Foundation – Isaac Asimov – Episode 44

The Buddies get real deep into sci-fi and politics in their most recent book, Foundation by Isaac Asmov. This book, in many ways like the Buddies, was a bit dense, so they were lost quite a bit while reading this one. Nonetheless, they powered through and got to chatting about the importance of Wikipedia, Star Wars, Rom Coms, and if Asmov knew that women exist. The Buddies suggest browsing your space encyclopedia and making some flash cards for character names, so you’ll have a great… Foundation for this one.

Intro: (0:00-2:29)
Stock Up/Down (2:30-29:50)
Favorite Short Story (29:51-32:35)
Love/Hate (32:36-39:56)
Conclusion (39:57-43:51)

Next Book: JURASSIC PARK  by MICHAEL CRICHTON
Next Movie: THE GRAY MAN

Transcript for SEO purposes 🙂

Alright. Welcome buddy Book Club. I’m Dylan, here with my fellow encyclopedias, Keith. What’s up, buddy? EW are we doing? We’re breaking down the bestsellers and this week we’ll be discussing the foundation by ASIC Asimov classic. If you like to recommend a book for us to read or reach out to us about a past episodes, you can visit our website buddy bookclub.com, or sliding to our games on Twitter or Instagram Buddy Book Club podcast. You can listen to us on itunes and spotify. So please download and subscribe Keith by Selden keith, what the heck is happening in this book? I’m here to find that out because I read it, but I don’t really know. I don’t know. Okay, that’s what we’re here for. We’re here to break it down, see what’s going on. Foundation is part of a trilogy that was published between 1951 and 1953. Originally, the trilogy was eight short stories published in Astounding Science Magazine. Excuse me. Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. It’d be hilarious if this is real science. The first four short stories were collected together and then an additional story was added, which is the first one in this to make up the first foundation novel. So Keith, bottom line is there are two things that are driving the story, right? We got the galactic empire that’s going belly up and is going to thrust mankind into a 30,000 year dark age. And then we have psycho history, which is like a mix of math, psychology and sociology that predicted this demise. But it also proved that the 30,000 years can be reduced to a mere millennia if these crisis are handled correctly. Pretty much. So it’s five short stories that kind of address those crises. Crisis. Crises. Crysis. Have you read Atlas Cloud? It’s like Atlasclouddoonthegameciation on the PC. Is Atlas Cloud the one that they made into a movie? They made a movie of it, yeah, with Tom Hanks. I started that movie and was like, I can’t, which is surprising because I can with any movie. So the movie didn’t make a lot of sense. It made a thousand times more sense in the book. So yeah, put it that way. I don’t know how I finished that book, but it was similar to this. When did you read this? You hide you keeping ship secret for me? I read on the train back in 2011, people must have looked at you and said, wow, that guy’s really smart. He must be doing really smart stuff. They’re like, oh, he must be into maps and clouds. All right, well, let’s just jump into stock up. Stock down. Keith, would you ever stock up foundation? Stock up Wikipedia and encyclopedias. Okay, yeah. This book centers around, obviously, the creation of an encyclopedia initially, which is all scam. I’ll tell you what isn’t a scam. Wikipedia. Yeah, it’s free insert the I’m not a smart man, forest gump sound bite here or GIF or whatnot, but I think that’s been well established, we all know that. But thank God for Wikipedia and just the internet in general, because after reading this, I needed someone to explain to me that was above my intellect level and just go in and explain what happened because I had no idea what was going on half the time. But this really gets to more, really. And this is why this is a stock up as well, is that this book talks about the future. This is the future. The future isn’t about being smart smart. It’s about being resourceful. It’s about going out there, finding stuff when you don’t know. I’m smart enough in my scenario to know that I’m not smart. You know what I mean? So I go out there and I find the things, the answers to when I’m curious. That’s what schools should be about. That’s what the future should be about, is that you find ways or teach people how to be curious and go out and find answers to things if you’re not smart enough to do it yourself. Yeah, it’s simple, like dumb it down for me. I need everything dumbed down. Make it shorter, make it concise, make it at a third grade reading level. I think a catchphase should be moving forward. Is it’s okay to be an idiot? It’s not okay to be ignorant. Very easy to be an idiot, which a lot of people are. I am. It’s fine. This is a hard level reading, but there’s so many things now, so you don’t have to be ignorant that you can just look up. Ignorant. Yeah. So that’s what the stock up was. Also, if we’re just to save space here I hope we are. I read the Wikipedia, I still don’t know what happened in this book, but that’s neither here nor there. I mean, the stock is still up. All right, fair enough. The only problem with ignorance, though, is that when you look this stuff up, you eventually just start forgetting everything. Like I just can’t keep the pieces together. So that’s just how it is. My