Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The Expanse (featuring James S.A. Corey)

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Daniel and Kelly talk to Daniel Abrahams and Ty Franck, the authors behind The Expanse series.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow.

That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and transnational. ending with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevdas you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dresses Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So thanks very much, guys, for coming on the show. And before we dig in, I want to do my due diligence and point out that I'm the only one on this call to not have won a Hugo Award.

because Kelly also won a Hugo. If you have fewer than three, it's like you don't have one. Thanks, Ty. You know, he did write us the night we got our Hugo to tell us that. Wow, he just rounded you down to zero hugos. All right. Well, welcome to the less than three Hugo Club, Kelly. Thanks.

Me, you, and most of the planet. We'll drink after this. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. I'm Daniel Whiteson. I'm a particle physicist, a huge sci-fi reader, and a big fan of the expanse. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and write about space, and I love the expanse so much because it's got like parasites and space.

Parasites in space. Space, space, space, space. So do you only read science fiction novels that contain weird evil microorganisms? Unfortunately, no, there's just not that many to choose from. But no, I love all sci-fi. What's your favorite sci-fi story? Oh, I'm a big fan of almost anything that is hard science fiction, that, you know, picks a set of rules and really follows it.

I read a lot of science fiction, though. I'm a big fan of Ian Banks, Alistair Reynolds, Adrian Chakowsky, The Expans, of course. I just can't get enough. I love The Expans. I also really like the Strugatsky brothers. They were writing during this like Soviet Union time. And they've got this book called Roadside Picnic, which just like guts me every time. And it's just such a interesting world and like also kind of gets me sort of teary eyed.

Anyway, it's, it's great. So I don't necessarily love the hard stuff. I just love a world that is created that is interesting where they're consistent with the rules. That's all I want is consistency in a world that's been made that's interesting. Another subcategory of sci-fi that I love is science fiction. written by professors. For example, I love Werner Vinge, and he was a professor in San Diego until very recently. And of course, I love that because it makes me feel like maybe one day I could also write science fiction, but also because it's good. Yeah, I happen to know that you

are a good writer in a variety of different genres. Yes, you got this. We'll see. But today we're not talking about Daniel's science fiction preferences. We're talking to actual massively successful, very influential writers of the expanse. Yeah, we somehow managed to get the expanse guys on our show. We're super excited and let's just dig right in so we can spend most of the time talking to them. Exactly. So for those of you who aren't familiar with the series, it's a set of books set in the near future where humanity has colonized the solar system, but effectively split into a few groups, folks living on Earth, folks living on Mars, folks living in the belt. Then they each end up with their own different culture and there's lots of fun space battles where they really take care of the physics and the gravity and then there's some unexpected stuff that has. happens. And they're just so good at character writing. All right, let's do this.

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe. Today we have the authors of the expanse, Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham. And instead of like telling you about how they got like a Hugo and maybe more than one Hugo, maybe four or something like that, I'm going to tell you the story about how we all met because it explains how Daniel and Kelly managed to land the expanse guys on our show, which is a pretty lucky catch for us. So many years ago, back when it was possible for little nerds like Zach and I to afford booths at San Diego Comic-Con, we had a booth for our sketch comedy theater, our sketch comedy show, S&BC Theater. And Ty came to our booth, not to tell us that we were funny, but to tell us that our friend James was funny. But James

wasn't there. And so he got stuck talking to us. And it turns out that Ty has a really, like, brilliant, amazing wife. And so we all got along pretty well. And then when Zach and I moved across the country, we asked if we could stop at their place on the way. And they said yes. And we brought our cats with us. And we made a big mistake because the cats were in the guest room. And I opened up the door real quick. And they both ran out and they hid in their fireplace. And then I went to try to get them out of there. And they ran across their house and put little kitty soot footprints all over the place. We haven't been back to their place yet. Probably the two pieces of information are not related, but maybe they are.

