Latest / LAST BEST HOPE: A Babylon 5 Podcast for Our Uncertain Age / #8 – One Battle After Another (BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY)

Transcript

#8 – One Battle After Another (BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY) · LAST BEST HOPE: A Babylon 5 Podcast for Our Uncertain Age

• 0:01
  JOSH: Back in the halcyon 1990s, a syndicated sci fi TV series warned us that it indeed can happen here.
• 0:07
  JOHN: In this podcast, we use Babylon 5 to talk through our current political moment, in an attempt to process, understand, and, perhaps, find hope.
• 0:21
  JOSH: Yeah, so it's been a while since we've done one of these.
• 0:24
  JOHN: It has been, it has been.
• 0:26
  JOSH: A lot has happened, obviously in the world. But I don't think we've reached our severed dreams moment yet, though. I thought we were getting pretty close a few times. Especially, you know, I'm here in Los Angeles and things have calmed down a little. I mean, they're still snatching people up off the streets, which I don't want to downplay the horrors of or the insanity of, but I think like half of the National Guard troops left yesterday. And it seems like the administration did do that thing where they just sort of declared victory and are kind of moving on. Which, you know, I think if there's any silver lining to be found in the tactics of this administration, it's the fact that much like Trump himself, I don't think that they have a well thought out plan and I don't think they have the attention span or the stamina to really follow through on something that they start, start. I feel like if they don't see immediate results, they would just as soon move on.
• 1:26
  JOHN: And that's why it mirrors the psychology of the President, because the lack of interest, the lack of focus, it becomes a big intense moment where there's a brief obsession followed by, as you've said, very often a declaration of victory and then moving on to the next thing that grabs his attention. I think there's a difference between what, what's in the minds of the people in his orbit who have very clear agendas with long term plans, and what actually happens when it's filtered through his executive power. So, yeah, I think you frame it in interesting ways. It's a very strange silver lining for the rest of us that there isn't that follow through. And I actually had a weird moment a couple months ago when I first heard the taco comment and I said, don't let him know that he doesn't follow through. That was about backing off on the tariffs and backing off every time.
• 2:15
  JOSH: Wait, sorry, what was the taco comment?
• 2:17
  JOHN: Yeah, so this became a big commentary and I want to get the line right. It refers to the acronym is for taco. Trump always chickens out.
• 2:26
  JOSH: Ah.
• 2:27
  JOHN: And it was specifically in regards to the tendency to make tariff threats and then backtrack on them. There is A constant oscillation back and forth. But what I thought when I heard that, I'm like, well, that's very funny. It's very insightful. But don't let him know, you know, because then at least the damage will be somewhat mitigated as opposed to pointing it out. Because that is one thing that happens with him, is that if you point something out, you get his attention. That Sauron's eye comes right on you. So avoid that and sort of, you know, maybe counteract elsewhere, I don't know. But that seems to be a major thing. And I assume it frustrates many of the people in the inner circle. But that's something that is really interesting. And sometimes letting that eye pass and then trying to rebuild can be a good tactic. But you're right. Even with the withdrawal of many of the National Guard troops, the everyday raids are happening. I mean, I saw them on the Northeast while I was on vacation. At the very end, I saw ICE agents, or what appeared to be ice agents grabbing people in a vacation town, Cape Cod. It's absolutely wild. And that's the part where I think were closer in that sense to severed dreams. But the pushback is real and that lack of attention span is real. So it's not like the grand conspiracy that operated around President Santiago's downfall and President Clark getting in there, followed by the shadows backing him up and all these other pieces. This is an interesting, much more basically political situation with a man who is quite clearly growing more unstable. The dangers are profound. What really has me thinking now is what happens next with both what he does if he decides to go whole hog with some crazy idea when hoping it goes properly the end of his term. The next president. What happens to all these various crazy things that have happened? Does the next generation fight for them? Does it, you know, which side's within his own party take over? Those are some interesting questions. And some people think, oh, we got to survive. Until they said, well, I think there's a lot more to be done just to make it through three and a half more years. It's three and a half years of this. Not only the policies. It's one thing to have a podcast. You're debating the policies you agree with or disagree with. But it's the massive instability, as you said. Like, we seem to be going very fast towards cyber dreams, very fast towards that direction. And then all of a sudden, oh, it's something else. It's whiplash. And it's also just. I don't know what to make of it. From day to day. There's a weird sense of non reality that comes from it.
• 5:01
  JOSH: Yeah, I mean, to your point, it reminds me of that old. I don't know if saying is the appropriate term here, but like he's not exactly playing four dimensional chess. Right. It's just lurching from shiny object to shiny object. And when we were talking about what is the end game here, what is the goal? If you think about Trump himself, he kind of has what he wants, right?
• 5:25
  JOHN: Yeah, I guess staying out of jail, staying Mr. Popular.
• 5:31
  JOSH: Yeah. And at this point, that like head fake toward resistance of the establishment from the first go around eight years ago didn't really happen this time. He hollowed out government agencies and career civil servants and everyone who had institutional knowledge of how things were supposed to work and had some sort of fidelity to the institution and the rule of law. Law itself.
• 5:53
  JOHN: And the funny thing about all that is, none of that is Trumpism and none of that is Maga writ large. That is a combination of Russell Voight, OMB and the architect of Project 2025. And then this amalgamation of that with Elon Musk and whatever concepts he had of efficiency as applied when he took over Twitter and was like, here, I'm going to do that with government. It's interesting how that was never on the stump speeches. That was never part of even the very concept of Doge. That was something Musk came up with in the latter part of the campaign. He's just, I mean, for lack of a better term, he's being the useful idiot for people who have these plans. But I, I genuinely believe this was his idea, was not to take somebody like rfk, put him in charge of HHS and hollow out our ability to do medical research, which is one of the many things has happened that was nothing he campaigned on. Doesn't have a personal interest in that. RFK was a useful pawn to get more votes during the election. So now let him run wild there while Russell Voight and Musk declare we have to hollow government. You never actually hear Trump talking about the values of that to him, how it will benefit the country. He just supports it because they supported him. And that's his transactional nature. And that transaction can quickly be reversed if somebody else comes or they betray him or anything like that. But what's really important about that, which I think will, as we move into the episode, it's relevant when you talk about governing a country in the long term and the things you have to live with, which is the boring everyday governmental stuff which Trump does not like having to deal with, which has left it open and very vulnerable to people like Russell Voight. And that is, how do you get the things you want in a country? If you imagine medical research is one of the best areas to talk about, how do you get that? How do you get all the amazing innovations and breakthroughs in medical treatment that you get? You don't get it by relying on a couple of investors to say, hey, let's take a long shot on this. The vast majority of medical research comes from government funding, filtered through the nih, to research universities on the order of billions upon billions of dollars. And from that, private companies will cherry pick, they'll develop drugs and medical devices and carry it the last mile, if you will. So what it really means is that when people say, five years from now, oh, what happened to all these drugs that were in the pipeline? What happened to all the cures for diseases we're looking for? And it's be like, oh, they're not here, they're going to be in China and then Europe, and everybody's gonna wonder, where did it go? Whose fault is that? Well, the groundwork laid now doesn't. You don't notice it tomorrow or even next year. And by then again, not only is Trump's attention span gone, but he won't likely be in any position of influence at that point, or at least if the institutions hold that long. And that's the real crazy thing about this, is that that's a boring topic to get on a stump speech about. You can do one of the wonky podcasts about it. I mean, I listen to them every day, but that's not something that's really sexy. And it's going to get to the mainstream headline type, grabbing news and videos. So what do the rest of us do while we're like this, man, he's just hollowing out everything that's good, even predict the weather now. And I know this is totally anecdotal, but I was, you know when I've read about how fewer weather balloons are being set up and how fewer things and meteorologists in general are saying our predictions on everyday weather are dramatically less accurate than they were one year ago. Yeah. Nothing's been accurate. And I know we always joke about, well, it wasn't, but it's been fairly accurate over recent years. Even down to the point where it says it's going to rain in 15 minutes, that was pretty accurate. You could forecast out four or five days, and there's your rainy day, there's your Non rainy day now it's just, who the hell knows? There's no reason to it. And that's because not only do we reverse, but you cut that, that entirely and it's gone. And it doesn't come back by magic.
• 9:59
  JOSH: No, because the infrastructure, the knowledge and the expertise and the, everything of it was built up over literally decades. You're right. It has a very particular resonance with the episode that we're about to get into discussing today. You know, private companies have been trying to get rid of the.
• 10:20
  JOHN: The National Weather Service, Right?
• 10:22
  JOSH: Yeah. Because they want to privatize it so they can make money off it. The idea is that if you are the one who control that information, that really undergirds so much software and so many devices and so many services that people rely on every day. Like you would make a lot, a lot of money. But the stuff that the National Weather Service and noaa, the stuff they do is not necessarily profitable. It's like they do risky things. They fly planes into the eyes of hurricanes and stuff like that just so they can map the storm and provide more accurate information, because that's the service that they provide. They are serving the public interest and the public good. The shortsighted gutting of that, I suppose, because some people see dollar signs who are in positions to make things go the way they want it to. Now the one, two punch of cutting those organizations and their work off at the knees with the increase in more violent weather events due to climate change is a horrific combination for life on Earth. There was that horrible flash flooding that happened in Texas that they had next to no warning about and supposedly not supposedly. I mean, this is true. One of the people at NOAA that they fired, his job was to coordinate with local media to make sure that the information about the warnings was disseminated to the communities and the around. I mean, there's no one in that job right now. So, you know, it seems like this was a very predictable thing if there was just someone who was paying attention and who gave a shit. You know, if this had happened six months ago, a lot of people would probably not have died.
• 12:13
  JOHN: Yeah.
