're gonna, we're gonna talk. I mean, for, for folks that haven't listened to your first, uh, four-part episode, and that might not be familiar. I mean, I can introduce a little bit one of my favorite speakers. I just had, I've been reminded that you are the author of several books, including my favorite 97 things every programmer should know and every Java programmer should know. And I think there, I know there's a couple of the 97 books. I don't know if you're co-authors on those ones. I don't think so, yeah. But a veteran of the speaking track. And we're going to talk

about maybe the talk that you gave at this conference and also an NDC and I think at a different conference. But also, we're going to have to talk about the talk that you gave a go to Copenhagen. but anyways, before we get into that, and we're going to have to talk about Afantasia a little bit because we've been chatting about that. But before we get to that, maybe I'll hand the mic to you and you can color in the bio bits that I missed just in case we had a new listener

since the last time you're on. Okay, so, yeah, I edited a bunch of books. I contributed to the 97 Things series, pattern-oriented software architecture books as well. I've been a columnist and a blogger and all kinds of bits and pieces, and occasionally it can be found running workshops and doing various bits and pieces for people. I guess that's it. Yeah, you can

normally run into me either somewhere on the internet or at a conference. And yeah, fantastic, I mean, like I said, one of my top three speakers. And I think, I don't, I actually, off the top of my head, I don't know if I can rank, but if I had to choose one, and you've probably heard me say this, but you might have forgotten a declarative thinking, declarative practice. Is that the title? So this was a talk now. It's got to be given at least six, seven years, plus. ago because this was one of the first talks that I watched when I started watching online talks. And it's link in the show notes, folks. We'll link all the talks, but it's a great talk. So where should we start? Should we start with Afantasia's anesthesia, or should we start with

the go-to Copenhagen talk? Or should we start with, yeah. What should we start with? Okay, let's talk about the, let's talk about the feely stuff, first of all. So we've been talking, so the conversations that have been going on have been very much about how we sense the world differently, how we experience the world differently. And the, it's come up in the context. It turns out that I am colourblind and so is Kent Beck, who is one of the other keynote speakers here. And technically we're both red-green colour-blind, but we actually have different versions of colour-blindness in terms of who perceives red, who perceives green. But in addition to being colour-blind, I'm also synesthetic. And synesthetic means you have cross-sensory wiring. And in a lot of

people the typical one and one that I have is a fairly run of the mill is that I associate colors with digits digits and letters so therefore when I think of a number it also has color associations when I think of a word it has color associations helps me remember my hotel room and things like that which what's my room number as you get some weird cross wiring like that but then you get this weird stuff that the conversations have gone off in terms of like how unique a person's experience of the world is and that we make a number of assumptions about how other people perceive the world. Normally it's based on our own experience and we have a lot of things that we share culturally. So common experiences that we have is how we hear things and how we taste things and we know

about other people's taste. They do like this flavor. They don't like that flavor. They hate strawberries, coriander tastes like soaked to them. These are things that we talk about. and then we have these things that we don't talk about because they really come up in conversation much and that we make assumptions about.

And one of them, I didn't realize I was synesthetic until I was in my 20s, didn't even know there was a word for it. These days it's a lot easier to find these things out. But you also have it in terms of other neurodiversity, in terms of ADHD, autism, all across the spectrum. And then you get some really interesting ones, which are not addition of things, but the absence of things. And ophantasia is an interesting one

because it's basically the absence of a mind's eye that you don't have a visualization of what you're reading, perhaps. You know, when you're reading a book, do you visualize the characters? And there is a, it turns out, that not everybody does. And this is a surprise to many people. In fact, the term itself, A Fantasia, is only really about 10 years old or so, even though people started becoming aware of it before that. And many people who have it that don't have a mind's eye,

First of all, when somebody makes a film of their favorite book, and other people are complaining, oh, you know, it doesn't look how I expected. And they're going like, well, I didn't expect it to look like anything. But what's interesting is that in their life, they have assumed that everybody's use of visual language with respect to memory is figurative. And so they make that assumption. They don't actually think, oh, that's metaphorical. They're figuratively speaking as if.