But Ty mentioned during that trip that he had like a space opera thing that was going to come out soon. And it turned out that was the expanse. So, you know, after hanging out with us, he became a really big deal. Maybe correlated, who knows. But importantly, he virtually introduced me to Daniel, who has a book called Unclean Spirits, which has a main character who's a parasitologist who is both attractive and very smart. Parasitologists are not usually portals.

portrayed in that light. If we're portrayed at all, we're kind of like creepy. And when I mentioned this to my husband, he pointed out that that book also has vampires and his fiction. You know, so if anybody needs someone to rain on their parade, I can give you my husband's phone number. So anyway, Daniel and Ty are both wonderful, amazing people. It's so much fun to have them on the show. They write together as James S.A. Corey for The Expanse and other projects. They also do amazing work separately. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Happy to be here. Is that about how you remember it, Ty? Did you ever get to meet James? Yeah. No, I bet James. James is in many of your videos wearing the Game of Thrones t-shirt I gave him.

Oh, nice. Oh, fantastic. He's also in a lot of our videos not wearing a shirt at all. So lots of options there. He's very brave. He's a very brave comedic actor. Yes, he is. He is. All right. So Daniel, how about you kick it off with the first question? So we're going to ask you lots of science questions about the universe you created. But first, I'm going to calibrate where you are in the sort of science fiction spectrum. by asking you a classic science fiction philosophy science question, which is about Star Trek transporters. In your opinion, does a Star Trek transporter actually relocate you? Or does it kill you and rematerialize you somewhere else? I mean, it clearly kills you because it disintegrates you. So your dad. And then it makes a perfect copy of you. But there's an argument to be made that that happens every time you fall asleep, too. So this is like arguing canonicity. This is like saying

is Luke really, you know, there is a pattern. The pattern is recreated elsewhere. Consciousness is an illusion. Consciousness can be two illusions. Consciousness can be eight illusions. Consciousness can be illusions in different places. You don't actually exist to begin with. So what does that even mean? Whoa. This got philosophical fast. That's what I was saying. The best and darkest transporter story ever written is by James Patrick Kelly fantastic one of the best short story writers in science fiction he wrote a story called think like a dinosaur which was later adapted and turned into an episode of the outer limits in the 90s and it is the best darkest transporter story ever written so you should definitely if you're into like

does the transporter kill you should read that one think like a dinosaur is on my list now Well, what I love about this question is that the teleporter in Star Trek was, of course, invented in the 60s or conceived of much earlier. And now that we know something more about quantum mechanics and quantum information and the no cloning theorem, you know, science has actually informed the philosophy of this question. So it's a lot of fun. Any process that begins with your own disintegration should be, should be questioned heavily. Your, as if there was a standard you. There's also an argument to be made from a partner. physical perspective that all of your quantum objects are interacting constantly and therefore

transforming. And the process of being dematerialized and materialized somewhere else is equivalent to the process of just moving forward through time as quantum fields ripple with energy. So then I have to agree with the other Daniel that like maybe you don't even exist in any sense. This is a problem of narrative framing. The actual issue here is that what's going on doesn't fit gracefully into our language. And that's our language's fault. When I first met Daniel here, was very powerfully on the free will side, I think, years of association with me

have beaten him down to the mechanistic universe. No, no, no, no. That is not true. I am still firmly in the free will universe. Yeah, because that's what the universe has programmed you to say. I'm going to pull us back a little. So when did you two meet, speaking of meeting each other, and how did it transform into a writing part?

partnership at Boobonica. That would have been 2006. Bubonica? Is this like a festival celebrating the bubonic plague? Basically, yes. It's the local science fiction convention in Albuquerque. And because we still have the black plague in New Mexico, we have peri rodent as our mascot and we just kind of lean into the dark.

It's also the only state in the country where you are likely to get a hemorrhout. tragic fever. Well, not likely. We are, however, number two in the world for necrotizing fasciitis. There's also a hunter virus. Are you a New Mexican, Daniel, I didn't realize. I am. No, I was born here.

Ty actually came through briefly, and that's where we met and started the project. And then he fled to someplace with water and greenery. I grew up in Los Alamos, so I'm a New Mexican as well. Yeah, Los Alamos. That actually explains a lot right there. All right, so you met at the Bubonic Plague Festival. Yes. And then how did that turn into a writing partnership?