• 12:14
  JOSH: The maddening thing is that it's a combination between just incompetence and lack of accountability because they don't know what it is that they're actually ruining. And so there's plausible deniability to be like, it's not my fault. How was I supposed to know about that? I mean, there are reasons why before you go in and start slashing jobs and funding, you should maybe educate yourself about how the organization works, what it actually does.
• 12:40
  JOHN: But with the rephrase of Londo's line, arrogance and stupidity, stupidity and lack of accountability. What an efficient package for messing up everything up. That should be the poster of Doge is, you know, it should be arrogance, stupidity and a lack of accountability, because none of them will ever be held to account, nor do they even do they hold themselves to account. They don't care. You think of those flash floods. The funniest part about that in this very dark sense was the immediate turnaround of the local politicians to say, well, who could have ever known? And then all the clips to air of the same local politicians during the Biden administration outright refusing the funds to upgrade their emergency response systems because it came with a price from the Biden administration that they had to spend the money on an emergency response system. They thought that somehow that was a great offense to them taking money from the federal government, from a Democrat. And it's so childish that it's worse to take money from the other political party to do something that is necessary to save lives. That's where the thinking has gotten. But you only get that when you have enough leaders promoting that kind of insanity. And that predates even the Trump era. So that's something that I haven't seen a good counter argument towards. But that's where I think there's some room to win on issues like that is to really drill home that not only are lives lost, but people are actively stopping the simple things that would save those lives in the future and then holding those people to account. So again, that sort of everyday political stuff that most people find so unsexy, so uninteresting, but if you have the right person to focus on it and zero in on it, then there's a little. There's a little bit of hope. There's a little bit of something for that. It's funny because that's a good sort of segue into the episode which when you're going over the list and I saw the name of that one, I said, wait, is that the doc Strike episode? Upon rewatching it, I actually think it's one of the best episodes of the first season from a story writing. It actually felt it was not written by JMS very quick note, it was written by Katherine Drennan, who at the time, I believe was his wife. And he makes reference to that in the Lurker's Guide and say like he did not want to be appearing to be in any nepotistic role, but at some Point realizing that she would be great to write an episode. And that one of her areas of expertise was to be very politically astute. This episode felt like a combination of Babylon 5 and the West Wing. It really had a very tight story, but tight details around the machinations going into this dockwalker strike in the episode. And to be able to write an episode to where that becomes a compelling narrative. Something that you want to watch through. You want to know what happens. You want the good guys to win. Which are very clearly telegraphed as the dock workers. That's a good political storyteller. Certain political parties could use a bunch of those when they tell stories about what happens in politics. So that's why this episode is. While it's not as directly related to the arc of how does one slide toward authoritarianism on a very obvious scale. When you ask the simple question, how do people end up dissatisfied enough, unhappy enough. That they're willing to turn towards anyone with an answer. Even the wrong answer. And this episode answers that question. Because there is no left or right political animation of this episode. Though I guess if you associate labor rights with the left wing, you'll see it from that perspective. But they didn't name Senator Adoshi's party. They didn't name who was on what side of what or anything like that. It was just sort of the everyday, real politic of woefully underfunded labor workers who keep everything going on Babylon 5. All the cargo coming along, all the ships. They are the core to the function of that station. And the Senate completely ignores them and sees them as irrelevant and an inconvenience. But when you do that long enough. And again, keep in mind, this is the Santiago administration. They refer to Santiago as well. He'll come back to this when he's turned things around. In other words, when he's built up his political capital and can cajole more of the senators to a better budget for Babylon 5's operations. Cool. But we hear that every day in our everyday politics here. This is written in 93. It felt like it was written yesterday day. And that's every day. Well, that happens day after day, that you're just everyday political parties are up doing their thing. And they're ignoring you as a worker, you as a person. And then they ignore you to the extent that one of your fellow workers. In this case one of the brothers dies because of malfunctioning equipment and over scheduling of work. You're going to turn to somebody eventually who claims to have an answer. They might be a Little more extreme, you know, who knows who they will be? But you have to answer that. And Senator Hodoshi, the senators were not interested in answering the problem of the core of this episode, which is what happens in your everyday operations in Babylon 5 when you over schedule your dock workers, when you underinvest in how many you can have and you underinvest on the contracts, the microchips that blew out causing the accident and the docking bay. All of that is again, it's not a sexy issue on its face. When you tell the right story around it, it can really get you interested. And there was a lot to sink your teeth into with this episode.
• 18:21
  JOSH: Yeah, you know, there's a lot of stuff in here that, if I'm being completely honest, when I was a kid I didn't have a lot of time for this episode for I think reasons that are self explanatory now. I think you're right. I think this is one of the highlights of the first season for me and it's just striking that ah, you said it. Pun completely unintended but appropriate as the best ones are. You know, this is not a story Star Trek would ever do. You know what, I actually take that back.
• 18:50
  JOHN: Deep Space Nine did an episode on unionization of quarks.
• 18:53
  JOSH: They did, they did.
• 18:54
  JOHN: When they went back in time with the riots in 2023.
• 18:59
  JOSH: No, you're right, I take it back, no riots.
• 19:01
  JOHN: Your point is valid that no other Star Trek did it except Deep Space Nine, which is the other Star Trek. It's about what happens outside of the post scarcity Infinite Resource Federation when you're on the edge of that. When you don't have the convenience of your near utopian society to back you up the same way.
• 19:22
  JOSH: Yeah, there's also the cloud minders in season three of the original series. But anyway, the point is Star Trek, particularly at this moment in the early 90s, was not really that interested in the nitty gritty details of how the Star Trek universe operated in a day to day sense. And you know, it was interesting you mentioned this political mindset about how politics has sort of devolved into this very tribal and zero sum us versus them mentality that is like substance less. You know, it's not about the pros and cons of policy, it's about you're for it, therefore I'm against it. And even more than that, your authority is not even legitimate. Yeah, and I think the context in which this episode was written is the beginning of this modern version of. I was gonna say Politics. But I think it's a little more pathological than that. You know, in this episode they talk about invoking the Rush act, which was named after Rush Limbaugh.
• 20:25
  JOHN: Yes, yes.
• 20:26
  JOSH: Who at this moment combined with Newt Gingrich, who shortly after this episode aired would become the leader of the House of representatives in the 1994 midterms. And the Republican Revolution, as they called it, and the two of them, more than anyone else, I think really ushered in this zero sum idea of politics and that it's not about policy, it's about dehumanizing the opposition and it's about winning, you might say, through any means necessary.
• 20:57
  JOHN: You know what JMS on the Looker's Guide that summarizes all the emails and all the things that he posted in AOL back in the day. And it says, who is Rush Limbaugh? Somebody asks. And JMS response was leading American proctologist, trust me.
• 21:11
  JOSH: Yeah.
• 21:12
  JOHN: And it was funny to have that opinion. I'm trying to go back in my mind. And that was itself an inflection point for our history.
• 21:17
  JOSH: Yes.
• 21:18
  JOHN: Was the coming of this Republican revolution that was revolting against something that no one could really put their finger on. It wasn't a particular policy. What it managed to do was get people really angry at the other side, especially if you listen to AM radio and Rush Limbaugh every day, as he said, just. Just for being on the other side. So whatever they did, it must be the wrong thing, even if it is a boring policy thing of like, where do we put the next weather station? And somehow that becomes the next political firepoint rather than just being like, well, you do. You do that because you do that because then we can break the weather. It began to get lost to us. And there was a great cycle repeating of that. When you see that two years after the next Democrat, President Barack Obama, you have the Tea Party, non coincidentally coming up in the midterm elections, 2010. And it's the same exact vibe. They're rebelling against this thing. They can't stand Obamacare. But then when interviewed on television five years later, all the people are saying, well, we gotta get rid of Obamacare, but don't you dare take my Affordable Care Act. And you're like, what?
• 22:22
  JOSH: Well, yeah, I mean, that's even happening now. The slashing of Medicaid. There are people who are for that but don't understand that what Medicaid is called in their state, you know, usually they have some sort of state specific name for their particular. They don't realize that the health care that they get from their state is actually Medicaid money. And you know, that confusion is intentional and it's fostered. The people who support this really think that Medicaid and the federal spending on these programs is some other thing that is just for like black people.
• 23:04
  JOHN: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:05
  JOSH: Their understanding of how government works and what it does and who it works.
• 23:09
  JOHN: For is completely warped by design, as you said. Like they is done to foster that. And it's by design is used to say this program benefits this other group that isn't in your tribe. They'll do it along race lines, along cultural lines, along religious lines. And it's very interesting. Which without going too much into the weeds on that, it's why the strongest enduring programs when you think of those like Medicare and Social Security are because they apply to everybody or specifically those two apply to everybody who essentially ever worked no matter how much or how much money they made. And it becomes universal buy in. And it's much harder to chip away at that on a tribal line. Whereas other more means tested programs, you say, well, they only apply to this group or this group or this income strata. It's easier to divide people. And those divisions are sort of what people are relying on. And that's why the politics in this episode. And again this is a political episode in the lowercase piece sense.
• 24:12
  JOSH: It's.