first stock up is having zero interesting characters in a book. So usually you would think, book has zero interesting characters. It’s going to be terrible. Maybe in this book there’s like maybe Salvar Harden or Harry Selden, I don’t know. But this book really doesn’t have any characters of interest at all. At no point when it went on to the next mini book or whatever you’re going to call it, was, I like, oh no, that stinks. I was having such a good time with that person. I was just like, yeah, okay, whatever. I don’t even remember their name. It was like shaking someone’s hand at a party or at a work event or something. I immediately forgot it. But this book won the one time Hugo award. They only issued this award one time up until like 2008 for best all time series. Best series all time. The foundation series. 1960, ₩6. It it beat Lord of the Rings. How is that possible? Literally no idea. Can you enlighten me? No idea. None. I want to be clear, I didn’t dislike foundation. I actually really enjoyed this book. But to beat Lord of the Rings, which is just like freaking epic, and like, talk about written in different languages, like, this guy created languages that are in the book, it’s just wild to me. And there’s only interesting characters in that book. There’s trees that talk. Like what? These are trees that talk in this book. So, yeah, I guess if you have zero interesting characters, you can still be the best all time series. So good on you. What else? Jeffrey for stock up. Stock up. Star wars phantom Menace. Really? This stock is trading quite low. Yeah, I mean, that’s key here. This book brought me back to when I was twelve years old and I’m in the movie theater with my popcorn and obviously getting ready to watch it. And like the first 30 minutes of Star Wars Phantom Minutes is about trade Federation and embargoes. Yeah, it’s that, but without any lightsabers, it’s basically like talking politics and like, trade Federation. I’m just staring with like, glazed eyes and being like, when’s the lightsabers come out. What’s going on here? I don’t know. There’s no Jar Jar. Maybe that dude that sounds like Elmer Fudd’s jar Jar, but there’s no catchy one liners. Now this is pod racing. I need something here. Give me something to grasp onto. I’m still a twelve year old at heart, so yeah, stock up. Fan of the Menace, though, because it did provide those things. I recently did the watch of Star Wars with the SGF because she had never seen them. So twist my arm. Rewatch all the Star Wars movies, right? Of course, Santa Mez is the only one that like three times in the first 30 minutes I had to pause and ask, do you know what’s happening here? And not like in a pejorative way because it is so confusing. She’s like, no, I don’t know. I was like, okay, so there’s this whole galactic trade Federation that’s trying to get controlled. Like, why is this a thing? What is this? Who does that? It was made for twelve year olds. That movie, specifically, I feel like, was very younger audience and like, pod racing is like, okay, cool, that’s for kids. If it wasn’t for Duel of the Fates, that movie would be terrible. Luckily, that is one of the greatest Star Wars scenes in my personal life. Yeah. Darth Maul is still a goat. Yeah, just the music itself. So sick. Yeah. My next talk off is short stories in general. Okay. I feel like we don’t read a lot of short stories, and I mean, the Stephen King ones are short stories that we’ve read. But the body was a full book. I don’t feel like it was a short story where these ones are like 50 pages each. And since foundation is made up of like five short stories, there were a couple in there. I was like, this isn’t for me. But the good part is. I’m like, all right, well, I only have 30 more audio minutes to listen to this, and then I’m going to move on to something that may or may not interest me. But I don’t have to really remember all of this except for the broad strokes. Even those were tough sometimes I just like the idea of a short story in general. There’s an overarching theme that’s going through, but the actual characters within that story I don’t have to try to tie myself to. Because real quick, number one short story, and there’s only one answer for this. What do you got? Scary stories to tell in the dark. I don’t know. Most dangerous game. Of course. That’s number one, but all right. Did you ever see the past with John Leguizamo? I don’t know the words. You just said the past. It’s a movie with starring John Leguzamo from the 90s. It’s basically lasagna. What’s his name? Leguizamo. Leguizamo? Yeah, he’s an actor. It’s basically their version of The Most Dangerous Game with some guy hires or like I don’t remember the premise of the story. It’s terrible. Terrible movie. I’m not saying it’s good. The COVID says anything about it then. Yeah, exactly 4.4 from Google out of five. All right, what is it? A run tomorrow on tomatoes. 67% audience score. Guess the critic score, though. 