Well, there were a couple of things. We had a friend in common who was in the critique group that I was part of at the time. And Ty had sold a short story and was therefore eligible to come play in the critique group and did. So we knew each other through that. And Ty also, I don't know, out of the kindness of his heart, saw the the sad, lonely Daniel, new dad working too hard guy and said, why don't I degrade his productivity and invited me over to play video games at his place on Wednesdays.

Great. And you said yes? Yeah. No, I love playing video games. And he hooked me on left for dead. So then I was screwed. Then I had to go get my fix. And then the expanse.

Was the expanse your first writing project together? We did some other little stuff kind of along the way, but the expanse was definitely the the big one. And how does your process work writing together? Does one of you outline, the other one flush it out, do you guys brainstorm together? You guys both editing the Google Doc at the same time. Daniel's in charge

of consonants and I am in charge of vowels. That's got to be a slow process. Not compared to some. Yeah. Not when you're typing on the same keyboard. Generally, we outline together, then one of us will do the first draft to a chapter and the other guy will edit the first draft and we'll just kind of iterate through

that. Who's the outline guy? Or does it alternate? Oh, no. There's, there's no. Outlining is a group project. And my collaboration was Zach. I'm the outline guy. So we don't have, but anyway. All right. So your books are so well written that when I was researching for my book on space settlement, I was blown away by how many times they came across citations of the expanse as though it were a documentary. And that kind of blew my mind. And so was it important to you that you created a world that followed the rules as we know it or not really? What do you think? Is it important to follow rules or make up your own? We get a lot of credit for being hard sci-fi that isn't actually accurate. There's kind of, there's only two rules that Daniel and I never broke in the

expanse. And because every other science fiction project breaks those two rules constantly, we seemed like weird and exotic. In the expanse, gravity works the way gravity really works. So spaceships in the expanse are not like ocean liners where the deck runs the length of the ship. Spaceships and the expanse are built like office towers so that the deck is below you in the direction that the thrust is coming home. So when the engine fires, you are pushed into the deck rather than being slid backwards the whole length of the ship and into a wall. So that was one way that one thing that we never broke. And the other one we never broke is that light speed is a rule. And so there's no faster than light communication.

So if you send a message to your buddy, you're on Earth and you send a message your buddy out by Jupiter, it takes three hours to get there. And by the time you get a reply, it's been six hours of past. And because every other sci-fi thing just handwaves those two things away, there's gravity plating or there's hyperwave communication. We seem very exotic and hard because of that. But the rest of it, we just kind of were, you know. A lot of the science in there came from. the stuff we were already kind of excited by, too. So, I mean, Ty got Ganymed right

because he'd been playing with astronomy and knew that Ganymede was the place that had the magnetosphere and kind of knew what magnetosphere were and did. So we had that level of kind of introductory knowledge. And that level of introductory knowledge has a bunch of cool stuff in it. So we stole all the cool stuff.

And I think that also kind of worked to our benefit in plausibility. I mean, we do sort of ignore the fact that anybody living on Ganymede would be massively irradiated by Jupiter's enormous radiation belt. Yep. You know, so, I mean, there's plenty of stuff you just sort of ignore. And in your book on Mars, you know, there's a ton of reasons why you wouldn't want to live on Mars, but it's cool if people live on Mars. So in the book, people live on Mars, even though there's, like, no reason to go there

and it would be a terrible thing. I'm going to push back a little, though, because, you know, Ty was like, oh, we only followed these two rules. But I think it wasn't just that you got all the physics right, is that you also thought through people so well and governing so well and how the environment would impact the way the people interact with each other and how they can be governed and stuff like that. And so it wasn't just the physics. It was you thought through all the different science fields, the biology, the psychology,