• 24:12
  JOHN: Yeah, I compare it to West Wing because it's very much. It feels like it's a wonky episode in that sense too. These are your everyday workers in Babylon 5, but they are the labor class. It's the way that they are dressed, the way that they talk. They are largely portrayed by Latino in the episode. The names that are chosen mice is. That's very much by design. It was meant to equate that to the 90s sense of yes, who are your typical conception of laborers. And even now we're now, you know, 30 years past that. And it's the same. You very often equate laborers with not only the economic strata but certain ethnic links and everything else. And that can be used to dehumanize. That can be used to make that group. The other say, well, why do they think they're entitled to so much? Why do they get all of this completely ignoring the obviously very well funded contractors who are making all the money installing cheap microchips on Babylon 5. That's a story ripped out of today's world as much as it was 30 years ago or almost any other time. The way, the way Garibaldi references the Lowest bidder, government contractor putting in cheap microchips. The language used, the phrasing sounded like somebody just said it to me yesterday. And you could be talking about that in so many ways, in so many modern issues. We've seen that type of thing play out and made me think, oh, wow, this is something that just keeps on going, this debate keeps on happening. So when we were talking about doing this episode, I'd mentioned the things that sort of pinged in my mind was we're back having the air traffic controller debate today. They just announced, well, they increased funding for air traffic control. One of the few things that actually got an increase in budget that wasn't border or military related. Yet all the money is going to modernize the system which this episode talks about. Like the dock are in part going to strike because they're overworked, over scheduled, understaffed, but also they're working with substandard, outdated, breaking down equipment. So you say at least they're addressing one of those things. But you look at what's happening today, the air traffic controllers themselves say, our system actually works. It needs improvement. We see in a way this. But the problem is the same as it has been for many decades. Understaffing, dramatic understaffing. So here you think, well, this episode has a real parallel to that. And all you have to do is go back to Lurker's Guide again and you say, what was in the mindset of the writers, in this case Katherine Drennan and then JMS as the showrunner, and he references the air traffic strike of the early 1980s at the very beginning of the Ronald Reagan administration. And that was a famous historical incident where the air traffic controllers, under incredibly difficult work circumstances, decided to strike. And it is against current federal law for not only federal air traffic controllers, but many other sectors that are involved with transportation to strike. And what Reagan did was in one fell swoop, he fired the 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. Now he then quickly had the government hire some of them back. But to this day, they never got up to the staffing levels that they even needed back in the early 1980s. They've always been way below staffing. So the current complaints today, and we're watching in our world what's happening. Newark Airport, near collisions, shutdowns, all kinds of stuff. And they say, well, it's just equipment. Woefully understaffed. No one wants to work at Newark Airport, no joke, just in Newark and New Jersey. But it's a high traffic area where the cost of Living is extremely high. So they're not paying enough for the air traffic controllers to live there, and there aren't enough of them. I'm like, we watched this story in 1981 and now we watch the story in Babylon 5. The solution seems pretty simple. Allocate a bit more funds. It's nothing. When you do the actual math, it's a tiny fraction of a fraction of the budget. And I always ask myself, even as a kid and now as an adult, why don't they just allocate that little bit amount of money and hire more people and have it so people work reasonable shifts? Isn't that a simple solution? And in this episode, the answer is the same as it's always been. The Senate first doesn't care. And then underlying that, when they get the, the. The negotiator, as he is in there. What was his name?
• 28:30
  JOSH: Zento.
• 28:31
  JOHN: Zento.
• 28:32
  JOSH: Oren Zento. That's a great name.
• 28:34
  JOHN: Not only does he not have an intention of negotiating, you can tell with his sort of smarminess, he has an act of contempt.
• 28:40
  JOSH: He has disdain for these people. Yes.
• 28:42
  JOHN: Who are they to ask more of us? I mean, he's like this feudal lord coming down from on high saying, how dare you demand enough food to eat? Isn't there enough purpose in your life? Just working as my servant. That's. And that's who these people are today, whether the senators, negotiators, businessmen, as human beings. They don't see these workers as human. They see them as cogs that they are entitled to use for their own economic purposes. And in this episode, they use the language, you signed a contract. You signed a contract, and that contract said, you can't strike and you can't. You know, what they added in which I caught really quickly was you can't quit. I'm not aware of. Maybe. Maybe someone can comment on this episode. I'm not aware of many contracts, certainly not in the private sector, but I'm not aware of any in the government sector that restricts somebody from quitting. I know that if you've engaged in military service there obviously there are some restrictions. You can't simply quit the inventory. And I wonder if those same caveats exist with government contractors. That the employees of a government contractor can't quit under certain conditions. That's wild.
• 29:51
  JOSH: It would make sense if you think about where they are here, living on Earth. You quit a job, like you walk outside and go wherever you want. Like when you're on a space station, an enclosed environment where the very air that you're breathing is manufactured and paid for by somebody and there's not really anywhere you can go. Your very presence there is costing somebody money.
• 30:15
  JOHN: Yeah, the comparison for that would be in modern day oil rigs at sea. And definitely the past is full of that with the indentured servants who were under the employ of the various entities of the, you know, colonial era. When you're sending people out on ships that took six months to get across the sea or whatever, whatever that was, you couldn't just quit. Under that circumstance, you are under the lash. So even if you decided, hey, I don't want any more money, I think this situation was misrepresented to me. This is an abusive situation. I'm getting out. You had nowhere to go. You're on a ship. And when you ended up on another continent, you also had nowhere to go except maybe out into the wilderness. So this situation is one that we have these historical analogs for of being isolated and so really tough one, you are under the complete control of other people. Any, there's a lot of talk, freedom, liberty, these American ideals, these were, these are people who are effectively indentured. But we like to think that indentured servitude is something of the past. Like to think that slavery is something of the past. But there's so many circumstances like this where you are this close to that without realizing it. Yes. In our modern world, unlike the dock workers here, in most cases, you can quit today. Again, the flight controllers, to my knowledge, are not bound in contract to never quit. Most of them are there because they love it. Their training is geared in for that career. So it would be an economic risk them to quit and go into another sector. So there's an incentive not to. But when you take away that ability to strike, you fundamentally alter the balance of power. You've taken that power away and you've said, well, sure, go, quit. Where are you going to go? And where would you send thousands? 11,000 air drive controllers, it's probably more than that day. Where do they get sent today? Where are they going to go in their lives? How are they going to pay their mortgages and all that other stuff? So that power is extraordinary that whoever's writing the checks has. And in this case, in this episode, the checks are not coming from a businessman. That's, that's where people sort of get caught up in, oh, it's their money. Well, it is the Senate's money. They're deciding where it goes. And they made promises that were alluded to in the episode about the previous negotiator. Oh, no paper trail of that. Sorry, it didn't really happen. Well, you got to wait for the President to consolidate his power so he can honor those requests. But what do you do about the people dying today? All these things, they're written for today's audience. And they broke and they started striking. And seeing that unfold, seeing their own union head initially be like, no, no, no, no word, strike, we can't do that. And then when they are completely rejected by the negotiator and told, keep your heads down, do the work, you're fine, you would gaslight them. Well, the experts say you have enough equipment and you have enough people to schedule this for. I know that that's just what they're told. But tell that to an air traffic controller today. In fact, I know personally other people in auxiliary industries associated with the airlines, all over scheduled, all in unions that can't do very much because they're all prevented legally from striking. It's sort of interesting to think about the power, a group of people who are striking. It's terrifying to those in charge. It's terrifying to those that rely on the system. But I can tell you it's not the end of the world. I traveled to London, there was a metro strike. That's illegal in the United States. The New York City mta, they cannot strike. They're not allowed to strike. France and Paris, they're always striking on the metro for a better deal. They're still functional cities. That's the interesting part. You know, I was thinking to myself, oh, I regret that thought too. My God, they chose now to strike when I'm visiting, as if they knew that I was going to dane the city of London. With my presence, as extraordinary as it is, I literally made it about me. Because that's what you do, especially as a traveler. You think the whole world is about you. And I thought, how inconvenient. And then I look back, I'm like, well, that's a shitty thing for me to have thought. And no, it was a week long strike. It impacted me for one. And you know what? It got them a better deal. It got them better work conditions, which is the big thing. I mean, imagine being told, nope, you don't get 10 hour turnaround. That's in the episode. That's one of the points they bring up. That's what she was writing in this episode, that level of detail based on strikes that actually are happening. They wanted a 10 hour turnaround, which meant that from the point you stop Working on the docks, you get 10 hours before you're back on the docks. Now, our lives, by comparison, are pretty cushy because I can't imagine a life and work that's saying you only get 10 hours between when you leave work and you start work again. That's 10 hours to sleep, to eat, to bathe, to do whatever you need to do in your life. And then you're right back at the docks managing Babylon 5. Like, that's wild. And all they were asking for was 10 hours. That means they were getting less. They were getting less than 10 hours. Who thinks that's okay?
• 35:12
  JOSH: Yeah. I mean, if you don't think of the people who do that work as deserving of that sort of consideration which, unfortunately, I think is all that it boils down to, which. There were a bunch of really great quotes in this episode. One of them was, one thing hasn't changed. Workers are always getting shafted. Which was actually in response to. Sinclair had this line twice, and it made me think of it when you said that this episode really isn't tied into the. The main story about Earth, about the slide into fascism. Sinclair says things are changing on Earth and not all for the better.
• 35:51
  JOHN: The very subtle line that you wouldn't pick up.
• 35:53
  JOSH: No, because it just sounds like the kind of thing that people think and say, no matter what's going on.
• 35:58
  JOHN: Yeah.
• 35:59
  JOSH: Like there's always that sense that things are changing and not for the better. But that's what he's talking about. And so this mentality that the government is entitled to the labor of certain people and doesn't have to fully account for their humanity or for their welfare, let alone their desires and dreams. I don't know. I mean, maybe this is the lefty in me, but I can't help but see an implicit relationship between that sort of attitude separating people into one group that's deserving and one group that's not. And dehumanizing whole swaths of people because, you know, you don't think that they're deserving of the same kind of consideration and material expenditure as you are not.
