Curious Matter Presents: Ask Your Father
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Welcome to Curious Matter Anthology. I'm Jonathan Pezza, your host. Now, I know you are all waiting eagerly for our Season 3's arrival, and we have some amazing news that you get to learn right here first.

Our new eight-part miniseries, The Exiles, starring Tiffany Smith and featuring an all-star cast that includes Phil Lamar, Eugene Bird, Tracy Toms, Colin Ferguson, Trisha Helfer, Kevin Smith, Todd Stashwick, Anjali Bhimani, Milana Vayntrub, and many, many more will premiere this summer online on June 18th.

But I'm here today to present an amazing brand new show to obsess over while you're waiting for our new season to drop. Ask Your Father is the newest production from Sean Williams of Gideon Media, the creators of hit shows like Steal the Stars, Give Me Away, and Audible Originals like Witness and Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Ask Your Father is an intimate space opera that throws us light years away from Earth, with Lem, the test pilot commanding the first ever faster-than-light spacecraft, along with Mikey, the ship's AI co-pilot.

A malfunction on this maiden voyage has thrown them far beyond the ship's expected destination, into the wild unknowns of the universe, and with no fuel and little hope for a return journey. The crux of it all is really the relationship between these two characters stuck in this desperate, desperate situation.

Their only contact with NASA being FTL drones carrying messages back and forth to a home they aren't sure they'll ever see again. Now, of course, before we jump in, I have a special guest with me today to tell you a little bit more about the show. Everyone, I'd like to introduce you to Sean Williams, the writer-creator of "Ask Your Father."

Hi, thank you so much for having me. I love the show. I love Ask Your Father. I think it's a really great look at the kind of relationships that you can get from science fiction and from speculative fiction that you can't always find in other types of media. But let's start at the beginning. Like, how did your journey in audio fiction and audio drama begin?

I began working as an audio producer doing music for basically music education programs. And both of my parents are classical musicians, and I just sort of tripped into the family business. And Mac Rogers, Jordano Williams, and I started a theater company in New York in 1999 or 2000-ish.

and did well. Mack is a sensational writer. Jordana is probably the best director I've ever known, particularly for building character and dialogue. And so the New York Theatre really embraced us, but we never could quite turn the corner sort of within the theatre industry, like specifically the economic model. Mack

got the job writing The Message and Life After and Steal the Stars. And we'd been producing theater all these years. And he came to me and said, you do audio production. I've written these shows. How hard is it to do this? Like, could we do this? And our original idea was we knew the Welcome to Night Vale guys. We knew that there were a bunch of theater companies here in New York that had moved into creating scripted fiction, audio drama. And

And Mac said, if we could make a little money doing this, we could fund our theater projects. And so by 2017, we had set up the studio. And Mac wrote "Steal the Stars." And we had a bunch of other scripts that we were working through. And we still produce theater. We still really love producing theater. But the audio drama world--

just opened us up economically and opened us up in terms of time. But as we were doing the audio drama, we realized we were paying people vastly more. They were doing way less work for us. The community was still there. It was still all of the same actors, all of the same people. We really loved the shows. We loved the shows as much as we loved our theater pieces.

that we still make theater, but boy, we love our jobs now so much. That's amazing. Yeah, what I've found is that so many people in in audio fiction come to it from so many different like sectors of creativity coming out of theater, coming out of like novel writing, coming out of film and television. It really is

Not dominated by any single perspective which makes it really diverse and really fun Yeah, tell me a little bit about the origins of ask your father When we were working on a couple of different ideas I had a pitch called that I called ask your father and it was essentially a horror show I had young kids at the time and it was a horror piece that I had started working on where

a dad is creating a parenting podcast because he thinks he's an expert and has a newborn, and then slowly it occurs to him that his newborn is actually like the spawn of Satan and

is trying to kill his wife and kill his other kid, and the thing sort of descends into madness. We have hundreds of ideas. Mac Giordano and I will brainstorm hundreds of ideas, and we know the ones that are good, not because we think they're good from the beginning, but they're the ones that we keep doing. The election in 2016 was devastating, and I wrote a piece for a theater company in New York about the first faster-than-light-speed ship

And the fact that all of the funding was pulled because the white Christian nationalists in politics had decided that they did not want to know what was out there because it would affect their worldview. Again, perfectly fine piece, but it didn't go anywhere and it was a bit angry.