the sociology. A lot of that's just, you know, Ty had read a lot of history. And a lot of the issues that you see in the expanse are things that are science fiction re-skinnedings of how humans have been working since we stopped being monkeys. We're a very consistent species. The stupid shit we do, we have been doing forever. And we just projected that into the future. Yeah, no, I mean, people ask like, what is the theme of the expanse? And, you know, the serious one is that tribalism is bad. But the joking one is people do the same stupid shit over and over and over and have done for the last 250,000 years that we've been in this shape. So you guys pick these two bits of physics to be sort of strict about. And that really changed like the experience of the

characters on the ship and what it's like to live in low G and hygiene and the societies that form there. But why did you decide, unlike many science fiction writers, to be hardcore about this? Is it because you felt like these, it changes the stories and those stories hadn't been told yet. Because we had an alien weird that comes through halfway through book one. And if you don't have things grounded before that comes in, then it comes in without any impact. The fact that we had something miraculous and strange happen halfway through the book meant up until then you couldn't. It's a necessity of the narrative that we approached that. way. The best example of that, I think, in modern fiction is Game of Thrones, George R. Martin's

first novel. Because it's a fantasy book, but it's not like every other fantasy book. There are no wizards. Nobody's casting spells. There's no elves or trolls. It's, it's just people. And he seduces you into believing you are reading a medieval history. It's kings and it's and it's princes and it's fighting families and everybody just uses medieval weapons and they live in castles and they ride horses and and by about the midway point of the book, you could be reading a history of medieval England and I mean, it would feel exactly the same. And then just about at the end, Danny Targaryen walks into a fire holding three rocks. And when the fire goes away, she comes out and she's holding three baby dragons.

And it feels amazing. It feels like this miraculous moment. the only reason it feels like that is because everything up till then has felt like medieval England and so it feels super weird if you're writing a story in which you know half the people are wizards and they cast fireball spells and the people fly around on flying carpets and three dragons show up at the end it just feels like a course that's what happens that's it's just like everything else that happens in the world to have that dragon moment matter it has to be weird compared to everything else and so for us to have the arrival of this weird

alien technology feel strange, nothing should feel strange up until that point so that that actually matters. Because if everybody's zipping around with transporters and teleporters and magic technologies, then another magic technology doesn't feel strange. So then why does Lost fail so badly? So like that, I feel like that's another, it's a series. I've only watched the TV show. I don't even know if it's a book, but like it's meant to be real until the magic comes in. But instead of you feeling like you bought it and now you're in this awesome magical world is just like, no, this isn't right. So it seems like it's a hard thing to pull off. And I'm not a fan of loss, but I don't want to just sit and bash on loss. But

what the reality is it was not a well thought out universe. It wasn't. They wrote an amazing pilot. And J.J. Abrams is a fantastic director, shot an amazing pilot. And they kind of had an idea what the first season was about. And they kind of had an idea what the show was about. But when it got picked up, they had to write a bunch of scripts. They had to put a first season together. they were coming up with mysteries to keep people interested. And then they got a second season. And they had no idea what that was going to be. So now they're just making stuff up.

And so you're just at that point, they're just sort of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. And because there's no consistency to it, it doesn't feel, I mean, once in our in our books, when the proto molecule shows up, which is the weird alien technology, it always kind of behaves the same way all the way through. And so each thing it does, you go, yeah, that's what it would do.

that's you know it feels very consistent in the lost it's like there's polar bears and then there's a black smoke monster and then there's this other thing and then there's the hatch but the hatch doesn't do what we thought it did and this need to relentlessly create mystery but never solve any of them it's like juggling a thousand balls but all you do is throw all thousand up in here at one time you don't catch any absolutely i feel like the contract between the science fiction writer and the reader is i'm going to present to you a mystery for which there is a solution that eventually this can all make sense in your mind. If you get to the end of the book and you're like, oh, you were just throwing dragons out every other page and you

have no idea what's going on, then I feel betrayed. The U.S. Open is here. And on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain, I'm breaking down the players from rising stars to legends chasing history. the predictions will we see a first-time winner and the pressure. Billy Jean King says pressure is a privilege, you know. Plus, the stories and events off the court and, of course, the Honey Deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very fancy, wonderfully experiential sporting event. I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be accessible and inclusive for all tennis fans, whether you play tennis or not. Tennis is full of compelling stories of late.