• 36:48
  JOHN: Worthy of dignity, of a simple dignity and respect. And this is something that is really troublesome because we all experience it, whether we want to admit it or not which is when you interact with somebody, particularly in hospitality, the service industry, delivery people it's really hard not to default to the mindset that they're there to serve you and that, as a result, they're beneath you. So when you're having a bad day and you Grumble. And you treat that Starbucks barista awfully. It starts to be justified by, well, they're just a barista, right? If they were somebody of value, they'd be doing something else. Which is a wild mindset that, again, I found myself having those same thoughts. When you're in that moment, I think the question is, do you then step back and say, wait a second. What did I just ask? And you start saying, they're doing a job. Wait, I wanted that coffee. I wanted to go in here and get that. This is something that actually has value to me. Why am I dehumanizing but also just decreasing the value of that person? Why? Because they're not doing some other job. And then what? What are the majority of jobs? And it's a system that I think we're all sort of indoctrinated to which is to say, well, wherever we are at any given time and that shifts. Your place in the pecking order is a lot less solid than most people realize. We're taught that, oh, just look down on anybody who's below you. Keep on looking down at them and as a result, don't look up out of envy. And then everything will stay ordered. And that is how labor's kept down. That's how slavery was maintained before the Civil War. It was. Well, at least you aren't in that group of people. You're above them. Even if you're sort of at the bottom, you're above them. And breaking out of that indoctrinated mentality is the real difficulty. What Babylon 5 does, in interesting ways. It says here we are 200 years from now. We haven't broken free of that. There's a huge system of different castes. As you will with the Earth Alliance. Some of the Manbari themselves are more advanced and they have an actual caste system with one of the groups being workers who are woefully overutilized and under respected until the line recreates the Gray Council to the worker dominant recognizing this very truth. Babylon V is not meant to portrayal a worker paradise. Meant to say, like, hey, even on Babylon 5, with our vaunted heroes there's this underclass that keeps everything going. And this episode brings that to light. It does play out through the rest of the series. I think you do. See, that's why you have the Lurkers. That's why you have down below. They never shy away from this being real but nor do they say it's a good thing that it's there. It's there because we haven't Figured out how to make it better yet. And I don't think that what JMS wanted out of Babylon 5 was the. It's better because it's the future. It's better because we have more technology. I think that's the really interesting thing about Babylon 5 is that it tells us a hard truth which is that just having more technology and just having more time between you and the past doesn't mean you're going to get rid of those really difficult, negative and very dark aspects of your society. And how is that dealt with? This episode shows Sinclair as the hero ultimately and is the ultimate negotiator. If you. Well, he's the ultimate diplomat both in the A storyline and the B storyline with g' Kar and Londo which is a very fun, funny storyline. But he does something that is very much what a protagonist, hero character would do. He comes in, he thinks about the situation from multiple angles trying to find out how to do the morally right things thing while also doing the thing that he can. And those two things don't always overlap. And that's the dilemma of the episode is initially he has to send in Garibaldi with his forces to break the strike under order. That's literally his job as the military Governor of Babylon 5. What he's plotted out in a really cool way is that he does what Sheridan does in season three in the lead up to Severed Dreams. He says, how can I use the language of the law like a lawyer to subvert what these other actors are doing, like the negotiator, the Senate? And he realizes that once the Rush act is enacted, he can do whatever he wants. He. He has the authority under statute.
• 41:12
  JOSH: Yep.
• 41:13
  JOHN: To end the conflict by whatever means necessary. And we all know what the writers that law, as fictionally portrayed would have imagined that meant the iron fist of force.
• 41:23
  JOSH: Right.
• 41:23
  JOHN: Sinclair sees it differently. And that's why he is our hero. Because he sees not only a better solution, one that works but one that also fulfills the moral equation of saying, yes, we are going to make the lives of the dock workers better. We're going to hire more. We're going to upgrade the equipment, we're going to reduce their shifts. So he wins in that sense. And the episode is brilliant because then it turns and thunder. Hidoshi contacts him. And this whole time you think Hidoshi just sort of disconnected and just, you know. And he gives him some advice. He says, listen, my grandfather was a dock worker every day of his life. I have great sympathy for this. But this is politics. And the Reality is you just embarrassed somebody very publicly who has powerful friends and they don't like being embarrassed by proxy. So you have new enemies and basically says, you did the right thing in the inconvenient way, which is what the president says, the Sheridan when he frees Earth. It's all about politics. And Babylon 5 is about politics. It's about how do you navigate a system. People think politics is about the tribes you're in. Politics is really about how you navigate a system. And maybe you're using the tribes to your advantage, but it's about how do you use these machinations. And Jamis really wrote a lot of cool stuff in all five seasons as to how these mechanics work and how our protagonists really manipulate them. So we have the happy ending. We have the dockworker strike ending. We have them also getting benefit. And you have the ominous foreboding warning to Sinclair. But the cool thing about a TV show, unlike real life, is we know that when all is said and done, Even in Babylon 5, our protagonists, our heroes, generally speaking, make it out all right. The real world isn't quite like that. So somebody who, in our world who made a decision like Sinclair would likely be out very quickly.
• 43:14
  JOSH: Yes. Sinclair had a great line. He says, you should never hand someone a gun unless you're sure where they'll point it. That's a great line. I also want to mention you mentioned Senator Hidoshi. I was looking him up, the actor who played him. I'm going to mispronounce his name, but a key along. He just recently passed away on June 22nd.
• 43:32
  JOHN: Oh, wow.
• 43:33
  JOSH: And I was also looking up the director of this episode, Jim Johnston, who. He actually appears in the episode as one of the dock workers. He has a line. He says, I say we strike. He just passed away in 2023. So that reminded me, you know, this show, I still think of it as more or less having aired yesterday. But Babylon 5, curse aside, we are losing a lot of these people who actually made it. So it is slipping into history. And it is just a testament to the show that, again, setting aside the maybe 90s aesthetics of it, how contemporary and how relevant and of this moment, it feels in that sense, it's really timeless. So, yeah, for various reasons, it's very easy to forget how long ago this show was actually made. I have a question for you. And it is sort of opening a can of worms that.
• 44:28
  JOHN: Oh, I love that.
• 44:29
  JOSH: That possibly undercuts the very premise of the show itself. Why isn't all of this like robots? Like, why are There still humans doing all of this manual labor and performing all of these jobs. Obviously the main answer is to tell an interesting story about humans, but given everything we were just talking about the devaluing of human life, trying to cut corners, not wanting to have to pay. Is it simply that it's cheaper to employ human beings than spend a lot of money on a highly advanced system that you have to maintain? I mean, like, in some sense, are humans more disposable than machines? Maybe. I don't know.
• 45:11
  JOHN: Well, that's, that's a really good question. That, that, that's some hell of a can of worms. I think, going to the very beginning. The reason why this story is told. You nailed it. Is because these stories are told to be accessible for the time they're told in. For a while I thought, well, it's just that our writers are not imagining that much into the future. I don't think there's any lack of creativity from JMS or any of our great sci fi writers. It's that if you actually do the sort of envisioning of what it would require to do space travel based on our current understanding of technology and trying to project that none of it looks like Star Trek, none of it looks like Babylon 5, because that's based on a very 20th century view of naval fleet ships combined with NASA going out into space with a 20th century mindset. But that's when the stories were told. The technology is so far beyond what we would be doing. You know, some people theorize generation ships or anything else. I don't know what kind of stories you would tell except the story about what that might be like. And there is some really cool sci fi about that I recommend to people for something that's accessible about what interact with aliens is like and how fast technology goes. Three body problems, an interesting example of that with a fairly good Netflix series to it, at least I enjoyed it. But what I liked was the portrayal of what it's like just having 400 years between you and another species and how that's a huge goal, but also makes what they are incomparable to the stories we're telling now of a few ships and stations and things like that. I do think that you bring up a really interesting point about labor. Why would they be using dock workers instead of completely automated and say, well, if Amazon is automating more of their warehouses, well, they are, but they're increasing capacity while still using an equal amount, if not a still expanding amount of humans. Theoretically there are going to be technologies. I Think down the road that can replace a ton of human labor. I think we're going to see that actually quicker in white collar work than we're going to see it in blue collar work in the next few years. And that's going to be hugely unsettling to our economy and societies as we don't know how to adapt to it from a political standpoint. But I think an interesting answer to it would be human beings don't know how to exist without labor. We don't know how to value each other or what we do in a society without there being some aspect of labor involved. I'd like to think that we can advance beyond that. Star Trek never answered the question as to how that actually looks, though I think it comes closest to the idea. And that's comparing without going too much into another show on it, but going to that sort of Gene Roddenberry motion picture idea is that, well, the people who need to do and also see others doing effectively end up in Starfleet. They end up on exploratory ships, they end up out there. The others are living a variety of lives on Earth, whether they are artists, creatives, different kinds of explorers, or doing nothing. Or as the novelization of the motion picture refers to the copious amount of orgies, apparently that Roddenberry wrote about. Not that he was projecting in any way there. It's really. That's the closest I can imagine. It's like, yeah, we don't know what we would do with ourselves. We'd have to find these other outlets. Which is why I actually think we're going to constantly invent new systems to keep us working, even if the work is literally pointless. Well, a robot can do that. Yeah, but if. Listen, if we have robots doing everything, I don't know how to value the people around me or control them, which is another part of society. How do you control people and order them? I really do think that as a related side note, there was a sociologist, economist. I'll try to get his name in a minute. He wrote a book before he sadly died an early age in the year 2020 called bullshit jobs. And it describes that particularly in White Collar, which is the majority now of US jobs, that it's bullshit. And he outlines the different categories of why not only are these jobs terribly redundant, pushing paper to somebody else who pushes paper, or an email to somebody else. And a lot of people can probably relate who are listening to this. The amount of meetings you end up in a given day that are meetings about other meetings to discuss having Another meeting. And then maybe you get to do actual work one hour a day before you have to go back into another meeting. You know, like, what am I doing? And he analyzes pretty convincingly that most of the work that's done is bullshit. It actually makes more work for other people to do. But that's the design of the system. Otherwise we don't know how to interact with each other. We don't know how to estimate why somebody has the resources they have. We don't know how to figure out their value as a person and how you interact with them. It's not where I think we want to be, but I don't think we yet know another way of ordering our society. So yeah, I think having laborers 200 year in the future, they're working with very sophisticated mechanical equipment on the station, obviously. And they refer to the computers. I did think that the way they were talking about computers, when you remember this is 1993, that the episode is written or 94, it is actually still somewhat accurate and modern feeling the way they were talking about how computers were used. So not only would it be a role for labor, I don't think we know how to live without labor. And I don't know that we know how to do deal with the idea of people who aren't in those high end scientific or creative jobs. They're like, well, people have to work, people have to be doing something. And what will it be? Will it be digging a ditch to fill in another ditch? Which is, you know, sort of what you had during the wpa. I think that's what a lot of it is. And I'd love for somebody to show me what some of the ideas are. How to have a post scarcity economy that doesn't rely on this concept of either bullshit jobs in white collar or just make work physical jobs in the physical sector. E5 is not giving us that deliberately. It's saying, no, we're still stuck in this sort of paradigm of the 20th century all the way out 200 years later. And it doesn't seem like there's any attempt to get past it either. From the standpoint of Earth, what did you think? I always had a sense that like the Shadows, the Vorlons, they clearly had a whole different way of doing things. They refer to there being very few actual Vorlons. It sounds like they're just constantly interacting with this copious amount of organic technology. You think of Drawl and the Great Machine like one dude in the middle of this giant machine managing everything. But then Again, no, there's my point. You have Zathras doing all the manual labor.