24%. Oh, my God. That’s a huge delta. Might have to add that into the Ron Tomato variants. I mean, it’s crazy that it’s certified fresh by the audience and a literal four. Yeah, it’s pretty insane. Okay. Yeah, well, I don’t know. See, that’s another random piece of information that came into that. You say? Most Dangerous game. I immediately think of the past. Did you have another stock up? Last one. Individual leaders stock up. This book was very, very high on individuals leading humanity forward and moving civilization in the right direction. I mean, this is written in the maybe still existed then. But does that even exist anymore? Do you even point to people and be like, that’s the person that we can trust and he’s the person that’s going to take the society forward. She’s going to make the society better? No, we don’t have that anymore. Right? Back then we had these scientists, humanitarians, who did things for the better good. I mean, the perfect example of what the world has become is Nikolai Tesla was like the most selfless person ever. Now that Tesla name is gone and it just represents a luxury car that’s owned by a billionaire who all he cares about is his name in the headlines. That’s what we’ve become. We would change the guy that’s like, what do you have, like, 100 patents they just released and said, I’m not making money off these. I just want everyone to have them. To a luxury car that pretends it’s for in the environment that only millionaires can buy. That’s where we’re at. Maybe I’m cynical. I just don’t think individual leaders will ever do anything that would happen in this book anymore. It’s unfortunate because you have to have the perfect storm of intelligence, charisma, interest to lead, but also selflessness. Yeah. Which that just doesn’t go with any of the other ones. You can’t have a huge ego, but also you need a huge ego to make changes, though. You have to be so self confident, like cocksure, that you but then you also have to be like, I got to get back, though, which is very rare. Yeah. You have to be equally the President, Billy Bob Thornton in Love Actually, and Hugh Grant, the Prime Minister of Britain. You have to be the exact middle of those two characters. Can we use a different romcom? You know, I’m not a love actually guy. Buddy. I only have a few romcoms in myself, and I threw one out there and you didn’t bite. I’m sorry. Love Actually is, like, way too there’s not a lot of calm in Love Actually. Oh, this great. I don’t know. The coms got.com good. Talk to me about crazy, stupid love or hitch. And now you’re speaking my language. Yeah, sure. So you have to be both Ryan Gosling’s character and Steve Carell’s character. Yeah. I don’t know if they can make that movie anymore. I think it could be canceled because he’s kind of like a date rapist, right? No. Girls are literally throwing themselves at him. Yeah, I know. And he’s, like, buying him drinks at bars, taking home. He represents toxic masculinity. Right. In today’s day and age. No, I mean, he’s good looking, so that’s fine. You can’t do it. It doesn’t count if you’re good looking. Yeah. If you’re good looking, it’s not creepy. But I did post when the trend was going around where they would show Steve Carell’s character, like dresses at dad, and they were saying, this is this, this is that. I did post that and say people that read books with Steve Carell and people that listen to audio books are Ryan Gosling. Nice. I thought that was going to blow up the Internet. Like, people were going to think one person liked it. I don’t know how Twitter works, honestly. I’m still trying to figure that out. I was like, this is going to kill it. Not one person even responded. You should have sent it to Ryan Gosling and had him reposted. I mean, it was one of those times when everyone was posting that. So it wasn’t, like, original, but it was like, an original in the book community, I thought. I’m not trying to cancel. Ryan, gosling. I think that movie is phenomenal. Yeah, great film. Movie. My stock up. My last one is parsecs. There’s lots of parsec talk in this novel foundation and Star Wars also had some pretty historic parsec talk. They’re clearly using it as a unit of length. Wink, wink in this novel. And people were talking shit about Star Wars because they said, like, oh, the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs, whatever the case is, be like, oh, twelve parsecs. That’s like they’re using it as a unit of time. That’s not actually true. People out there. Just so you know, the Kessler Run is a 20 parsec distance. And Han Solo, by being able to fly close to the black hole, was able to reduce the distance to twelve parsecs, which means he was ballsy enough to fly that close to the black hole to decrease the amount of time it took him to get there by decreasing the length. So it is also in Star Wars, a unit of length. Just said it kind of in a weird way. So get your shit right. Don’t shit on George Lucas there, at least for the first three. Nicely done. Yeah, that’s a good callback. And I did notice the parsec stuff. I was like, oh, I know that word. I don’t know what it means, but I know it 3.5 light years or something like that. Yeah. Okay. I like it. What do you have for stock down? Stock down. And I hate to do this, but women not a good