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AXS.com. So that leads me to ask you guys about your process. How much of the whole series and the whole concept had you mapped out before you started writing in a word one of chapter one? Did you outline the entire thing? We didn't know that we were going to have a whole series. when we wrote the first book. I mean, with the first book, we had, I think, a pretty rigorous outline of what the first book would be.

And, you know, we knew what the end of that book was going to be. We knew what the last scene of that book was going to be before we went into at the front. And then for the whole series, actually that got mapped out during the writing of book two, when it became clear that the publisher was, interested in doing a bunch more of these and at that point we we kind of broadstroke the whole series to the point that we did know you know tie pitched the last scene of the last book um

the last scene of book nine while we were about halfway through book two and that didn't change so a lot of a lot of the pathway along the way was not cooked yet was not identified but where we were going we knew early. Did you have any moments where you were like, oh, crap, how do we get there? Like we've built and maybe now it's not a clear path back anymore or just knowing where you're ending up keeps you from having moments like that. Not really.

I mean, you talk through how you're going to get there, but I don't think we ever painted ourselves in a corner, which can happen in fiction writing. You can create plot points that as you get to the end of the book, you realize, oh, I've screwed myself. The plot points that I have created do not allow me to have the ending that I wanted. I mean, I know people who do that. But because we always kind of firmly had an in point in mind and we, you know,

the two of us plot pretty rigorously and talk through everything, never really wound up getting lost in the weeds. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, the metaphor. we keep using is a road trip, you know, you're going from New York to Los Angeles, you know, where you're going to end up, you know where you're starting from, you don't know exactly what restaurant you're going to stop at, where you're going to get gas, what little side detours you're going to do. But you know, generally speaking, you should probably head west. And what's your process scientifically? It sounds like you guys do a lot of reading, you're smart

guys. Do you also talk to scientists? Do you have consultants? Do you do all your own reading and research? It had two people, no, there were three times in the writing of nine books that we asked for outside expertise. Daniel had somebody help him figure out a complex physics problem, yeah. Yeah, an acceleration issue with a ship doing something strange and what that was, the experience of being inside the ship would feel like. And then I had to, I had a guy who, you were talking about you were from Los Alamos. I had a guy from Los Alamos.

I asked him the question if the entire asteroid eros went up by two degrees, how much energy would that fit? And he figured that out. And he gave me the answer in Jules and hand grenades. Apparently hand grenade is a unit of measure in physics. And then the other one, weirdly that you asked that is Kelly's husband, Zach, helped me with something. I had a question, a math question. which was if you have a sphere a million kilometers across and on the interface of this sphere you have rings that are 10,000 kilometers across and you have 1173 of those rings how far apart are they from each other. Zach is smart than he looks. And Zach, it was funny because, you know, I mean, Zach and I were friendly but we weren't like good. I mean, we had never stayed at each

other's house at that point. It was just, you know, we were sort of friendly. We had met a couple times and We emailed back and forth periodically. And so I sent him this question and his reply after like a day, I thought he was kind of ignoring the email, but a day later he just wrote back and said, this is not a trivial problem. Why did you send it to Zach? I mean, he's definitely a smart guy.

But why? Because we had talked about some math stuff and I knew he was really into math. And figuring out math problems was a thing that he was into. And so. I don't remember. Did he get you an answer? Yeah. Nice.

Way to go. We didn't check it. I mean, it might have been wrong. We have no idea. He's been pranking you. Absolutely. Yeah. Could be.

