The Martian Revolution (featuring Mike Duncan)

Daniel and Kelly talk to Mike Duncan, creator of The Martian Revolution, about economics, politics and revolution on Mars.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
So Mars just is like, it feels like the planet
that has most most captured our imagination, the imagination of
the science fiction community, I think has been most captured.
And it's whatever a couple hundred years run that we're
at now, but really like in the last century, like,
Mars has been the setting for so many different things,

(00:25):
and it's that planet that is like us but not,
and so it's just there, and so I picked it
for that reason.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space, and
you know, I love science, but I gotta be honest,
I don't really listen to a lot of science podcasts.
History podcasts is my thing, and I am such a
huge fan of the Revolutions podcas.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm a
big fan of science and history, and especially the history
of science. I really enjoy trying to get into the
minds of people in the past before they understood something
that we now take for granted, to try to grock
what it was like to learn that or to live
in a world when you didn't know that. Because I
feel like there's such a huge intellectual distance between us

(01:23):
and people who didn't know that the Earth is round,
or moves around the sun, or the universe is so vast.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah, I've been reading the Journal of Parasitology starting at
nineteen twelve, moving to the presence, and I feel like
every once in a while you'll catch a paper where
they'll be explaining like, oh, this is how something works,
and you know, as a scientist in the present that
they're wrong, but you can totally see their reasoning, and
I feel like it helps you remember to be humble,
because things that can seem right and seem obvious can

(01:50):
be wrong with more information. And so yeah, I also
enjoy the history of science in that regard.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
As well, And I think these two fields are more
closely related than people realize because science is also about storytelling.
I mean, history obviously is storytelling. We're going back in
the past and trying to understand what happened and why,
what were the major themes and trends. But science is
also storytelling. We're telling a story about how the universe
works and how it came to be, and it's, if anything,
digging deep into the ancient history of the universe. So

(02:16):
I feel like these two fields are more closely connected
than a lot of people give them credit for.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
I totally agree. And you and I have interviewed some
really great storytellers in the past, so we're both pretty
big sci fi geeks, and I often enjoy hearing from
a sci fi writer who's trying to explore how some
particular scientific concept might play out, you know, under slightly
different conditions or on a different planet or something like that.
And so I was really excited when Mike Duncan, who

(02:41):
does the Revolutions podcast, started writing science fiction. And so
instead of trying to test like what would it be
like living in a low gravity environment, he's bringing all
of his knowledge about past revolutions. So he has a
history podcast that he's did for a decade going through
different historical revolutions, and he's bringing that history and exploring
how these history street things will play out on the

(03:01):
Martian environment.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
And he's doing something really interesting, which is that he
just dropped this into his normal nonfiction podcast feed about
history and just start talking about a future revolution as
if it was in the past, with all sorts of
like references and like comments about this source, which you
can't really believe. And you should read this other source,
all of which is obviously made up, but completely deadpan

(03:25):
right as if it was real history. It's amazing.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
I love it so much, and I particularly love it
because I listened to the Revolutions podcast. It helped get
me through the pandemic. I'm a huge fan. And he
did this series where he sort of summarized some of
the main points he took away from a decade of
studying revolutions, and then the Martian Revolutions thing dropped, and
I'm like, oh my gosh, I get to hear, you know,
all of the takeaways from the Russian revolutions on Mars,

(03:48):
and I get to put together these two worlds that
I love so much, you know, space settlements and the
Revolutions podcast, and I am having so much fun.

Speaker 3 (03:57):
He's really the right person to be writing science fiction,
if you asks me. And I'm going to say something
a little controversial here, which is that we read a
lot of science fiction from scientists, but most science fiction
is not about the science, like, yes, you invent some concept,
but really it's about the people and the politics and
what life is like, and it's about the sociology and
the people who are best informed to write realistic stories

(04:18):
about that are people who know the stories from history.
So historians and sociologists and political experts are the ones
who are going to be able to write effective, realistic
stories about new situations. And that's what science fiction really
is all about. So anybody who's into science fiction, I
really encourage you to check out the Revolutions podcast about
the Martian revolutions.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
And I've been waiting every week for a new episode
to drop, but you don't have to do that because
today is June third. The series wrapped up on June first,
so they're all out there and you can start now
and you don't have to wait a week to hear
the updates. It's all there and you can just listen
to it through.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
But first listen to our conversation with Mike Duncan, the
author and creator of Revolutions.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Mike Duncan is a history podcaster and author. He's written
the New York Times bestsellers The Storm Before the Storm,
The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, and
Hero of Two Worlds, The Marquis de Lafayette in the
Age of Revolution. His podcasts include The History of Rome
and the podcast will be discussing today Revolutions. Welcome to

(05:24):
the show, Mike.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
Thank you very much for having me so, Mike.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Since you have dipped your toes into science fiction, which
I love, we want to start out by asking you
the same question we ask every science fiction author we
talk to, which is a philosophy question, and that is,
when you step into a teleporter on Star Trek, does
it actually teleport you or does it disassemble you and
rebuild you somewhere else? Is it a murder machine or

(05:48):
an actual transportation device.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
It really strikes me as a murder machine above all.
I mean, if that's how we have to categorize these things.
It does seem to be deconstructing something and then recreating
it from the matter on the other side. So you know,
it's definitely like a ship of theseus situation, because there
is something about the identity that persists that is clearly

(06:12):
like locked inside the physiology of the body, so like
there is a there is a persistence of identity. But yeah,
it really seems like whatever got onto the transport pad,
that entity doesn't exist anymore, and a new entity has
been created down there that is that is fundamentally different.
And you can kind of see this sometimes with like
you know, when they're a transporter mishaps, right, and there's

(06:34):
like there so now there's whatever. So like the Thomas
Riker situation, like you've created a whole new thing down
there that thinks it was Will Riker and and but
you know the thing didn't get destroyed up on the ship,
so clearly something new was being made.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
And so if you were given the opportunity to use
one of these fantastic devices, would you do you believe that.