Full disclosure, I am well-medicated and completely in control of my bipolar disorder, but I do manage a bipolar disorder. And Jordana came to me and said, "I think it would be interesting if you wrote about that. I think it would be interesting if you wrote about dealing with depression and mania at the same time as I was thinking about how to be a good ally, how to be a good

how to fight the good fight in the world. Like, what do we have to give up in order to make the world more... to fight for justice both economically and in every other way? And...

The title ask your father and the idea of answering questions from someone's kids stuck with me and then the final piece was that Kevin are free is one of my favorite actors in the world and is an absolutely phenomenal man and He has been really inspiring me over the last five six years with his integrity his art his writing and I thought

Frankly, we write these huge rhapsodic giant sci-fi epics. And I thought, "Can I just work with Kevin? Can Kevin and I make a show together where we can just act off each other and we're very close as friends?"

And so that was sort of the genesis. It was all of those things put together. It was the freedom to throw away the 90% of a good idea that isn't as good and hold on to the rest of it and then build a brand new piece out of it, along with all of the guidance that I got from Jordana and Mac to actually stick to themes, craft the dialogue and

and make make the show a show the intimate aspect of it is really what I think is like the most special part of it the fact that it does feel like this series of like intimate moments between these two people kind of in this desperate situation and like the relationship really builds out of that I mean I think that one of the biggest things in my life is my is my love for my

male friends, the intimacy I have with this brotherhood and sisterhood. When you're 25 or 30 years into a marriage the way I am, it's very freeing and you can be really intimate and have deep love for your friends without it being complicated. And the way that Lem and Mikey feel about each other is the way that I feel about

12, 15 of my closest friends where like every time I see them no matter where we are it's like coming home and I wanted to talk about that a little bit. It's wonderful. I think that is definitely present in the experience as a whole. What other influences came into play for you in creating this show both like in terms of like writing it but also like the production like what did you want it to feel like for the audience?

There's a Young Jean Lee play called Straight White Men where one of the characters is a straight white man who feels like he doesn't deserve his life. Where the world has come to, there's a thing that Mac Rogers said. I don't mean to wander ideologically here, but there was a thing Mac said after the September 11th attacks. We were all here. We actually had a show scheduled that we had to cancel and we were in mid-rehearsal and

I was like, "I don't know what we're going to do. I don't know how we run a theater company. We should be working with the city." Because we were downtown a lot, but I was like, "For the rest of our lives, what are we doing?" And Matt came to me and he was like, "Hey, I don't know how to be a fireman. All I know how to do is write scripts."

Why don't we just do that and see what we can do? And the only way out is through, and let's just all do it together." And that was one of the main inspirations, was figuring out how I could use the world of speculative fiction to talk about the responsibilities of people who are born with enormous privilege to people who have been dehumanized.

So it was my kids and my relationship with the everyone who's my age that is going through the same frustrations and struggles. I mean, I think that's like the very heart of of our modern era of science fiction is that, you know,

speculative fiction is always based off of emotional truths, period. It always has been. The truths at that time define the truth of that story. And I think the concept of othering

like separated from like the specifics of like each time in history has had an othering component that has been at the center of its moral or ethical debate. And that othering as a whole has become kind of our grand theme in 21st century science fiction. For me, it's the same way. Like you have to use...