But actually, they're actually having a very different experience. They are genuinely not seeing anything. their memory and their perception, their imagination is organized fundamentally differently. And there's a whole sliding scale. It's not an on-off thing. As developers, we like to think in terms of ones and zeros, no, it's not like that at all. You get hyperphantasia at the other end of the scale, which is just like your memory, how you imagine things is super vivid, even beyond reality. And so there's this kind of idea of there's a whole sensory experience that some people have got more of, and other people are absolutely missing, which, you know, whenever you're

in a conversation where somebody has or has not got one of these things, there's always this kind of look of disbelief or, you know, what does that feel like? And it's just like what it feels like being is one of those things. But yeah, it's an interesting one, Aphantasia. Yeah, we've talked about this now a couple times over the last week. And I had not, I didn't know the word Afantasia. And you, we'll link it in the show notes. You sent me a podcast.

I think it was, was it Rutherford and Fry? Yep. Or is it, I got that backwards. Anyways, it's a very interesting conversation. And, yeah, the idea that you don't have a visual, in your head. Like, I took a quiz online. It said that I had hyperfantasia, but I'm a little, I'm a little skeptical. It was on some, like, you know, takea quiz.org. So I, because I, I don't have the vividness, but I definitely, you know, I talk with my wife all the time about this is that, like, my

ability to go back and replay, like, a run in my head from, like, you know, 10 years ago that I used to do, like, on a, you know, every second day. Like, I can, there's a run that I used to do in China when I lived in Hongzhou. I can still visualize, like, all the turns. It's not, like, more than reality but like when I ask her oh like can't don't you remember we just went on a drive and she's like I have no idea and then the same thing you mentioned textures we've always talked about how we think that our pallets are on like a different experience level because a lot of stuff I think her distribution or range it's like ah everything's kind of good where I'm just like if there's cheese and something it is uh I can I could smell it on the the speaker dinner we had

the other night and they had the risotto that they put down and I could before they even put it on the table, I could smell that there was cheese. Anyways, I just think it's very interesting, because how often, except for this past week, are you ever really talking about the difference or the delta between you and your peers or your friends or your partners, how you experience the world? Because kind of people, they say, oh, you're a bit odd for not liking cheese at the, you know, the extremity that you know. It's like, well, if you could feel the reaction of like what it's, it's, I mean, it doesn't

seem that unreasonable. But I think for other people, they don't like something. It's like, ah, I just, I kind of prefer not to, but I can eat it. Anyways, and you said you've had discussions with your son about this stuff, and that's kind of what's illuminated. Obviously, you discovered this in your 20s with a synesthesia, but talking to your son. Anyways, it's, I'm not sure if you want to add, like, anything, but I just think it's such a fundamental, like, the way we perceive the world.

I will add that I used that in a talk a few years ago, one that you've seen that, you know, what do you mean? What do you mean? Oh, oh, oh, what do you? where I kind of explored this idea of like some things there are common myths that when we communicate and certainly in the world of software we're always communicating we're trying to build stuff we're trying to communicate what we mean and there's some things that we kind of typically get right there's things that we know we often stumble over and therefore need to clarify we're kind of

aware of this and then there's stuff we don't even know we're assuming that is different and you know I use this in a talk basically saying here is this sliding scale of you know misunderstanding but also shared experience to unshared experience that is genuinely hard when you have a particular experience either because you have something heightened something added or something removed what does that feel like and it's really difficult to describe but we often don't have a shared conversation so we don't know we make assumptions about other people and that's and I think that's a really interesting one that it's just like you know listen carefully listen carefully watch carefully.