I just saw all of our future hopes and dreams go out the window. Hey, listen, I’m basing it off the book. I’m buying the stocks of the book. This is the whole point of stock down. Stock up, stock down. Yeah, but do women even exist in the future? I don’t know if they even this book did not have feature any women at all. It’s highlight of one of my stock downs as well. Yeah, not a good look by Isaac Asimov in this one, I think there might have been one reference to a woman and it was like a nag. She was like one of the nagging or whatever. Yes. Oh, look, I got this nice new clothes. And she was like, fine, I’ll put out because you got me those tech piece of technical. I think they referenced, too. They’re like, you want to sell more goods and make more money? Listen to us. Think of all the women that will buy the cooking and cleaning supplies. I was like, Jesus Christ. I know it was written in the 40s, but was it that long ago? They made it sound like 1600. So they’re like for all the things that are predicted in this future, the ideas of what the future is going to be like, to have that much foresight into being able to see these trends and whatnot, to not think that maybe women will be given I don’t know. They’ll have been more scientists that are women like, are you crazy? Like what? How do you think that we can’t keep the women down that long. You got to step it up. So he didn’t, especially since this was during World War II when women were literally taking all the jobs that men were doing and just drop off their own. What? Yeah. Well, I don’t know about baseball. They’re holding their own, but still everywhere else they were doing, like, manufacturing jobs. Kind of crazy. Rose of the Riveter. Shut up. Yeah. Actually, one of our other books I’m thinking we do is we haven’t even talked about this, but The Rose Code, it’s about a bunch of women during World War II. I think we add that to our list. But yeah, Isaac Asimov. I don’t know what you’re thinking here, buddy. You got to get your shit together. Because I think he was probably, like, some sort of incel or something like that. He also didn’t have time to go into the world. He wrote, like, 500 books. So I don’t know. Maybe because he was a man, he was like, only men exist. What do you think right now that we’re saying that 100 years from now, you’d be like, wow, I can’t believe they didn’t take that into account. I was thinking, like, children’s views. Like, right now, we’re like, kids don’t know what they’re talking about. But 100 years, maybe we’ll look to children just to answer every question. It’ll kind of be like, what’s your favorite book there? Phantom Toll booth. What? I’ve never even heard of that. The Sci-fi kids book. Ender’s Game. Anders Game. Yeah. It’ll be like ender’s game. Maybe in the future. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, maybe it is kind of crazy to be like, women will have rights. They’ll be equal to children. Actually, it ties into Jurassic Park a little bit, too. I mean, they got Timmy over there managing the you’re probably not there yet. No real spoilers here. But they’re like, I don’t know how to work a computer, Tim. You do it. He’s like, I’m eight. Yeah. They’re like, no, restore the power to the entire park. He’s like, okay, hold on a second. F four done. I don’t know. I’d have to think about that. Maybe make a blog about it. None of us are going to exist anymore. It’s going to be robots and everything’s going to be the Chat GPD or whatever thing is the smartest thing in the universe that’s writing all of our blogs right now, by the way. It probably could it definitely could type five paragraphs about how chicken wings are taking over the world, and it’ll spit it something out. Yeah, my brother in law uses it for his business. He’s like, oh, I just say what’s a good social media post about hockey training? And he sends me what it kicks out. And I’m like, oh, yeah, this is pretty smart. But this is before I even knew it existed. He was like, oh, yeah, that was a bot that wrote that. What that’s done our job. 2 seconds. Yeah. Crazy. So, yeah, I don’t even know. Probably will all just be like truthfully. The closest thing is it’ll be like Wally, where everyone’s just like, sitting in their chairs, like sucking down Mountain Dews. It’ll be a mix between Wally and Idiocracy. Yeah, makes sense. Okay, my first talk down was being committed to your work. Let’s talk about the encyclopedias here. These guys, and I do mean guys because for some short sight of reason, the galaxy doesn’t have any working women. Ridiculous. These guys have fully bought into Harry Selden. Right? Let’s just picture this for a second. They’re leaving behind when they’re on Trantor, they’re leaving behind friends, family, and the comfortability of a society to go to the most far reaching edge of the galaxy, all for the greater good. They’re only like, okay, Harry Selden said the world’s going to end. We got to build this encyclopedia so that things can move forward. All right? We’re going to sacrifice everything. We’re going to take the wives and kids and get the heck out of here like the puritans. But go on. Yeah, sure. They’re going to spend their lives compiling their entire lives compiling all the scientific information available in order to save the world from darkness and chaos. Every day, they grab their lunch pail, tell their woman to stay in the kitchen, I guess, is what this thing goes. They go to work, and they’re working furiously to get everything in this encyclopedia. And this guy has done this for 50 years. He left Trantor, he’s been working his butt off on Terminus eating fucking rocks for 50 years. And then this time capsule opens up. Harry seldom comes on screen. He’s like, oh, wait, no. Uno reverse card. Psych. JK encyclopedia was a joke. I don’t give two shits if nothing’s created. This was all just so that we could have a colony on Terminus to start the next galactic empire. So all these scientists, encyclopedias, 100,000 people have just been told that their