hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the
Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number
158.
When we can find a pattern, recognize a trend, or predict a
path forward, human beings collectively and individually
tend to default to 1 of 3 responses and
or reactions to that pattern, to that
trend, or to that path forward. We
fight, we flee, we freeze.
Societies, cultures, institutions and organizations behave in the same way
as individual people, except they do it at
scale. And ever since the Post World War II promises
of political, cultural and social advancement have proven to be
so much smoke and mirrors in the early 21st century.
We in the west have resisted the advancements that we have
received and we have fled ignominiously into
entertainment and hedonistic whimsy. Or we have
encased ourselves willingly and into inaction,
indecision and stasis.
But none of these reactions of flight,
freezing or freeing are
happening in a vacuum, and the ways in which societies, cultures, institutions and
organizations attempt to manage their reputation, resources
and reactions is rarely as opaque as
they believe it is. Which brings us to our
author today. Today on the show
solo episode, we will be introducing the author,
exploring some of the dominant themes, and expressing
some of the thoughts I have on one of these seminal science fiction
novels of the mid to late 20th
century. It is a book that predicted
with dreary certainty the world we in the
west currently inhabit, and continues to
predict with dreary certainty the technological and social
world we are about to inhabit. Just about five minutes
from now, the basis for
the movie blade runner from 1982,
we will be introducing and discussing Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip
K. Dick Leaders
we get the world we want either through action or inaction.
Either path is a choice and no choices can be made
without consequences.
So as usual, we will be summarizing
some of the themes that we are going to be
exploring here and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? We
will not be reading directly from the book. Instead, what we're going to
be doing is we're going to be talking about specific
chapters and areas and sort of a broad summary because this book is
still under copyright and we do respect copyright here on
this show. So when you open up new
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, you are introduced
to a world that is ashy,
a world that is covered in gray dust, a
world that is declining, an earth that is declining as
a result of a third world war
that was indeed nuclear. Chapter one opens
up with us being introduced to a man named Rick
Deckard, played in the movie by Harrison
Ford. Now, Rick Deckard is a bounty
hunter. He's an independent contractor hired by the police
to, to hunt down and to quote,
unquote, retire androids that have escaped from
the Martian colonies and returned
to Earth where it is illegal for an Android to be.
We're introduced to his wife, Iran, and I did say
Iran I R A N. And his wife is
struggling with some mental health problems,
depression, anxiety. And she
finds safety by grabbing the handles of and by
engaging with something called an empathy box and
engaging with the religion of mercerism.
More on that later. Rick also
has a sheep. Now, the
sheep is part of the setup of the book and
the sheep is not a live sheep. It's an electric sheep,
which, you know, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? That's sort
of where the title really kicks off. And so we open up
the book, we open up the story, and nothing much happens
in the first couple of chapters but this. Then Rick is on his way to
work and he is seeking to figure
out how to get a live animal because
everything is floating in ash on the Earth.
Everything is denuded. As a matter of fact, one of
the things that many of the characters point out in doandroids Dream of
Electric Sheep is that, no, all the human
beings basically that could leave, could emigrate from Earth have already
emigrated to go to other places like Mars or other
interstellar settlements. And all the folks that
are left on the Earth are living in the remains, living in the
rubble of what was once a great society,
particularly what was once a great city in known as
San Francisco. By the way, when I say that there are no live animals,
there's a whole running piece
inside of of the book that
is really focused on the value of a.
Of a live animal. And there is a
magazine and this is going to come back, come back to haunt us a little
bit later on in the book. A catalog actually called
Sydney's. And Sydney's catalog is a catalog that
prices live animals. This is
going to come back later on when Rick Deckard
runs into Rachel Rosin
with some interesting consequences
that will come about from that.
