Hello and welcome to Flash Forward and Rose and I am your host.

This is the first of five episodes in which we are going to cover the Real, Science,

Tech, Policy, Ethics, Economics, etc. that inspired the Welcome to Vanguard States series.

So these episodes are going to talk all about the various storylines, which means that

if you have not heard them all and you don't want to be spoiled, you're going to want to wait

to listen through everything first and then come back to these.

Before we talk about the details of the story, I want to say a couple things about the story

itself and the narrator perspective that you heard. So one thing that sometimes surprises me

when I release Flash Forward episodes is that people who listen to the show sometimes assume

that the fictional elements at the top are always positive in the sense that like I'm always

describing how I think things should be or the choices that people should make.

That is not true in this story. Our narrator is presented with a bunch of choices,

many of which kind of suck and the narrator is not always in the right, right? Their point of view

on things is not mine and it isn't the one that I think that everybody necessarily should have.

The idea of the story is to kind of show you a few ways of seeing things and see how those

ways feel when you're sort of forced to live with them and make choices inside that framing.

So one example of this is that in the story, the dead character doesn't actually have a ton of

agency, right? The narrator and their sister make a ton of choices for him and he doesn't really

get to be in charge of his life. And while I would certainly not argue that that is good and

right and how it should be, I do think that that is unfortunately realistic. We're just sufferers

and we're expected to go home and accept that the end is near and that, you know, there's a

gross underestimation of the capacity of all people with dementia and I've been saying that for

...