• 51:30
  JOSH: That's true.
• 51:31
  JOHN: All the different Zodruses. Yeah. And it's like, oh, so you still have the manual labor. And how underappreciated is poor Zathrys there. You have Draw. There's. There's your, like, classic 20th century economic thing. He looks down upon Zathrus, though he does have a fondness form. And there's bore. Zathras having, like, clean shit up all the time, literally. It's like, that's. Is that what we're stuck in? Yeah.
• 51:51
  JOSH: There are a lot of things at play here. I mean, first of all, I think simply a big part of it is when you're a writer and you're telling stories, you want to tell stories that are relevant to the audience that you imagine you're writing for. So there's. That. There's also a certain amount of. It's like when you start to pull at those threads, the story becomes about that thing.
• 52:13
  JOHN: Yes, yes.
• 52:14
  JOSH: Because it's so much of a massive shift that you have to explain everything, and then it's, oh, well, if that no longer works like that, then that would no longer work like this. And so. So you can't really tell the story you want to tell.
• 52:29
  JOHN: You're totally right. And that's what. There's so much great speculative fiction out there. Yeah, science fiction that does deal with things like that. But you're right. The focus is largely on describing how that world works and how people interface with that world.
• 52:40
  JOSH: Right.
• 52:41
  JOHN: And it becomes hard to make it about the people themselves. I think that's why fantasy environments are also so appealing as audiences, because, again, you could tell a modern story, reframe it in a fantasy land that's maybe has medieval level technology or the fantasy setting where you can make it whatever you want.
• 52:59
  JOSH: Right.
• 52:59
  JOHN: And there's your story, there's your relatableness. It's not meant to be historically accurate, obviously, but you're telling that story, but, yeah, it can get caught up. I will say I'd love to follow up on this in a future episode or another podcast even. I started a series because of politics. I read an article that said that all of the tech lords out there right now, you know, Zuckerberg to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, their favorite book is about the culture. These sci fi series. Consider Phlebus. I'd never read it, so I started reading them recently, and I'm enjoying it quite substantially. But they're all obsessed with the really well done, intricate descriptions of technology in those books and they ignore, is a complete reordering of society as well. And omnisexual space hippies with AIs are essentially the main protagonists and the victors throughout the books. And it is a complete reframing of that, who the antagonists and all the difficulties they face are. But what's fascinating is people who are reading that at the top of our economy right now are missing everything except for the really cool descriptions of technology. They're ignoring the description of how society might be ordered. Not for those technologies like advanced AIs. B5 does not go down that road. Too much of advanced AI, even the shadow ships require human CPUs as a component. There really isn't much supercomputing going on, which is interesting.
• 54:27
  JOSH: I mean, first of all, you see that a lot with our current techno overlords. The Sam Altman deliberately drawing comparisons between his product and the movie Her. And it's like, you understand that her was like a cautionary tale, right? Like, it wasn't supposed to be like a how to.
• 54:47
  JOHN: Yeah, it was an inspirational story.
• 54:49
  JOSH: There's some meme that's been floating around that I'm absolutely going to slaughter, but it's like, never mind. I can't even come up with an approximation.
• 54:57
  JOHN: You can edit that in after the show.
• 54:58
  JOSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of these technologies were from science fiction stories where the whole point of the story was how that technology was either being misused or was dangerous and shouldn't exist like that. And it seems like a lot of these guys were so distracted by the bright shiny objects, or they're sociopathic and that's the only thing they can see. And. Yeah, so we have human beings creating the dystopian science fiction that we all grew up with. That was supposed to be a warning about how you shouldn't do that every time.
• 55:34
  JOHN: And we ask ourselves, like, did they not read the book? Reading this article about Mark Zuckerberg bringing this book to his book club? And then all the other major Silicon Valley figures having read this book series. The author, I believe as Ian Banks.
• 55:48
  JOSH: Yeah.
• 55:49
  JOHN: A Scottish author, if I recall. And that they can so woefully misconstrue some things. It boggles the mind. But it makes a certain sense that they're just literally obsessed with the coolness factor. And I think of myself as that. When I was a kid watching Star Trek and then Babylon 5, what were the moments that I most wanted to go back on my VHS tapes and play it was the cool battles. Now Babylon 5 has a unique position with that because it managed to marry an episode with amongst the best space battle in history with one of the most dramatically well written stories ever. And that's severed dreams. I know we'll do that episode at some point. I almost hope we don't ever have to do that episode. You know, we'll keep dangling that one. So when you go back to that, you get the full spectrum of amazing experience. But really at most points you're like, I wanna see the space pad, I want the lasers, I wanna see the ships slam into each other. And I did that with Star Trek. I'm like, I wanna see the cool special effects when they use them. And I think these guys are locked into that part of their brains from when they were 14 years old and they just wanna do the cool thing. There's some CEOs are like, you know, we're gonna create murder drones, it's gonna be great. And you're like, didn't we like have a whole movie, ongoing franchise called Terminator about that and how. You don't want. They're like, yeah, it'll be created by. They'll be controlled by a central AI. Wait, we call that Skynet. Don't you think, like, there's some warning signs about that? No, it's gonna be the coolest thing ever. You think, oh, so they weren't watching the same thing. And there's also just a simple explanation of there's arrogance. Oh, it won't happen when I do it. And how many times have we all done that in our lives? Well, it won't happen when I do it. And then of course, lo and behold, it happens. That's the thing that I can imagine frustrates the writers of books and shows like this. I think JMS had to transcend that at some point because I just recall that, you know, for a while he took a bit of a step back from the online communities. Because every day back in the 90s would be him explaining something to somebody. And then to have created this show, have people in modern day look at it and be like, oh, there's no comparison to what's happening in Babylon 5, to what's happening in the modern era. You're like, no, it was designed for that purpose. It was written that. The critiques about historical figures are well documented by the writer in those references. What are you talking about? How frustrating it must be to be JMS and deal with that. And I think perspective was required for him to pull back and say, okay, I can't engage with everybody who's just completely obtuse.
• 58:12
  JOSH: And it also must give you a very enlightening, let's say, perspective on how information travels and how knowledge travels and how things are misunderstood and misconstrued. Like, he's in a situation which is sort of like society's information ecosystem. Rit small. It's just him. He's God. And then he has, like, a handful of fans and acolytes and some haters who are following him around in these online spaces. And, like, he can say something, and then people are arguing with him about the show he made and the thing he said. And it's like, I don't know how else I can explain this to you. No, that's not.
• 58:48
  JOHN: And it's not. When you're in class and your teacher is telling you what some artist who died hundreds of years ago meant. Right. Piece of art. Or through their novel, like, he's sitting.
• 58:58
  JOSH: Right there telling you exactly what he meant.
• 59:00
  JOHN: And the great writers will always say, oh, well, this operates on many levels. Just like a good song, you take from it what you will. But then there is that idea would say, I said that punching somebody in and doing this is a bad thing. And you're saying it's a good thing. No, I said it was a bad thing. And I said it right here and I'm saying it now. And people will still say, no, you did. That's not what that means. How maddening is that experience? And I guess at some point you just. You either laugh at it and detach, but also, I wonder how cynical it makes you. I know that in the case of Alan Moore, I think it made him more detached. That's the author of Watchmen.
• 59:32
  JOSH: Yep.
• 59:32
  JOHN: Graphic novel. And when people come up to him on the street and say, oh, man, that hero, Rorschach. He's like my inspiration. Alan, more famous, would respond, get away from me.
• 59:43
  JOSH: Yeah.
• 59:43
  JOHN: Do not come near me. You're a horrible person. You completely misinterpreted my work. And I'm telling you that he was not the hero of that book and that he was reprehensible character. And still legions of fans are like, what? No, that's. That's the person I relate to. He's the cool hero of it. So it's. At some point, the art goes out there. It's beyond your control. You do have to let go of that. But I think in the case when you're still around, you can still comment on it. You can at least Reach the people you can reach and be like, hey, this. This is at least what I was mean to communicate. Let me give you some context. Let me give you some insight into the writer's process. That's something I really appreciate about JMS is he. He not only shares what his intent was, he shares a process, how he crafted it, which is really insightful. That's something that we don't always get from writers.