Now that we've laid out some of the opening themes, some of the initial
themes that are in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
by Philip K. Dick, let's take a look at the literary life
of of Philip K. Dick. From his
Wikipedia article and a few interviews, we were able to glean
numerous details about the man's life, both directly
from his mouth and from things that other people
wrote about him. Philip Kindred
Dick was born December 16, 1928 and died
March 2, 1982. He was an American
science fiction writer and novelist. A
prolific yet troubled creative, he wrote 44 novels and about
121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction
magazines during his lifetime. As a matter of fact,
Philip K. Dick struggled as a science fiction
writer until
Duandro's Dream of Electric Sheep really took off, as well as
probably his most notable notable book,
which was turned into an Amazon, an Amazon studio streaming
show a few years ago, the man in the High
Castle. His fiction explored very
various and varied philosophical and social questions
such as the nature of reality, the nature of perception, what
exactly is human nature and identity. And his
stories commonly featured characters struggling against against elements
that they could not understand and had trouble identifying, such
as alternate realities, illusory environments,
monopolistic corporations, and even monopolistic governments,
drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and
most interestingly, altered states of
consciousness. Philip
K. Dick was primarily raised by his mother after a vicious
divorce where his mother refused to move
basically across the country. Well, not really across the country, but from one state to
another state with his father, who by the
way, his father worked as a writer for the U.S. department of
Agriculture. I am firm in my
belief that the process of the divorce and the way in which
he was raised by his mother, first in Washington D.C. and then later on in
San Francisco, deeply impacted psychologically,
the young Philip K. Dick. Matter of fact, it affected
him, impacted him. Infected is probably a good term. Impacted
him so deeply psychologically that he
was unable to really be effective in school.
Particularly during a mid century time when conformity in
school was thought to be the highest honor that you
could possibly have as a student. A
genuine king in his own mind. Dick dropped out of
college because it bored him. He took a lot of classes, he did a lot
of things, but he never landed on a major and he never received
a degree from the University of California, Berkeley. At the
time, by the way, UC Berkeley hadn't yet become a
haven for hippie dumb and progressive and
later on, Marxist thought. By the way,
the reason he dropped out of college, the reason that was
stated according to his third wife Anne's memoir about him,
the reason that he dropped out was because of ongoing anxiety
problems. And I tend to believe that that was probably true.
And also pointed out that Dick really didn't want to be
involved with or engaged around mandatory
ROTC training. As a matter of fact, when you look at
Philip K. Dick and you look at George Orwell, both of
their relationships to power influenced later on
and hierarchy influenced later on their relationships and
how they wrote about the relationships between individuals and
a hierarchy. A man driven by confusion,
driven by anger and perplexity at the world and his place in it,
and a man seeking answers to questions in all the wrong places.
Philip K. Dick was a complicated individual who
did not have an easy life. He also
experimented and dabbled in drugs, as did many people of his generations
of his generation. But he came to significantly different conclusions
about that drug use and about the results of that
dabbling. Science fiction was an
outlet for Philip K. Dick. It was a way for him to express
all of the ideas and thoughts, thoughts and feelings
that he could not successfully express to others
and also gave him away, quite frankly, to be weird
fellow. K. Dick was not Robert Heinlein, although Robert
Heinlein was, was a friend of his. He was not
Charles Gibson. He was also not Isaac Asimov or Ray
Bradbury. Those guys were at least a
generation older than him. Philip K. Dick was part of a
new generation of science fiction writers who were
utilizing science fiction in order to work out
therapeutically their own psychoses and of
course, to project their own ideas of a new world
and new men on to readers
both now and readers that would read them later on
in the future.
Back to our analysis of the book, back to Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K.
Dick. So we pick up
in chapter three of the book
and Rick Deckard goes to the, the
San Francisco police station. Now it's a
newly built police station in a different part of town and,
and it's called the hall of justice on Lombard Street.
And when he arrives, he is informed in
no uncertain terms that
a new unit of Android has been released
called the Nexus 6 brain unit or the Nexus
6 Android. And the Nexus 6 Android is, is,
is, is supposed to be designed so that it can be
unidentifiable, so that it can be,
it can be indistinguishable from human
beings. He finds out that a colleague of his
is in the hospital from having killed or retired
one of these Nexus 6 robots, sorry,
androids, and that there are something like six
more of them floating around the earth
somewhere. He's also ordered by his
boss, a Mr. A Mr. Bryant,
to, to go out to the. Go out to
the, the, The Rosen Corporation. And the Rosen
Corporation is an organization or it's the organization
that creates the, and, and makes the
Nexus 6 robots. As a matter of fact, they make all of the Nexus 6
here saying robots, Nexus 6 androids that are on the
Earth. And whenever an Android escapes, it is the
responsibility of the manufacturer to make sure that that
Android is brought back. They of course,
cannot do this without the help of the police, and the police cannot do this
without the help of the bounty hunters. And thus, that is the virtuous circle.