life’s work is meaningless. Meaningless. So the meaning of this whole thing, the point of this is just don’t care about your work because it’s meaningless. At the end of the day, do not be committed to your work. It is meaningless. All right, good. Positive message to take from that. I appreciate that. That’s not me. That’s harry seldom. He comes straight from his mouth. Well, how about the fact that too? He’s like, Well, I’m going to die, so I don’t care if everyone else gets screwed over. Like, whatever. He’s like, all right. Wait, what do you mean everyone else gets screwed over? It doesn’t go to yeah. He’s like, I’m going to die. And he’s like, I’m going to set these people up to fail for 50 years so that they only can choose one path from there. Okay, so much for personal freedom. They still bowed down to him after that. I’d be blowing things up. I’d be like, revolting if I found out my 50 years of work are worthless and this guy has just been lying to me the whole time. I’m like, oh, really? I’d be opening up all the time capsules and fucking those things up. Yeah, I mean, these people have all buy in, you know what I mean? They got Harry Seldom tattooed on their neck and posters of him on their wall like he’s Chairman Mao or something. So they have to believe. I mean, at that point, they just have to believe. Like he knows the greater good. Like whether or not he bullshitted us here, he knows it was all for a purpose. I’m being a little bit facetious in my being committed to your work thing because the end of the day, Harry was right. Are you not tearing down your Millie and Vanilla or their band poster after you find out they’re not actually singing? You’re keeping those up on the wall? Well, let’s say they weren’t actually singing because they were going to stop a galactic crisis then. Yeah. I keep my problem about 1000 years from now. I’m not worried about that. That’s everyone’s problem. That’s the whole point of everything. And that’s why live for today. Live for today. That’s your next stock down. Living for tomorrow. Yeah. So why aren’t you just like, I don’t know, chain smoking cigarettes and doing heroin? Who says I’m not?

You hear this deep voice. You don’t get this from non smoking marble reds in Virginia Slims every day. Those are two completely different kinds of cigarettes. Yeah, that’s right. Okay, what else do you have for stock down last? Stock down? I think you’ve already kind of touched on it, remembering names. Stock down. I’m already off with this. Just terrible. I know it’s going to only get worse as I get older, but what I’m going to do, and to steal a line from you, if I’m blessed to have kids, something I want them. I’m pulling a Manny Ramirez or George Foreman? Manny Ramirez named his first son Manny Ramirez Jr. And then his next son, Manuel Leto, who goes by Manny. So Manny, manny. And then George Foreman. Yeah. George Foreman as George Jr. George Jr. George three, George four, George five, and George six on this. So that’s what I’m going to do. Isn’t his daughter like Georgeta? And I don’t know, I thought I missed that. Yeah, that could be true, too. I missed that one. But yeah. This book has five different stories, has 25 plus characters. All the names are like made up names. Could he not just kept everyone on the same family tree so I could at least also the toughest part too, is that there’s Harry Selden and Salvar Harden are like two of the main characters. They sound way too similar. And then the two cities I didn’t know. The torment is not exactly the same, too. Yeah. What are we doing here. Yeah. I could not remember names. I couldn’t remember places. And then I did. I’m like, Is that that guy or that guy? Yeah, even the places were tough. It’s like the acronym. And I’m like, okay, which ones are they? Are they the ones from the other book who were fighting those ones? I don’t know. It goes back to what I say about every book. It needs a map in the first page. I need to see it. I’m confused. Otherwise, I need a few pages of maps. Well, did you read this book physically? No. Is there a map? It could have been. I’m not sure. I read it physically once, but I don’t remember a map. Okay. This is my second time reading it. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. You really know what’s going on. Maybe. Kind of. Kind of. My last talk down is psycho history, so it seems pretty rad, you know, sociological math that you can use to predict the future at the time. It’s a novel idea, and supposedly it was potentially used successfully in terms of election, picking out who would win election or something like that. And it makes a lot of logical sense if you know big sociological if you can predict big sociological trends, you put them into your math formula, click some buttons, and it’ll tell you spit out an outcome. So I liked that. I mean, I still like it in the story. It’s a very fascinating idea, and to kind of come up with that is pretty cool. Isaac Asimov was somewhat of a genius, for sure. He wrote, like, 500 books, including college level biochemical engineering books. He’s wild. But unfortunately, ten years later, chaos theory is discovered in the early 60s, which pretty much makes this totally obsolete, because chaos theory, the typical idea they use, is like, butterflies flapping his wings in Brazil will create a tornado in Texas, or whatever the case is. And it’s a huge part of Jurassic Park, which we’re going to