• 1:00:31
  JOSH: No. And especially at the time that he did it and in the venue that he chose, it was really pioneering. It was really unprecedented. There had been nothing like it before he did it. He thought it was important to do it, and it was also very intentional. Whereas, you know, you have some similar things in recent years of, you know, live commentaries on social media. You can ask creators questions, you have podcasts and all of these interviews and commentaries on things. But that's mostly because of the technology and the information ecosystem and media ecosystem that we live in now. I mean, not to diminish the generosity that a lot of these creators have to share their insights and use their time to do so. But like with JMS doing this in the very early 90s, to very intentionally say, I am going to lift the curtain on the process of creating, writing, showrunning, producing a television series, because it's a very opaque process and I have an opportunity to create a record in real time of how it's actually done. So much of why I do what I do and why I'm interested in, what I'm interested in is because of reading the JMS Speak section on the Lurker's Guide, hearing him explain things and talk about how things were done and how things worked and just, you know, realizing that it was a real thing that I could wrap my head around. It wasn't some magical thing that happened somewhere else that you, like, had to be sort of anointed as someone who's allowed to know how these magical systems work. No, it's a thing, it's a job. And here's how it works. It's imperfect and sometimes we make mistakes. And here's how you try to learn from them, here's how you try to avoid them. And yeah, it's really quite amazing that he did that. By the way, before I forget, the thing I was referencing earlier was actually a tweet from 2021 by lexbleckman, who is a writer, game designer, and staff writer for the Onion and Clickhole. He had a tweet. Sci fi author. In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and then a tech company. At long last we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci fi novel. Don't create the Torment Nexus. It's like sort of the summation of what you were talking about.
• 1:02:45
  JOHN: It absolutely is. But the moment I hear that, my mind was able to create the entire stupid press conference that some random generic tech company was doing about that. And the enthusiasm and tech pro speak that would be around it like a TED Talk almost. And I'm thinking, yeah, I don't know, maybe we sort of deserve it when somebody decides to invent the gray goo that now devour everything. Look what we just did. Really? That's what you were thinking about doing?
• 1:03:12
  JOSH: Yeah. There's some interview with Sam Altman from a few years ago I keep returning to in my head, over and over again. I can't. It's my eternal torment that I can't escape it. But it was right after ChatGPT came out. He was being interviewed and it was some question about where is this leading? Isn't it dangerous? And Sam Altman says something like, yeah, the world is probably going to end, but there'll be some really cool companies along the way. And it was like, you psychopath.
• 1:03:39
  JOHN: Oh, yeah.
• 1:03:40
  JOSH: Like, you know, you don't have to do this. You don't have to do it. I do think it's interesting because a lot of these stories that we grew up with, I think Babylon 5 holds up better than most because it was telling a very intentional story about human nature and how people react to things that unfortunately is timeless as turning on the news or opening a newspaper will attest to. Well, actually neither of those things because we don't really do either of those things anymore in that way. It just sort of, oh, my phone says that the world is over.
• 1:04:12
  JOHN: Oh, no, just says the world's over to send a text. That's it. You get the text. You're like, oh, okay.
• 1:04:20
  JOSH: But a lot of these shows are dealing with. And I suppose I am thinking about Star Trek in particular, are really portraying a mid 20th century vision of the future that transposes a lot of our conceptions about how we organize society and how we interact with technology in particular. And also the very idea that the future is out in space. Right. Like, we take that for granted. The idea that the future is in space, that's not necessarily the case, but I think it says volumes. That notion is synonymous with the idea of the future.
• 1:04:56
  JOHN: Yeah.
• 1:04:57
  JOSH: There will be humans in space and that we will have colonies and we will see other planets. And stuff like that, which if you stop and you think about it, that's a very specific 20th century, I would even say 1950s, 1960s. Specific notion of what the future would be.
• 1:05:14
  JOHN: Yeah.
• 1:05:15
  JOSH: Silicon Valley CEOs are also trying to create that vision of the future. Like, why do you think Elon Musk is so obsessed with getting to Mars and creating a multi planetary civilization? It's because he read foundation when he was 12 and he thinks that's what the future is supposed to be.
• 1:05:31
  JOHN: Yeah. Which is so interesting because now that series has its third season coming out. I'm watching that. I've. I read the books years ago and looking at that, that itself was also a novel where space was the way of telling the story and exploring some really cool ideas, but it wasn't aspirational. Foundation as a series is a anthology. It is a telling of a future history with its warnings of a collapse of everything and how to avoid the worst of that collapse while never being able to avoid the completeness of it. And again, I say, well, so what is that motivation? I watched Star Trek. I thought, well, space sounds pretty cool. But the biggest part of the message from that was not only a better world, but it was, oh, we're going to go solve the mysteries of creation by exploring. That's a vision I can still very much relate to. That's not the message I'm getting from CEOs of Silicon Valley. What it seems to be is entirely based on how can we make more money from this with maybe a marginal improvement to convenience of life. So now you have an Uber or maybe you have an AI assistant, whatever it is. But it's not solving any of the larger problems. It's just adding another convenience that has another drawdown problem to it on the other side. Not to say that there aren't any. There are going to be some CEOs who are quite visionary, quite brilliant in terms of the future. But I'm waiting to see, like, with somebody like Musk, it's like, besides getting to Mars, like, what is this grand vision for humanity? Sadly, we know from politics now what that is. It's nothing insightful, impressive. It's actually quite dark and predictable. It's just a view of, sadly, a view of like, I guess his big thing right now is a neonatalism. The idea of, oh, we gotta make sure that certain racial populations have enough children for the future and to populate our species or something like that. We're under no actual population collapses that the ones he wants to see in charge may not be reproducing at the rate that he wants. Like, well, that's a terribly retrograde view. I mean, there's nothing new about that. There's nothing particularly insightful. There's certainly nothing that expands our horizons and goes way out into space and does something with. So he's actually living in, like, the 19th century or even the 15th century. And I'm like, oh, that's all there is to him. That's really sad. Like, I thought there was a grand vision behind his desire to go to Mars. So there was a grand vision behind SpaceX. And there were a lot of people who really assumed that there was something unspoken behind his very successful, very government subsidized, successful companies. And it's a sad thing to realize. I mean, besides the fact that I think he probably bought into it, I mean, Star Trek Discovery tried to make him out as one of the great visionaries of their future history.
• 1:08:22
  JOSH: Remember, that was only 2017. That episode aired eight years. Oh, my God.
• 1:08:29
  JOHN: And how the world has changed. How the world. How the world has changed. We sometimes lose our heroes in that sense, but it shows the difference in people who are writing or creating things that ask more questions than they answer. And he has very narrow answers. The best shows, the best stories, Babylon 5, the questions we're asking constantly, it's not providing all the answers. You can't create a Babylon 5 Bible that will guide you through all the questions in life. That wasn't the intent of the show. That's not what Jamis tries to do in his interactions with fans. It's constant process of telling stories, asking questions and giving some hope. Sometimes a difficult hope. But it's not about. Well, here we know everything, and it's all the things you already knew.
• 1:09:13
  JOSH: Exactly. Just one more thing about Musk. When you think about. If you think about it as literally, he read foundation when he was 14, and that's the set of premises that he's operating under. He thinks that there's a fall coming and he's trying to create technologies that will shorten the.
• 1:09:35
  JOHN: The Dark Ages.
• 1:09:36
  JOSH: The Dark Ages that he thinks is inevitable and that he and certain other few will survive. Which is what the obsession with neonatalism and all this really heinous, racist, eugenic nonsense is. I mean, I'm sorry, it's just wild to me that you would care about the rates of, like, white children being born. It's like the only reason to care about that is if you're racist.
• 1:10:00
  JOHN: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:01
  JOSH: Like, foundationally racist. There's no other Reason to care. Yeah, I mean, as you said, it's not like the human race is dying out. Far from it. So anyway, Musk, fuck that guy.
• 1:10:13
  JOHN: I want to say that I read foundation at an older age. I think I was in my late teens or early 20s. And you know what foundation can do to you if you miss the cautionary part, or more importantly, you miss the computer complexity of the stories as they unfold in foundation is that you really combine the idea that you're going to be Harry Seldon, that there's a darkness coming, that you will be the one to shepherd creation through it. First of all, that doesn't happen in the books. No, Seldon's grand plans all fall apart due to the random components of existence. Mule.
• 1:10:44
  JOSH: Yeah.
• 1:10:44
  JOHN: And yes, other people have to use completely other mechanisms to salvage things. And they have to go against much of what Seldon thought he knew and thought he predicted. So you know what it is? It's just like reading Ayn Rand or anybody else. It makes you feel really special about yourself. And the problem is if you grow older from that point and never grow up to where you realize, oh, A, that's not what Harry Seldon was really about, but B, I'm not going to be the only one who matters. As much as you want that little kid of yourself to be the I, the hero of everything. And God, what a boring story that would be too. Babylon 5 pokes fun at that in and of itself. Because yes, it's written that we have Delenn and Sheridan as the protagonists. They are not perfect, but they are really awesome. That's what their characters are. And they get constantly beaten down and they survive and create something that endures. And in that future moment they're deconstructed academically. Oh, are they really this? They really that? But the point was, in the end comes the Inquisitor. They were willing to die in the dark. It wasn't all about them. And that's why they lasted as heroes, because they didn't really want to be the heroes. They weren't doing it for their own aggrandizement. And they weren't deluded into thinking that was their destiny. Right. It's fun to think about. And when you have that sort of still childlike mind, you want to be that center of everything. But don't grow up to be middle aged CEO and think that's still how it works. Because all you end up, I mean, sadly, you also sort of end up being a joke once all said and done, but with a lot of destruction and death behind you. I think that's sort of the sad part of the people end up thinking in that sort of delusional sense, which is not to say, like, go after the right things, do the right thing. Be that. But don't expect that everything has to be about you.
• 1:12:39
  JOSH: This episode reminds me of that. The way that this story places our characters, our heroes, kind of in the middle of something. And they're not necessarily on the side that we want them to be on. It's a little uncomfortable.
• 1:12:55
  JOHN: Yeah.