Rick Deckard is equipped with something called a Voight Conf
Test. V O I G T K A M
Pff. And the Voight Komp test measures
the level of empathy that a human has versus an Android,
or the level of empathy or empathetic responses that
an object has, and then identifies the difference between
the empathetic responses of an Android versus the empathetic responses of
a human being. Now, primarily this is done
through questioning individuals or
questioning androids and measuring their,
their biologic and their mechanical
responses to the. To the questions. Because
without being able to do that, the Nexus 6 Androids
can effectively pass for human.
Deckard goes to the Rosin Corporation and
he administers the Voight Conf test to a
woman named Rachel Rosin. And it is
revealed through the failure
of Rachel Rosin to pass the empathy test
that the Rosin association of the Rosin Corporation
has indeed created a an
Android. And Rachel Rosin is one of the
Nexus 6 androids. Not the one that has escaped
from the Martian colonies, but one that was created
in order to live here on Earth. Now, of course, it is
illegal for androids to live on Earth in
the Earth of Do Androids dream of electric Sheep?
And this sets up Rick Deckard as
our not only as our protagonist, but also as our
also gives him motivation for going out and pursuing,
getting the bounty by killing
these or retiring these Nexus 6
androids. But of course, just like everything
else, Rick Deckard cannot do this
act successfully alone.
He who fights with monsters might take
care, lest he thereby become a monster. And if
you gaze for long into an abyss, the
abyss gazes also into you.
Frederick Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy
of the Future, 1886.
When we think about Philip K. Dick and when we think about some of the
themes in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I think of that line from Beyond
Good and Evil. Now what we've covered Nietzsche on this podcast,
we've talked about Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And as
you know, if you listen to that episode way back in season one,
I am not a big fan of Frederick Nietzsche. I. I think that he played
the classic Two lies and a truth.
And he did it a lot with folks. And as a philosopher,
he left something to be desired.
However, his words have impacted other folks and
they have caused people to think about reality differently.
And of course, the people that he influenced the most were people who were
in ways of personality and temperament and probably even
intellect, most like him. And these are people who are looking
for and looking at and looking down
the barrel of post World War II
nihilism. We kind of
stumbled across this a little bit when we were discussing George Orwell in
1984 and we did
not cover on the podcast this year Aldous Huxley's Brave New World,
which is the other end of the spectrum on this. But both of those
novels and Brave New World is a little more science
fictiony than 1984 and a little
actually significantly better written. Both of
those, both those novels look at and view
future dystopias not
necessarily with. With glee, obviously, but
mostly with a sort of mute horror. But
it's a mute horror that goes along with or is accompanied by
a sense of the inability to act as if
events merely happen to a person.
They can do very little to respond.
Philip K. Dick was a drug user. And as a
drug user he was very much influenced by Aldous Huxley's writing, in
particular Aldous Huxley's writing and thoughts around
lsd. Now, Dick used
lsd, or maybe he didn't use lsd. There's,
there's a little bit of lack of clothes clarity around that. But I can
say that in an interview that he gave
before his death, he did admit that
he had seen people use drugs and that many of the
brightest minds of his generation had been consumed by drugs and
that drugs were indeed a bad deal.
However, Dick was also a free thinker and he had an FBI
file on him, most notoriously
for being associated with avowed communists and Marxists
as well as. Because one of the jobs that you could get as a
low paid or lowly paid science fiction writer, one of the only
jobs you could get in the middle part of the 20th century was working
with high school students and teaching them, of
course, influencing minds for the future.
But with all that being said, Dick didn't gloss over the negative effects of drug
use and their impact on. And this is where he was mostly
interested in drug use, their impact on the nature of belief.
Philip K. Dick had some interesting views about the nature of reality and the nature
of transcendence and the nature of God, much of which
showed up into Android Stream of Electric Sheep. But
some of that also showed up in, in his book, the Three Stigmata
of Palmer Eldritch. And that was a book he wrote,
quote. I wrote that after reading a magazine article on
hallucinogenics by Aldous Huxley. Drugs have taken the lives
of some very, very dear friends of mine. Close quote.