your platform as small or as large as it is to express your own, your own emotional journey. But, you know, the one, the great thing about, about science fiction is you can put it within the framework of these larger, giant or questions or, or, you know, settings that make us think that they are alien when they're really not. They're really part of our, of their, they are, they're part of our experience now. They're just kind of, um, redressed, uh,

in a way that gives us the ability to kind of lean back and see the bigger picture because we're not in it. And then by the time we do see ourselves in it, we realize that we've been taken to this other place. But ultimately, we're talking about something very close to home. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you saying that. And I do know also that

whatever I'm trying to write, I'm only able to write what I end up writing. I'm a pretty slow learner and I'm not great at writing to the brief. And so I'll come up with an idea and really want to follow through and really want to follow through and then just won't succeed. So the stuff where it does succeed, I think, is because I'm inspired by the same things you're describing. Yeah.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. I know our audience is really going to enjoy this first episode of Ask Your Father, which is currently in season. It has a few more episodes still to come. What can audiences expect over the rest of the coming season? I think you are going to discover, particularly with the episode we've just released, that

what kind of relationship Lem has with his sister and husband and kids, like how deep that love goes, how deep the friendship and dedication goes between Mikey and Lem on the ship. There's only one way for them to escape

from where they are and it is based on the kind of leap in trust and friendship and love and dedication that I wanted to put these guys in an unimaginable situation to see what our dedication to the people we love can inspire us to do. And

I hope I never have to make the decisions that these guys make. And if I'm ever in that position, I hope I rise to it as well as these guys can. Well, you heard it here, guys. Take the leap. Grab your popcorn. Grab a nice cozy corner somewhere. Sit back and enjoy the first episode of Ask Your Father. Lem? Yeah. Yeah. I'm here. Are you okay? Yeah. Yes.

I don't seem to have experienced any problems. Yeah. So, this is... Oh my god. Oh my god. We did it. We did it. We did it! We did it! This is extraordinary. It's literally extraordinary. I almost can't believe it worked. Hold on, I'm doing systems check. Yes, right. Do it. Total time was...

Oh man, okay, some of the readouts are screwed, but O2 is fine, hull is... hull is fine? Are you getting anything? Hull is frozen and holding. Carbine lattice is unchanged and holding. Electrical is unchanged and holding. O2 is unchanged and holding. What do you need from me? No, I can... right. No, I know, you can't do the physical stuff. I've got it. Just tell me what else I can do to support. Manual check where I don't have cameras.

Can you see the seal back to the Bolo Hub? Yeah, the seal is fine. Oh man, we did this well. Bolo Hub is stationary. I'll let it out once we know we're stable. Everything is stable and holding. Cameras and speakers are operational, so... So even though I won't be able to see you, you can see me and, like, we can at least chat. Of course. Okay, hold up. I've got my checklist.

I'm holding it up in front of the camera. Do you see this? You've got a checklist on paper? Old habit. Dumb story. Really? Yeah. I... I fucked up the math part of the SAT because I... Are you looking aft? Are we deploying? Yeah. The nuke is dropping back on the telescoping arm. It'll be fine. You fucked up the SAT. Sorry, yeah. I fucked up the SAT because I completely spaced on having scratch paper. And...

I forgot a calculator too, so I had to... Sorry, can you double check the fuel? This readout is totally dead. We might have a crossed wire for the fuel cell readout because I'm not getting it either. What happened with the SAT? I, um, I got one wrong. You got one wrong? Lost me bragging rights. I'm not impressed. You think I'm impressed, but I'm not.

I could get a perfect score on the SAD without bringing a calculator. If I had a calculator in my OS, I wouldn't need to bring one, jerky. Sorry, Mikey, hang on a sec. I'm looking out the window. Yeah? I only have a few cameras out there. What does it look like? Well, it's... Mikey, can you send a signal to the fuel cell and check the line? Something's wrong. Yep. The readout is fine. We're reading no fuel at all. That is...

Yes, that is correct. This is... the stars are wrong. What do you mean? Mikey, the stars are wrong. The stars are wrong. The... We have no fuel, and the stars are wrong. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

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So, I don't know what to tell you. If this was good, we'd be in there. It's clearly bad. Jesus, look at them. Yeah, it looks like a toddler daycare after too much juice. Oh, thank God the kids aren't here. Oh my God. Effing babies.

Jesus, thank god they're not here. This is... This is... This is very bad. This is very fucking bad. Can you hear them? The conference room windows are probably space glass or something. Jesus Christ. Yeah. You know what? Rebecca? Hey! You need to open this door! Open this door! Right now! Hey, Jay.

