CLASSIC: Moving to Mars with Marshall Brain

In 2017, Elon Musk laid out plans to build a permanent colony on Mars -- one with at least a million human inhabitants. What would this colony look like? How would it work? Most importantly, could we use a Martian colony as an opportunity to improve on the socioeconomic practices of Earth? To find these answers, Ben, Matt and Noel went to the smartest guy they know: Marshall Brain, the founder of HowStuffWorks and author of "Imagining Elon Musk's Million-Person Mars Colony."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, fellow conspiracy realists. In today's classic episode, we are
lucky enough to sit down with one of the smartest
guys we know, a guy who uh is directly responsible
for our day jobs. Uh. We got to speak with
the founder of How Stuff Works, Mr Marshall Brain. He's

(00:20):
not a doctor, which is a shame because always wanting
to call him Dr. Brain. He does have brain in
his name, though, this is this a pen name, real name.
Talk about nominative determinism. It is fine. It is funny though,
because when we sit and record this today, we are
on the cusp of three and this episode was recorded
way back in the Before times in twenty seventeen, just

(00:42):
a year after Elon Musk laid out plans to build
a colony on Mars. How's that going for you? Elon? Uh?
I think he think he's a little too tied up
in that bird website to worry about any martian Um
colony plans. But Marshall does unpack some of the fact
and fiction behind the uh seeming pipe train. I absolutely

(01:03):
love Marshall's attitude towards some of these things. We get
into it in the episode. It's so funny to me.
We hope it is for you too. From UFOs to
psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events.
You can turn back now or learn this stuff they
don't want you to know. Welcome back to the show,

(01:36):
ladies and gentlemen. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben. You are you that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know? And as always,
it feels great to be back in the booth with
you guys. Absolutely, And that is the sweetest thing you
said to me all week. That is the only nice
thing I think I've ever said in my life. You
do one nice thing a year. I tried to. I

(01:56):
tried to to make it count. And of course shout
out to our super producer Alex on the ones and twos.
What a time to be alive. Right as we record this,
this is uh let's see towards the end of June,
and we are in a renaissance of technology. You know
what I mean? Uh inn right right now, it's so

(02:19):
weird to think that. Um. Nowadays, we are closer than
ever before to the idea of not only bringing the
human species to Mars, but maybe actually staying there. It's
so cool. I mean in the same way that you
know people are able to make movies and records because

(02:40):
the technology has gotten so much more affordable and accessible.
This is obviously on a higher level, but now we
have private companies like SpaceX that are developing stuff that
you know before could have only even been conceived by
government programs, and they're doing it with such attention to detail,
with such a kind of a niche approach, that they're
making leaps and bound strides in this kind of technology

(03:02):
that could do exactly what you just described, Ben. And
then last year Elon Musk, the person who heads SpaceX,
got up in front of a crowd at the sixty
seven International Astronautical Congress and he made the announcement that
he and SpaceX want to achieve a million person Mars colony,

(03:23):
and he outlined all of the different rockets and the
spacecraft that they are trying to design and build to
achieve this. And then someone that we know personally wrote
up a very long thought experiment about what this colony
might actually look like. I would say yeah, I would,

(03:43):
I would say, uh thorough. And it really makes you think,
because look, this is a huge and uh increasingly crucial
step in the expansion of the human species. And we
didn't want it just to be the three of us
digging through stuff and and telling you just our opinions.

(04:06):
So we went directly to one of the most intelligent
men we have ever met, and that is the man
who literally founded how stuff works, Marshall Brain, and we
have him here today to help us explore what a
colony on Mars would actually look like. Thank you so
much for coming today, Marshall. Hey, it's great to be here,

(04:26):
and it's great to talk about Mars, because that is
one of those things that, uh, was just mind blowing
when he announced it. You you, you were talking about
technology and all this stuff's happened, and this is an example,
and it's mind blowing that we could even conceive of
getting a million people onto another planet. Now, I guess

(04:48):
first things first, the big question that a lot of
people would have is we know that, uh, scientific progress
often gets exaggerated in the mainstream, you know, when it
becomes like a a share able article on social media.
So we wanted to ask you, you know, how, like,

(05:08):
is this definitely a real thing? That's going to be
the first question. A lot of our audience members have.
So there are a lot of, um, the problems that
have kind of been swept under the rug. And that
is a little bit like Elon Musk sometimes does that.
He'll put something out there. It's seemingly just to make

(05:31):
us think or to imagine or to wonder, um, you know,
like he proposed this idea of digging tunnels under Los Angeles.
I don't know that that's practical, but it definitely is
a different way to think about the traffic problem in
Los Angeles. So with Mars, I think the technology side

(05:53):
of it, him making the rockets and moving the people,
that is all fathomable. The thing I think people are
unsure of is once they get there, could they actually
live on a planet that's bombarded with radiation and that
has much weaker gravity, Like we just don't know if
you have a kid on a planet with gravity that's

(06:17):
significantly different from Earth, Like can you even have a
pregnancy in that situation? And does it work and does
the kid come out normal? And you know, there's a
whole bunch of stuff like that that in this discussion,
we're just going to kind of leave under the rug
and assume that you know that it works out now,
martialist science fiction has taught me anything. We would obviously

(06:38):
be living in some sort of gravity controlled biodome. Well,
I don't know that we can control gravity yet. Like
I would assume that too, because that's what Star Wars says, right,
like that all this stuff is easy and straightforward. But
I I I'm not sure that humans on Mars is

(07:01):
even a possible thing from a long term standpoint. We
don't know. Well, let's talk about some of the problems then.
I mean, you addressed gravity right up front. That's obviously
a biggie. But what are some of the other issues
that you kind of tackled in putting together this thought
experiment about what it would take to actually accomplish such
a you know, seemingly insurmountable task. Well, so Elon Musk

(07:26):
has said, you know, and as and as articulated pretty
clearly that the transit problem, uh is solvable, and he's
implied that the money problem is solvable. So we would
have assumed that it would be so ridiculously expensive to
move a million people to Mars that you could never

(07:47):
consider it. But he's he's put down a stake and said,
I'm going to solve the money problem as well. I'm
going to make it cheap to get people to Mars.
So now they land there. And we don't know a
lot about this planet. We you know, we know some things,
but a million people is a lot of people. And uh,

(08:12):
you have the gravity thing, you have radiation, which you
could probably solve by shoving everybody underground. But then the
question is a million people living underground? Does that work? Like?
Do people function okay living underground for long periods of time?
We don't, you know, as sunlight important, I guess would