be reading soon. And really, with the amount of time that the foundation stuff is going through, we’re talking a thousand years. It’s just there’s no way that you could actually predict that. I know I’m poking holes in something that’s made up and supposed to be found in science fictiony, but it’s just unfortunate that this new piece of science was developed ten years after this book came out that was, like, really wouldn’t work. You can’t predict these things. There’s too many moving pieces. Yeah, well, I mean, also relies on great leaders stepping forward that are not going to take over the country and be dictators, ruin all their plans. Yeah, not necessarily. I mean, that’s what Salvar Harden did. Like, he took over, and he was for the greater good. Yeah, sure, you expect him, not a Hitler, but maybe seldom predicts that. I don’t know what happens in the other books, because even at the end, with the merchant princes, their. Goal is really to make a lot of money. But it also coincides with what the whole thing is with Selden. And they even say at some point he’s like, oh, well, he’s like I’m not really concerned about the big picture because I know that Harry Selden has already figured it out. Which is probably a good way to to do it. You know, just like you said, live your day to day and be like doesn’t really matter. Like Harry Selden already calculated. Harry knows what’s going on. That’s what I say every time too. But the other big piece of science that was learned like three or four years later is the relativity of time or whatever on each planet. And they didn’t really follow that in any way either. Right. What do you mean? Like a day was a day? It was a day everywhere. Whereas certain planets I only know that because of I don’t know the theory on our sand or solar. The only thing that basically taught me everything about space. Well, I think that’s also only if you’re super close to a black hole. Is that right? I just knew that because time or just because light doesn’t travel. I always thought about like even if we were able to see another planet that was really far off, we would see it 40 or 1000 years in the past, not today. Which I always thought was crazy. Yeah, I mean, it is crazy. The fact that when you look up into the night sky, you’re looking into the past is pretty cool. I think the premise here, though, is that there’s an ability to warp space and times that you can travel to different places in the galaxy rather quickly. It’s not like when you’re traveling there, they’re aging that much more. And for interstellar in particular, it was because of the black hole. Because the black hole is so big and creating so much gravity that space and time is bent from there. So the closer things are to the black hole, the faster time goes elsewhere. Instead of a favorite scene, I’m interested to know if one of the short stories you enjoyed more than the others. Yeah, I think the third one, I think that was the best by far. Yeah, that should just be the whole book. It should just been expanded upon because we had both the religious aspect of like here’s how someone basically probably following the crusaders in some ways, right. Goes out there and spreads religion and makes you get locked in and that basically allows you to build an empire. Yeah, I don’t know anything about the Crusades. I assume that the Holy Catholic Church wasn’t going out there, sending crusaders out there in order to gain more power, more money, you get more people into your religion. Right. So I assumed it was similar to that. No idea if that’s true. But then they also had that and they also had that cool battle where there was like one family that was trying to take them over and they did the Uno reverse card and said, oh, actually, we knew about your plan and here’s all the things we did to set you up and fuck you over. And I was like, all right. So that was kind of a cool story. They should just expanded upon that, made that a little bigger. That would have been a better book to me than all the other stuff. Yeah, I’m with you. The Mares was my favorite as well, also, because we have the encyclopedia section first to kind of set up Salvar Harden’s character, who’s just like cigar smoking good hang guy. And so that sets up his character. And then now we see him, like, in older age, more wizened, if you will, and then it’s him really using all of the tactics that he’s learned to pull this move on the acronym, whoever it is. I can’t remember. I think that’s who it is. And it was it was a great setup because you’re like, OK, wait, how does he have this under control? Because he kept saying, like, I got this. No big deal. And it’s like, Wait, you’re going there? Why are you going there? He’s like, don’t worry about it, I got it. And you see, whereas the pieces start to fall into place, you’re like, oh, snap. He’s using this religion as a weapon is just amazing stuff. They have the chair that levitates or whatever, and people believe in it is really fascinating. It does remind me a lot of Dune for sure, that part. So yeah, I agree with you. The mayor the mayor’s was good. The first three were good, in my opinion. And then I just kind of I got more and more confused. I understood the points of the later ones, but at no point was I as drawn in because they tried it kind of with the Merchant princes when it was the assassination attempt or the priest was going to get murdered. And it turns out