Speaker 4 (06:52):
I have never? I would never. I would never get
it on transporter in my life.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (06:58):
No, same like if I had a shirt that said,
like McCoy was right.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
About everything, even he's getting off and on it all
the time.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Right, So you have clearly revealed your like science fiction
creds already or convinced. So who are your favorite sci
fi authors? And have you always been interested in writing
sci fi? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah, this is you know, I was, you know, a
nerdy teenager once and so science fiction is you know,
a part of my sort of cultural identity growing up.
You know, I was obviously raised on Star Trek and
raised on Star Wars and got into you know, when
I was a kid. It was like Golden age sci
fi stuff, you know, Asimov and Clark and Hindline, and

(07:40):
then you know, you progressed ten years down the road
and you're like you look back on those guys and
you're like, a lot of this is actually like very problematic,
and maybe maybe I'm not maybe I'm not so happy
that there's so much Hindline like going into my brain,
but wait, but we can not do that.

Speaker 4 (07:54):
But then, as you know, as I got older, it's
really like, you know, like Philip K. Dick is like
a huge is huge form.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
He's a huge influence, and Vonnegut was a very big
influence for me. And then also there's a more obscure,
kind of out there dude called Robert Anton Wilson who
I really enjoyed. And so if anybody out there knows
Robert Anton Wilson, they're like, oh shit, Robert Anton Wilson. Okay,
but yeah, those are the guys that sort of like
when I was getting into high school and being a
teenager and kind of thinking about what I wanted to

(08:21):
do with my life, and I knew I had some
like talent and some passion for writing that if that's
the direction I wanted to go like, those guys were
kind of like my guiding North Stars less than Hindline.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
It's always my dream that somebody mentions to me some
science fiction author I've never heard of before, and now
a whole new vein of text has opened up for me.
So I'm gonna go google Robert Anton Wilson after this
is done.

Speaker 4 (08:42):
Oh yeah, dude, knockout Illuminatus. Sometimes yeah, it's great.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
So what kind of science fiction do you prefer?

Speaker 4 (08:48):
Though?

Speaker 3 (08:48):
Are you hardcore about folks following the rules they set
up in their universe, or are you okay with more
like a vibes based science fiction universe.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
I think, like, you know, I don't don't want to
have to pick one over the other. But if I did,
you know, it's more the vibe space stuff, because you know,
I fundamentally come out of the Humanities department. You know,
when I went to college and I had this notion
that I wanted to be a writer and specifically you know,

(09:17):
do like science fiction stuff. I didn't enjoy the English
department at all. I didn't have any good times deconstructing
texts or reading these things or like talking about them.

Speaker 4 (09:27):
It's like, oh, look, another Christ delusion.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
Great, you know, like this is kind of this is
boring me, and also I'm not good at it, so
maybe I cou should do something else. And when I
would think about those guys who I admired, they were
very literate in like philosophy, and they were very literate
in you know, Ray Bradberry is another one that I
would put on this list. This is more sort of
like philosophical where we are using science fiction as a

(09:51):
vehicle for like thought experiments, and you know, like Dick
is always constantly, you know, grappling with identity, like what
does identity mean? And you know, like if if you
wake up tomorrow and all your memories have been implanted,
is that any different than you know, who you were before.
We actually just you know, touched on this at the beginning,
so like I wanted to study that stuff. So this
is a vehicle for like politics and history and philosophy

(10:12):
more than being like I was really into engineering, and
I want to talk about what it would mean to
build a spaceship and what it would mean to live
on Mars. That's that's not really my background. I need
you guys.

Speaker 4 (10:24):
I need you.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
Guys doing those things for me. Yeah, for me, it's
much more of a it's all. It's metaphorical space for
me more than anything else.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
Well, I love that there are lots of different flavors
of nerds, and I welcome them all into the community absolutely.

Speaker 4 (10:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
I still read, you know, the Star Trek Technical Manual,
you know, but even even I didn't come up with it.
And then like some days, I don't know, we'll maybe
get into this, but like, you know, I get dang by,
you know, the people who are like only hard sci
fi is sci fi and everything else is like you know,
less than and you know, like and they point to
Star Trek as being like, you know, they're doing a
good job.

Speaker 4 (10:58):
It's like they realize one day.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
That the world would kill everybody on the ship in
like a nano second. It would become splats against the
back wall. They're right, what do we do? Oh, we'll
invent a thing called inertial dampeners.

Speaker 4 (11:09):
Right. It sounds science y, but it's magic, right, And
it's like they're not. It's magical thinking no less than
somebody like me just being like, yeah, they got grav units,
it makes artificial gravity, Like, just go with it. Who cares? Yeah,
problem solved? They're all grab units. And then people be like,
you can't artificially create gravity. It's like, I don't know, man,
I just did.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
So Starchek does science the way that like chat ChiPT
does science. It's like confidentely produced nonsense. It sounds about right.
If you don't know anything, you're like, well, yeah, okay, sure,
tachy on inertial drives or whatever. Yeah, technobabble, exact technobabble,
that's exactly it.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
So the Revolutions podcast ran for a decade, and during
the pandemic, the section on the Russian Revolution, like that
helped get me through the pandemic. I looked forward to
that every week. And then you stopped doing it, and
you took like a two year break, and then you
decided to put a sci fi story in the Revolutions feed.
So in the feed of your nonfiction history podcast, we

(12:03):
now have this fictional story about Mars. What made you
decide that that was the right venue for your science
fiction and how has the audience responded?

Speaker 1 (12:10):
So I had this notion to do a fictional revolution,
to write a fictional revolution, and specifically science fiction fictional
revolution at least as far back as the French revolution
is how long this idea has been in my head.
This is not something I came up with at the end,
Like I sort of knew this was going to be
something I was going to do for a really long time,

(12:33):
and a lot of paying attention to like the structural
beats and archetypes of these various revolutionary cycles, which often
mirror each other. I would take notes on these things
knowing that at some point I was going to write
what I'm writing, you know at this moment, and I
wanted to put it in the feed because it's a revolution, right,
and it fits as a revolution, and it is a revolution.