What was the acceleration problem you were wrestling with? If you are in a ship that is accelerating at 2Gs and you have an unbalanced firing of a maneuvering thruster at the nose that puts it into a spin, what does it feel like on the inside? if you are if you're on that ship it is spinning while also accelerating at uh two gs are you thrown against a wall are you what what's what does it feel like what is what is the the lived experience of being in that system sounds like a great problem to put on my physics final there there was a wide variety of opinion it sounds similar to the scenario of like a fighter pilot doing a loop de loop where they feel very different forces at the top of the loop and the bottom of the loop because at one point in the

loop gravity is adding to their effective acceleration and the other part of the loop is contrasting except that you don't actually have that underlying gravity to confuse things because you're not on a planet no but that but that gravity is being replaced by the the thrust of the ship no that it yes there the gravity exists but there's not like that the thing to make one part of the loop feel different from the other part of the loop yeah There's no directional, nothing from a planet. Well, I love the realism of your space scenes because it gets me thinking about the physics. And it actually reminds me of another book.

I don't know if you've read Alistair Reynolds' book, Revenger. He has all these scenes that feel sort of like British naval battles because he's thinking about the kinetics. And his ships actually have like huge sails. And I asked him the same question. I asked you, which is like, why did you go so hardcore about the physics? His answer was totally different. His answer was like, I actually wanted to write a British naval battle. but my agent said it had to be science fiction.

So put it into space. We all get through different paths. What was the hardest part of writing? And what was the hardest part of writing together? The hardest part of writing. The hardest part of writing is writing. Yeah. Parking your ass in a chair and typing.

The hardest part of writing together. I mean, I think this is an emotionally unsatisfying answer to your questions because it's all about logistics. It's all about, you know, finding the time. You know, the hardest part of writing is sitting your ass in the chair and actually writing. The hardest part of writing together is working out your schedules so that you're in the same place to have the conversation at the same time when you both have full lives with distractions and event.

You know, it's, it would be great if, you know, the hardest part was, you know, the, the, having to fine-tune your brains in such a way that you can think as one. That's not how it worked. It was much more, uh, the process is much more like, um, running a small landscaping company than it is like, uh, something high sci-fi and brilliant. I think Shakespeare famously said that also, didn't you? No, it was marked. It's always Mark Twain. It's always Mark Twain. No, I mean, I think the probably the only frustration that we have is that I am very, very, very lazy and I really want to procrastinate everything.

And Daniel actually wants to get things done. So periodically he has to go, hey, so are you going to get that thing done that you said you were going to get done? Maybe we should get something done. So, you know, that's, I am the burden that Daniel's forced to carry. but you all picked up a new set of books together right so like you couldn't have been that bad of a burden what is the new series you're working on we also very much enjoy getting paid some burdens are worth carrying I'm just saying now the new series is uh it's a very different part of this kind of space opera spectrum and it was tie had this you know tie had the idea for the expanse he did all the world building for the expanse he did all of the the kind of groundwork setting that up and then he had this other idea that he thought might also be a cool idea for space opera so now we're doing that one and it's pretty fun it's pretty good stuff it's not the same relationship to history that the expanse had the expanse you could really see where it grew

out of our world and how it it we might plausibly have gotten there this is more like dune or left hand of darkness or something that's like gazillions of years out and light years away and that It lets you approach some very different things. But because I'm me, the relationship as to history is it's all based on ancient Babylon. Why did you pick that time period? I'm a big fan of pre-classical history. And when I was a kid, my parents drug me to church a lot. My parents are very religious.

And I am the least religious person on the planet. So when I was there, you know, the only thing you were allowed to have is a Bible. And most of that book is very, I don't know if you've read it, but most of it is very boring very dry but there's a few books that have some interesting stuff and one of those is the book of daniel which has like empires conquering and people being drug off as slaves to serve in the palace of kings and i always found that story interesting of like what if you're just this little agrarian society and the much more technologically advanced babylonians show up and go oh you guys all belong to us now and we're going to take a bunch of you slaves back to babylon and some

of those slaves will wind up working for the king in the court of the king as bureaucrats That just seemed interesting to me, so I wanted to write the sci-fi version. And so now we're in the midst of having this human in a very alien framework, a very alien society, and figuring, you know, trying to understand his own context and keep himself human, while on the one hand serving and on the other hand undermining the great nation that has destroyed him and his friends. I love that you guys go into history to find these stories and effectively extrapolate them forward and think about, you know, the economics of a solar system-wide society and this kind of stuff. But does doing that change your opinion about it? You know,