It's a lot of what we want to do is much more careful observation, if you like. I mean, that made me just think, because the robot that I am, you know, I had to learn empathy at some point in my life because it didn't come natural to me. And I read a couple different books that were all terrible. And they always had their basic, you know, summary was like, you know, empathy is about putting yourself in someone else's shoes. And that's not, for the longest time, I never really got that. I was like, I can put myself in their shoes.

And it's like, yeah, it's not a big deal. Like, well, why are you upset? but then I heard a quote that was empathy is not actually putting yourself in someone else's shoes it's understanding what it's like for that person to be in their shoes because when you put yourself in someone else's shoes you bring your own lived experiences

and whatnot and so you go in their shoes and then now you're just you again and it's like well I know I still think it's kind of but if you actually think well what is it like for that person to be in their shoes and if you don't have a lived experience or anything that's remotely close to what they're going through it is very hard to empathize

because you now have to basically imagine what it is like for them with their, like, history and whatnot. And that is a, that can be a very difficult thing if you have, you know, the closer you are to having been through that, the much easier, it's like, oh, you know, I've gone through something very similar. I completely empathize, you know, because I've been through it. But if you haven't, anyways, it's a, another interesting, like, how experiences and perception, it's all, uh, probably, we would all be living in a healthier, better world if we could find a way to have more of these conversations. and anyways, and also to be learned, or I learned,

because when I was listening to that podcast, they talk about Afantasia, but then they also talk about a lack of an inner monologue. And I was like, well, why is there, there's a word for synesthesia, but there's no word. There is a word for it, and it's anendophagia. Anendiphasia, that's it.

And how do you pronounce it? I'm going to go with an endopphasia, but it could be different. So if there are any neurologists or psychiatrists who are listening in, just let us know. But yeah, another, I used to talk to my dad about that because he was a massive reader as a kid and consumed all of Robert Heimline

and all the sci-fi and Asimov, et cetera. And I remember he said he talked to a, I can't remember he was a teacher or a peer when he was in high school. And he said he lived most of his life like inside of his head just talking. You know, it's like that, in your monologue, you talk, the person you talk to the most

is that voice inside your head. And he said he met someone and said, oh, that kind of sounds crazy. Like, I don't have a voice in my name. He was like, what? Do people not have voices in their head? Yeah, so there is this common thing, and you probably come across this meme. There is this, you know, picture of Morgan Freeman, and then there is a quote, and you are hearing him in your head, reading it.

And Morgan Freeman has a very distinctive voice. And the whole point there is that that is not true for everyone. Yeah. Yeah, but when, if somebody, and that notion, when you have an email from somebody that you know, you hear, it's different from an email from somebody who is anonymous and unknown to you, because you can hear their voice saying it. It turns out that is not true for everybody. And more importantly, it's more true for some people than others.

Yeah, and I wonder to how many listeners, because we, I mean, it's over the first month or two, I think there's usually about 4,000 to 5,000 people to listen. There's got to be, just statistically speaking, a number of folks that are resonating with this. I wonder how many, though, are hearing it for the first time, you know? Like, I imagine of the people that have synesthesia, infantasia, and then there's even a term

for the way you experience different textures for the first time listening and being like, wait, what? Like, you know, I'm not alone or like I didn't realize that people are seeing, you know, pictures in their head or do they have a voice inside their head? Anyways, interesting food for thought.

Hopefully this causes some discussions, you know, go and talk to your coworkers or your partner or your family and, yeah, make the world a better place. How many minutes were at? Oh, we're only halfway, so perfect. Let's pivot to, because I'm eager to talk about, we'll talk a bit about the Al talk afterwards. But so I did not see Kevlin's second most recent, right?

Technically, is it your more recent? What's the talk that you gave for the first time most recently? Was it the Copenhagen one? That's a little bit of hard math to do because... I think it is the Copenhagen. Yeah, I think it is the Copenhagen one. I'm trying to think. But certainly that one was new.