Speaker 4 (12:55):
It's just a fictional revolution.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
Now, when I dropped this without telling anybody that I
was doing it and just loaded it in there, there
is a split inside the Revolution's community, you know, between
people who who really do come to me for nonfiction
and for history and now I am sort of not
doing that, and so, you know, no hard feelings. They're
just like, this isn't for me, this isn't what I'm
looking for I want, you know, I come to you

(13:18):
for history. And then lots of other people are like,
this is the greatest thing that you could have ever
given me. Because you know, if you're into science fiction
and you're into the Revolutions podcast, and then I write
a fictional account of a revolution on Mars, you know,
this is like peanut butter and chocolate. You know, this
is the invention of the recent's peanut butter cup for
a lot of people. And then you know, a chunk

(13:38):
of other people are like, no, I'm not following you
down this road. And you know, I got you know,
some some upset emails in the early going, they've they've
mostly petered out, and some people were upset literally that
I put it into I put a fictional thing into
something that was tagged nonfiction, and they're like, this is
a nonfiction podcast. I can't fit it in my brain

(14:02):
that fiction is now a part of it. It's like, well,
go with it, maybe just just kind of maybe just
roll with it.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
Well, and you said it in twenty two forty seven,
so it's not like it's ambiguous.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
But I did, I mean, I get it in the
in the first couple of weeks because I deadpanned the
whole thing. I did not signal that I was doing this.
I did not tell anybody I was doing even though
I knew about this for like a decade, Like I
didn't tell anybody I was doing it, and then when
I dropped the first stuff, I wasn't like I'm going
to write a fictional account of something. I just started
talking about the Martian Revolution as if it was real.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
I think that's a really important point that you've done
it in the same style exactly as if you really
were a historian of the future talking about it. So
it's like this fictional, non fictional style. It's incredible.

Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, there was also like clearly like there's self parody
that is part of this, Like a lot of the
ticks that I do in the show, like I'm bringing
those back, and you know, the wording and the phrasing
and the style and the cadence, it's all meant to
eight myself, but in a fictional setting.

Speaker 4 (14:59):
And I actually you'll think.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
This that as a work of as a creative work,
it's better if I never break character inside the show,
Like I never want to acknowledge inside the series on
the Martian Revolution that this is being narrated by anybody
but somebody who lived two hundred and fifty years after
the Martian Revolution and is now writing about it. That's
I think that's actually important to keeping it. I don't

(15:23):
know the fidelity to the thing is that the.

Speaker 4 (15:25):
Word I'm looking for.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
That's the same reason that like everything Nathan Fielder does
works because he never breaks character. Do you worry that
in two hundred and fifty years from four hundred years
somebody's gonna unearth this and be confused because you never
indicate that it's fiction and our only clue is that
obviously it's set in the future. But what if deep
into the future somebody unders this.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
I'm not so worried about that because I will be
dead and so like whatever happens after this, I mean,
I'm going to try my best to make the world,
you know, better that when we leave it for our children.

Speaker 4 (15:57):
But like you know, I don't mind that much, like
I And partly it'll keep historians employed, you know, because
like right now, I'm writing a book.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
I'm writing a book about the Crisis of the third Century,
which is which is a period in Roman history.

Speaker 4 (16:10):
It is famously very little.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
It's not well documented because it was so it was
like this fifty year period that was so chaotic that
we don't have like good solid sources. But one of
the sources that we do have is called the Historia Augusta,
which we still don't know whether this was like a
hoax document that was made. It's like it's like a
series of biographies of the Caesars, the later Caesars, where
a lot of it just seems to be completely made up.

(16:33):
It's a lot of his it's historical fiction that was
maybe done by somebody on purpose to trick people or
as some creative exercise, and we don't really know whether
it was.

Speaker 4 (16:42):
True or not. So yeah, people could come along and
be like, you know, there was a revolution on Mars,
but I don't remember it going like this. He's like
one hundred years off on the dating, and none of
the name seems the line up.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
But he's very comedy. He's referencing all these books like
like I don't know.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
And just like chat GPT, you're referencing things that don't exist.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
See, I'm far more worried about chat GBT leaving a
record behind that makes it impossible to know what actually
happened than I am this little thing that I'm doing well.

Speaker 3 (17:13):
I was actually going to ask you about that. If
there are analogues of this in history, people writing pseudo
fiction of the future other than the examples you just made.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
Oh, you know, not in terms of history, because like
the thing, like the thing I just referenced with somebody
writing it's a fake history, but it's of the past,
and you know, you do start to get you know,
proto science fiction being written of people speculating about the future,
like the origins of science fiction, there's you know, several
steps along the way. But in terms of like using

(17:46):
these kinds of non fiction accounts to write something about
the future seems pretty modern and like for me, you know,
it's like you know, like I said, Asimov, you know,
like Foundation has like you know, galactic encyclopare media references,
and I know that done like the actual text of
it has a lot of like it's cyclopedic entries.

Speaker 4 (18:05):
And though I have not.

Speaker 1 (18:07):
Read The Song of Ice and Fire, and you know,
I watched the show, but I know that's written as
a history and those things like we're really those that
using nonfiction sort of tropes to write fiction is a
very fun thing.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
For me.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
It's it's it's for me, it's exactly at the intersection
of my brain being inspired by those kinds of things.

Speaker 4 (18:32):
But it's all. It's all pretty modern.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
I don't remember anything from like history that did this.
There's probably somebody out there who will email us and
tell us what it is.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
Let us know. The internet always lets you know.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
The Internet.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah, yeah, the Internet always lets you know. This is
why you should never say always, You should never say never,
you should never say first, you should never say last.
Never say those words and you will be fine.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
My husband gets so frustrated with me when we're writing
because they'll always try to put an always or never,
and I'm like, we haven't read everything exactly. We don't
know that for sure.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
And the thing is is like one time I said
that this was the only cavalry encounter to ever capture ships, right,
like a cavalry captured boats.

Speaker 4 (19:11):
Okay, that's pretty unique.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
And there was an incident in a Dutch in a
frozen Dutch harbor during the wars of the French Revolution,
and I was like, this is the only time that
this ever happened, because it's so implausible. And then later
I was doing Spanish American Independence and some Jose Antonio
pause is cavalry guys like took some gunboats. It was
just it was a shallow river, and so there's another cavalry,
a cavalry attack that captured boats, which you would think

(19:36):
would be impossible.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
At least you were the one who figured out the mistakes.

Speaker 4 (19:39):
I did someone email you with I did find that
one out.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
Yet they're not always so nice when they email you
with up the mistakes.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
No, No, somebody actually emailed me about the Martian Revolution
and the subject line was errors and mistakes in the
Martian Revolution, and.

Speaker 4 (19:52):
It was not cheeky.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
I've gotten some emails that are very cheeky and like
people are like responding with deadpan. They're like, you know,
you reference this book and I have found him to
be like very like sketching on the sources, and like
there's this other book that I think is way better.
And those are emails like these people get it and
I'm having a really good time with them. But then
this guy emails me and these like errors and mistakes
in like your work of fiction, and I'm like, I
don't think you can do that.