it was like a decoy person. And I was like, yeah, okay, there’s another trial. So it’s like, okay, trial, like at the beginning, but it just didn’t have the same feel to it. What do you love about foundation? I like futuristic societies. I like dystopias, the human tendencies and how things are spread. I like all that stuff. So there was a lot of that in this. This is probably a master’s level of that. I like the young adult version of it. So that made it a little bit tough. I like the Albert FUD dude. He said that earlier. Who are you talking about? The guy that dropped his arms to sound smarter? Yeah, at the beginning. Yeah. I don’t really know why he did that, but I’m trying to mimic it now. But I can’t even think about how to do it. I’m trying to mimic it. Yeah, there we go. I was like, oh, that’s Elmer Fun. That’s where my intellect goes to. It’s like, oh, I get it. That’s a cartoon character that’s happening in your head all the time. I love the scope of it. I mean, how can you not? You kind of touched on it with what you said for love. But the idea of this giant galactic empire that spans 25 million planets or whatever is super cool and seems to us now maybe potentially played out even. But at this point, it was groundbreaking. This is supposedly the first Sci-Fi series to ever encompass a full galactic empire. So if nothing else, whether you like or hate the book, the idea that Isaac Asimov put out into the Zeitgeist, this idea of a galactic empire and that a story can encompass the entirety of this empire is what put forward so many other pieces of pop culture and work that we enjoy, most notably Star Wars. I mean, your favorite. Without that, would that have even happened? Because George Lucas kind of took the foundation took the foundation of this also took, like, Kirasawa’s Japanese action movies like The Hidden Rangers. No. The Hidden Fortress. Seven Samurai I mean, Darth Vader’s helmet is a samurai helmet. He has a lot of influence from Kirsawa. So taking curasawa’s work, tying it in with this, and creating his own creation from there was awesome. Great. And Frank Herbert, when he wrote Dune, supposedly there’s like a very clear he read foundation and was like, oh, okay, I’m going to focus on a different aspect. This could have gone a different way as opposed to this foundation thing. It could have gone a different way because that’s dunes all about the fall of this empire and the rise of Paul Maudib. So, yeah, it’s so cool to think that people can just come up with this shit that now to us seems so great and obvious, right? It’s like creating like, a unicorn or like all the bad guys. They’re now just like, oh, yeah, vampires, obviously. But someone had to create that. Yeah, sure, dracula. Why not? Yeah, okay. What else you love? I do like how they used religion and money and merchants and different things to create dynasties. Like I said, I’m sure there’s a lot of ties to history to that. I’m not smart enough to know those, but I’m sure there are. I also liked which this might be everyone might know this, and I might just have never noticed it, but everything in space is a sea term. So like, ships and ports and life vessels, and they have all these things that are just nautical things that I never realized. That’s what space stuff is. Like spaceships and space ports. And I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. And they used a lot of different ones that I kept on thinking, are they in the sea? And I’m like, oh, no, they’re in space. But they just use the same terms. Yeah, they do. I thought that was interesting. I like that too. I wonder if there’s because we get starboard bow, we got port side and what’s in Star Trek, they use that, right? Yeah, but I’m wondering, is there a different dimension for like, top and bottom? Oh, yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah. I don’t know. And what’s the opposite of port? I don’t know. Base is just the final frontier and yeah, you said it was tied to history. I think Isaac Asimov went into this thinking a lot about or using the Roman Empire as kind of like an allegory. So the fall of the Roman Empire, he was like, okay, what if there was a fall of the Roman Empire, but on a way bigger level, like a galactic level, and someone had the ability to predict its demise kind of thing? Because I think we’ve talked about on the pod before, how a lot of the stuff from the technology and whatnot from the Roman Empire was lost and people later would stumble upon some of the creations aqueduct. Yeah. And think that some crazy alien race or something had created it because it was so beyond their understanding. Okay, what about hates? I mean, we already touched on this. I didn’t really like the jumping around the stories. I love world building, but typically that involves you kind of set yourself in the small area. You build up that small world, and then those characters, you learn about them and then the world expands around them. So, like, Luke is in Tatooine, and then this whole universe opens up or Red rising, you’re in this small area in Mars, and then it becomes bigger and bigger, and that’s the cool thing to watch. Or look, this was just like, here are two characters, the world’s huge, good luck. And then it’s like and then we’re going to change them, and then we’re going to go over here and it’s like, what’s going on? I don’t know. Where are we? Who are these people? Yeah, I didn’t care