Sunday Nights Radio is live streamed at 930 PM Eastern on Substack Sunday evenings. By the time Sunday evening rolls around, taking your mind off of politics and discovering something new is a great way to spend the last few hours of your weekend before you start the weekly grind. It’s how I decompress, as I like to dig into different areas that are crowded out by all the weeks events by people lesser notoriety, yet amazingly still capture our attention.
This episode was a result of a few twists and turns during last week. Last Wednesday afternoon while I was running through items for an open mic session I host, and I ran across a Substack article that referenced a new AI mobile app for mental health and companionship called Rosebud.app.
Rosebud.
That name stuck with me, and immediately I thought of the 1941 classic film Citizen Kane directed by Orson Welles. It seemed an odd name for a mental health app. I started reviewing clips of Citizen Kane, and the loneliness of the character reminded of another literary figure from 20 years earlier, The Great Gatsby. So I decided that it could be a fun comparison of the character arcs of both figures for SNR, as there were plenty of clips of Citizen Kane and the 1974 movie The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford. It would be change of pace from the all the Founders History that is normally the focus.
Saturday I realized that it was time to cover Patrick Henry’s life and his speech Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death since his birthday was this month on May 29th. So history was back on the menu for SNR. Sunday afternoon, while finishing up SNR prep I was gathering clips for Citizen Kane on YouTube, and decided to locate a re-enactment of his speech on YouTube. I hurriedly added Patrick Henry to the search bar with the Citizen Kane still in the box, hit enter without knowing what I was going.
And the Internet blessed me with an unusual synchronistic surprise: Orson Welles had performed a re-enactment of Patrick Henry’s speech for radio. Talk about winning at the table. A few more searches of Orson Welles and his appearance in Future Shock, a late 70’s style documentary on the pace of technology and change, caught my attention. The main theme was the displacement of humanity due to rapid change. That oddly fit the theme of the original article I had read regarding AI and a mental health “companion”.
So there you have it. What started out as a series unrelated rabbit holes just gelled into this episode. SNR tends to be lighter topics, so no discussion of the Rosebud AI is pursued. That will the focus of an forthcoming article this week, so stay tuned.
One last note, I’ve begun looking for current music to include, there has been a lot nostalgia with classics, and I found some music from Myles Kennedy that ran congruently with the themes, so I hope you enjoy those as well.
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