• 1:12:56
  JOSH: Particularly when Garibaldi shows up to talk to the negotiator. They're very antagonistic, the dock workers and Garibaldi. And it comes right up close to the tension between law enforcement and the working class. Right. Like, you know, law enforcement is simultaneously thought of as a blue collar job, yet they're also quite often serving the interests of the upper classes in terms of, like, who sets the agenda, what their priority is, who they really serve. And in that moment, because of those dynamics at play, Garibaldi goes in there and he's kind of the bad guy in that scene. And that's uncomfortable. It's a really uncomfortable thing to watch. And it's a really daring thing for your show to do. It's an interesting place for your show to go to. Risk making your characters not the straightforward, righteous ones.
• 1:13:50
  JOHN: Yeah. The very beginning. Is Ivanova pushing them? Yeah. Because she has the pressure from the Norns. So she pushes the dock workers, which ultimately leads to the accident. And is that because she's bad? No, she's under the pressure. She's doing her job. But it's not the. She's not the pure heroic ideal as a result. And you want them to be.
• 1:14:10
  JOSH: So it is interesting. It's because they all are at the mercy of the system that they are operating within. I thought it was really interesting. There was that scene in the council chamber where they're talking to Jekkar.
• 1:14:24
  JOHN: Yes, yes.
• 1:14:25
  JOSH: And he's saying, you know, my cargo and the plant, and we want to be compensated for the loss of the property. And the head of the dockers union, she's like, somebody lost their life. Right. And it was all like, what did you expect my captain to do? He was under threat and he reacted and blah, blah, blah. And it was just this chain. Each individual action was rational and logical, but taken all together, it led right toward this horrible disaster. And when you look at it that way, at the individual actions, it's like, okay, well, that person over there shouldn't have done that. It's like, yeah, but that's their job. So you have to land at the conclusion that the problem here must be the way the system is designed. Either something isn't working right or it is working right. And this is how it's designed to work. Which, again, back to the idea. The way our society is organized. Does it depend on having an underclass whose lives are expendable? You think it does in its current.
• 1:15:24
  JOHN: Iteration, it really does. The show doesn't shy away from that. But the show also is. Because what you're talking about is sort of what I, in economic terms, call the micro and the macro. But I think of you're talking about the individual decisions versus the system and that individually, you're right, every decision was sort of rational within its own little, you know, each person's, you know, view in that moment. So you look at the system. But the show also highlights what happens when an individual takes a stand and does something. So that's as the show develops. And you stand up to President Clark when you stand up to the shadows and the Voronlons, when you make the tough calls. So Sheridan is described as a nexus. He's not God. He's not just some morally superior human being. But he's in a unique role that in which direction he goes, people tend to follow, but not universally. So that's when you have a little bit of, if you want to call it power. And then you decide, what are you going to do? In the case of B5, he changes the system radically, kicks the Ancients out, resets that equation for a while. Now it's up to everybody else to do the next step. He's not going to be able to do that. He only has 20 years left. This is. That debate is like, are you just going to say on the individual level, yes, you're making these rational choices. You got to live with what you got. This is the way the system is. Or do you debate the very nature of the system? One could very easily imagine in Babylon 5 that, okay, well, dock workers were being overset. But why didn't I. Why isn't the policy to say, oh, sorry, we're at capacity. We can only handle this amount of cargo. That's because the Senate says we need that station running at this level. You get this amount of cargo through. Oh, but Senate, you didn't provide the funding for it. Make it happen. That's a very common business response in the way that we've ordered our society is to say, oh, even if you don't have a Reasonable amount of resources, make it work. Make people work harder, make them work tougher. And they'll use all kinds of terminology around that. Oh, don't you value work? Aren't you a hard worker? Are you lazy? And then all these things come in and try to make it a moral issue. What it really comes down to is that somebody at some point didn't want the accountability to be somewhere else. Because if the Senate had granted Babylon 5 more funds for the dock workers would that have had any material impact on the budget of the Earth Alliance? No. Would it have improved the quality of life for the workers? Yes. Would it likely have increased the thorough put of how much cargo and commerce can happen in this very unique place? Being a station between all these different alien civilizations? Yeah, probably would have been a net good in the result. But it would have been a challenge to the power dynamic. It would have said, wait, if we don't keep these DOC workers low enough people say, oh, then you got to give to everybody. No, I think the real danger to those people is then they're going to be affirmed as near equals to me. And I can't have that. That was, I think, why the senator had that line, oh, my grandfather was a DOC worker. That's meant to actually portray. Not sympathy. He thinks he's portraying sympathy. It's meant to show, I understand it, but I'm above it now.
• 1:18:25
  JOSH: Right? Yeah. So it also shows that what's progress is getting away from that.
• 1:18:31
  JOHN: Right. Not solving the condition.
• 1:18:33
  JOSH: Right. He did that so that his grandchildren wouldn't have to do that. The other thing, it doesn't strike me like there's really anyone in the Senate to advocate for the position of the dock workers. And it speaks to the separation between the lived experience of the people in the Senate and the lived experience of the dock workers on the ground. You know, there was that line that you quoted. Our experts say, you have enough money, blah, blah, blah. Eduardo, the lead dock worker, says something. Well, I'd like to see your experts come down here and work a shift on the docking bay. And it's just that when you remove from the actual experience knowing how it actually works, not in theory how it works, it's like, well, if they can do this in this amount of time then that means that they must be able to do this in that amount of time. Right. That's not how it works. And they don't know that that's not how it works because they're not interested enough to find out. Noticing some parallels here. If you don't want to know, then you don't have to care.
• 1:19:33
  JOHN: Yeah, that's one of the core rules of how most of our societies in this planet function is that you keep yourself unaware and ignorant of that because it might otherwise make you feel a little bit responsible or a little bit.
• 1:19:48
  JOSH: You might have to confront some things about how, yeah, things work. And maybe you are part of it.
• 1:19:55
  JOHN: Because I was thinking at it from the other angle, but you're right. So that's the angle that appeals to. It's not empathy. I've been moving away from some of the definitions of that word because now it's so contentious as it is. But the idea of if one has empathy or compassion for another, it becomes much harder to maintain your actions when you see that the consequences of what you're doing or lack of knowledge about what they're doing hurts them. I was thinking about it that, well, what if we appeal the pragmatic side, I think both are really necessary. For those that have empathy, for those that have a sense of caring about fellow human beings, expanding out that awareness helps. On the flip side, for those that are a little bit too jaded, a little bit too cynical on that, well, there's the other side. If you ignore the humanity, the concerns and the dignity of people long enough, eventually those people will turn to a pretty dangerous leader. That's something we see in history repeatedly. You saw it predominantly with fascist leaders in the past whose dark their rise to power, typically from workers parties, now very quickly turn on those workers. Those workers end up at the same bottom rung they were at. But now there's a new national identity, there's a new power base, and it's quite brutal. Obviously Italy and Germany, the early 20th centuries are these like prime examples. But it's repeated itself numerous times. And the comparison to today is that current administration, the president came in on a campaign of grievance, but a lot of valid grievances. And you went to a working class in particular that has been ignored, derided, and I mean just wrecked by every administration, Democrat or Republican, across the political spectrum, across businesses. So somebody claims they have an answer for them. Now on the outside, we know those answers aren't going to work. Those answers don't even apply to their problems. Nothing that the current administration is doing is going to increase the quality of life or the dignity of the frustrated voters who voted for it, at least from the workers can't. But at least I feel like it was somebody directly addressing that grievance. And that's what that's the vulnerability that our society always faces, that if you're going to take this sort of milquetoast approach to incremental progress and say we don't really have the money in the budget this year, the president of the Earth alliance doesn't have the political clout to do the right thing right now. Well, did you try? Did you really give it a try? Or did you just write it off as well? The numbers didn't make sense for this year. And you do that this year, then you do it the next year. You do it the year after 10 years have passed, the workers conditions go down. And all of a sudden somebody comes out with grievance and says, okay, you've been ignored for 10 years. I'll give you a better option. Go after these other group of people. That's really the reason why your life is miserable. Further inflaming those tribal differences. And at the end of that populist's path, there's never salvation. But the people following. At least somebody hears them. In this episode, it wasn't until the end that somebody heard the dock workers. Sinclair does. Garibaldi shakes their hand and basically like, yeah, no, let's come to an agreement on this, not press charges. So the real answer as to why that was done is that Sinclair manipulates the system, gives them something. Was it the final story? Was it everything they needed? Probably nowhere near that. But to be seen to watch somebody fight for you and to turn the system on itself to get you something, what you need, the goodwill that buys is extraordinary. That's something that we have well documented history in labor movements for. And I don't think modern politicians in our world are yet ready to acknowledge that reality again, which we have in the past at different points. Which is to say you have to not only pay lip service, but you have to take whatever action you can, even if you're not solving all the problems in one shot. And if you don't do so, it's going to be your political career at peril, ultimately to a much more powerful populist force that could go in any direction and could do anything, like a whirlwind, you know.
• 1:24:17
  JOSH: That leads me to one final thing that I wanted to say a couple episodes ago or last episode, I said something at the end about if there's anyone listening to, please reach out and send us an email or contact us. And somebody did, a listener named Ellen who wrote us a very lovely email, which I think I speak for both of us when I say that, you know, made me feel Good. And like, what we're doing here is kind of worthwhile knowing someone is hearing what we're talking about and they're connecting with it and maybe seeing some of their concerns or values reflected in our conversation, maybe not feeling as alone, but one of the things that she happened to mention, one of her favorite quotes from the entire series was from this episode. There are no happily ever afters, just new battles. Which is kind of like what you're describing here. It's, yes, at the end, the good guys quote, unquote, win. It's a quote, unquote, happy ending. But you're right, they didn't get everything that they needed, but they got some. And more importantly, they saw someone was fighting for them, and that's the ending they have to live with for today so they can survive to fight another day. And, yeah, I think implicit in that line, there are no happily ever afters, just new battles. For me, at least the era of Trump, I found that to be very true because we are fighting a lot of fights tooth and nail that I thought were long ago won.
• 1:25:47
  JOHN: Yes. Settled. Settled things.
