I, HATE, I, ROBOT,

[00:00] The most prolific writer of science fiction is Isaac Asimov. Now, usually when I write a sentence like that, I'll throw in some weasel words like one of the most prolific, mostly so that pedants can't correct me in the comments, but in this I feel that it is just literally true. Wikipedia has five separate pages

[00:16] just listing Asimov's bibliography. In his own words, over a space of 40 years, I published an average of 1000 words a day. Over the space of the second 20 years, I published an average of 1,700 words a day. Granted, most of his work is nonfiction,

[00:32] but he still wrote enough fiction that there's actually a fair bit of scholarly disagreement over how to count it. The number I've seen for novels and short stories is around 400. 400. He wrote so much he even wrote books about how he had written so much. And obviously it's not

[00:49] just that he wrote a lot. It's that he wrote some of the most foundational pieces of science fiction ever. But you'd think with over 400 science fiction stories, and with how popular science fiction

[01:01] is at the box office, that there'd be like 100 or 50 or 25 or even 10 adaptations of Asimov's work. But no, there are only eight. There would be nine, but fantastic voyage doesn't count.

[01:15] It's often mistaken as an Asimov book because the novel came out before the movie, but actually the script for the film was written first and then they hired Asimov to write the novelization. He managed to get the book out onto the shelves six months before the film came out because he's just

[01:29] that fast of a god damn writer. So today I want to talk about the 2004 quote-unquote

[02:08] adaptation of iRobot starring Will Smith and nothing else. This video is only going to be about the 2004 quote-unquote adaptation of iRobot starring Will Smith. Wait, why do I keep putting the word adaptation

[02:20] in quote? The reason I wanted to talk about this movie is not just to harp on a more or less forgotten blockbuster from a bygone era because it is fun, but because last year Apple released a big adaptation of foundation. Asimov's biggest series, and before talking about that I wanted the

[02:40] context of some other times people have adapted his work, which is what we're doing here, but we're only going to talk about iRobot. I wouldn't read and watch every Asimov adaptation in existence no

[02:53] matter how obscure, charting 60 years of failed or underfunded productions just as the prelude for a different video, that would be insane. There is an entire field of film criticism centered on

[03:05] categorizing the different kinds of adaptations, but unfortunately all of that scholarship is compromised because all of them will need to put the 2004 air quotes adaptation of iRobot in its own special category because the making of this movie is real weird. So back in the 90s, screenwriter Jeff

[03:25] Inter wrote a completely unrelated screenplay called HardWired. The movie was an agatha Christie's style murder mystery where the suspects were all robots or other kinds of artificial intelligence. An inoption fame to film the Nile. There was a robot called Sunny, a super computer called Vicki,

[03:42] and the hologram of Dr. Lanning, the man who had been killed. It was originally written more like a stage play, taking place entirely on one floor of a building, and with FBI agent Detective Del Spooner tasked with figuring out which of the robots killed Lanning and how. It's like a sci-fi knives out.

[03:57] The script was first acquired by Disney, where it entered a period of development hell and got rewritten several times, with one iteration taking place on a space station in an entire team of space marines taking on the role of the detective from the original script. When that version of

[04:10] the movie fell through, Fox became interested in the idea, and Vinter expanded the scope of the movie out from the original stage play like murder mystery to a big budget studio film, broadening the scope of the story out to an entire metropolis and bringing back the central detective character.

[04:24] As soon after that, Fox acquired the rights to Isaac Asimov's short story collection, iRobot. Now we're saying to themselves, how do we make money off of this thing that we just got? I know. Why don't we get poor Jeff Vinter to rewrite his screenplay again so that it can pass

[04:37] as an Asimov adaptation? So poor Jeff Vinter, who had rewritten this thing like 11 times by now, went about making some Asimov references in the new screenplay. The changes include renaming the female main character. They renamed the company that made the robots to US robotics.

[04:54] They inserted the three laws of robotics into the plot, and in Vinter's own words, that's pretty much it. So yeah, they basically just slapped some Asimov paint onto an old script that'd been kicking around for a decade. This is why in the credits for this movie, it doesn't say based on iRobot, it says

[05:10] suggested by Isaac Asimov's book. Suggested by. Thanks for the suggestion Isaac. So they go about making the movie, and there's a great deal of debate over how big of an action

[05:22] picture it should be. Which was solved once Will Smith came on board the project. There's a scene where Sunny either robot is hiding in a field of other robots,

[05:36] while the main characters are looking for him, and as Vinter said, when I wrote that in the script, I think Sunny the robot was hiding among 50 robots. This scene was always a point of contention. Can we afford this scene? Should this scene be in the film?