(08:32):
be another way to phrase that question. You have the
whole climate thing, the temperature problem, which means you've got
to enclose this whole structure. And as you start to
think about that, um just it becomes a materials problem.
You have logistics. You know, as we get into this conversation,

(08:54):
one of the most interesting things about it is how
do you move of all the technology to make all
the stuff that humans have today to Mars. Like that
doesn't have anything to do with the geophysics of it
or anything like that. It's just when you when you
think about all the stuff that we consider normal today

(09:19):
and that you know is everything from scotch tape to
microprocessors to move all that manufacturing capability and knowledge to Mars.
That's chapter thirteen in the book. That that one problem alone,
UH is just mind boggling to think about. Yeah, when
you start breaking that stuff down in the book and

(09:42):
just showing the list, I think you put a list
in there of how it's made episodes where it just
shows you all the different factories and things you and
different resources you would need to make structure, right, I
mean even get that in place in such a way
where you could have factories that could produce that kind
of stuff and the weight of the stuff you need
to build a factory. And I think there's a I

(10:03):
think there's a a brilliant point here. Uh. One of
the one of the headings for that chapter is how
will we make chips on Mars or pharmaceuticals medical devices? Uh?
In will Mars be able to be a viable backup
plan for humanity? It reminds me in a way of
that old time travel question where people say, you know,

(10:25):
I would love to travel back in time to you know,
the thirteen hundreds, and I would be like, as this
um intellectual giant and this DEMI God, But the average
person does not have the knowledge, much less the means
to create so many of these common things, you know,
probably including to your early example Marshall Scotch tape. So yeah,

(10:50):
so how would we how like, how would wets an
Old's point, uh, make this infrastructure? And it would almost
would it almost certainly have to be something where we
severely limit the kind of products that we would have.
Would this be like the the effect of living on
a remote island times of a billion. That's a great question,

(11:12):
and and that's one of the things that makes it
such a great thought experiment is you know, Elon Musk
has said, Okay, I can get the people there, and
I can get them there cheap enough for us to
imagine it. But as soon as you open your mind
to well what are they going to do once they land?
And the desert island thing is really a funny way

(11:33):
to think about it, then the number of questions is gigantic,
thousands and thousands of questions you have to start going through.
So you mentioned this, this notion that Mars could be
a backup plan for humanity, meaning that we have a
second civilization that's on a different planet. So if planet

(11:56):
Earth gets struck by an asteroid, or it gets lown
up by nukes, or some other catastrophe happens, there's a
whole another instantiation of humanity somewhere else that could carry
on without Earth anymore. And that makes you wonder, what
could you take everything that's happening on Earth today and

(12:20):
and actually bring it up like booted up on another planet.
And if you if you drill down into it, that
just it seems incredibly difficult. It's imaginable, but it definitely
would require a huge amount of thought and logistics and training.

(12:46):
I like I came up with a rough estimate that
you might have to have two thousand people trained in
all these different disciplines to make Scotch tape and to
make aluminum oil, and to make chips and to make fires,
and like, there's just all these things we make that
are all so specialized. The amount of knowledge you'd have

(13:08):
to send there and skill and practice and stuff, it's
just it's fascinating to think about it, especially when you
think that you can't you can't have a wood making
facility that just procures would or something like that. It's
something as simple as that, you know you have to
manufacture a lot of these different elements essentially that then

(13:29):
go into the product. Yeah, we take carbon really for
granted planet. Yeah, and would is a great example because
you aren't gonna have any wood for like thirty years
if you want real wood, you know, because it takes
time for the tree to grow. Well, thankfully i Kea
has those flat packs, which surely would and so one

(13:52):
of these landers. Um no, but seriously, like who's gonna
build this stuff? Like? Is it like this is a
volunteer situation. I mean, obviously this is part of the
thoughts perament, is the fact that this stuff it hasn't
been discussed and it's also amorphous at this point. But
you sort of lay out and make a case for
how will people contribute once they get there? Can you
talk a little bit about that? So if you're gonna

(14:14):
if you're going to create a complete backup of human
activity on Mars, if you're going to try to do that,
then uh, you mentioned chip making as an example. Chip
making is probably the most advanced thing humans are doing
right now. I guess we could argue there's other you know,

(14:35):
there's competitors, but chip making is really hard at the
at the scale we're doing it at, and at the
precision we're doing it at. So if you wanted to
bring that whole industry up on Mars, you start, you know,
you asked about what are the roles of different people, Well,
there is a crazy amount of really esoteric expertise east

(15:00):
that would have to be trained into the passengers that
go to Mars so that they know how to land
on the planet, build the different parts of the chip
making you know activity, get it all up running, uh
like have it produced its first product, and then they

(15:21):
would have to start moving it forward on the research
side like we do on Earth as well, or they're
going to get behind very quickly. So yeah, when you
think about the roles people would have, um, you know,
like one of the one of the little riffs in
chapter thirteen is that there are people on this planet

(15:46):
inside of Apple and Intel and other chip making companies
that their whole specialty might be, you know, the floating
point multiplier of a CPU or the branch prediction part
of the CPU, or you know these really esoteric memory
features of a CPU or something. There's like thousands of

(16:10):
those little specialties just to make CPUs and that doesn't
have to do with the manufacture of it. That just
has to do with a layout and design of it
and the improvement of it. So you're talking hundreds of
thousands of people who know such amazingly esoteric things so
that all this stuff can actually start working on Mars.

(16:33):
And then you can't just send one of them, right
because what if that guy gets hit by a meteor
or is ship crashes on landing or so you have
to send enough redundancy, and then you have to send
an education system so that you can train up new
people so when those people die, they're replaced. And just
it's like this huge rabbit hole if you actually start

(16:56):
to think about what Elon Musk is proposing, what are
you incentivized seing these people to get the best in
the brightest? Are we talking about like only the super
elite are even going to be considered for this? Like
like yeah, I mean, is it like Australia and a
prison colony. Maybe they're the first round that go and
they do all the work and then we ship them
back to the States. It's a great question, though, I

(17:17):
just wonder. I mean, there's us Like you said, it's
like each question begets like fifty other questions and that's
that's why it's so much fun to talk about. But no,
but really, like, I mean, who, how do you incentivize
people that even have these skill sets to go like
on this dangerous, you know, dicey expedition. I would say
being part of history is a huge argument, right, being

(17:39):
on the the backup planet that might be an incentive,
I think if we're just honest about it. And one
of the things that the book starts with is that
there are like pick a number, two billion, three billion,
four billion people on planet Earth who are living in misery,
Like just to put that succinctly, they are getting the

