17 Comments

Most of my best ideas happen unknowingly. Will listen later today!

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That's some sage buddhist wisdom right there!

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Magical insights

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Enjoyed the podcast! I appreciate your instinct in maintaining a human connection while texting “face-to-face” with your cleaning gal (I have to communicate thru writing or other alt methods w my nonverbal son so that was very familiar and right!). I also have to say the posthumous art discussion made me think of Natalie Cole’s duet with her father on “Unforgettable” which I loved back in the day- so I guess I’m all for present & future creatives finding ways of reviving artists so we can connect with them in new ways.

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Thank you, Robin! Appreciate you telling me about your nonverbal son. I honestly wasn't sure what the right thing to do was, so it's good to know that my instincts and heart were in the right place. Also, thank you for mentioned "Unforgettable”! One of my favorite duets!

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Cool, I accidentally nailed it, just like Bill Murray in The Man Who Knew Too Little: a movie everyone likes and remembers.

Thanks for the terrific shoutout in the episode! ❤️ I thought the discussion was funny and insightful. The Situation Normal podcast goes right to the top of my queue.

I sometimes forget that my favorite novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, was published posthumously, but it was Toole's intention to be published, so I don't get the same dreaded feeling of "Would the author have approved of this?" that I do for a lot of other posthumous work.

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I LOVE everything about this comment! And I think you're right, the artist's intent, if we can know it, goes a long way toward resolving the posthumous issue, at least for me. What strikes me funny about Now and Then, and we sorta touched on it with the pod but didn't go deep there, is that we don't know Lennon's intent. All the reporting I've seen is that Yoko and his son and all the Beatles say that's what we would've wanted. But um, you know, he was a solo act when he wrote it. My feeling is I need a little more than people close to him saying that's what he would've wanted.

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Agreed. Especially when the people close to him have financial motives to greenlight production.

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I know about Dave and don't have an Alexa.

Birgit had a sex change and is now Bernie.

Technology makes us think it's serving us, but really we are being trained to feed it electricity and information and to pray to the God of the Internet when technology doesn't give us what we ask for.

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I feel like everything here is true, except for the surgery. I have a question there. Does Kaiser offer gender reassignment surgery? That feels like something that’s beyond my HMO.

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They now do provide transgender surgery.

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I’m glad to hear it.

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If I had to pick one person to be Skynet, it would probably be John Lennon (minus the history of domestic abuse).

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That sorta feels like an attribute Skynet would want to incorporate into its anti-human agenda.

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I reacted to the song. The AI aspect makes you think what if…I wrote about Now and then but didn’t even think of AI, however this makes sense. Reinventing posthumously. Does it work?

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Michael, I enjoy your podcast - it provides a deeper dive into your written piece, quite nicely. The good news is that you’re not paranoid; the bad news is that, yes, Alexa is trying to kill you.

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We boss of technology; we use it, but the unconscious shall be used by it, use tech to have more energy poured into what make us human, Imagination, loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity, to reach the stars and to be ok with impermanence and not knowing. No matter how much tech is there; life will always be a mystery and it is also our humanity that appreciates this and shall bring us into tears and waves of joy that the robot will never understand even if they try like in the Kubrick film Ai. To love, to truly connect, to build…. Hmmmmm I love being human and our divinity is so far beyond what technology can even touch ❤️

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