He had a different view on drug use
than most free thinkers did back in the
1960s and 1970s. And one of the
key themes that is revealed in Duan Droid's dream of Electric sheep
is the idea of the nature of the differences in perceptions of
reality between people with organic brains, like
Dick, like you, like me, like anybody listening to this show
today, and objects that
embody the anthropomorphized reflections
of the human beings around them. Or another way of
saying, this is when we put on our objects the
things that we come up with, the perceptions of reality that we come up
with out of our own brain. And if those perceptions
are influenced through the use of hallucinogenics or
psychedelics, our nature and our
perception is going to then be
strange as we anthropomorphize our
objects forward. By the way,
just in case you think I'm crazy, the guy who founded Apple Computers,
one of the two guys, Steve Jobs, he was an avid
LSD user in the 60s before he founded
Apple Computers. And as a matter of fact, the logo of
Apple Computers, the apple, is taken
from the story of.
Of. Of a Turing, right, Alan Turing, who
during World War II came up with the idea
of artificial intelligence, but also came up with the idea
of a way to test whether or not a computer system was quote,
unquote intelligent. And Turing, of course, died
of suicide taking, if I remember
correctly, arsenic out of an
Apple. Hmm.
Back to the book, back to Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep? So we're going to pick up in
the middle part of the first part of
chapter 10. And this
picks up or this, this is right in the middle
of the retiring by Deckard of
several of the androids. As a matter of fact, this. This chapter picks up
right after he. He fails to retire.
And one of the Nexus 6 Androids named Luba
Luft, who is posing as an opera
singer and performer in.
In. In San Francisco, and he goes
to Luba and he administers the Void conf. Test,
she or the Android, it immediately
rejects the questions that are being submitted to
it in the course of the Void comp test, and then
calls an Android cop, another
Nexus 6 Android, to come and arrest
Rick. And when that arresting or when
that arrest Happens, Rick is taken to the Mission
street hall of justice building. And so what the. What the Nexus
and Nexus 6 Androids have done, which is really quite clever
actually, is they've created an entire separate
ecosystem for aping or
for pretending to be engaged in law enforcement in order
to fool bounty hunters. And this, this
fooling of bounty hunters has worked so well that they actually have a human
bounty hunter working for them underneath and taking the
orders from an Android as
his boss. And so this bounty hunter is named Phil Resch.
Phil Resch works under the Android. Garland does
not know that Garland is an Android. And when
Rick is then brought to this, the second police station
and is taken into Garland's office for question questioning, Phil
Resch comes in and states that he is going
to. He's going to
deliver a. A test
to. To. To Deckard. And the test that he is going
to deliver that Phil is going to deliver to Deckard because Phil
believes that Deckard is the. Is the.
Is the Android. That test is a. Is a little bit
of a different test than the Voight Kampf test, although it does measure
the same basic. The same basic
idea or the same basic tendencies around empathy.
Now when this test is. Is delivered,
and by the way, that's called the Benelli reflex arc test,
when this test is, is. Is delivered, or when Phil actually
goes to get the gear to deliver the test, Garland reveals to
Rick that he's really an Android. Rick asks Garland, does
Phil know? Garland says Phil doesn't. And then Rick
proceeds to retire Garland.
When he comes back, or when, when Phil comes back,
the, The, The. The
inter. The interaction right, between Rick and Phil
becomes. Oh my. It
becomes, it becomes
a little fraught. And by the way, I have that wrong. I just, I just
read in the, in the chapter, just looked at it, actually. Resh was the
one that fired at Garland and retired him. So I apologize
there. Let me correct that right up front. Anyway, so the interaction between
Phil, this is what I want to focus on. The interaction between the human Phil
and the human Rick now becomes fraught with
suspense, right? Because Rick had a thought,
and this is very, very interesting. He had a thought that maybe he was
crazy, right? Or that maybe he was an Android himself. Matter of
fact, when he went to retire Luba Luft, he was wondering if he had the
ability to retire an Android or if he was beginning to feel empathy
for the androids. Phil, on the other
hand, Phil Rash, the other bounty hunter, had. Has
already begun to move through to the other side of the
veil from where Rick is now
in the story, as a matter of fact, Phil and Rick
commiserate in the car. They talk about the Nexus
6 androids, they talk about the Bonelli test, they talk
about retiring. And you know, Rick
has his suspicions about Phil, Phil has his suspicions about Rick.