Speaker 4 (20:14):
You can say like I wish you hadn't have said that,
or I wish you had done something different, but I
don't think you can tell me that there was an
error in it. No.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
My favorite email is when someone says they're telling you
an error you made, but actually you didn't talk about
their favorite pet topics. Yeah, and that was the error
that you made, was you didn't talk about that other thing.
And you're like, I could have this book could have
been five thousand pages long. It had to end somewhere, man.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
Yeah, I when I did the American Revolution, I basically
got an email about every single local skirmish that ever
happened in the entire course of the American War of
Independence that I did not cover, and therefore have left
my audience bereft of the deinformation that they need. Like, okay, man,
there was like seventeen guys there. I'm trying to talk
about the Declaration of Independence. You know, I got to

(20:58):
pick and choose what I talk about here.

Speaker 3 (21:00):
So when you're doing history, obviously you want to be
rooted in the facts, and so you're constrained by what
actually happened. In this case, you could have chosen any
location anytime. Why did you choose Mars in the twenty
two hundreds.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
The other thing I'm doing with the show is, you know,
I'm taking all of these like historical moments historical events,
historical beats, historical archetypes, and creating a mosaic story out
of them. But I'm also taking science fiction tropes and
using them. I'm like sort of combining both of those
at the same time. So there's aspects of the show

(21:33):
that's like, oh, this comes from the Mexican Revolution, and
then there's a thing from the show, like that thing
that came from Enders Game. So Mars just is like,
it feels like the planet that has most most captured
our imagination, the imagination of the science fiction community, I
think has been most captured in it's whatever a couple

(21:55):
hundred years run that we're at now, but really like
in the last century, like, Mars has been the setting
for so many different things, and it's that planet that
is like us but not And so it's just there,
and so I picked it for that reason, right, Like
I wanted to live in the same place that you
know they were writing about one hundred years ago.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
Well, let's take a break and when we get back,
we'll talk about building a world on Mars. All right,

(22:35):
we're back. So when Zach and I were researching a
city on Mars, we were often asked and often thought
about what could economically justify settling Mars, and we came
up with like nothing, And the proposals that we saw included,
like you could start a reality TV show on Mars
and that would fund it. Even though people like started

(22:55):
shutting off the Apollo missions after twelve, they tuned back
in when the Oxygen canister up on thirteen, but after
that they started tuning out again. So I'm not convinced
reality TV would fund your space settlement.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
Unless you're intentionally killing people.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah, which hopefully notes yeah, But so I suspect, yeah,
you came to the same conclusion that Mars doesn't have
a lot of resources valuable enough to send to Earth.
So tell us about the resource you came up with
that justifies settling Mars and how you picked that resource.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
Oh yeah, I mean it's just that, like I had
to have a reason for us to go to Mars,
and at the moment, there is literally no reason for
us to go to Mars.

Speaker 4 (23:30):
Like going to Mars would be a stupid waste of
time and money.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
And I say that even as somebody who is like
enchanted by the wonders of space, you know, like I
grew up on science fiction.

Speaker 4 (23:41):
Just like everybody else.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
It's not like I want to say, you know, we
shouldn't explore and create and like advance our technologies and
all that stuff.

Speaker 4 (23:48):
Like I love I love NASA, like I love I
love this stuff, I really do. But they're nothing on Mars.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
It's not like people think about Mars sometimes like it's
just like New Mexico or something, and you can just
go there and it's like red and desert.

Speaker 4 (24:00):
Ye, but that's the that's the only difference.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
And you know, as like I came up with this
and I'll answer your question, but like, yeah, you know,
reading City on Mars is just like really drills home that,
like the future of the species is not building a
dome in the in the Mariana Trench, you know, because
that's an impossible, stupid place to try to like live,
just like Mars. So I had to invent Essentially a

(24:25):
new periodic table of elements.

Speaker 4 (24:29):
Is what it is.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
Basically, Like inside the periodic table of elements, we discover
that there's like some substratum matrices within that that we
had we've never discovered before and didn't know about before,
and it's in there and there's different versions of things
and There's a thing called FOSS five, which I gave
it a very very long scientific name in the first episode,
and which I could not recreate ever again, like I

(24:51):
actually had to fanatically spell it out for myself, and
I just I did. It was technobabble, right, I just
like jammed together as many prefectses and suffexes into a
single world as I possibly could, and then then slapped
a five on it, which was a bit of an omase.
There's a Red Rising series about a revolution on Mars,
and their thing is like their mining helium three some
My thing is Phos five, which, again, like these are
meant to be the sort of like homages and tips

(25:12):
of the cap to all the people who came before me.
So Foss five is a thing that then powers what
is essentially unlimited clean energy, and that is what allows
our species on Earth here to get out from under
the twenty first century, which I am positing to be
like insane chaos anarchy, you know, climate disasters that is

(25:37):
going to define the twenty first century, and pulling out
of the twenty first century is about the discovery of
Phos five, the discovery of these things called flex cells,
which allows us to have unlimited clean energy, and then
there's only a limited amount of this on Earth, but
there's a just a ton of it on Mars. Right
The volcanoes of Mars are loaded with PHOSS five. And
so that's what takes us there and gets us there

(26:00):
and justifies it. And this is all just complete invention,
you know, because there's, like I said, there's nothing in
reality right that we as we understand it right now,
that would justify the colonization of Mars.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
And if I could just dig into a tiny bit,
I don't know how hardcore you went on the science here.
Were you mentioning something with the atomic number is above
the numbers on the current periodic table or somehow like
stuck in between?

Speaker 4 (26:22):
Oh no, No, I didn't get into that at all.
I just gave it. I just gave it a cool
sounding name.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
Because there actually is a really fun concept in science
about these super heavy elements which could maybe have been
created in supernova events or nutrient star collisions, and potentially
could be in other places in the universe and could
have really weird properties.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
So one of one of the things that I do
in the show is, you know, I'm constantly referencing like
these fake history books that talk about because the show
is set like the narrator's two hundred and fifty years
after event, so he's always referencing, you know, books that
have been written about the Martian Revolution. And in the
very first episode, I was like, okay, if you want
to learn more about out flex cells and FoST five

(27:01):
and how all this stuff works. You know, the definitive
account is by this doctor I forget what his name is,
and his book is called Suspending Disbelief. How to stop
caring about it even though you really want to care
about it and just kind of like, this is my book, right,
and this is like signal to like the audience just
just just sit back and enjoy the story without getting

(27:21):
too caught up in like the mechanics of it, because
I'm not doing that. I'm I want to be Ray
Bradberry and Philip K.