like after writing The Expans, are you more or less bullish on asteroid mining or colonies on Ganymede? Are you less likely to invest in a startup that's actually going to do this kind of stuff? There's no economic reason to go out into space. There's just, there isn't any. I mean, there's other reasons to go there. There's an, you know, exploration, learning more about the universe and our place in it. All of those are very good reasons to explore space. And I'm glad that we have a space program. We do that stuff. But there is no reason for people to live on any of those other bodies other than the all your eggs in one basket argument, which is a valid argument of, you know, what if an asteroid hits the earth and there's no humans left. I would say, though, that if your

answer to that is, we'll build a city on Mars and there'll be humans on Mars. Shortly after the asteroid destroys Earth, all the humans on Mars are just going to die. So, so it's, yeah, you have eggs in another basket, but those eggs are going to expire very quickly. So unless we get much, much, much more advanced at like turning unlivable hunks of rock into livable hunks of rock, we are nowhere near right now. There's just no reason to do that. At that point, you might as well just be building really, really advanced space stations

and putting people in those because you're much more likely to survive in one of those. generation ship in orbit would be a better basket. Yeah, it's a better answer than Mars. And I think generally the experience of having fictionalized these things and talked about them in ways that are compelling and plausible, but not actually grounded in anything, I feel like it's helped me understand like Elon Musk. I think, you know, he's got a lot of great stories on how things are going to work. And I recognize that they're not grounded in anything. And there's a level of bullshit detection, I think, that comes with having spun up a bunch of your own bullshit. I think anybody has spent any time really thinking about what it would take

to colonize Mars sees right through Elon Musk. I can't see you and Zach signing up for the first rocket to Mars, Gellie. No, no, but I also can't see us signing up for the like 1,000th rocket to Mars. We're just not very adventurous people. Hey, when Mars has like strip malls and movie theaters and all of that, then yeah, sure, I'll go out there for a vacation. I will not. I barely want to go to New York. It's a very long commute. Daniel is a medieval peasant in that he will be born, live his entire life, and die within a one mile radius. And be happy. It's not, I'm sure I'm in a mile and a half. Well, I wouldn't want to leave my bugs, so I get it.

The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain, I'm breaking down the players from rising stars to legends chasing history, the predictions, well, we see a first-time winner, and the pressure. Billy Jean King says pressure is a privilege, you know. Plus, the stories and events off the court, and of course the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S.S. Open has gotten to be a very fancy, wonderfully experiential sporting event. I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be accessible and inclusive for all tennis fans, whether you play tennis or not.

Tennis is full of compelling stories of late. Have you heard about icon Venus Williams' recent wildcard bids or the young Canadian, Victoria Mboko, making a name for herself? How about Naomi Osaka getting back to form? To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain. I heart women's sports production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this.

Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this. Do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do my eyes close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah.

This is Devin. And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what?

Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. See? Listen to no such thing on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman. And my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper

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We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do.

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as part of my Cultura podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation.

And I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. So you make a compelling argument that there's no economic reason, but what's your prediction for the future? Do you think 1,000 years from now, 5,000 years from now, humanity has colonized the solar system, or we're all effectively Daniel still just living in our own backyard? I think it's very optimistic that we're all still around in 1,000 or 5,000 years. But if we are, the one thing, and Daniel, I'm sure we'll have his own answer for this, but from my perspective, the one thing that science fiction does really, really badly is

predict the future. That's true. We're good at inspiring, but we're terrible at predicting. And I think anybody who thinks they know what the world's going to look like a thousand years from now is laughably wrong and probably a little. Do you think fiction is usually trying to predict the future, though? Some people actually call themselves futurists who are science fiction writers. And they believe that what they are doing or what they are attempting to do is accurately predict these changes. In the near future, you can do some stuff.

Some. Even then, look how wrong cyberpunk was. You know, we were all reading William Gibson and going, oh, this is an amazing, accurate prediction of the future. And then 20 years later, it's laughably silly. And that is often the case with sci-fi, where we try to predict what the future is going to look like and then just look silly.