There was no previous version of it, and there has been no version since. and that was the beginning of October. Yes. So it was beginning of October and didn't hit YouTube. It said when I watched it, which was on the plane, when we were on their way to Brisbane, so a couple days ago. And when I downloaded it from YouTube to watch it on the plane, it said it had dropped three weeks ago.

So it, I think, was released sometime late November. And I was on my honeymoon then, I think. So I usually YouTube, very good at recommending me all of Kevlin's talks, even when there's like three views on it, It knows, it's a Kevlin talk. Connor wants to watch this. And so I was shocked to hear that there was a talk of yours that had come online and I hadn't seen it. And actually, I'm going to guess the title, The Future That Was?

Close. Close. The way the future was. The way the future was. And I'll hand the mic to you and, yeah, feel free to spoil it for the listener. We'll link it in the show notes, as we mentioned. But tell them what this talk was about. And then we'll chat a little bit about after you've told the listener. Yeah. So this was a talk I did jointly with James Lewis from ThoughtWorks. We've been angling to do a talk together for probably the last three years. I did an interview with James about three years ago. And we just kind of nerded out and a whole bunch of stuff. And afterwards, we also continued talking. And I have done so in various conferences and airports, sometimes about science fiction, sometimes about politics, sometimes about the way the future was in the sense of this difference that we'd

we'd noticed we're kind of similar generation. And there's this notion, it started happening in terms of online meeting. We were both program committee members of the go-to conference. And during each online meeting, James and I would sometimes end up talking about, oh, yeah, yeah, and this was an imagined thing back in the 1970s or 80s. People would project this into the future. And we also started talking about this idea that qualitatively is something that I'd noticed. a few years ago, it was first brought to my attention accidentally by my older son.

I showed him a couple of books that I read as a kid. And these books were published in the late 70s. And he was about the same age as I was then, so I guess he was around 10, 11. And these are books of the future. It turns out I have a few of these. These are quite popular. But these particular ones, they got recompiled recently and re-released the Usborn Book of the Future. It's a lovely piece of repackaging because what they've done

is they haven't changed the original text. They've taken the original three slender volumes, put them in one and said the Usborn Book of the Future, just basically given it a tagline. This is how the 21st century look from the 1970s. A lovely way of repackaging the material, but also allowing me to have a version that is currently not falling apart. And I got given that for Christmas, a couple Christmas is back. But when my son was younger, he looked at these books, and he was just like absolutely fascinated. He was just looking at this, because why don't we have anything like this now? And I suddenly thought, oh, that's kind of interesting.

That's a good question. And if you like, this talk was a response to that question. I mean, I apologize to my son. The response is nearly a decade and a half late. But the point there was, it's exploring that question. Why is this the case? so different about now, because there is the standard thing, you know, old man going like, yeah, it's not the way it used to be and all this kind of stuff. So I check, is that just me

or is it an objective thing? And it turns out that it seems to be more of an objective thing. And it's not just my son noticing an absence of books in that space. There are a few books that are published, but let's put it this way. They are not the same, not with the same kind of like optimism or prevalence that we used to have. They were much more, there was a, I feel like It's a naive optimism at one level. But there was also an idea that goes back, typically we find it within science fiction, but certainly post-second World War, an idea, a very strong idea of techno-optimism. Techno-automism still exists, but I want to say that it was more of a default.

It was the idea that the future means progress. The 21st century is somehow, if we can just get past this small issue of maybe wiping ourselves out, if we can get past that then the 21st century maybe we grow up it's a kind of a Star Trek universe is like we get to a point and all of the potential is unleashed all of these possibilities

and this is not just sort of saying flying cars and stuff like that it's much deeper in terms of like thinking about utopias and along those lines and there was genuinely a sense in the 70s and 80s I can't speak for the 60s I was not really there only

vaguely present but 50s 60s, you know, the jets and view of the future, and you just see it in the science fiction of the time. Now, that continued, and then the 90s happened. The Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War was over. We've done it. We've, we've grown up. This is all good. And there's this whole idea, this is actually quote in the talk that I used, Darren Aronofsky. It's just like the 90s, you know, it was just like wonderful period where we didn't have the, threat of nuclear destruction of the whole race. The worst political scandal was Bill Clinton having an affair.