It looks like they're not opening the door. Rebecca, please. Hey buddy, can I borrow your chair? What? Thanks. Hey, asshole! Mikey. What's up, man? How'd I do? 247. Fuck. That's 15 miles. It's not bad. It's worse. It's not bad. It's... Come on, Mikey, don't do that. It's literally not bad. Bad is worse than this.

I didn't say you were beating your old time, and I wasn't saying you aren't losing time, but you're actually doing great. Anything under three hours is actually fantastic, with all the givens. Yeah. I'm not gonna lie to you about this. When it's bad, I'll tell you it's bad. How's the O2? It's not good. Come on! What? It's not good! It's not good? Do you mean it's bad? Let the scrubbers do their job. It's not bad as if the scrubbers break.

It's not good right now. But wait and you'll be fine. Fuck. Take a shower and we'll do the kids. Fuck! We'll do the kids and you'll feel better. I won't feel better, but fine. I could cry salty tears Where have I been all these years? Little while

Mikey. Yeah. Do you know the drain is slow? I do. Planning about it for six weeks. What to do? What to do? We could stop the bolo and go to zero G. The water would probably just drift away. Nah, let's just call a guy. I'll get right on it. Mikey. Okay. What's in the package? Here's what we've got so far.

measurements and it's not as bad as we thought but still you know not great it's 9.63 light years not 10 or actually last time we thought it was 10.2 so over a half light year closer great that's fine okay it's just that it totally doesn't make any difference at all I know that's what I'm saying it's like what are we saving

20,000 years. Okay. Out of 470,000 years. Right. There's never any good news. Okay, how about this? This is the fourth transmission we've gotten from them. More than that, this is the fourth transmission they've sent, and we've received all four. Think about how impossible that is. Yeah. It's a miracle. It's a miracle given the whole... Yeah.

I now have a pretty detailed map of the surrounding area. The nearest stars, nearest possible planets. Really? I mean, yes, but it doesn't really matter in terms of... Yeah. But think about the math, about where we are, about how fast everyone is moving in all directions. No, I know. Earth going around the sun, sun in a big ellipse, we're moving at... Jesus, I get it. Come on. Ask me about the O2.

Tell me about the O2. It's perfect. The scrubbers are doing their thing. Okay. Ask me about food. Come on! We can feed two people indefinitely. Which we don't actually need. Exactly, since we decided to just send one astronaut and one AI. Although, if you're worried about... The nuke engine is still working, still dumping heat away. So my food supply, as it were, is in no danger of running out. Okay.

You're kind of being a brat. Jesus Christ. Just a little bit of a brat. God, I hate this part. I gotta take a break. You're at point 6G. It'll be easier from here. You'll start floating up, rungs have perches, the walls are soft. Take your time. It'll be easier.

NASA's got a lock on our ship. Four transmissions, none missed. We've got a direct line of communication and this last time they sent a bigger drive. Really? How much bigger? 10x. I mean, still like grain of rice size, but 10x bigger. And it's got fuel to go back.

Come on. Yes? Yes, Lem. Yes. Okay. So? Yeah, I'm hearing you. You're hearing me? Yes, Christ, just fucking... Look, this is gonna be harder on me than it is on you. I get that. You don't have to deal with this the same way I do. We're different. I get that. So, you tell me what you need. Because I know this is different for you.

So if you need me to just say like, "That's cool, it all sucks, you have every right," or whatever, then I can do that. But what I'm supposed to do is to point out the ways that it doesn't suck. If that's the wrong thing, then tell me. I can do it either way. I just... Just tell me and I... You know what I probably need? I probably need to go for a walk outside. Like a summer stroll. Probably need sunshine and a cocktail on a porch swing.

Probably need to drink scotch late at night with my husband after the kids have gone to sleep. Sure. Probably need a sandwich. Or like, drive-thru. I probably need Taco Bell drive-thru. Has Taco Bell drive-thru ever honestly made anything better? You see, you don't know this. There's no way you could know this, but oh my Jesus yes. Really? Really.

That's interesting. Back at the academy, okay, I was 14, 15 something, and my roommate Kamathi, his dad got him a car.