Speaker 4 (27:27):
Dick. I don't want to be Arthur C. Clark.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
I don't want to be and I don't even want
to be Kim Stanley Robinson even though I love Kim
Stanley Robinson.

Speaker 4 (27:33):
I can't do what he does. I can't do what
I can't do what those guys do.

Speaker 3 (27:36):
Well, I'll put more tachions into the disbelief dat exactly.
But I want to ask you a history question about that.
You're making this argument about the future and resources, and
I was wondering if you're making a broader argument about
the cycle of civilization, about how we discover a new
resource which transforms our society, opens up a new territory,

(27:57):
and that we then go through this sort of cyclical
expansion and collapse or revolution. Is there a broader argument
that you're making there about the sort of structure of
human civilization.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
It's mostly a plot device to get us to Mars.
But but your point is well taken. I mean, like
the Dutch were powered by wind, and then when coal
supplants wind, then the British are suddenly like doing great
because they've got all this coal. And then we move
from coal to oil, and you know, now the United
States and now you know the Saudi's and you know,

(28:29):
the Middle East suddenly becomes like the main center of things.
And it's been a minute since we've had a true
revolution in terms of our energy usage, like what and
how we use energy. And if something comes along, yeah,
I think it'll radically change the nature of our civilization
and who's on top and who's who's not.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
What are some of the other historical points you're trying
to get across in this in this podcast? Is it
just for fun or are you trying to help people
understand revolutions better?

Speaker 1 (28:55):
The project is, yes, to have fun, but also we're
going through the process of a revolution, and I am
trying to create the structures that I have seen previous
revolutions go through. There is an enseon regime of some
kind that is broken and dysfunctional, there will be resistance

(29:17):
to that. It's not, however, just about you know, oppressed
masses rising up and overthrowing something. There is always disaffected
elites inside the enon regime who either want more power
or they're frustrated with the incompetence of the leaders of
the regime, who start to turn against it because they
would prefer themselves to be in power. There are structures

(29:39):
inside of the movements where where any revolutionary movement that
comes together to overthrow the power that had ruled them previously,
there's a thing that I positive it's called the entropy
of victory that as soon as that group wins, they
break into two or even three factions and then begin
fighting amongst themselves. One of those factions wins, and then
that group splits into two. And there's this constant sort

(30:00):
of like like coming together and then breaking apart that
I've seen so often, to the point where then you know,
you get to the end of the Russian Revolution and
Stalin is literally purging the old Bolsheviks, right, He's purging
the Bolsheviks are the one who they beat the Mensheviks,
they beat the Srs, they beat the anarchists, they beat
the Royalists, they beat the they beat the liberals. And
then you say, you have this tiny, tiny group of Bolsheviks,

(30:21):
and then even inside that Bolshevik click, then Stalin breaks
off from them and purges all the old Bolsheviks. So like,
this is a thing that goes on, and that is
something that is happening inside the Martian Revolution for sure.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
I heard a great history joke the other day, which
is what the when the IRA gets together, the very
first thing they do is discuss the split.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Yeah, anyway, and that's the thing that's that's not that's
not just the IRA, that is every single group. I mean,
you know, like Monty Python's life with Brian like had
that great bit where they're like sitting around in the
stands of the coliseum and it's like, you know, the
People's Party for I don't. I don't remember what is
and I'm not even gonna try because then we're gonna
get money python people yelling at me.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
But you know the joke, right, I don't remember that
part of the Life of Brian. I remember the amazing
song at the end, which I played for my daughter
the other day. What were you going to ask?

Speaker 3 (31:08):
Did I hear you say correctly that we're going through
a revolution right now? You mean like us literally at
this moment in time.

Speaker 4 (31:14):
No, no, no, no no, in the Martian Revolution?

Speaker 1 (31:17):
Oh okay, I mean there are revolutionary things that are
happening right now in current events, but they're not like
fun revolutionary things. This is bad revolutionary things. But they're
doing revolutionary things that are very similar to sort of
year zero Jacobin stuff and like abolish everything Bolshevik stuff.
They're just doing it for reactionary reasons, not for progressive reasons.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
So we talked about how you created FoST five to
give an excuse to go to Mars. What were some
of the other features of life on Mars that you
felt like you had to deal with So I know
you didn't constrain yourself to the hard science, but were
there things where you were like, oh, I really have
to deal with X and Y.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
Well, it was like it was sort of in designing
what the cities would look like. It sure felt like
they were going to be living underground as opposed to like,
you know, buildings on the surface. It just seemed like
that was going to be a thing. And so there's
this thing inside the show called the Martian Way, which
is like sort of how the people who lived on

(32:16):
Mars wound up living, like their cultural attitudes and like
how they wind up behaving with each other. And there
is something to the fact that they're living in close
quarters with each other all the time that there's you know,
it's corridors and rooms rather than like nobody really has
any open or empty space. And so if you're somebody
who can't handle being around people all the time, then

(32:36):
that you're not going to survive on Mars. And then
there's also a whole thing about how you know when
you're out there and you have to do this stuff,
like the sort of the individualist settler archetype that we
think of like the rugged individual who goes out and
you know, makes their own farm and they're totally self sufficient.

Speaker 4 (32:54):
Number one.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
That wasn't even true in the Old West. But it's
especially impossible in a situation like Mars. So like those
kinds of like but that's mostly about the social stuff,
and so to deal with other things, like what are
the gravity differences? I invented gravi units and grave units
handle that. And there are air scrubbers that make sure
that the air is clean and works properly, and they've

(33:18):
got ways of generating food, and they've got ways of
generating water that are just it's not about trying to
figure out how we would actually live on Mars. And
then when it comes to like the ships, like the
ships that are going back and forth. I mean I
literally say if I say in the show that, like
it would usually take six to eight weeks at this

(33:38):
point to get from Earth to Mars, depending on you know,
where we are in the orbits, which just by coincidence,
happens to be the amount of time it took sailing
ships to get from Europe to the Americas during the
era of classical revolutions. Because that's what I'm here to
talk about more than anything else.

Speaker 3 (33:56):
If you've created these little science fiction do dads get
around some of these issues? Why not set the revolution
in the Marianna's Trench or Antarctica or somewhere else more realistic?