You know, that was it. And it was just like the 21st century was filled with possibility. We've arrived. We're about to get it. We're about to get it. Yeah, we are on the edge. All the good stuff said, oh, the web. So the network, you know, the online network you saw referred to in so much science

fiction, this is all good. You know, there was just a sense of wealth disparity. That's not going to be a problem. The future is going to be filled with all these kinds of possibilities. Anyway, 21st century arrived and that apparently is not where we're at. And so therefore, things changed. You can put it in a kind of post-9-11 era kind of view. There's lots of different things.

But there was something qualitatively different about people's perspectives. And again, checking through age groups that there is a difference here. In 2025, when we look at 2050, it doesn't feel, it doesn't. doesn't have the same feeling as being in 1975 looking at 2000 we do have a we let's let's be very clear we have some really cool stuff and actually in the talk we break the talk down into a number of sections the way the future was and then the title of the talk and then the way the future it is which is slightly more depressing when we compare it and the way the future came to be where we actually look at what's the mechanics of

stuff and that's a little more interesting and the way and then we basically end with the way the future could be, you know, if you like, a call to action, but it's not a guarantee. We're not guaranteed of anything. So, by the way, plenty of spoilers here in this sense. But there is a comparative thing that in the 1970s there was a view, people like Gerard O'Neill were putting forward the idea of like, hey, we can have cities in space. And he had a very particular view, and a lot of the imagery will be familiar to anybody who's watch science fiction films. These have made their way in, vast orbital structures. These made their way into mainstream media. But he had a very particular vision, and it was a very

utopian one. And then we get films like 2013's Elysium, which is a much darker, darker picture. We have the beautiful orbital, but it's only for the top fraction of a percent. It is the kind of the ultimate gated community. And it is the same physical structure. And yet the political and wealth disparity and the overtones that go with it are quite interesting. And I recently re-watched Elysium in 2025, and it's a very different experience to watching it in 2013. In that kind of post-2016 world, there's a lot that's been a lot of things that are kind of like, oh dear, this is not the future we had hoped for. There's still a lot of things that are possible, but when we look at the possibilities, this is where we start painting a picture

of optimism is that most things happen not because you try to make them. In other words, the video phone, people spent the better part of the 20th century trying to make video phones and it never took off. And it turns out the video phone, when it happened, it happened just not because people were trying to create a video phone. It was incidental. It relied on other technologies. It had a prevalence that came from messaging platforms. In other words, it was not from the, you know, in the 20th century, it was people like AT&T, they were kind of exploring video phones. And of course they would because they're a telecommunications company. But the video phone did not come from the telecoms companies. It came through the kind of the back door of like

a communications backplane that was ubiquitous, sufficient bandwidth. The fact that sometimes people wanted to extend their messaging, whether that was a MS messenger or whether that was more recently WhatsApp, you notice that all of these have a secondary video facility. It's just like tacked on because you could have it. And that's the whole point. It made it inevitable. And we see that, so we see that kind of idea

that the way to get certain technologies is not by targeting the technologies, but by looking at what they are built on. And that gives a very, very different picture. We have a lot of conversations about the car. People love using car metaphors. And everybody focuses on the technology of the car. But the biggest boon to the car was the tarmacs road.

Without that, the modern car would not look like it does. It would not have its ubiquity, would not look like they do. It turns out that it was the road that made the car. Of course, the car was, just like my devices have to have a camera for me to have a video experience. You have to have a car to have a driving experience, but actually the biggest contributor to its social uptake is the road and how we think about roads and how we organise roads.