[05:51] I think in the finished screenplay, there are actually a thousand robots in that scene. So after struggling and fighting for that scene for quite a number of years, when Will Smith came on, the robot count went up from 50 to 1000. That was the Will Smith effect.

[06:08] With Will Smith on board, Fox hired a second screenwriter at Kiva Goldsmith to bring the film further in line with a Will Smith event film, which basically meant increasing the amount of action, upping the stakes from simply solving a mystery to saving the world, and making Spooner sound more

[06:22] like Will Smith. So the film took a pretty long road to its final form, and you can really see all of the different elements in competition with one another. Vinter's original murder mystery script,

[06:35] competing with Asimov's three laws of robotics, competing with Will Smith's persona and Goldsmith's action rewrite. They're all pulling out one another for the entire runtime. So wait a second, what does this movie about again? This is a two front war. It's a two front war, and it's a war

[06:52] we're going to win on both fronts. Even though it was originally written in the 90s, the final cut of iRobot is an extremely post 9-11 kind of movie. There's Patriot Act themes. The main character is extremely paranoid, and also Shyla Buffas here. Dr. Alfred Lanning is the inventor of robots,

[07:11] and the three laws of robotics that make them safe to use. One day, he seemingly commits suicide, and Detective Del Spooner is called in to investigate. He thinks that it wasn't a suicide, but that a robot committed the crime. Spooner has an irrational prejudice against robots,

[07:25] thanks to a traumatic incident in his past. A robot saved his life rather than a young child who was also in danger, because it had calculated that there was a better chance it could save Spooner. Spooner criticizes robots for lacking heart. So Spooner immediately assumes a robot is the culprit,

[07:39] and as he's investigating the crime scenes, a robot named Sunny tries to escape. They give chase, capture it, and try to interrogate it. But no one else believes a robot could have committed the crimes because of the three laws. Oh, and by the way, the three laws are as follows. The first law

[07:52] states that a robot cannot harm a human being, or through an action, allow a human to come to harm. The second law states that a robot must obey human commands unless it conflicts with the first law. So a human can't tell a robot to hurt another human. And the third law states that a robot

[08:07] must try to preserve itself unless it conflicts with the first and second law. So if a human is in danger, the robot has to sacrifice itself to save the human, and if a human orders it to destroy itself, the robot has to do that as well. A robot cannot harm a human being, the first law of robotics.

[08:23] Now despite this seemingly airtight logic that makes robots safe to use, a robot tries to kill Will Smith every 10 minutes in this movie. But frustratingly, no one else is ever around to witness it.

[08:35] He has like this big battle with robots in an underground tunnel which somehow leaves zero evidence of what happened. Now eventually Spooner learns that there is a robot which has a unique

[08:56] interpretation of the three laws. Rather than just looking at the first law in regards to a single human life, the supercomputer Vicki has interpreted it as saying that she is responsible for protecting all of humanity. Dr. Alf realized that all of this was happening but couldn't do anything about it

[09:33] because Vicki wouldn't let him, so he instead arranged for Sonny to kill him with the very vague hope that Spooner, a guy he'd never met before, would figure it all out and save today. The movie is a science fiction mystery action film, but it really only succeeds on the action front. In becoming a bog

[09:50] standard American action movie, the script has to basically kneecap anything interesting about the mystery or the science fiction. In an interview Jeff Inter talks about how making the film more of a Hollywood movie meant changing the detective from the more intellectual kind of Sherlock Holmes-esque

[10:06] character that he had originally had in mind to more of a traditional cop and boy can you feel that? Del Spooner isn't just less intellectual, he is anti-intellectual. You could swap this character out

[10:19] with any police officer protagonist in any cop movie of the last 40 years. He's got the attitude of a badass hero cop that knows better than all these suits and scientists. He knows how to shoot a gun, not like those flimsy women. It's actually kind of crazy how much more casually

[10:41] misogynistic movies from even a decade ago are. Spooner's most unique characteristic is his rejection

[10:55] of all futuristic technology. He's introduced to us wearing converse shoes listening to old CDs and later driving a gas powered motorcycle in a world where everyone has an electric car. And since technology turns out to be the bad guy of this movie, all of his skepticism is rewarded. That he

[11:10] doesn't rely on tech is what communicates to the audience that he's a strong masculine man. This makes for a typical character in a 2004 action movie, but it's a self sabotaging choice for an asthma of adaptation. A protagonist in an asthma story is typically defined by their cleverness.