(18:02):
raw end of the economic deal on this planet. Like
there's this fun statistic of the people on planet Earth
make less than ten dollars a day that like, that's
impossible to imagine, but nonetheless that's a fact. And there
are lots of people, like billions who make less than
five dollars a day, and they're a billion that make
less than two dollars a day. There are plenty of

(18:25):
people whose lives would be radically like a hundred times
better if they had the opportunity to do something like this.
They don't necessarily have anything right now. But if they
could be trained and brought up to speed and then
sent to a place like Mars, the incentives for them

(18:45):
are far different from the incentives that you know, someone
living in America or Germany or Canada might have. That
it's a whole different world for them. So then it
leads us to a really big question in um. For us,
the three of us in the studio, for many of
you listening, not all of you, we are familiar with

(19:07):
a capitalist economic system, especially if you live in the West,
and one of the huge questions asked are proposed by you,
and here is why not export the American economic system
to Mars. And we're going to get to that right
after a quick word from our sponsor, and we're back.

(19:35):
We have returned not from Mars, but from an ad break,
not from Mars. Yet we left on one of the
biggest questions and a singular thing explored in the book,
which is not not just the technology, but beyond the technology. Um.
You know, you could argue that one of the most
intangible and important technologies that humanity has evolved, our socioeconomic

(19:59):
syste them right. So one of the questions is if
we're making a backup planet. Not only what should we
bring from Earth, but are there improvements or are their
superior approaches that we would want to institute on this
you know, Earth two point oh, or do we just
think about it in a completely new light right and

(20:22):
m The the socio economic part of it is absolutely
fascinating to think about because there are a number of
different systems that are like in place on planet Earth.
But if we look across the whole planet at the
effects those systems are having on people, we have not

(20:46):
figured out the socioeconomic part to any degree on planet
Earth yet. So before the break, there was this fund
statistic that of the planet makes less than ten dollars
a so you know, that would be less than dollars
a year, and of the planet would be something like

(21:11):
five five and a half billion people, maybe billions and
billions of people are really getting shafted by the economic
systems that we're using today. So it forces us to ask,
if we're going to create this whole new colony, what

(21:32):
kind of economic system do we want to put there?
And if we're starting with a blank sheet of paper,
which we are, why not come up with something much
much much better for everyone who's going to live on
that planet. Why don't we come up with a set
of goals for the whole society and then figure out
how to make an economic system that delivers on those goals.

(21:54):
And ay, those goals are easy to figure out, Like
all we have to do is think about what we
want in our own lives and be the the goals
that we set, we want them to apply to everyone.
We like, when we think about put bringing up this
whole new thing on on Mars, we expect it to

(22:15):
be cool and shiny and new and wonderful, you know,
kind of the word utopia's way overused. We would like
it to be good for the people who go there.
And we know from looking at Earth that if we
take what we're doing on Earth now, it's gonna be
just as bad on Mars. So how do we conceive

(22:37):
of a new economic system? How do we think about that?
And there's a number of chapters in the book that
tries to lay out this whole new economic way of
thinking that benefits everyone and that delivers on all the
goals we would have for a Martian society, things like
everybody gets food, and everybody gets clean water, and everybody

(22:57):
gets housing and everybody gets healthcare. I mean, those are
so obvious that they don't even bear you know, thought, really,
except that on planet Earth, billions and billions of people
don't even have those essentials. It's like, it's crazy when
you think about Earth and then you think, well, what
what will we do to make it better on Mars?
You know, I had kind of a freudy and listening

(23:19):
arret as a a second ago when you said a Martian society,
I heard Marxist society. And I can't help but think
that that plays into this a little bit. I mean,
you know what I mean, like just the idea of
putting everyone on equal playing field, making where everyone works
together towards a common goal. And this is a system
that we've seen, you know, fail time and again. How
do you feel like it would be I'm not saying

(23:40):
this is straight up communism, but it has the feel
of that in certain ways. How do you feel like
that would work from a you know, setting up a
brand new society when it hasn't worked, you know, in
in the planet we have Well, so the first thing
I think we could ask is does the system have

(24:00):
now worked? Like we like to say that it works,
but if we were to really look at it and
no things like that. There's a billion people living in slums,
and there's billions of people who don't have any real
access to modern health care and are making less than

(24:23):
ten dollars a day, and you know, and we look
at that. Is that success? Like I you could argue
that it is radically successful for some of us, Like
if you happen to have a good job in a
developed country, you're doing great, but you're like five percent

(24:44):
of the planet or something. So it's working great for
five percent of the planet and it's working less and
less great for the other Is that success? But aren't
those people that are successful in our economics system the
one that would be more likely to want to escape
and live in a utopian, you know, society and kind

(25:05):
of own everything well after everything's been built. That's kind
of what I'm hearing, Like, let's let's send the poor
people there to build everything radiation poisoning, right, and then
like you know, we go and live on our Martian villas.
I don't know that's maybe being negative, but that's one
thing I'd like to One thing I'd like to examine here, Marshall,

(25:29):
is um I think there's a really strong point to
the book's approach, where it is grounding the thought experiment
in current statistics from international institutions to current socio economic practices. Noel,
I'm really interested in what you brought up about the
idea of Marxism as we as we know, international economists

(25:51):
and people who study international affairs have routinely given backhanded,
uh like backhanded compliments to the American system. They've called
it the least worst of all disasters. But I mean,
and uh, the thing that you said, like, why what

(26:11):
where would something like this succeed rather than fail? First,
it seems like there's a smaller sample size if it's
a million people and they're going to be pre selected
to some sort of rubric or through some sort of rubric.
But the question I would ask you, Marshall, is how
would you see a I interacting in this or and

(26:32):
to what degree? If so? So, if we're gonna design
a society from scratch, we would be silly not to
take AI into account in designing that whole system. So
the problem we're facing in America right now, or a
problem economically, is that when AI comes along, it is

(26:55):
increasingly displacing people from their jobs and then those people
really don't have anywhere to go. And and a great
example of that that's that's coming in the near term
is is truck drivers. Like we can pretty much say
that in X years, where X might be ten or

(27:16):
it might be twenty, but it probably isn't more than twenty.
In X years, all the truck drivers are going to
get bounced out of their jobs by AI, by self
driving trucks. And that's one point six million jobs just
for truck drivers of eighteen wheeler kind of trucks. That
doesn't count all the FedEx trucks and the UPS trucks