Rick and both of them have to decide
are they genuinely really human
or are they posing? And this creates a real
existential crisis for Rick that continues
to drive the remainder of his actions as a bounty hunter forward
in the book. Even drives his
interaction with Rachel Rosin, his purchase
of another animal from Sydney's
catalog. And finally the retiring
of Roy Batty in
a abandoned and dilapidated apartment building
later on in the story. This
idea that, that,
that k. That that Philip K. Dick introduces in this
story, this idea that two human beings would struggle
to find the humanity with each other
in themselves because their
recognition of that is being blocked by
their concerns about androids. And their level of
empathy is part of their. That theme
that Dick often explored in his book
around, well around the
challenges of seeing through illusory
environments, dealing with monopolistic corporations like the
ones that created the Nexus 6 androids. And the nature
and even the androids questioned this with
Deckard and Phil. The nature of who
works for and enforces the rules of
authoritarian government.
One of the more compelling questions that is
that is proposed in, in Philip K.
Dick's book do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? One of the more
compelling questions that's proposed is a, is a question
that is actually framed in our time better
by the character from the movie
Avengers, Age of Ultron. The, the. The
robot, in essence the Android that is
the creation of Jarvis, a
combination of Jarvis and Tony Stark's Iron man
armor. The character Ultron in the movie
Ultron asks a question or makes an
observation actually after utilizing his
AI, his large language model driven brain
to examine all the inputs that Tony Stark has placed on him.
And Ultron makes this observation about the Avengers. He says, and I
quote, you want to protect the world, but you don't want it to
change. This
is actually an important point because
Philip K. Dick wanted to change the world,
but he didn't. He didn't know what it was going to be
changing into. And there are many folks who have come after
Philip K. Dick who have
also experience this sense of and this,
the experience, the handcuffs of
stasis in the world. Peter Thiel points this out
not only in his book Zero to One, but he'll talk about it on any
podcast that he is invited on to. It's
this idea of believing that the future will be brighter,
but not taking any steps to making sure that the future will
actually be brighter, not taking any action. And there are several
themes in Doandroids Dream of Electric Sheep that we did not cover
today. On this, the introductory episode to the
book. We didn't cover how
Philip K. Dick looked at the future world as an
incredibly low trust society that was experiencing
decay, not just interpersonal decay, but decay
at, at a scale that could only be brought about
by a third world war. We didn't talk about
the aspects of sexual exploitation that are in the novel
as well. Philip K. Dick actually did a speech
one time talking about can there be sex between androids
and human beings. We didn't talk
about the phenomenon of quote unquote chicken heads. That's in the book. Individuals
who cannot escape the Earth and
are decaying in the dust of the nuclear war. And
it's impacting their brains, it's lowering their IQs, it's
impacting how they think. And they can't escape, they can't get away, they
can't go to Mars, they can't go to interstellar colonies, they can only
remain on a dying Earth. And of course, we
did not touch on mercerism, an entire
religion designed to, to engage in
and create empathy with empathy boxes. But
then there's a whole reveal at the end of the novel
between Buster Friendly and Amanda about the nature of
mercerism that the Nexus, Nexus 6 robots believe
will destroy that belief and will allow human
beings or will force human beings to accept
androids as well
human. You want to protect the
world, but you don't want it to change.
That's key because the materialistic perspective we are confronted with
in New Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a logical
outgrowth of the end of evolutionary theories of human development.
The same evolutionary theories that are driving much of our.
And we're going to talk about this in the next section. Much of our
deployment of robotics and of
LLMs that we are now on the cusp of taking
to scale in the very near future.
However, this all comes with a challenge that we can't seem to
philosophically name, or at least we can't articulate
it, but we can philosophically name it and we have a sense of
disquiet around it. The challenge is that if our objects treat us as gods
because we created them, how long will it be before our objects
perceive that we only have feet of clay?