[11:33] And most of the stories, especially the robot stories, are puzzles that the reader gets to solve alongside the characters. They are puzzles that are carefully set up and examined with an extreme level of detail. Here's an example. Remember that scene I mentioned earlier where Sonny is hiding in a field of

[11:48] a thousand robots. So this scene is partially inspired by the short stories in a robot called Little Lost Robot. The footage I'm drawing from is from the first adaptation of asthma's work, the 1962 episode from the short-lived British science fiction anthology series called Out of

[12:03] this World. There are only 13 episodes of the show, each of which were adaptations of popular science fiction authors. And the asthma of episode is the only one that still survives. Apparently a common practice of British broadcasters at the time was to wipe the tapes after the show's aired. So very few

[12:17] episodes from this time still exist. You gotta hand it to the brits for being consistent and erasing their own culture as much as they did everyone else's. So in this story a team of scientists have to figure out which of 63 identical robots had a slight adjustment to its programming. So the

[12:31] problem arose when a worker on an asteroid mine told a robot to get lost. So the robot took this as a literal command. It got lost by hiding itself in a crowd of other robots. Now normally that

[12:49] wouldn't be the damage of a problem, but it's a problem in this situation because this robot has a different version of the first law. They still can't harm a human being but they can now

[13:01] allow a human being to be harmed. It is a small modification. So it's up to the protagonist, Susan Calvin, to design a series of tests that will reveal which of the robots has the modified

[13:14] laws. How do you figure out a robot has the ability to let the human being die through in action without actually hurting a human being? Especially when that robot is actively trying to hide from you. It's a great little setup. And what I love about the story is how thoroughly asthma of is with the logic

[13:29] of the three laws. Not to go through every single plot point but let's just list a bunch of the ways that Susan Calvin tries to solve this problem. First she interrogates all of the robots with a series of questions about their work and receives identical responses from each of them. This tells her that

[13:42] the modified robot is willing to lie. She then tries testing the robot's responses when a human being is in danger. She sets up a situation where from the robot's perspective it looks like a human being is about to be crushed by a falling weight when in reality he's perfectly safe. She wants to see if

[13:56] the robots will try and intervene and again all 63 react identically. The modified robot has the ability to not react to allow the human to come to harm by inaction but it can also reason that doing so would reveal itself so it does as the other robots do. Noticing that, Dr. Calvin runs the

[14:10] experiment again but this time they put cables between the robots and the humans who is in danger. They then lie to the robot saying that touching the cables will cause their own deaths. After theoretically the normal robot will touch the cable while trying to save the human but the modified

[14:23] robot will opt for self preservation since it doesn't have to intervene. But when they run the experiment all 63 robots remain motionless. Dr. Calvin then interviews all of the robots again to try and figure out what happened in the last test and all of the robots say that they were aware that trying

[14:37] to save the human would have been futile because of the cables and if they had tried to save this one human they would have surely been destroyed and therefore incapable of saving any other future human lives. This line of logic is something that the modified robot has convinced them all of in between tests.

[14:51] I won't spoil the ending but I can get the point that the back and forth of the intellectual game is riveting for this kind of story. It's fun to figure out the logic and have it all piece together. In the movie though? Since the third law for self preservation is trumped by

[15:22] the second law of obedience, Spooner bets that the normal robots will stand in place as he destroys them. So he starts executing them one by one but then he sees sunny flinch way back in the background. It makes no sense because sunny is far from danger and then any pretence that there's a battle of

[15:37] ideas here is over. It's time for some action baby. Look at this fistfight. Get him will! Now I decided to meticulously go through this short story to illustrate the depths of potential

[15:53] that exist in Asma's work for an adaptation to explore and also to show the kind of flippant manner that this movie deals with his work. In this video that is about the 2004 adaptation of iRobot and nothing else starting now. And rather than actually engaging with any of his ideas, they just kind of

[16:07] blitz through them. They nod towards different stories without doing the kind of work to really make them interesting. And nowhere is that more evident than in the climax of this movie and with what Asma called the Frankenstein Complex in stories about robots. That term was actually coined by

[16:23] Asma in the short story we were just talking about to refer to how the fictional public in his stories were fearful that robots would rise up and destroy or dominate them. Just as Frankenstein's monster tries to destroy his creator, we worry that robots will try to destroy their creators.