And we were always up by 05:15, Mess by 06:00, classes started at 06:30, and we didn't get back to Mess until 14:30. That's eight hours between meals. Right, which we were totally used to. But in Form 5, my roommates and I had off from 11:00 to noon. Some screw up in the schedule or something, whatever. But Kimathi had a car, and the five of us... This is Kimathi Kandori.

Yeah. You were roommates with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs? Can I tell my story? Yes! Kamathia had a car, and we used to pile in this thing and go get an early lunch. And it was 20 minutes to town, but we only had 60 minutes total. So you can't go sit down somewhere. Had to be drive-thru. And you chose Taco Bell. It was like, we didn't necessarily choose it, but it definitely was where we went.

Back then, all the fast food places were all in the same corners. If a McDonald's popped up, then Wendy's and Burger King and everyone else would just set up shop on the same block and basically feed off the draft like birds in a chevron. Makes sense. That first day, we saw the intersection and at first we were just washed over with this sensation of normalcy. I flew my first jet at 12, right?

But here I am in a Toyota something or other looking at the place where everyone gets chicken nuggets. And we were all like that. And then Kimathi just pulled into the Taco Bell and we were all just like, yup. Amazing. If you told me we were going home, a small part of me would be thinking about Taco Bell. It wouldn't be why I wanted to go home, but I'd be like,

My husband, my kids, my bed, 1G gravity, clouds, the sun, colors that make sense, seven-layer burrito, my dog, my sister Rebecca. Like, Taco Bell wouldn't be number one, but... But it would be right before your dog and your sister. Oh, yeah, definitely. And Rebecca would be cool with that? She'd be pissed at how low on the list Taco Bell is. You want to do this? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'll take it in command.

Mikey. You want them in the cans or on the speaker? Uh, let me do the cans. Okay. There are four pieces of audio, but they aren't... Are they dated? I guess just whichever is first, then. Hi, Dad. I got your message, and thank you for your message. I have more questions. Um, hold on. What was that?

about the horses. Okay, Dad, I have a question about the horses you used to ride. How long can you get the horses to, like, stay up? And how do you get a horse to stay up? Mikey, what the hell is she even talking about? I didn't hear your answer. Sorry, it was Effie. She wants to know how long a horse can stay up and how do you get a horse to stay up? How long a horse can stay up? Yeah, I mean...

Aren't horses always up? Like, do horses lie down when they sleep? I don't know, actually. That can't be what she... Wait, how do you not know? Come on, Len. Seriously, I thought you knew everything that, like, I thought you were a repository of all human knowledge. How big do you think my hard drive is? I mean... You're talking about the internet. Do you think I'm the internet?

No? You're talking about hundreds of thousands of interconnected computers all over the planet Earth, which is 9.63 light years away. I can't access all that shit. All right. Jesus. Look how it's all fucking human knowledge. God, I'm sorry. How am I supposed to know? You're right. It's a dumb mistake. Totally not a problem. Let's just... Yeah. How does a horse stay... I mean...

It stays up on its... Oh! What? It's... She's asking about when the horse rears up, I bet. What's that? Horses do this thing where they go up on their back legs, they kick up their front legs and sort of spin their front legs around for a second. Oh, like the Lone Ranger. Right. Wait, okay, never mind. I'm not going to ask how you've only got so much hard drive space, but somehow the Lone Ranger is in there. It's a mystery to me as well. Okay, I don't know how to answer this question anymore.

Just record something and talk to her. Yeah, yeah. I'll do the best I can. Produced by Gideon Media.

It begins, as terrible things often do, with a knife. People of Hirtath! Chosen children of the night! A lost soul has come to us! I'm not sure if I can do this. It's always better if you just do it quick. You came to St Kilda to escape your past, but the past isn't so easy to outrun.

You always say you're changing, but underneath you're just the same. She was a child, Lockie. You liar! Did you really believe this community would accept you? I think you're meant to be here. A little bird told me that you're a liar. All of this, it comes with a cost, Lockie. Did you really believe you could find redemption? The time for excuses is over.

The Secret of St Kilda, available wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Season 1 now, and remember, there is no change without sacrifice.