• 1:25:49
  JOSH: So many things. And I think that's really true. The work of, whatever you want to call it, government, or the work of just being a force for good in the world is never done. It's never, you know, mission accomplished. Okay, we won. Now let's all go home and never think about this again. It's constant, the work.
• 1:26:10
  JOHN: Yeah. By the way, that's not a dark or a downward perspective. It can be interpreted that way. But I've always thought of as, well, life doesn't just stop and go into stasis. The idea of a happily ever after, the idea of just a point sort of means that what happens after the battles continue. I've always thought of it like, when you hear the concept of the. Of the joyful or the happy warrior, you're not fighting out of anger or just fighting because it's miserable. You're saying yesterday's challenge was yesterday's challenge. Today's challenge is today's challenge. And to not sit in stasis as if you accomplished one thing, and that's the totality of life. Because that would also be kind of sad. It's like the war hero who has no more battles to fight and just keeps on reliving that one victory, and it's like, well, what are you doing with the rest of your life? So you win one great struggle, and you pick up the next thing and say, but how can we next improve ourselves? I think that's the ideal vision of science fiction. You're not locked into stasis. You are moving forward all the time and your destination keeps on getting updated. The negative is when you do have to deal with a constant onslaught of difficult things and you hope to at least get a respite. I think that's what we need like this. At least the small victories here and there that say, ah, what you're doing does have purpose, even if it doesn't work every day.
• 1:27:34
  JOSH: Yeah.
• 1:27:35
  JOHN: And then you have the strength to keep going. Yeah.
• 1:27:39
  JOSH: You know, which also really makes me think about the structure of the series. They achieve their goals that we all assumed, you know, was going to be the end point of the series. The victory over the Shadows and also the liberation of Earth and the resolution of the Earth civil war. But the show is still interested in what happens when. Once you've won.
• 1:28:00
  JOHN: Yeah. Even as it's maligned for other aspects. The fifth season explores a lot of interesting concepts around that, especially as it gets into its final arc. And that's why a, there are always more stories to be told. We're never done. And then I guess be it means that it continues. But it's not a bad thing. Sheridan and Delenn had more stuff to do. They had more life to live. And as a result, they continue to grow as people. They continue to have more experiences together. That to me, is a good story and a very hopeful one. It's a lot tougher if it's just, well, they won. They beat the Shadows. We're done. Let's turn off the cameras, turn off the lights. We're done.
• 1:28:40
  JOSH: Yeah. And I also think it's more relatable, it's more true to life because, you know, when you have your whatever version of a hard won victory or, you know, you do the thing, you graduated, you got the job, you finished the project, you did it. You still wake up the next morning and you have to figure out what to do next.
• 1:29:02
  JOHN: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:29:03
  JOSH: There are no happily ever afters, just new battles. I agree with you. It's not a downer. It should be kind of inspiring or at least invigorating.
• 1:29:13
  JOHN: That's a good word, invigorating.
• 1:29:15
  JOSH: Yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting episode. I love that the show is just as concerned with the experience of the Dockers as it is the first sentient life in the galaxy.
• 1:29:28
  JOHN: And it's not the only episode like this. I mean, as we discussed the down below, Lurkers are integral the stories in the future, but also you see their Perspectives. And of course, the fifth season does a brilliant episode. One of the best, I thought was actually one of the better episodes in some ways where it's entirely from the perspective of the maintenance workers who are constantly fixing the station in between the battles, the disasters or the everyday things and just see that perspective and say, yes, this is what is also happening. And they are as much the heroes as the main characters. It's a really cool thing. And that's why I think the show stands out for Star Trek. It took lower decks for you to really get a sense of lower decks, which I'm so grateful for. But there were always questions and a lot of other sci fi what is it like on the lower decks? What is it like for everybody else? And what are those struggles beyond just the grand battle not touted? I think the other, the other show, you focus a lot on your podcast and. Or goes into the grittiness of what it is to fight as well, when you aren't just the heroic figures. So that's why I think shows like this are always appealing to me, because they give you the hero, they give you the things you really want, a story. But it's not limited to that. It's not just giving you the hero. This isn't just one perspective. We're getting the whole picture and we're seeing how complex it is and how sometimes the heroes don't get fulfilled. I mean, Sinclair gets beaten up and as J says, even in his comments, like he's beaten up for 48 hours straight from all sides, no one's happy. And in the end, he does earn the respect of the dock workers. But now he has new enemies in the shadows somewhere, not the actor and the politicians and businessmen of the Earth Alliance. So it's like, oh man, the poor guy just gets beaten up on all sides all the time. What is he going to do? And he keeps on going.
• 1:31:18
  JOSH: You think Elon Musk ever watched Babylon 5?
• 1:31:21
  JOHN: I almost don't want to know the answer to that question, but I don't think so. There's nothing that I've come across that has anything that he's shared that has either been from the show or has been an idea that is very clearly from the show. It's always been something that's specifically to other science fiction, but I wouldn't bet money one way or the other on it. I just, that's my feeling. He's never talked about the grander issues or issues in that sort of grand idea of, oh, what does this mean in terms of Whether it's authoritarianism or, I don't know, shadows and voice, there's just nothing. There's nothing that's been there for that. And he's never spoken as if he's ever interacted with somebody who isn't well off. Certainly has not shown any indication of that. So I don't think he knows that people exist. He certainly wouldn't know the dock workers exist except as an intellectual abstraction.
• 1:32:20
  JOSH: My headcanon is people were wearing him down. Wearing them down. He finally gave it a shot and he started watching it. And then he got to this episode and he gave up after this one because it's just not for him.
• 1:32:30
  JOHN: I can see that.
• 1:32:31
  JOSH: All right, we will be back at some point in the not too distant future. I think we're sort of at a point where we were saying before we started recording, like when we started this, the episodes we naturally gravitated toward because of what was going on in the real world. It was some really pretty one to one parallels where it was very clear, clear, you know, what episode we should watch next or what we should be talking about. And it's not that things have improved really, but real world events aren't mapping one to one to the show. So I think from here on out we're gonna jump around and cover episodes that we sort of feel like watching. And then I suppose if something happens.
• 1:33:14
  JOHN: And there's a very clear corollary, we could jump in. Certainly. I think that last recording is like the one to one, at least in the US System, the President's power is at their peak in the first hundred days, typically speaking. And it makes sense, that would be the most of it. Now that doesn't mean to lull anybody into a false sense of complacency. Three and a half years left, full power of the executive branch at his disposal. But what did happen, which is where it diverges from the show, is in the show, the core of resistance is the station. The outer colonies, which are very low population, keep that in mind. And the events were moving towards the shadow of Orlon war. In our timeline, the pushback has been quite real. Has it been successful in stopping the thing? No, but it's been real. And there's a battle every next day. The battles are still happening. People are pushing back today, tomorrow, and not every day is a victory. But because of that, it stopped the momentum. I don't think we're at the point of momentum that he had in February, March and April, which seemed like a juggernaut without any stopping now. That giant machine of the executive branch is still going fast, unrestrained by a collaborative Congress, the Supreme Court, that seems hell bent on dismantling anything liberal progressive within the government. But it's slower. And I think as long as people keep going, there's some things now that it could also be that the show does show that there's a brief resistance to President Clark and very quickly is sort of put out because that's the difference we face. That's where the stories diverge, that's where the flow part happens. The parallel I would draw is that's when you realize there's a resistance to Clark, but it's much quieter. And that's when second half of season three into season four is unfolding. As you see what is the day to day. Like, how are people trying to get through it? How are people resisting in the ways that they can? But we will see. As I said, I hope we don't do a actual Severed Dreams episode of, well, that's what's happening right now. Because I think that would be quite scary in and of itself. But who knows? There's so many more lessons from the show. That's the point is it's a, it's an inquiry into dialogue and there's a lot to learn about how to do that. Maybe in some small way the reason things are a little bit different now is because people are taking the idea not from our tiny little show or not just from Babylon 5. They're saying, hey, if you keep on fighting those battles, that's the point, you don't know what the outcome will be, but you got to keep it, got to keep it going. And that's what I see today is that people are standing up. Has it stopped ICE in la? No. Has it maybe slowed it down? Maybe. Has it changed the thought around it? Yes, because the polling data of the sentiment of the U.S. population has seen a seismic shift. The seismic shift is from a massively anti immigrant perspective view when polled on the American people a year ago, to a near pro immigrant perspective now that's being pulled, that is silent. That's a fundamental shift. Even if we don't have the power to stop what the government is doing with a massively empowered new amount of money going into ice, it tells you that's what happens. And that's what happened to B5 was it wasn't winning battles every day. It wasn't, oh, we just have the technology to defeat the shadows overnight. He was cobbling together these alliances, cobbling other people and slowly winning people over on ideas. God, it's a grueling process and it's a frustrating process. It must be. That's what Sheridan was losing his mind at the end of season three, trying to get people on board just to acknowledge the threat of the shadows. So that, I think is itself a huge victory. That if the Poland data is correct and the American perspective is shifted on not only the idea of immigration, the dignity of immigrants themselves, things are already changing again. Three and a half years, a lot left to be known. But that to me is very hopeful.
• 1:37:25
  JOSH: Yeah. No, I agree. The other thing, too, morale among ICE agents is incredibly low because they know that they're reviled. I think some of them joined for whatever reason, but I also think that they're having real experiences that are unpleasant.
• 1:37:42
  JOHN: Yeah.
• 1:37:42
  JOSH: In terms of the work that they are being asked to carry out. So I think from all sides, it's probably not a fun time for them. And good.
• 1:37:55
  JOHN: Yeah. That's a successful method of resistance. I'm trying to remain serious right now as I demanding my attention.
• 1:38:06
  JOSH: All right, we are lastbesthopebe5mail.com. Please reach out and write us an email. We're going to be more on social media at some point, if and when we are last. Best hope B5 and we'll see you next time.