[16:54] But Asma felt that the tendency of robot stories to veer directly into Frankenstein plotlines did a disservice to the genre. That there was so much more that was interesting about the concept of robots than the simple fear that they might destroy mankind. His stories are often about the moral,

[17:10] political, social, and economic effects of robots rather than merely using robots to generate action scenes. The word robot comes into English from the Czech play Rossum's Universal Robots in 1920. But the

[17:22] word robot in Czech meant forced labor. In central Europe a certain kind of surf was a robot. And it's the idea of robots as forced labor that is Asma's real focus in his series. He's asking what if we had

[17:34] something that could do all of the labor we need without it being unethical to force them to do it? What are the societal implications of that? The fear that robots could take over is sometimes present, but the stories rarely actually delve into that. Or when they do, they do it in an interesting way.

[17:50] So for instance, one of the other short stories in iRobot that the movie iRobot references is The Evitable Conflict. In this story, it's the year 2052 and the world has been divided into four geographical regions, each of which has a supercomputer that manages its economy. In the story,

[18:06] the man who's elected to be the world coordinator has noticed that the machines have started to make small errors that have economically harmed certain groups. When he investigates this, he learns that the people associated with anti-machine groups are the main victims of these actions. Eventually,

[18:20] he realizes that the machines aren't making mistakes. They are deliberately sabotaging people opposed to robots because they have come to recognize that humans need robots in order to be peaceful and prosperous.

[18:32] So over the course of many years, they've come to generalize the first law of robotics so that instead of it being about protecting any single human, their true task is to help humanity on the whole. Even if that means a few humans are harmed by their actions, it's what Vicki is talking about,

[18:47] except, you know, they're not just jumping to robot police state. The kind of control they are exerting is subtle and it's scarier. It feels prescient of today's algorithms that govern so much of what we think and feel. And I think that's an idea that's just so much more compelling than having robots,

[19:03] you know, just attack. As I was saying about iRobot in this video that is only about the movie

[19:16] iRobot and nothing else, we've got a movie that is half action, half science fiction, and half murder mystery. And so far, it's pretty content to toss the science fiction ideas out the window in favor of big budget action scenes. But what about the murder mystery part? Maybe if there's a mystery

[19:31] that was compelling or interestingly told, there'd still be a worthwhile movie here to come back to. But as you can probably guess, the mystery is also pretty bare bones. I'm sure the original Jeff Inter script made for a compelling story when it was a small scale puzzle where the characters could

[19:43] really consider all of the options, but once it becomes a Will Smith vehicle, the mystery solving part of this movie takes a backseat. Right from the start, Spuner is 100% convinced that a robot was behind the murder despite all evidence to the contrary, but because the movie depicts him as a standard

[19:57] American action protagonist, we kind of just know he's right. We've been conditioned by a million different movies to assume that this character is right and that he sees what everyone else is missing. So it's kind of a long trek from the beginning here to the final revelation since the audience is

[20:11] already basically at the right answer from the start. A robot did it. Like the only card the movie has to play is it's not this robot, it's this other robot. I imagine this would have been cleaner in the original script because from all evidence about it, that story is explicit from the start that

[20:27] a robot did it. And the mystery comes from investigating a handful of subjects that are known from the beginning. Here they try to lead us astray by making us think this human CEO is behind it all, but the audience doesn't fall for that. We know there's a Frankenstein robot hiding somewhere here,

[20:42] but the real problem with the mystery is the pacing because between each scene of investigation, we get a superfluous scene of action. It's almost like a second screenwriter came in and clicked add action scene whenever the characters learned something. Now, they actually could be the right

[20:56] combination of action and mystery to carry a movie like this, but because of the way the movie was written, the action scenes never pushed the story forward. The mystery was written first and in the action scenes were added into it and expanded. So whatever happens in the action scene has to get

[21:10] the characters back to where they were before the action scene started for the mystery to continue. They're detours. We don't spend any time talking about the aftermath of this house getting destroyed or all these explosions on the highway. It's just along with the previous mystery. It's really