Speaker 4 (34:06):
Oh, because it's fun to be on Mars. I mean,
I mean, straight up, man, It's just it's more, it's
more fun. What was cooler? Star Trek or SeaQuest DSV.
You know, Star Trek.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
Jonathan Brandis was pretty awesome though.

Speaker 4 (34:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
He was in SeaQuest right.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, he was the Yeah, he
was the he was the he was the tiger beat
heart throb from from SeaQuest.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
I did have the tiger Beat things pinned to my
wall when I was the right age?

Speaker 4 (34:35):
Who was who was it was?

Speaker 2 (34:36):
Jonathan Brandis?

Speaker 4 (34:37):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (34:38):
Yeah, greater than light history on the pod today.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Really great hair, real loss for everyone. Yeah he did
have great hair. Yeah, all right, anyway, sorry to get
us off track there. When we were writing about a
city on Mars, a lot of the arguments that we
found for why you should settle space is that it
would cause cultural diversity, and a lot of people we're
arguing that, hey, you know, we're losing a bunch of
languages here on Earth. But if you go to Mars,

(35:05):
they're going to be so cut off from everything that's
happening on Earth that you're going to get all of
this diversity in culture and we're going to be able
to undo this horrible homogenization that's happening here on Earth.
How good do you think that argument is?

Speaker 1 (35:18):
It's certainly nothing that I thought would happen. And this
is a lot, you know, I do in the early episodes.
You know, the Martians do develop their own culture because
politics is off and downstream of culture, and so I
wanted to make sure that there was like a because
this is actually one of the things about revolutions is
you go twenty thirty years before a revolution and you

(35:39):
start getting writers and artists and musicians who are exploring
new ideas and putting ideas that are out there that
then sort of the generation that grows up with those
sort of cultural outputs in their head, then they go
on and they do sort of like the political and
economic changes. And so the Martians absolutely have their own culture,
but they're plugged into the company. They're plugged into and

(36:01):
the signals that are coming out of omniicor are you know,
they're watching the same shows, they're seeing the same commentary,
they're they're receiving the same information as as Earthlings on
Earth who are living under omnichor as auspices are in
the same way that like when I went to I
lived in I lived in France for three years. And
when I was in France, you know, thirty years ago,

(36:21):
if I was living in France, I would have just
been bathed in French TV, French you know, magazines, French newspapers.

Speaker 4 (36:28):
Because that was the only thing that would be available.

Speaker 1 (36:30):
But I could sit in Paris today and just you know,
beyond English language Twitter and watch English shows, and I'm
not I never felt like I was cut off from
like American culture when I was living in France. And
that's essentially what I'm positing for the Martians is that
a lot of what they're getting passively is is cultural

(36:54):
products from Earth. Also in the way that like, you know,
that was true of the Americans in you know, in
both Spanish America and Anglo America and Franco America, they
were engaging with the cultural products of the mother countries,
not from themselves, and it was a big deal when
Hawthorn comes out and is relevant back in Europe. And
so there is a person whose name now escapes me

(37:16):
unfortunately because I wrote it so long ago. But it
was a big deal when there was a musician who
made a song that was actually a hit back on
Earth and it was the first like Martian whoever, like
cracked the civilization was like geist back on Earth because
they're all living under that same thing, so they wouldn't
be cut off, and at least not in my at
least not in my story because like I mean, how

(37:37):
long does it take to get a signal? There just
is just a couple of minutes. It's not like it's
not like they're living in Lima, Peru in you know,
like the fifteen hundreds, when it would take literally six
to nine months to get a letter back to Spain,
and then another six to nine months to get the letter,
you know, the response back like how.

Speaker 4 (37:56):
Are you that?

Speaker 1 (37:57):
Nine months later somebody's like I am fine. Nine months
later it winds up back in Lima, Like that's not
how it would I think be on Mars.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
So as a reader of science fiction, I'm always using
my physics brain to analyze, like does this make sense?
Would that actually work? But there's often social stuff and
historical stuff and big themes in these books that I
don't feel qualified to, like, you know, understand whether they're realistic.
When you read science fiction, Like when you read the Expanse,
which is very political, right, it's got these communities and

(38:23):
they separate in these ways, does your history brain kick
in and you're like, that's not how it was to work,
or actually this should go a different way, or basically
what are your thoughts about those things? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (38:33):
Yeah, And I think that part of this project for
me is to you know, I'm not infallible. I'm not
creating like a perfect product here or anything, but like
I'm so steeped in the political history of human civilization
that I do feel like I'm uniquely able to write
plausible politics for in a science fiction setting in a

(38:55):
way that lots of science fiction books. I have to
suspend my disbelief about how this society has been organized.
You know, we all have to suspend our disbelief that
every planet anyone seems to go to, it's like the
planet is like a country, it's a node. Like there's
never there's never internal you know, conflict on any of
these planets. It's always just like one planet equals like

(39:17):
one thing. And that's that's for storytelling reasons and for
dramatic reasons because it would get so complex. But yeah,
for sure, I think, like I do have to suspend
disbelief all the time. And when I read you know,
the Kim Stanley Robinson books, which are fantastic, right, I
love those books, and I even wrote, I even wrote
into the show that the people who were designing all

(39:38):
the stuff that allowed us to live on Mars, you know,
the company that was doing it was KSR Designs. They're
they're the leaders of Martian technology and spaceship technology. Because
that's it's Kim Stanley Robinson, right, that's that is what
that is meant to be. Some of the politics in
those books, I'm like, ah, Okay, that's fine, I'll suspend disbelief.

Speaker 4 (39:57):
It's fine, I don't mind. My thing is better on
the politics but obviously terrible on the science.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
So you and ks are both leaned into age extension
as a way to move forward the plots. I feel
like as a biologist, that's the thing that gets me.
I'm like, oh, I'm not convinced we're ever going to
be able to do that. And so the age extension
thing seems to have been dropped. Now does it come back?

Speaker 5 (40:18):
I want to tell me what happened, I'm not going
to I'm not going to give any spoilers, all right,
all right, So the life extension thing opens up like
the like a third thing here, which is like, obviously,
if you know science fiction, you know that science fiction
is writing about the future, But what's it really writing
about the present?

Speaker 4 (40:38):
Right? Every work of.