(27:39):
and all the taxis and all the other jobs. Just
the big rig truck drivers is one point six million people.
They're gonna get bounced out of their jobs and then
they're gonna do what like that. That is the problem
our economy has with AI is that it displaces people
from jobs and then their destitute like the it's gonna

(28:00):
be very hard for them to find new jobs. And
that's going to get worse and worse and worse as
AI accelerate. So why don't we design an economy where
that where AI is a good thing rather than a
bad thing, And why don't we apply it everywhere we can,
from healthcare to education to truck driving, to apply it everywhere,

(28:22):
and then as it frees up more and more people,
we take advantage of that and spread all that automation,
all the advantages and wealth from it out to everyone,
rather than letting it concentrate as it is right now
in an increasingly small slice of humanity. Like they're sometimes

(28:46):
called the one percent, they're sometimes called the elite, whatever
you want to call the the percent of humanity that's
taking all these gains right now, why don't we design
an economy that spreads it out to everybody instead of
concentrating it. And that that's a big part of the
underpinning of the book's thought process is how do we

(29:07):
make this planet, this new planet, how do we make
it benefit everyone instead of having most of the people
being destitute and then some being okay, in this tiny
group being you know, ultra wealthy, which is what the
Earth is. Like, Yeah, we know we we have in
our society benevolent billionaires. They do exist, But you wouldn't

(29:31):
it require that, wouldn't it require wealthy people to be
willing to spread that out? And like participate in a
system where everyone is benefited equally, as opposed to being
in the position they're used to being in, which is
kind of at the top of the mountain. I think
we have to create an economy that automatically you like,

(29:52):
that is structurally designed so that everyone benefits from the economy,
instead of an economy that is what we're experiencing right now,
which is a very small number of winners takes pretty
much everything. Was this really weird statistic that came out
at the beginning of the year where eight human beings

(30:15):
on Earth own as much wealth as the whole bottom
half of humanity, So eight own as much wealth as
three point seven billion people. And that is happening because
that's how today's economy on Earth is structured, that's how
the rules are written, that's how it's all designed to

(30:35):
work that way. Well, what if you do it on
Mars in a completely different way, Like why not make
a different set of rules that have much much better outcomes?
And the advantage of Mars is that gives you a
blank slate. You don't have to force existing billionaires out
of the way to make it happen. You just make
it happen. Organically by designing it that way from the start. Yeah.

(31:00):
In chapter fifteen of the of the book, Uh, you
examine the political system or possibilities for a Martian political system,
and one of the one of the first when the
first proposals that you explore is the concept of the
direct vote. You know, and just for all our listeners

(31:22):
who are outside of the US, the way the system
would work here in the US is that the average
voter votes for a representative. Still at this point human
who or you know, but yeah, yeah, I mean it's
a great point. But you know, the big difference here

(31:43):
is that, um, the average voter votes for a representative
who then in theory, pursues the interest of the forces
they represent, which you know, the big criticism is that
in practice the forces they represent tend not to be
the voters who elected them. Yes, that is one big problem.

(32:03):
And we know this. That the folks get elected, they
go to Washington, then they start receiving large amounts of
money from rich people in a wide variety of ways,
and then they start doing what the rich people want
them to do. So the voice of the people basically

(32:25):
is meaningless now, uh, except in those rare cases where
the voices of people happens to intersect with what the
rich want to happen. And you know, if we want
to make this topical to today's news, we kind of
see this with the whole healthcare thing that's coming down,
where tens of millions of people are gonna lose access

(32:48):
to healthcare coverage. Like, I don't think normal rank and
file folk, which is us most everybody else, would want
that to happen in But for whatever reason, the wealthy
people want that to happen. And since they are pulling
the strings there, they're ramming that through the House and

(33:11):
then the Senate. Uh. And the president who we elected,
who said he would never do this, like he would
never modify Medicare or Medicaid and abandon all these working
class people, has totally flipped and is now on the
side of really really hurting working class people. So he

(33:35):
promised one thing to get elected, and he's not delivering
on that promise at all. That is that is the
problem with electing human beings to political positions. It really
uh forces you to think about how to get humans
out of politics, representative humans, like like we're experiencing in

(33:58):
the United States right now. I feel like we're really
getting to the point we've been beating around this whole time,
is what's the government going to be on Mars. Who's
gonna be running it? Well, I just have to introduct
really one of the things, Marshal, that you propose uh
in here, which isn't necessarily the government, but I can
or what would be a government, but I can see
it functioning somewhat in that way. I think we're talking

(34:19):
about the same. It's the software that you talk about
that will be constantly monitoring all of the inhabitants of
the colony, all the colonists, and it's it will distribute
work based on the needs of the colony to these colonists.
And it seems like this really highly entirely government, right. Well,
in a way, yeah, in a way, it is right.
But at the same time, it's also resource allocation because

(34:42):
it's looking at what the colony needs and here's all
of the work I need to get that done at
its best though, isn't that what the government's kind of
supposed to do? Kind of? But so so, ultimately, Marshall,
I just want to talk to you about the way
you would see that functioning, and mostly the problems that
you see arising from that system. So if you think

(35:03):
about how this Mars colony could be structured and how
it could be organized, and how you could uh spread
the benefits of the economy around everyone. Uh. In the book,
it starts with the premise of food, like how could

(35:24):
the colony produce its own food? And the way we
do that in America today is a real hodgepodge. Like
a person randomly seemingly decides that he or she wants
to be a farmer and grows some food, and then
it goes into this very odd commodity marketplace where prices

(35:49):
can fluctuate wildly depending on this thing we call supply
and demand. And then it goes into a you know,
a whole giant corps apparatus that distributes you know, that
turns raw food products into manufactured food products a lot
of the times, and then it gets distributed through these

(36:10):
other things and and it's all hodgepodge. It's all uh,
completely random. There's a hundred, like a million places for
people to extract money out of that system and concentrate it.
And and so then you think, well, what is government

(36:30):
supposed to do? Like how how is government supposed to
behave in that system or in a better system. And
if you think about food down at the bottom, you
you need people to do certain tasks to make the

(36:51):
food available so that we can consume it. And fifty
years from now that will all be done with robots.
But right now we don't have robots to do certain
parts of the problem, so we use human beings to
do those parts. And the system that's proposed in the
book is we just let you know, a piece of

(37:13):
software help people to find the things that need to
get done based on their preferences of what they would
prefer to be doing, and it manages the whole allocation
of those tasks and the production of all the things
that the colony needs. That is not unlike the system

(37:36):
that you might use on well, like on the International
Space Station right now at a tiny scale, or on
an aircraft carrier at a bigger scale, or on a
you know, a like an Antarctic base or anything else. Like,
we're just taking it up to the million person level
so that everybody gets the benefits of the work that