And so therefore, as technologists, the trick is we kind of keep aiming sometimes a little bit too high and then being disappointed by the failure of adoption, only to see it happen a decade later when some other technology, some other platform-level thing or something that becomes hidden but ubiquitous becomes normal. So James and I kind of explore a number of these things. We talk in terms of energy distribution.

We talk about the failure of the metaverse. It's a kind of retro-futurist idea. It's like what people thought the future might look like in the 1980s and the early 90s. But we arrived at a different version of the web. Our experience is fundamentally different. I don't want to be walking through a virtual shopping mall in order to buy stuff.

That's a janky, slow experience. Why would I want to do that when with a flick of a couple of keystrokes I can order stuff immediately? We ended up with a catalogue metaphor. So, you know, online shopping is an extension of the catalogue metaphor. It is not an extension of the shopping mall experience. And we've already made that decision.

And so there's this interesting thing that there's a future that was a future path not taken. So we kind of talk a little bit about that. But that notion of the optimism, we stored a lot of hope up. We lived under a particular, well, we lived under a particular shadow of the Atomot. We also had post-Second World War optimism.

We talk a little bit more about other culture perspectives in the talk as well. But there is this idea that in the 21st century, something else has happened. We've achieved a dominance. the tech bro dominance is it turns out that they're not all in it for the good things they're not in it for the good of humanity and it turns out that with great power

you can exercise any kind of lack of responsibility you want and that becomes part of the issue but at the same time that's also our call to action at the end of the talk we're kind of like you know what this could be different we have an immense amount of power collectively most of the technologies

for solving real problems have not yet been put together but they are there they're waiting to be done so there is possibility there but yeah it was an interesting exploration but the bit I loved most about the talk in addition to doing the talk

with getting the chance to do it with James having a really receptive audience answering the question that my son laid out was also it allows me to like do a non-code or software related talk so technically I'm now a futurologist. I could be completely wrong, but most futurologists are. So that does not discredit

me from that, but I can now put that on my CV. Yeah, I think the reason the talk came up was because we were talking about a conversation that had been had at the first instance in Melbourne. And I realized that I had accidentally become like the bad guy, like the tech bro. And I mean, I talk with Shima, my wife all the time, and that she always tells me that I'm a techno-optimist, transhumanist. And And then after this conversation, I went and talked with her, and she was like, you know about the Overton window. I was like, I've heard of it. Anyway, she sent me a diagram, and she's like, what you have to understand is, is you have, like, radical views that society is not ready to accept. What, the interesting part, though, is that you're basically kind of in your talk show that, like, it used to not be radical to be hopeful about this technology.

But now because of the, you know, it's multifactorial, no, the political climate, you know, the wealth in a quality you know and it's like uh and i had to really think about it as like oh wow like uh saying that i want to chip in my wrist uh for all this you know future stuff people you know she and my wife she even said oh like you know that can be offensive to some people you know it's like you're trying to take the humanity out of and i was like that's not what i'm trying to do i just uh it's like the equivalent of you hovering cars and whatever for the future anyways i just think it's it's a it's a great talk people should watch and it leads to interesting discussions of like, you know, it's not just

Elysium, which is a fantastic film, but like, I love anything adjacent to that. Like, you know, Altered Carbans, a TV show based on a book. I've read the first book. The books are, even the show, I think, it's like PG-18 or R, so if you, we got young listeners, wait a few years until you're in university.

But, you know, like Black Mirror. And to be honest, a lot of the kind of future-based shows are dystopic. You know, Alien, Sean Pair, a recent guest. He was talking about alien and how they have the five, which are, it's a post-government society where five corporations govern the world, you know, not out of the realm of anyway. So it's interesting, though, that there

aren't, there are way more dystopic kind of future TV shows versus like the Jetsons. We've got the vacuum cleaner robot. It's very interesting. I'm not sure, also, too, if listeners have recommendations of anything adjacent to Elysium, altered carbon, black mirror, any of that's, I love that stuff, I'm always looking. Pantheon, I guess Pantheon. I guess Pantheon, and anime, depending on how that was recommended by Joao a past guest on the pod, or not this pod, but a raycast. That's kind of not fully dystopic. It's about becoming