In a speech in 1972, Philip Dick talked
about this. He said that many of our drives originate from the subconscious as human
beings. And that subconscious controls us and makes us predictable.
But according to Dick, we all have attributes of an Android.
As he later goes on to say, androidization, which is an
interesting word, requires quote unquote predictability.
And if our subconscious leads us to predictability, then it is something that is completely
out of our control, meaning the merging of ourselves and our technology
is unavoidable. Dick does not believe that to be an
Android has any relation to physical attributes. He talked about this in his speech in
1972. Instead he said being an
Android is to be pounded down, to be manipulated without consistent
consent. And that is something
that lies at the core of the androids problem.
The, the core of Roy Batty's problem, the core of Luba
Luff's problem, even the core of, of Rachel Rosin's problem.
In the novel,
Dick believed that the world can only be made new by
resisting the pull towards a denuded, flat and hedonistic
worldview, while at the same time
resisting the pull in the opposite direction towards a worldview
that separates our objects from ourselves and looks
at them and views them and treats them as mere,
well, things
which way? Future
Western man,
foreign.
So as we round the corner to our ending here of our
show today, our introduction to our episode today,
which is an introduction to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep By Philip K. Dick
and I would encourage you to go out and, and get a copy of this
novel. You can find it pretty much anywhere
or you can find it in a collection of, of novels.
I have, I have my copy in a collection called
Counterfeit Unrealities that was
published by oh gosh, Science Fiction
Printing in May of 2022. And there
are three books in, in this, in this, in this novel or
in this, in this collection. The three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
obviously do Androids, Juvenile sheep. Actually there's four. So the
stigmata Android Drew Electric Sheep which we're focused on today, Ubik
and a scanner darkling go out and pick up a
copy of that collection today.
So solutions to problems, right?
Philip K. Dick proposes several different problems that I think
have already started showing up in the world. Probably started showing up 25 years
ago with the beginnings of the proto
beginnings of social media and were probably,
probably going to show up anyway with the advent of the commercial
Internet being turned on in 1989.
These problems that Philip K. Dick has proposed
and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep we're about to be confronted with
and I don't think we have any really Good answers for any of these problems.
As a matter of fact, I'm not even quite sure we have a bunch of
clarity on what the problems are that we are really going to
face. So here's one
problem we're about to be confronted with.
Embodied objects and what that actually means in
the world. Sure, we've had objects in the
world before. I mean, look around your, your, your room or look around
your car if you're driving. Right now in our
time, the best example of artificial intelligence and the best
example of an artificially intelligent driven robot
is a Tesla vehicle. But they're about
to get a lot more humanoid looking. And we're
already seeing the initial proposals for robot
companions showing up in the marketplace, LLM driven autonomous
robots to work in our factories and to provide security from, for our homes
and our businesses. And of course we are seeing the
rise of, and the proposals for humanoid
slaves to do the work that we don't want to do.
Whether that work is physical,
psychological, and of course we're going to try to push
the boundaries to having them, or demanding that they do that
work in the spiritual and psychological realm as
well. These proposals are being resisted. And
this is another next level problem. The
resistance to these sorts of proposals and these
proposals are being resisted in all forms primarily because
the utility of such proposals really does nothing to address
that genuine real problems humans have, particularly humans in the
west, and of course human specifically in America, but
humans globally. And the problems that
we have are quite frankly the ones that are generated by too much
leisure, too much boredom and too much
hedonism. When you have everything that you
want at your fingertips and all your material desires are
fulfilled, another object to fulfill material
desires is probably not the solution to
your problem. Hmm.
And that's just a couple of problems we will be
confronted by in the next 10 to 15
years. Look, the way forward is neither
going to be easy, nor is it going to be entirely predictable, other
than predictable in the fact that human beings will continue to perform in ways
that feed their most base appetites.
And of course, other human beings will resist such appeals,
and the vast majority of human beings will be confused by the question
and will slowly and painfully adapt.
But one thing is for sure. Next 10 to 15 years
that Philip K. Dick predicted will be neither a
dystopia nor, nor will it be a utopia.
It will probably be closer to something like,
well, just another advancement
in your normal life.
And, well, that's it
for me.