(37:59):
they input into the system. That's the basic idea. Okay, yes,
so would this be a situation then where where for instance,
Matt or Noel as Mars colonists have a profile of
some sort a database just about them that list their

(38:20):
their skills, their expertise, UM, there are other concurrent projects
or past experience, and then based on the needs of
the of the overall system, uh, they're they're assigned a
particular role that would be fluid depending on the state
of those needs. Well, there's a lot of different aspects

(38:42):
to it. So what the stuff you're talking about that's important.
Then there's like how do you guys prefer to work.
Do you prefer to work at night? Do you prefer
to work a little bit every day? Or would you
prefer to work for a month and then have a
month off? You know, there's like what kind of conditions

(39:03):
do you prefer working in? There's what are you really
good at? Um and what really brings you joy when
you do it? Like like let's say you have a
system and you can talk to it, and you could say, well,
you know, I like doing podcasts, but I also I
don't know, pick something I also like preparing engines or

(39:27):
you pick something so I would say farming repairing engines. Okay,
So you know, if if we had a system that
that understood all of that, it could customize a set
of tasks for you that might be much better than
the mix of tasks you're having right now. And if

(39:50):
you're one of the classic millennials who went to college
but then couldn't find a job and now you're working
in a coffee shop and that seems like a totally
uh useless way to use your time, the system can
prevent that kind of just amazing waste from happening, because,

(40:13):
you know, the the problem that a lot of millennials
have right now is either they don't have a job
Millennial unemployment is way higher than average unemployment, or if
they do have a job, it is a job they
have no desire to be doing because it's unrelated to
anything they've been trained for. So again, and we look

(40:35):
at the American system and we think, well, this is okay,
But as soon as you look at it with any
kind of uh, you know, critical thinking, it really isn't
good at all. For probably a majority of the people
they're in. They're in positions that they would never choose

(40:55):
to be doing strictly because they have to do something
to make money, or they're unemployed. So the system can
just ring all of that inefficiency out and and give
everybody a much better mix of tasks that are matched
to their skills and their preferences and their dreams, their

(41:16):
passions whatever. Yeah, and this is this point is perhaps
one of the points that would be uh controversial for
some audience members. It reminds me of the arguments people
used to make about autonomous vehicles, which you know candidly
are going to be the rule rather than the exception
within our lifetimes in many parts of the world. And

(41:39):
and that argument that some critics would make is they
would say, well, this is removing my own autonomy or
my own personal freedom. And I really appreciate how, you know,
how you took steps to emphasize that this would be
not a soulless uh putting a person into a lot

(42:00):
or a box for a given amount of time, but
it would it would engage with their preferences too. So
I guess for our members of the audience who would say,
you know, well that I am making my own human decisions. Uh,
you know, I'm not gonna let a piece of software
tell me what to do, how would you respond to,
uh to those members of the audience, Well, the flip

(42:22):
it responses, don't go to Mars. You don't want to
live that way. Uh. You know, in anything, no matter
what we create, there's gonna be people who don't like it,
and they're going to complain at whatever volume they choose

(42:43):
to complain at. The nice thing about Mars. Uh, you know,
if we went back ten minutes, someone mentioned this is
that there's a very strong filter possible on who gets
to go to be in the Martian colony. And you know,
a selection process, us, training, vetting, whatever you want to
call it, and everyone gets housing and food and clothing

(43:07):
and healthcare, then off you go. And if you're not
down with that, like if you think that half the
people on Mars shouldn't get healthcare, chances are we don't
want you on Mars. Like, why would we want to
create a society where half the people don't get healthcare?
That's that's insanity really, But there are a lot of
people who believe that. So, I mean most of the

(43:32):
Senate that's a representative seems to believe it right now.
As crazy as that is, So we just choose people
who are aligned with this way of thinking. Uh, As
we select the people who go to to the Mars colony. Okay,
so this brings us to the most important, in my opinion,

(43:54):
question that you pose in this entire thought experiment, Marshal,
and that is what do we with all the assholes
on Mars? And we're going to get to that right
after a quick word from our sponsor. Welcome back to

(44:17):
the show everyone. We are still here with Marshall brain
talking about colonizing Mars, right, and Matt raised a very
interesting question at the end of the break, what do
we do with all the assholes on Mars um and
which which leads me to something I was thinking about
bringing up before the break, but I think it works
perfectly here. Marshall, we're talking about this sort of software

(44:41):
AI kind of task master governing system. I guess, for
lack of a better term, that that then needs to
be an acronym. By the way, it's an efficiency system.
Big fan of acronyms. But if it knows all of
this stuff about us, it assigns us these tasks, it
knows our strengths, it knows our weaknesses, does it not
also record black marks against us and potentially mark us

(45:04):
as undesirable elements over time? As we interact and engage,
you know, with this new society if you know, to
the point of what happens to all the jerks is
that the machine that filters them out and sends them
to work in the minds like what are we talking here?
So I don't know about you, but I personally, I'm
great with living with people who are nice, and I'm

(45:26):
great with people who are neutrals. That is, they're just
trying to get on with their lives and and make
things happen. But then there's this group of people who
actively works to make other people miserable. Those I've I've
just applied the colloquial word assholes to them. And I
think society is much much better if we can control,

(45:53):
preferably eliminate asshole behavior, because it does make everybody miserable.
And and we could sit here and we could list
off a bunch of asshole things that we experience pretty
regularly today that we would like to eradicate. On Mars,
I'll just pick one simple one, like racism. What is

(46:15):
the point of that? Why? So, why would we want
to have a group of people who were actively trying
to oppose or to make other people miserable? Like why
what benefit does that have for the society for you know,
all the people living in that society when they're actively

(46:36):
working to make the lives of others miserable. I think
a big part of the Mars colony of any kind
of perfected human society would be to recognize those behaviors
that make people miserable and then do everything possible to
eradicate them. That's one of my questions, just to jump
in here, that I would I think a lot of

(46:58):
people would have on their mind. Is is there a
degree of uh, to put to a coin of phrase,
is there a degree of assholary here? You know? Because
there are people who are an inconvenience or in considerate
in daily life. Uh, And then there are people who
are clear and present dangers, perhaps like a chronic a

(47:20):
chronic drug abuser who operates heavy machinery. You know what
I mean. Uh? So, what's what's the scale here? I
guess is the question? Man? Who gets to make the list? Oh? Right?
Both good questions. So there is a spectrum of assholary
you want to say it that way, right? And you

