Ubik

I'd also been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick books, and there's a lot of similarities to those.

Especially Ubik.

In Season 3, you'll definitely notice that the paint can is pretty directly lifted

from

Ubik.

There's

also always a lot of Kurt Vonnegut influences in anything I write.

Ideas of exploration versus isolationism.

Charlie's whole allegory that is very much speaking to the present moment with ai i think and i don't even mean to oversimplify that like we're we're star trek is best when it is speaking to right the fuck now and like these books are fun and odysseys and we're way out in the monsters and scary things and radiation that makes you angry and all kinds of fun classic tropes and pseudoscience and real science from real physicists and then stuff that i just make up because i think it's fun you know all that stuff is in there but it is all like my favorite science fiction meant to serve as a as a as something reaching back to touch the The present moment, right? Like, I'm reading Ubik right now by Philip K.

Dick.

Oh, wow.

I've been on a Philip K. Dick run.

I've done four of his books this year.

But, like, I'm reading Ubik at Vons while I'm getting my vaccines for the fall.

And I'm just like, well, one, it's like, what a weird thing to read before you get your vaccines.

So there I'm a bitter person.

Um, you know, otherwise it was like reading, you know, uh, I'd never read Ubik and just rereading a couple of other Philip K. Dick books.

And, and my, and then I, a lot of the, all, almost all the tech stuff, uh, the corporate tech stuff just came from my two years as being a part of a class action lawsuit, suing chat GPT open AI.

Um, And that really was sort of a lot of the spirit behind the book because the initial what if of the book, when I had it, seemed really goofy to me.

Yeah, he got to everybody eventually, right? He threw Dish under the bus and a few other people.

And, you know, Lem had some interesting critiques of him, but he did admit that Ubik was a great book.

So I'll give him credit there.

What kind of teenager were you before? Because I'm assuming getting into healthcare and medicine was something that must have been ingrained into you somewhat early on.

And this is also the period when he produced Duandroy's Dream of Electric Sheep.

Ubik, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, The Free Stigmata of Palmer Eldredge, and most of the novels for which he was most famous and is still most remembered today.

The shift was that Philip K. Dick began thinking about deeper themes.

He became very interested in in the dynamics of human morality and particularly themes of empathy that he explored by thinking about how did the Nazis come to and hold power in The Man in the High Castle and Philip K. Dick was quoted as saying that he couldn't complete the sequel to that novel because he just couldn't stay in the psyche of the nazis any longer to continue writing the story the theme of empathy and do androids dream of electric sheep what would lead humanity to once again enslave sentient life forms and hunt them Through the streets.

And this finally opened up through his spiritual, transcendental experiences in the last part of his career, in his Vallis trilogy, to his... ascendancy to the role of a prophet of our modern contemporary times.

And in the last three of his prophetic visions, the question of what is reality is central.

Ubik is Philip K. Dick's most mysterious novel.

It's a collision of cryptic, philosophical, science-fictional ideas that arrive at no single clear conclusion.

This is where the physics of his universe completely break down.

We are moving into 1969 with a novel called Ubik.

And I have to admit, wrapping my head around this one was a challenge.

Ubik is universally cited as one of Dick's absolute undeniable masterpieces, but it is notoriously disorienting.

The premise is wild.

The characters in this world begin to notice that physical objects are inexplicably regressing.

But he weaponizes entropy.

Right.