Speaker 1 (40:39):
Science fiction is ultimately commenting on its own contemporary society,
And so there is stuff that is in here, the
politics of this thing even more now than ever, like
freakily so, and we don't have to get into it,
but like because a lot of these plot points that
I came up with years ago or now like happening
in real life and it's really disturbing to me. But
the agent, like the life extension thing, that's like we

(41:01):
live in a gerontocracy, Like we live in a world
where there's a generation of people who were the first
people to hit sort of real advances in medics to
the boomers, right, they hit these real advances in medicine
that are keeping us alive longer that are allowing eighty
year olds to continue to like, not just be dead,
but continue to be alive. And when you look at
who the leadership is of the country, we were living

(41:24):
in a gerontocracy, which is the rule of old people.
And I think that this is really bad, right, I
don't know how else to say it, Like, like, I
will editorialize and say that it is bad to have
leaders who are like I don't use email because I
don't understand email. Like, it's twenty twenty five. We've got
real problems, right, and I do not need people whose
brains were formed in the nineteen fifties to deal with

(41:48):
the issues that are facing us here in the twenty twenties.
I think they're fundamentally unequipped to do the job at
a certain point. I don't want to be agist, but like,
I just think that's true. So the Age the Life
extension stuff is meant to be a comment on that.
And my life extension juice is not like Fountain of
Youth stuff. It's not you get to continue to be

(42:08):
alive and vital and your brain still functions. These people
are staying alive, but their bodies are just kind of
inert vegetables. Their brains are just kind of inert vegetables,
Like they're not they're not at the same level they're
cognitively and physically.

Speaker 4 (42:25):
All they are is merely alive.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
And that's the thing that I think is different from
previous life extension things, which is definitely a part of
the Kim Stanley Robinson books. And you know, if you
read or not read, but like you watch some of
the Alien prequels like Prometheus, like there's a life extension,
you know, a little subplot in there with that guy.
But yeah, this is that part is almost entirely social commentary.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
All Right, We're going to take a break and when
we get back, we'll talk about whether or not a
revolution on Mars is inevitable. So I've been wondering whether

(43:13):
or not a revolution on Mars is inevitable or how
we could avoid it at one point. So, the way
international law is currently set up is that if you
go to space, you remain the responsibility of some nation,
but you're not allowed to own your land. It looks
like the international community is going to let you extract
and sell resources, but it does seem like there could

(43:35):
be some fundamental conflicts. If you are like living very
far away, but you're still governed by people on Earth
who don't get what your life is like. Do you
feel like with our current set up, a revolution on
Mars would be inevitable? Or what could we do to
avoid a future Martian revolution?

Speaker 3 (43:50):
Should we be shortening Martian stocks? No?

Speaker 4 (43:54):
Yeah, big time.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
Thing is inevitable, right, Like I have to officially declare
this as a representative of the History Department. Nothing is inevitable.
Just because a bunch of stuff happened before, that doesn't
mean it's going to happen now. There are lots of
times where it seems inevitable that something happens and it doesn't.
There are other times where something seems unfathomably impossible and

(44:22):
then it just happens, And that's really what history is
all about. It sure does seem like in the history
of civilizations and colonizing civilizations that eventually those people who
are in the colonized place are going to want home rule.
And that seems to be pretty consistent across time. You know,

(44:47):
not in every time, not in every place. But you know,
there's a reason the America is there are a bunch
of independent countries and do not continue to be uniformly colonies.
There are still a few colonies left and we've got
our own colonies. But yeah, that kind of thing happens
all the time. So if you actually, if we do
go to Mars and we do have the colonization of Mars,

(45:09):
there's definitely going to be people who were like, yeah,
we want Mars to be independent. And in the show,
there's a guy Jose de Petrov who this is early
going like before this like precursor revolutionary stuff, you know,
where he literally produced this like really influential documentary that
is that is saying exactly that, like it is inevitable

(45:30):
that Mars will be free, and so what we need
to do as Martians is be the agents of that inevitability,
Like we need we need to be the soldiers for
this force of history that is inevitably going to give
Mars its independence. Whether it's today, tomorrow, or five hundred
years from now, it's going to happen. And then I
say in the show, of course he conveniently ignored all
the times in history where that didn't happen. But it

(45:51):
was a very influential documentary and you know, it impacted
a lot of people. And also just like in terms
of like where people's mentalities are at us, this has
happened so often in history that you know, our future
Martians will know that, and they will have it in
their heads that you know, in certain times and places,

(46:11):
you know, people that have gone off and and done
something far away wind up running it themselves. But how
do we avoid that if we don't want the Martians
to have their freedom, if we want to continue to
have them live under the thumb of the earthlings and
the earthworms?

Speaker 4 (46:26):
How do we do that?

Speaker 2 (46:26):
Necessarily? What I want?

Speaker 4 (46:28):
No, I know, I know, I picked up on the subject.
You you hate the Martians and you want them.

Speaker 3 (46:31):
To serve you.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
They're the worst, They're.

Speaker 4 (46:34):
The absolutely worst. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:35):
But when you look at sort of the example of
the United States without like unpacking the sort of the
genocidal way that this unfolded, the Northwest Ordinance in was
it was a pretty early document in American history. That
is what lays the foundations for the path from colony

(46:56):
to statehood from debate not from colony but from from
territory tist and then saying, once you become a state,
you're an equal part of this project that we are doing.
And there is something to that, because there was an
argument at that do we take it for granted that
like this path, the statehood is a thing, But there
were arguments at the time that like the thirteen original colonies,
they should be the states, and then as the white

(47:18):
settlers move into the interior, those should be territories that
are primarily serving us here on the coast, like the
real thing, like these United States, and then those are
going to be the territories. And it was a big
argument about whether you know, Ohio and Kentucky and Wisconsin
would would eventually be able to become states if enough
Anglo settlers move there. And I think that doing that

(47:39):
has helped keep the country together. California, which is a
really far away from the East Coast, especially you know
at the time that the settlements of California are getting going,
like California just became a state even though it was
a whole continent away and California did not. Ever, there
was no plausible independence movement. I mean, I'm from the Northwest.

(48:00):
I know about all the little subgroups that want independence
for Cascadia and independence for California, but there's never been
any need for it, and so I think that having
that kind of incorporation, legitimate incorporation, into the larger project
is how it would work.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Yeah. I keep trying to think about the best way
to get Mars settlement started, which I don't think is
going to happen in the near term. But right now
I worry that we're going to have a scramble for territory,
which is going to lead to conflict down here. So
trying to figure out a way where you don't get
a scramble, but at the right time without violence, you
give the people on Mars, you know, the ability to

(48:39):
govern themselves. Is a what sounds to me like a
complicated question. But I don't deal with the human stuff.
I mostly deal with the science stuff.