(47:41):
you mentioned one like people who are intoxicated who are
operating heavy machinery and are are endangering people's lives. We
can throw murderers and robbers and rapists. You know, they're
at one end of the scale. We all get that
they're a problem, and we already have systems that try

(48:04):
to contain and deal with that end of the spectrum.
That's the police force, the court, the prison system. You
know that all. Uh, it's pretty well understood. Then there's
stuff in the middle. Uh. And then there's the really
lightweight stuff at the other end of the spectrum. So

(48:24):
if someone gets into the line at the grocery store
that clearly says ten items are less and they dropped
fifty items on the conveyor belt. Yo, that is a
level of asshol Arry. It's far different from murdering someone.
But it this is yaw, we are getting very dangerously

(48:55):
into like, Larry, But I'm learning a lot about you
right out. Okay, Look, sometimes I do twelve. I try.
Sometimes I look at my basket and like, visually, visually
it looks like ten. But then as I'm placing them, oh, man,
but you know what, they don't care. They don't care. Yeah,
well someone should the scientist ten. I'm sorry. I could

(49:18):
see I could see even in the microcosm of our
own society. How this is already how how there are
points of contention, And I think that's an excellent point
um that that you're making here, Marshall, is that whether
or not their degrees of um conflicts creating behaviors or
or or misery causing behaviors, they they still have an

(49:43):
appreciable impact over time. So this is the this is
the very light example, but humorously egregious. Someone goes into
they go to the local Mars safe way and they get, uh,
they see the science as ten things and then let's
say they get uh, fifty noodle packs and they argue
that it's one thing because they're all the same noodles. Whatever.

(50:06):
What if they rubber banded together at a giant bundle
and then nuts, I mean if it's one upc anyway, Yeah, yeah, sorry,
we don't mean to derail. So so what happens in
that situation. Well, so one thing that's proposed, uh in
the book is that everybody in the society has the

(50:27):
ability to report what they believe to be asshole behaviors.
So the book goes so far as to suggest, like
what if everybody wore a body camera and now we
have this record of stuff that's happening in society all
the time. And let's pick something a slightly less trivial

(50:49):
than the ten items. Let's um, let's you know, one
of the videos I linked to in the book is
the one where the woman walks around New York City.
She's just walking around, living her life. And the number
of people who can't call her or to reach out
to her a toucher, or who follow one ft behind

(51:10):
her and you know, stalking her, and just the amount
of harassment she receives just walking around as a normal
human being in New York. It's on camera, and it's
easy to see that it's asshole behavior. And if all
of that stuff can be picked up, documented, and then
everybody who's doing it gets sanctioned for it, in the book,

(51:32):
it proposes that we call him out and retrain them
in you know, in that case, in uh, you know,
some kind of literacy about social etiquette. Then all of
that behavior is gone, and she and every other woman
can walk around New York City without that happening anymore.

(51:53):
You know. That's the kind of thing that the book
is proposing, is that we just create a system so
that this crap that happens to normal people as they're
living their lives gets documented and the people who are
doing it gets shut down and and we eliminate this
huge amount of you know, societal junk and misery from

(52:19):
the Mars colony. So this brings us to anonymity is
we have discussed on this show on several occasions about
how personal privacy is increasingly becoming a thing of the
past or a privilege, you know, for the elite, a
new currency if you will. Yes, Ben has the best
ideas on this, and I'm that don't mean to jump

(52:40):
on those, but um, in the thought experiment, it goes
into this same AI, which is keeping track of the
work you're doing and that you need to do, is
also tracking where you are at all times, and coupled
with the proposed body cameras, anything that goes wrong can
be proven immediately. This is where person A is and

(53:01):
where person B is. Person A stopped breathing, person B
is at fault to that that kind of scenario. But
I know that thought of being constantly tracked and being
constantly watched or watching UH is terrifying to a lot
of people listening and is not something they would want
to be a part of Why could it be a

(53:24):
a really good thing? I'll take it even not a
less diplomatic route. I mean to me, when I first
read some of this stuff, it struck me as like
the plot of like every dystopian sci fi book I
read in high school. I mean, it has that sense.
But I'm wondering, like, how is this better? How is
this not that? And how would it not be abused? Right? So,

(53:44):
I think one thing to understand is that we're going
down this path already. You know, if we went back
to the seventeen hundreds, we had an aonymity and there
was no way for anybody really to get rid of it.
But today we're well past the halfway point. You know,

(54:07):
like every everything I charge on my credit card is tracked,
every camera I walk past looks at me, my cell
phone tracks every step I take. Already, you know, like
all this stuff is happening, and it's just happening in degrees.
So why don't we just fast forward and take it
to its limit? You know where it's going to end

(54:30):
up anyway, And then ask, and now that everyone has
no anonymity, what are the advantages of that? And the
advantage is that you can radically reduce crime, and any
crime that does occur, you can instantly know who did it.
There's no more of this detective that has to go around.

(54:51):
And you know, it takes a whole hour for the
show to figure out what the the murderer's identity was.
You know, we watched these cops shows on television. It
takes days weeks to solve these crimes. Well, you down
know the perpetrator instantly, and you can get all those
criminals out of society so that again, the rest of

(55:14):
us can live our lives without the misery that they're causing.
I don't I don't think any of us has anonymity anymore.
There's a patina that makes us think, you know, and
there are places where we can gain it, but like,
why not just embrace it and take advantage of every

(55:37):
benefit that it has to offer if we remove anonymity
from the equation. I think that's a really I think
that's a really fascinating point because you know, we're we're
almost looking at two different paths for um, you know,
the removal of privacy currently in the in the system

(55:58):
we've mentioned the terrest real system. Uh, we have the
removal of privacy, largely for uh corporate interest and largely
for state control. There's not very much compelling evidence that
uh illegal wire tapping activities have actually stopped, for instance,

(56:19):
the great boogeyman of our time terrorism. But there's pretty
compelling evidence rather that this information has been sold at
a profit right and the people generating the information don't
profit from it. Um. I I would like that just
add on, uh, just the dovetail what you said marshall. Um.
We have to remember as well that this is not Earth.