for that. One of my hates served my only hate, too. It just seems like the multiple short stories weren’t really tied together super well, and there’s definitely an overarching theme. I get it. And it all makes sense as a whole, but just kind of like ending one story and then fast forward a bunch of years and it’s like a new story. I think as individual short stories, they’re interesting and compelling, but trying to pull them all into one novel, it didn’t seem the cleanest for me. And additionally, like we talked about, there’s just so many characters, by the time you get to the next door, you kind of forgot about the previous characters. And maybe that’s the point. It doesn’t really matter. Only what matters is that the foundation is continuing, but at the end of it, it didn’t really get me to want to know how it ends. I have listened to the second one. I think I listened to it, like, while I was working ten years ago at work on YouTube, and I don’t really remember it. This is one where I’d want to use your stock up of Wikipedia and just see how it ends. Because I think there’s like eight books. Yeah, or watch the TV show. Yeah, I think the TV show does try to do a little more from one person’s perspective, like fish out of water situation. I do also remember from the pilot that there’s one person that’s Basil Exposition and is just explaining to you, like, what’s happening eventually just stops explaining to you because that character even says, like, I understand now, and this is basically telling what’s on the camera. Yeah, we all understand now. We get it now. Yeah. I only saw the first episode and a half, but the set pieces or whatnot were pretty cool. Would you recommend Foundation, Isaac, Asimov’s beautiful novel to your friends or family? No, I wouldn’t. I think there’s a certain amount of people that would really appreciate this, and I think there’s a handful of people. I’ve asked if they’ve read it, and those are a very small segment of people. I felt like this is kind of like Shakespeare, right? Where you kind of understand what’s going on and you appreciate that you read it cool to say that you read it, but at the end of the day, you don’t really know what’s going on. Yeah, that’s pretty much it, right? That’s what it is. It’s a Shakespeare type. I think I stumbled upon, when I was looking up this book, a blog from like, IO nine or something like that, that was basically like ten Sci-Fi books that you want to tell people you’ve read, but you haven’t, and this is one of them. I was like, that’s exciting. Yeah, that makes sense. So, I mean, if you’re looking for a character driven storyline, this is not going to be the book for you. I would say if someone I knew was a big Sci-Fi fan and hadn’t read this book, I would call it a must read just because of the story itself is good. I like it. It’s quick. It’s not like a long book or anything. And I think just more for societally, pop culture wise, what it brought. I don’t want to say it’s more for a philosophy or sociology type person. I agree. I wouldn’t necessarily be like, oh, this is a Sci-Fi type person’s book. I think it’s those things more than anything. Yeah. I guess I’m just thinking of someone who was like, oh, I love Enders Game and I love Dune and I’ve read Disc World or whatever the case is. I’d say, well, probably should check out foundation because it is the foundation for all of those. That’s just my opinion. I think I said the same thing for Brave New World, though. So to be fair what that is for sociological types. I’m surprised you remember that because that was like 35 episodes ago. I had some deja vu going on there. I was like, I feel like I’ve said this before. Deja vu. Great Tony Scott movie featuring Denzel Washington, of course. Yeah. You don’t like Tony Scott, though. Yeah, I do. I just don’t like that one. I just watched Taking Pell on one, two, three. I actually didn’t think that movie was bad. Oh, so a train movie that you liked? Yeah, I mean, there was actually an enemy. It wasn’t a physical object. The train is the enemy. The train is the bad guy. We can’t stop this train. What do we do? Just get off it? I don’t know. Who cares? What does this matter? It’s going to blow up like a whole town. Well, that’s something totally different. We are not going to poke holes at Tony Scott, one of the best directors of his age, so I would recommend that you wouldn’t. I mean, it’s not going to break my top ten, but I enjoyed it. What do we got coming up next? Are we doing Jurassic Park next? Doing Jurassic Park next. And I think for movie we’re doing Debbie Does Dallas or Ryan Gosling to keep it on on point gossiping movie. The great man. Yeah. Yeah. It’s going to be terrible. I’m excited. I mean, we already have a blog up on the Buddy Book Club about it. Really? And your boy liked it. I know you’re going to dislike it, so I can’t wait. I cannot wait. I’m going to bring my guns. I’m going to get them loaded like my boy Ryan Gosling in the movie. Get them ready. It’s a pure action movie. Oh, I can’t wait. I like pure action movies. Don’t do it. I can already tell you. I know. This is not a D man movie. Well, it depends. Is the gray man a reference to a train? Because if it is, I’m down. So he gets on a train and here’s the whole thing it can’t stop. All right, well, that was foundation. We’ll catch you next time for Jurassic Park. Another great sci-fi book. So we’ll see you then. All right.