an uploaded intelligence, so you can go through an operation and have your brain zapped, and then you're living in the cloud. That's the transhumanism thing that doesn't sound all bad to me, folks. Kevlin has something to... Oh, it's not about the transhumanism. It's just one of the things that we mentioned in the talk, I was just thinking in terms of the dystopianism is that dystopianism isn't new, but it

had a different meaning in the past, so therefore some of these same things taken out of context or put in a different context mean something different. So for example, historically a lot of the stuff that we associate with a kind of a cyberpunk future, things like altered carbon, if you go back to

kind of Blade Runner and things like that, most of the ideas, although they did touch on certain possibilities of the future in terms of corporatism, and politics. They were very, they were very, very gentle by comparison. They were mostly thematic. So in other words, a lot of the ideas, like we're going to adopt this, as a visualization, as a style, as a feel within the story, not necessarily. Alien Earth is actually quite a good example because you now have this, you know, it's a fully fledged idea of the dominance of

corporations. The original alien didn't really have that. That's something that's emerged over time. the corporate ideas just become a bigger, bigger thing. And we've kind of grown into it. We've got the louder background music now, folks. So you'll probably still be able to hear us, but the audio quality may or may not have just declined. I'm not sure why that is necessary. Anyways, it should be fine.

But yes, go watch the talk. I mean, I'm sure we still have a day and a half left. I'm sure it'll get talked about some more. But it is, I think, a very, very interesting conversation and, like, societally important, right? I am pretty sure, except for maybe a few of the billionaires out there, nobody wants to live in a world with, you know, income inequality skyrocketing and people being left behind because, you know,

AI is a tool that half of society can take advantage of, and the other half it's just going to hurt their circumstances. I think the majority of society can agree that we do not want that. And, you know, talks like this start conversations, and, you know, I had never really thought about the fact. You know, for the longest time, I just thought I was on the good side. You know, I always thought I was, I was about to say a Jedi, but then there's some people out there that have theories that the Jedi are actually the bad guy.

I'm not sure if you got to take on that. Kevlin wore a Star Wars Hawaiian shirt in his second edition in Brisbane. Also, have you seen the Jarger Binks YouTube video theory? I'll send that to you later if you haven't where it was George Lucas's had this like symmetry and the Yoda of the prequel trilogy was supposed to be Jar Jar and was a drunken boxing, you know, Sith Lord that was, so it had all this compilates. If you haven't seen it, folks, and you're a Star Wars head, or even if you're not a Star Wars head, link in the show notes, that's some of the best fan detective work.

And I personally do think that Jar Jar was a Sith. But George Lucas got so much blowback on the character. He just had to abandon it. Have you seen that? Do you have theories? Or what's your wildness? Because we've been talking a lot about Andorfor. folks. Kevlin, huge Andor fan, huge Star Wars fan, maybe a little Star Wars to wrap up

this episode. What do you want to tell the people? I don't have a specific take on Jar Jar Binks except that I used to be a big fan of machete order, which mostly, you know, if you're not familiar with that, just go and look that up online. Machete order Star Wars, which basically excluded most of the Jar Jar Binks material. Ultimately, Jar Jar did cause, he called for the vote that ultimately caused the collapse of the Republic and led to the foundation of the Galactic Empire.

So, you know, I think he's more pivotal than people give him credit for. What degree of intention he had, I'm going to leave that one to other fans, but if you want a wonderful breakdown of how revolutions start, and the moral grey areas

that a revolutionaries inhabit and or is absolutely the one to watch. Be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at ADSP the podcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a get-up discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening.

We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. Low quality, high quantity. That is the tagline of our podcast. It's not the tagline. Our tagline is chaos with sprinkles of information.