(56:42):
People can't walk outside and live off the land by
a coast somewhere, you know. Uh. So so anonymity I
think UH could be disadvantageous in a situation where disasters
are much more likely. And if one thing goes wrong
with this very delicate mobile ecosystem, UH and we don't

(57:03):
know where people are, then we would just have to
assume they have died. Like so is it? Does anonymity
also provide um we talked about crime for um or
excuse me? Does the lack of anonymity? Does constant surveillance
also provide benefits beyond just personal person crime? Right? It

(57:28):
has you know a lot of advantages. And the other
thing about Mars is that we will know every single
person who's there. You know, they all cost a million
dollars each to get there or something, So it's not like, uh,
you know, the United States has this weird problem right
now where ten or eleven million people are here illegally,

(57:50):
like technically they don't exist in our society because they
aren't uh, you know, registered citizens of the society. That
can't happen on Mars. That's sort of the ultimate anonymity.
If you think about it, you just walk over a
border and you're in the United States. Is this kind
of ghost doing things that you know that are completely untracked.

(58:17):
That's you know, that's not a good situation for society
to be in either. So on Mars, you know every
single person who's there. We already know the location of
everybody from their cell phones. So we simply take advantage
of that when crimes occur and and know who is

(58:38):
where when the crime happened, and suddenly every crime, just
about every crime is solvable in that kind of scenario,
which has an incredible reductive force on the on the
crime that's going to happen. And this since we're talking
about pop relation. I have a I have a couple

(59:01):
of different questions I wanted to explore, um, and I'm
gonna save one for the end, if that's okay with everybody. Uh,
but right now, while let's stay on society. So one
of the one of the things that I think is implied,
and it's it's explicitly stated in the book. I think
it's implied in the proposition of people living on Mars

(59:25):
is that the way as society grows and the way
generation cycle will have to be radically different. Right. Um,
so what would what would change about, say, reproduction on
Mars or you know? Um, it reminds me of Okay,

(59:48):
this is kind of a deep cut for for sci
fi nerds in the crowd. Um, but do you all
remember Logan's Run? Do you do you remember that one? Marshall,
I have not seen that movie. Illiterate when Logan's Uh.
In Logan's Run, there is a there there is Uh.

(01:00:09):
It's like an post apocalyptic thing where in a lot
of the members of a society are given a specific
amount of time during which they live, you know, and
after that timeline expires, they are um, they you know,
they are eliminated. Uh. One thing that's interesting about that

(01:00:33):
is it focuses on the end of human life. But
in in your book, in your exploration here we talk
a little bit about reproduction, about the beginning of human life,
which is pretty much um. You know, nowadays, nobody would
have to pass the test to have a child. Nobody

(01:00:53):
would have to And when I say tests, you know
you know, I mean like no one would have to
pass some sort of socioeconomic at mistest, like can you
afford a child? Uh, do you have any health problems? Etcetera?
Would this change on Mars? Well, first of all, I
haven't written this chapter yet, although it's coming. Of all,

(01:01:15):
it is a great question because in the United States anyway,
once someone becomes fertile, they can have a child. And
in addition, anybody who's fertile can have as many children
as she wants. And a she can do that with

(01:01:37):
absolutely no training of any kind. Notes you know, training
or you mentioned background checks or uh, you know she
strung out on heroin. You know, nothing stops someone from
having a child in today's society. And the question you

(01:01:59):
would ask about Mars, is that an appropriate way to
be raising children? And should it be rethought. The the
cool thing about the thought experiment of Mars is that
it is this blank sheet of paper. So would you
rethink how parenthood would work in a situation like Mars

(01:02:20):
where everybody's living under a bubble and you can't necessarily
just have the population explode without some forethought and some adjustment.
And the other thing that's happening is that human lifespan
is is stretching out right now. So there's a number

(01:02:41):
of different large organizations working on making people immortal, and
a lot of speculation that our lifespans are about to
get much much longer in the near term future. So
in in all you think about all those things. And
and the question for the Mars colony is can anybody

(01:03:01):
just have a kid whenever they feel like it? And
if not, how do you how do you organize the
system that's going to to make reproduction more rational in
the Mars environment? And it's like a lot of these questions.
It really makes you think, like deeply about how we

(01:03:24):
run our society today. Why should anybody, you know, like
I have four kids, I had no training when I
had four children, Like why not what a barber, for example,
in these of training just to cut a person's hair, Like,
how is it possible that I'm a parent without any
training at all. It's it's weird, Marshall, is that when

(01:03:50):
it's my kids might have some interesting perspectives on this,
I'm not going to let them near the phone. So
the you know, it's it's very odd to run something
as important as reproduction as as loosely as we do
on planet Earth. And if you look over at Africa

(01:04:11):
and what's happening over there with reproduction right now, that's
a whole another dimension of it. But that is a
very sticky issue, very controversial when you start trying to
intervene in people's reproductive systems the way they use their bodies.
People are repelled by that in general, can be but

(01:04:34):
the flip side of that should have should an untrained
human be able to create and then mold a new
human life? You know, both sides of it are fascinating
to look at and to think about. Uh, and I
it's something we should talk about as a society, like

(01:04:54):
it should be out there and getting discussed because the
idea that a fifteen year old can have a kid
with no training is weird that you know, we wouldn't
let someone drive a car with no training, and we
wouldn't let you know, thousands of other activities occur in

(01:05:15):
our society without training, but bringing up a whole new
human life, uh, and the ramifications of that are just
startling to think about. And and I think the Mars
Colony is a great place to explore the different options.
So there's uh, there's another thing here that that occurs

(01:05:39):
to us when we talk about options. M one thing
that we we haven't addressed yet is the interaction between
what would be too radically different systems or you know,
in the case of Earth and Mars, one radically different
system being the Mars Colney, and then this pastiche of

(01:06:01):
these other systems. To what degree, given the distance and
the chasm of space there, to what degree would the
Martian colony and the people of Earth interact? That's a
great question. And like there there are ten different forms

(01:06:23):
of interaction that we might think about. So do they
like just a phone call between the two places That
doesn't work. But you can't have a phone call from
Mars to Earth because of the time delay. It's as
short as six minutes, it gets as long as forty minutes.
I think I'm doing that off memory. But you know,

(01:06:45):
you you just can't have a phone call. So now
that's gone. That means video call or gone. You can
do email. They can interact that way. They can interact economically,
like through trade, but that's hard to imagine because of
the cost of moving freight around. Then there's trade of
intellectual property. Uh. You could develop things on Mars, you know, books, movies,

(01:07:11):
digital products. You can move those back and forth and
communicate that way with Earth. Then there's travel like moving
actual physical bodies around. That's possible, but really hard and
really expensive, so unlikely to occur very many times. Uh.
And so you look at all those different forms of

(01:07:33):
of communication, the it's quite likely that Mars, the people
on Mars would spin up their own way of doing things.
Because of the isolation that the distance is gonna uh
force onto the two societies. It seems more plausible that

