Icarus

And I didn't grunt when I bent over to tie my shoe.

No, to extend the Icarus comment, I actually think you and I are the Icarus, and Jon is Daedalus, Icarus' dad, the guy who also designed the maze where the Minotaur is.

Right.

So it is up to us to figure out...

LAUGHTER

The story of Icarus is in your book.

You describe the men in the Tarrakis family as Icarian men, like men who are like Icarus.

What do you mean by that? What are those traits?

I think there's a feeling of invincibility in the men in my family that God love him has killed one of them.

I think it's about then reaching for other things after.

But yeah, I think there was a Icarian quality in the men in my family that I, at one point, really deified and thought was the coolest thing in the world and very quickly learned, oh, you actually don't have to do that stuff to be a good dude, you know?

Well, Icarus famously makes wings, but puts them together with wax, flies too close to the sun, the wax melts and then falls from the sky.

He has a way of making words fly off the page and so when I saw he'd written a book called How to Fly, I had to invite him onto the podcast to chat about the ways in which flight has evolved more than once, and our own obsession with flying.

Along the way, we discovered a shared love for Douglas Adams, and Simon explained why we should stop being so obsessed with Icarus and focus more on Daedalus.

But to begin, I wanted to ask Simon when he first became fascinated by flight.

It's hard to say because I always have been.

And yes, looking up and seeing them go past, I don't have a specific memory of it, but just that the spell of that has been on me all my life.

I think we've all always been fascinated by flight.

If you go back through human history, you get stories like Icarus, you know, it's that thing.

Do you suppose that that's reasonable to say that humans have always wanted to fly?

We've got internet questions for Jimmy.

This is not from Icarus' son.

Son is spelled S-U-N.

Son Icarus.

And I guess Son Icarus wants to know, don't fly too close.

Yeah, exactly, because that's what Icarus did.

He flew too close to the sun and it melted his wings.

His father, Daedalus... didn't and managed to survive.

So King Minos became billionaire Minos King, who is the victim at the beginning of the story, whose archaeological treasures go missing and reveal the mystery of the Minotaur.

And then in the original myth, you have Daedalus and Icarus, Daedalus being the architect and Icarus being his son, both of them being known for trying to escape the labyrinth by creating wings and flying too close to the sun.

So in my story, the architect is Dr. Daedalus and her son, Icarus, who goes by Russ for short, so you can kind of anglicize it and make it feel a little more modern.

And they become someone that... our mystery gang meet when they come to solve the case.

And I did love putting in some comedy at the beginning where after Minos King gets robbed by this mystery Minotaur who scares him, he calls up an old friend of his who happens to be Mr. Blake, another building there.

Exactly.

If you can forge metal to move on its own, why couldn't you manipulate the natural order of living things? I want to start with gravity and the myth of Daedalus and Icarus.

Ah, Daedalus.

He represents a very different archetype than Hephaestus.

So Daedalus is trapped in a labyrinth of his own making by King Minos.

To escape, he studies the birds.

He crafts artificial wings made of feathers and wax for himself and his son Icarus.

Now, when I look at this story, I see an ancient Silicon Valley startup.

But despite the fact that I find AI professionally useful, I fervently wish it had never been invented.

I now think it is quite possible the advent of AI will be humanity's Icarus moment.

You probably remember how the Icarus story ends.

He flew too close to the sun, and the wax on his wings melted, and he fell into the sea and died.

Fewer people remember the whole story.

Don't go too high, or the sun will melt the wax.

Don't go too low, or the sea spray will soak the feathers and drag you down.

The danger was on both sides of Icarus's flight path, and I think that's roughly where we are with artificial intelligence.

It gets punctured, and we see these falls all the time, reminiscent of the original fall from the Garden of Eden, of what happened to Jeffrey Epstein, what happened to Elizabeth Holmes.

Well, and, and you know, you mentioned the Garden of Eden, but in some way, it, the, the other, the other story here is the story of Icarus.

Icarus, of course, is a, a really great example of, of inflation.

His father, Daedalus, was the master craftsman magician who created the labyrinth in which the Minotaur was housed, and many another thing, but eventually was imprisoned way at the top of the castle or, or fortress.

And what he did was to gather feathers from the birds and make wings for himself and for his son, Icarus.

So he made wings, and they were affixed to planks or branches, whatever, with wax.

The actual construction turns out not to matter that much-

... 'cause this is a story.

Her sister [laughs] is the mother of the Minotaur, married to King Mi- I don't know, claim to fame, mother of the Minotaur, married to King Minos, fell in love with a bull, a white bull, and the whole story with, uh, how do you say, Daedalus, the master craftsman.

And Daedalus, of course, is the father of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, and you know, there are all these intersecting stories that you probably, like, remember even in sort of like a fable-like way, and you're like, "Oh, okay, they're connected." And Theseus is the one who fi- you know, defeats the Minotaur with Ariadne, all these things.

So anyway, Circe's sister is the mother of the Minotaur, and then she has a brother, Aeëtes.

I think I'm saying that right, and he, he becomes, like, a necromancer.