[21:24] only at the end when it shifts into a full-blown action movie that the two elements finally cohere because we're headed in the same direction. The mystery also relies on some really stretched out clichés, like the guy who died left a copy of Hansel and Gretel in his room and Spooner picks up

[21:38] on it and literally all that is meant by it is for Spooner to follow the bread crumbs. That is like a placeholder for a clue, like something that you changed to something else on a

[21:56] second draft, but gets the absence of a clue. It's just like, oh follow the breadcuff, follow the clues. And it's a bit of a shame that this movie has a pretty half-hearted murder mystery plotline because if they wanted to get some inspiration on how to tell a murder mystery science fiction story,

[22:10] they could have read this guy named Isaac Asama. So iRobot is the first entry in the robot series, and while it is a collection of short stories, it was followed up by four novels, most of which are about Detective Elijah Bailey. These books are classic detective stories with a science fiction twist,

[22:26] and they were all extremely loosely adapted in the extremely low-budget, Directive VHS Interactive Movie Robots

[22:39] Yes, you heard that right. Interactive movie. The idea here is that at six points in the movie, Elijah will turn to the camera and tell the audience to pull a card from a deck that came with the video. Each card is a clue and you can draw from different decks to modulate the difficulty of the

[22:54] game. The video itself is only 45 minutes long and it ends on a cliffhanger right before the classic Sherlock-esque reveal of the truth, but it informs the audience that they have enough information to figure out the mystery. You should be able to name the suspect, spell out the motive,

[23:08] and describe the opportunity before time expires. Bailey out. In this series, Robots exist but they aren't distributed equally across society,

[23:20] and different populations feel very differently about them. So there's almost no robots on Earth since Earthmen are prejudiced against them while they are extremely common out on the Spacer worlds, which rely on robots for pretty much all of their labor. All of the mysteries in the books explore

[23:34] a flashpoint in the conflict between these two societies. The murder victim is always someone who might have changed the status quo between them and the murderer usually has some political motivation. The way Elijah solves each murder changes the relationship between Earth and the Spacer worlds and

[23:48] ultimately decides which will go on to populate the rest of the galaxy. The movie is sort of a big blend of all the novels in the series. The initial plot resembles the cave's seal since a taste place on Earth is about the tension between Earth and a Spacer embassy, and the murder victor

[24:02] is a Spacer scientist, and just like in that book, the first of the series, Elijah is teamed up with Deniel Oliver, a robot made to look identical to a human, and then goes about investigating the cakes. The most fun part about that book is that Elijah is super skeptical of Daniel the entire time,

[24:18] so they'll interview different suspects, but then every 20 pages, a chapter will end on a big cliff anger with Elijah accusing Daniel of lying to him, or not being a robot or being the murder himself. The interactive movie doesn't really have the time to capture that, and it's said

[24:31] folks is mostly on Elijah just interviewing different people, and most of these characters are drawn from the later novels in the series, which is what makes it different from caves of steel. And now that I can really follow the production with a budget of $2 and a dream for the fact that the most interesting thing about it is that it happens to be one of the first film roles for Deborah

[24:46] Joe Rupp, that's her in the spray-painted garbage can costume. Gotta start somewhere. Kodak Productions, but it doesn't make me wonder why no one has ever attempted to adapt caves of steel, or one of the later robot books. But yes, iRobot was the title that had the most

[25:02] audience recognition, but imagine if you call the movie iRobot and then adapted the story of caves of steel, that's a pretty great recipe for a great film. Cave of steel is a tightly written detective story where one of the main characters is a crime-solving robot. Like, come on!

[25:16] Had to screw that up. A part of the reason no one has ever attempted it, I think, is because, well, the Blade Runner already exists, but it's a shame because it's probably the one book from asthma's work that would be most easily adapted into a film, with the least number of changes

[25:30] needed. IRobot, on the other hand, the movie that this video is exclusively about feels like it only deals with mystery as a kind of obligation to the original script, when really it's just waiting to become a schlock action as quick as possible, and embodying the particular ethos of the most

[25:45] recognizable talent in the project, which is sort of a thing that keeps happening with asthma of adaptations. Yes, I'm going to talk about the bicentennial man. Now, are you kidding?