(01:07:54):
they would inevitably begin to drift apart than it does
that they would maintaining very very close relations um. You know,
most one thing we know about a lot of colonies
in human history, just on the planet is that they
end up doing their own thing eventually. And I'm gonna
go super rabbit hole with this. Over a long enough timeline,

(01:08:17):
would they evolve differently? Oh well, I think that's almost certain. Yeah,
over even a relatively short timeline. Because of there's so
many uh weird things about Mars, from the gravity to
the radiation and the places and ways they're going to

(01:08:39):
live and so on. It it's going to impose a
lot of uh new pressures on the human genome that
will cause them to diverge. I would expect sooner rather
than later. So really fast, Marshal, the timeline for this
that Elon Musk played out, can you just tell us
about that really fast? Well, it moves around a little bit,

(01:09:01):
but the thought was that it could start in the twenties,
and I think his architecture moves a hundred people at
a time, so that would probably take decades, you know,
a couple of decades, three four to move a million
people across. But as soon as you move any people there,

(01:09:25):
they're probably going to start reproducing in some form, so
you don't necessarily have to import all one million folks
uh into the colony. But in his vision, it's starting
in the twenties, and it maybe is is taking to
three or four decades for the colony to ramp up

(01:09:45):
to its full million person scale. I'm just as I
was reading through, I was trying to imagine the innovations
that will be occurring with our current technology by the
time the first you know, series of ships leaves, and
then what Earth, what planet Earth is going to look
like from maybe just a climate perspective at that time,

(01:10:07):
and uh, I don't know. It just started making me
a bit nervous for the future, but also you know,
hopeful in a way that we are sending these flow
tillas out to Mars. So overall, I think the economic
system that you have outlined here and you you've kind
of proposed in all the different situations, it does seem

(01:10:30):
like it would at least lift or it would be
possible to lift everyone up to footing that is somewhat
equal from a socioeconomic standpoint, yes, agreed, less unequal, and
would provide him with all the food that they need,
um and you know, clothes and everything they need for

(01:10:50):
a healthy and happy life. But in trying to apply
that to the Earth currently or maybe even in that
time frame in the twenties and the forties, um, it
seems like that won't be possible because of all the
powerful forces that currently control our system. There would have

(01:11:10):
to be some kind of very big and elaborate conflict
for that to occur. Right. Well, Chapter seventeen came out yesterday,
so this is a serialized book. I had a chapter
every week, and Chapter seventeen looks at this one interesting problem,

(01:11:31):
which is the Syrian refugee problem. So we have pick
a number, you know, a couple of million Syrian refugees
living in pretty much absolute squalor in refugee camps, and
there's no good solution to that problem on the table.
So one of the things proposed in chapter seventeen is, well,

(01:11:54):
let's take these people and let's apply the theory of
the Mars Colony to them today on Earth in order
to improve their situation. They're so bad off that anything
we do is an improvement. And the other thing is
they're already costing money. The U N and NGOs and

(01:12:16):
the international community are spending some amount of money, billions
of dollars every year on this pretty much intractable problem.
So I understand what you're saying about. You know, it's
hard to imagine this happening on Earth, but I think
a situation like the Syrian refugee situation, which is at

(01:12:40):
a lot of people living in abject poverty and misery.
They're already consuming resources, but it's never going to get
them out of that misery. If we do it the
way we're doing it now, it gives us a chance
to think about trying something different with them. And and
that's what chapter seven and is about. Could we take

(01:13:01):
these principles and bring them to life on planet Earth,
you know, starting six months, use the money that's being
used to support them already but re allocated so that
they get to build themselves a modern city to live
in that is really a great place to live, as

(01:13:21):
opposed to a miserable, almost prison like existence that they're
having now. Yes, I think this is This is a
great point for anybody who hasn't read UH chapter seventeen.
As as Marshall has said, this is a serialized and
ongoing work. Marshall, as we as we wrap up the

(01:13:45):
episode today, we want to thank you so much for
your time, and most importantly, we want to know if
you have any closing statements or thoughts that we have
an addressed yet in the podcast. That would be um
of particular interest or use to our audience. Well, the
first thing I would say is I would love to

(01:14:09):
get feedback, positive and negative feedback on on the book
as it's developing, and I already get uh a lot
of really interesting thoughts. Like you guys brought up a
lot of really interesting thoughts, and they uh, they truly
helped with the development of the book. So my email

(01:14:29):
address UH is online and publicly visible. It's easy to
find me on the internet, so you can look at
the book and send me email. The other thing is, UH,
you know, I I left how stuff works and one
of the things I want to do with my life

(01:14:50):
is solved some of the big problems on Earth. And
this Mars Colony thought experiment is a way of exploring
ring the poverty problem and the concentration of wealth problem,
and the inequality problem. And that has been a really interesting,

(01:15:10):
uh experience and interesting exploration to try to think of
a new economic system that would radically improve the lives
of billions of people on the planet. So the more
people who know about it and are thinking about it
and are discussing ways to improve society for everyone, I
think the better. What what is the website? That you

(01:15:33):
do all that work for Marshall. It's called Marshall Brain
dot com if you come there. UH. The Mars Colony
book is at Mars dot htm on Marshall brain dot
com or you'll see links to it on the homepage.
It's a free book. It's uh available to anyone. Lots
of people reading it right now. So UH feedback is

(01:15:57):
welcome and encouraged, and we also welcome our listeners to
send us feedback about the interview and any questions you have, UM,
any thoughts you have about all of this stuff. We
think it's super fascinating and we really appreciate you talking
with us about it today. Marshall Brain. Thanks so much. Yeah,
thank you, thank you so much. Because I do I
do want to mention as we close that this is

(01:16:19):
only the latest in a long line of books that
you have written, Marshall, including How God Works, the Engineering Book,
multiple How Stuff Works books, Manna UH Teenager's Guide to
the Real World. You can you can find all of
these uh if you search online. And as Nola Marshall said, UH,

(01:16:43):
this is this is ongoing. We want your feedback in
a very real way. What we like to say here
on the show is that you, the audience, are the
most important part of this whole of this whole crazy thing.
Uh so yes, Uh. Marshall Brain uh, founder of How
Stuff Works, the author of the ongoing serialized work imagining

(01:17:04):
Ellen Musk, million person Mars Colony. You can check it
out today at Marshall Brain dot com. And that's the
end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts
or questions about this episode, you can get into contact
with us in a number of different ways. One of
the best is to give us a call. Our number

(01:17:24):
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If you don't want to do that, you can send
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(01:17:45):
favorite shows.