I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WB EZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, this is Nerdette.

I'm Greta Johnson, and you're listening to the Nerdat Book Club. Each month, we read a different book and talk about it. It's just like a normal

book club, except you don't have to share the amazing treats you made. And if you didn't do the

reading, that's totally cool. You can still hang out. So today we're talking about Uncanny Valley.

It's a memoir by Anna Weiner. It's about Silicon Valley and the tech industry.

Our panelists are Kara Swisher, a tech journalist, and host of the Recode, Decode, podcast. Kara, you have

been covering the internet like before the internet existed, right? Yes. Since Al Gore invented it,

yes, in fact. And in fact, he did. He was important part of the legislation that created the modern internet or the commercial internet. Oh, well, there you go. Yeah, I've been covering it since the

early 1990s, first at the Washington Post, and then I wrote a book and then came here to San Francisco

in the mid-90s. That is awesome. And Tricia Bobita, NERDak co-host Emeritus. Hey, Trisha. Hello. And of course, we're going to be hearing from some of you as well. We got a lot of really great listener voicemails and comments on our Goodreads discussion board. So before we start, Trisha, I want to put you on the spot immediately. I feel like it's important to unpack for a moment the title and what uncanny Valley actually means.

It's a fun play on words because, of course, it's a concept from technology that

when things that are not human are computer generated and animated to look too human.

Hello, I'm a human, and I have feelings like everyone else.

When they are not human, that little distance that's left between is unsettling to us.

And I think the first time I felt it was Tom Hanks in the Polar Express,

where the animation was just a little too human.

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