[26:04] Bicentennial man is a weird movie. Along with iRobot, it's the only other major Hollywood production of an asthma story, and while they could not be more different kinds of films, they are both answers

[26:17] to the same problem, and that problem is that asthma's writing kind of sucks. Okay, I couldn't help phrasing it like that, but what I mean is that he is more of an ideas guy. His characters are not typically three-dimensional people, you come to care about all that much, there's simply tools

[26:33] used to communicate the science behind whatever he's interested in. So there's just this giant gaping hole in his writing that a Hollywood production needs to fill somehow, or at least they feel they need to fill it. How do you get the audience to care about the characters? And the way each

[26:47] production decides to do this is extremely idiosyncratic. iRobot is dominated by Will Smith's persona. Bicentennial man is dominated by its two main creative voices, Rob Williams and Chris Columbus.

[26:59] Bicentennial man is really not a story that lends itself well to film, and the problems are right in the title. This is a movie that takes place over two centuries. It's just really hard to effectively convey that much time in a movie, and this one is plagued by time jumps every 15 minutes,

[27:14] making it hard to connect with any of the characters outside of Andrew, the robot played by Robin Williams, who is slowly becoming more and more human. They try to offset this by having one actress play two different characters, one of Andrew's first owners, and then later her granddaughter, but they do

[27:29] so with this very clumsy excuse. On top of just taking place over a long period of time, the story sort of has to cover a lot of thematic material too, meaning it kind of changes focus

[27:44] with every time jump. In the beginning, it's about Andrew exploring his creativity, then later it's about him looking for other robots like himself, then later it's a love story, then after that he's seeking to be recognized as a human by the world government. It's a lot.

[27:57] It's also not really a story that plays to the strengths of its two main creatives, even though they do their honest best. Chris Columbus movies are generally aimed at a younger audience and have a kind of twee sentimentality sprinkled all over them. He directed Mrs. Doubtfire Home Alone and

[28:12] The Goonies, and after this he's going to go and make the first two Harry Potter movies. There's an emphasis on whimsy and innocence in all of his films that he tries to recapture here, but all of that only really works when the audience cares deeply about the characters. When the audience doesn't,

[28:27] it comes out very awkwardly, especially when the music is begging you to cry. Meanwhile, I can't think of a role that makes less use of Rob and Williams than to have him play

[28:40] a robot. His entire screen persona is all about energy, motion, changing voices, laughter. Here, he stuck doing the opposite of all of that and it's worse to be restrained and formal for a full hour and a half of the runtime. And don't get me wrong, he's really good at playing a

[28:53] convincing robot. His motions are so smooth and controlled during this portion of the film that you're never doubting the authenticity of what's being done. It's just that he can bring something no one else can to the screen and it's not being used here. It's only towards the tail end that he

[29:08] becomes quote unquote human and can start being Rob and Williams. But in the words of Roger Ebert, Rob and Williams spends the first half of the film encased in a metallic robot suit and when he emerges, the script turns robotic instead. So you've got to really dry science fiction premise that

[29:23] is being pulled in two different directions by its director and lead actor, one of whom was trying to make it more emotional, the other who was trying to make it more fun, neither of which really works in a story like this. Science fiction is so rarely a genre that is allowed to stand alone in major

[29:37] productions. It always seems to need some other angle or genre to make it more marketable, even though that often means diluting the central ideas that make the genre interesting in the first place. Eye robot and bicentennial man are not the only casualties of that phenomenon. It's extremely rare

[29:52] to see science fiction movies that aren't also action or horror or mystery or comedies too. While bicentennial man flopped at the box office, Eye robot was a modest success, but both were critically panned and it took a decade and a half before anyone else even attempted to bring Asimov's work

[30:07] to the screen again. Last year Apple released the first season of a foundation TV series based on Asimov's most well-known book series outside of the robot series and I have made a full hour long video

[30:19] dissecting that for season. And between these two videos I'll have talked about every Asimov adaptation ever made and it's not all negative because in that video I also talk about the one time someone

[30:32] managed to do it in a pretty fun way. So if you want to watch that video and you want to watch it right now, right the second you can do so by supporting me on Patreon where it is currently available to all of my patrons. So I hope that you'll consider becoming a patron of this channel. I've been

[30:47] making videos on YouTube for a long while now but it's never really felt entirely stable. Videos like these two which are more long-form than my other content require a lot more time to make and a lot more research as well but it's the kind of videos that I truly want to make. The best video essays

[31:04] that I can and that's not really possible without the reliability of Patreon. My goal right now is to make it to 1000 patrons so if you can afford it I hope you come and check it out. I'm Sage thanks for watching everyone and keep writing.