Speaker 3 (48:46):
Oh, it's very trust Eelon. I'm sure he'll do it right.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
Oh yeah, let's Tuste alone.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Some of the things that he has thrown out there
about like this is what Mars should be, Like it
should be democratic, but you should be able to rescind
any law with one third vote, with like, if one
third of the popular opposes a law, they should be
able to just like werecenting, It's like you're just sending
people to die like that is the only thing that
this organization of society that you are positing will actually
accomplish is that everybody dying and you're creating a new Roanoak.

(49:13):
So the way I get around that in the show,
like the scramble for territory on Mars, is it's a
monopoly and there's just one company, and they have secured
a monopoly at at a certain point in human history.
They've secured a monopoly to all resources and territory beyond
the line of lunar orbit, which you know, gets me
to want, you know, for one thing, being able to
make social commentary about life under a monopoly corporation, but

(49:36):
is also sort of like tipping a cap to you know,
the line that the Pope drew that gave the Spanish
everything on one side and the Portuguese everything.

Speaker 4 (49:45):
On the other.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
Like the Spanish just for a while, the Spanish were
literally claiming all of the Americas as their own territory
because the Pope said that it was theirs, and that
was a real thing that happened, and so that's that's
how I kind of wrote it into the show. And
you know, I even said that like a couple of
the corporation, the rival corporations to Omnicor that initially agreed
to giving Omnicor this monopoly, they were just like, this

(50:06):
is great. Let them claim that monopoly, because they're going
to go try to colonize it and they're going to
bankrupt themselves and they're not going to get anything out
of it. It's going to be a huge debacle. And
so like, letting them go off and try to do this,
we're actually securing their collapse here on Earth, and that's
going to allow us to become more powerful, you know,
in relation to them. And of course they were unfortunately
dead wrong, and Omniicor became very very powerful because they

(50:27):
did it, and that short didn't pay off.

Speaker 3 (50:29):
It did not.

Speaker 4 (50:30):
Now they tried.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
I keep hearing people say, let mus do it, he'll
just go out there and die, and well, I think
that's high probability. I also worry about what would happen
if he was successful.

Speaker 4 (50:38):
But there's there's no chance he gets on one of
those ships, none whatsoever. Wow, Eland Musk is not getting
on a ship to go to Mars. Never.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
He would never do that. He would send people to
do it. He would have other people die for sure,
but he would be like, that's too risky for me.

Speaker 3 (50:53):
And would you get on a ship to Mars?

Speaker 4 (50:55):
Absolutely not.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
How about New Mexico? Would you visit New Mexico? That
goes great?

Speaker 4 (50:59):
Yeah? I love in Mexico, lovely place.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
I grew up in New Mexico and couldn't get out
of there fast enough. But it is a beautiful place.

Speaker 4 (51:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like the I think it's the
outdoorsy stuff, you know, it's a good, good place for
hiking and stuff.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
So tell us about what's next for you. You're planning
to write more fiction? Is there going to be a
Jovian Revolution inspired by Biova? Space tiring? What are you
planning on next?

Speaker 1 (51:23):
At the moment, I am finishing my third book, which is,
you know, nonfiction about a certain period in Roman history
where it seemed like their civilization was collapsing and that
would be irreversible and irretrievable, and then instead they pulled
themselves out of it and put themselves back together and
went on for another couple of centuries, which I feel
like is a pretty pertinent story that deserves that deserves

(51:47):
to be shoved into people's brains as we all doom,
scroll our.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
Lives away a hopeful message.

Speaker 4 (51:53):
Yeah, yeah, honest to God, like a hopeful message.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
And then you know, there's eight episodes left on the
Martian Revolution, and then when that's done, I'm going to
restart sort of like the traditional series of revolutions, and
I'll sort of pick it up where I left off
with Russia at the end of World War one ish
and so like the Irish, I'll do the Irish Revolution.
You know, Cuba will be done, maybe the Spanish Civil War.

(52:16):
I haven't quite I'm going to be calling it as
I see it and as I go, But there's basically
the twentieth century revolutions are left to be covered, and
then you know there is there future fiction.

Speaker 4 (52:28):
Yeah. I would sure love to do more stuff like this. Basically,
the way I put it is, the people who.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
Like it love it, and I've gotten a lot of
positive feedback about it and people saying that they really
really enjoy it, and so if I can do this
kind of thing again, that would be fantastic. Is there
going to be a sequel to the Martian Revolution? If
there is, it's already been coded into the show, and
you would just have to know what you were looking

(52:53):
for to be like, oh, that's what he's doing, because yeah,
the sequel is known if it happens, and it should
already be something that if you were really paying attention,
or if you just happen to accidentally have a realization
in your head one day. Oh, that's why he keeps
saying that, then you know what the sequel will be.

Speaker 4 (53:14):
Listen carefully, focus, Listen carefully, and it's it's there. It's there.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
This is something we should have asked earlier. But have
you written science fiction that is publicly available yet or
was this your first science fiction?

Speaker 1 (53:25):
No, this is my first work of science fiction. This
is my first work of like published fiction. I have
stuff that I did, like like independently, like little short
story things, and I did the Three Day Novel Contest
a couple times, and I did record an.

Speaker 4 (53:39):
Audiobook of one of those. But that's like a that's
like a detective story that's using all the tropes from
like Raymond Chandler and stuff. But Nope, this is this
is the first science fiction.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Got it So in the next eight weeks when the
Martian Revolution is over, there's nothing for us to fall.

Speaker 4 (53:54):
Back on, not fictionally, No, no, no, you no, you
can no, you can't be like, oh, I love this
new stuff and he's got this old stuff. I mean,
you knows. Maybe I'll maybe I'll resurrect some of those stories.
They're all science fiction.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
E all right, well, I love the Martian Revolution. I'm
looking forward to what comes next, and I'm looking forward
to the history revolutions coming back to It's all wonderful.
Thank you so much for being on the show. I
had a really great time.

Speaker 4 (54:16):
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2 (54:24):
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We
would love to hear from you, We really would.

Speaker 3 (54:30):
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Speaker 3 (54:57):
O'll be shy right to us. This Sally