The actual world has a much more kind of florid imagination than any one of us, but individually. Well, that brings me to a question. I wanted to ask about how you build your universe. You guys are really careful about the gravity and, you know, the kinetic energy and what it's like to fight these battles. But something that would really change those battles are things like, you know, AI-controlled drones. We don't have, you know, delicate meat sacks in every ship in these battles. But you don't see a lot of that in your universe.

Was that a conscious choice because it would really change the story or was there some of the reason for not including that? We like writing stories about humans because humans are going to be reading and buying them. So, yeah, no, one of the choices that we made early on was not to include the kind of automated space stuff, because once you include that, there is literally no reason to have any people out there. And we do have smart drones for fighting wars. They're called torpedoes because there's no reason to build an automated little spaceship and mount a gun on it. Just put a big bomb on the end of it and run into the other guy. And then you just have a torpedo. The idea that there will be like little fighter planes driven by robots shooting at the other ships.

Why? Just have it fly into the other ship and explode really big. And then you win. And if, you know, if it's if it's a little robot driving a cheap ship, why put a gun on it? Just have it blow up. The thing is we do have kind of unmentioned expert systems in AI. We do have that kind of, you know, you flick on the light switch and the light comes on level of normalized technology. The only weird that we have is we also kept the meat sex. So is it difficult when you

start working on a TV version of your work, which, you know, maybe one day will happen with me. Who knows? But like to go in from like you're completely in control of the narrative to now you're in a writer's room and it might go in a direction that you hadn't anticipated, what is that experience like? It's like having a partner that you're writing with only there's more people. I mean, we were in a sense kind of built in the government lab to move into a writer's room because we were already in an artistic project where none of us totally owned it. Now, we just included Noreen and Dan Noak and George Lee and all of those other voices became other voices that were also contributing for Noreen in charge.

but that kind of divesting your ego from the project had happened for us on day one. That's great. I feel like when I work with professors, the more professors that are in the room, the less we get done. And it's great that. I know, I'm sorry, but it's great that you all have managed to be so amazing with so many people working on a project together. Sometimes it makes it harder. The thing that is true of a TV show is that it has a show. showrunner and they have the final say. If you have a room full of professors and one of them is the

boss and gets to tell all the other ones what to do after the conversation is over, they make a decision, things will get done. It's when nobody's the boss and everybody thinks that their version should be the one that happens. That's when things. And we got really lucky with our share runner. We got a guy who was really smart, really invested in the project and probably the best manager that I've worked for in any industry. So, you know, go us. He only says that because he never worked for me. That was awesome.

What's something that you see in the TV show that's visualized differently than how you imagined it as you were writing it, but that, you know, you're happy about. I don't want you to throw anybody under the bus. But what's something new that came into the visual element of the show that you liked? Everything. Daniel and I are not, we are not prop designers. We are not costumers. We are not set builders.

So, you know, our plan in writing books, and this was how Daniel basically educated me to do this, is you describe enough that you get the reader to do all the heavy lifting. You get them to imagine the rest of it. You don't give them detailed instructions. You just kind of give them a little hint, and then they go imagine the rest. You can't do that in a TV show. You actually have to build things. And so you hire very smart people to do that.

You hire prop designers and you hire costumers and you hire set builders and production designers and all those people. So everything they brought was something I hadn't thought of before. But in almost every case, it was better than the version I would have done because I'm not a professional at that. So there was every day, there was a new thing I hadn't thought of. But I was like, oh, yeah, that's great. That's totally what I would have put in the book if I had thought of it.

I had that experience as a reader too. I, you know, I read the books. I had everything in my head about how it should look. And then when I watched the TV show, you know, like so. often you see it and you're like, oh, that's not really how I imagined it. I'm sort of disappointed. But almost every time I was like, oh, that's even cooler than I had imagined it. That was awesome. Like, just the team was so, so incredible. I loved how they really centered the physics. I really felt, of course, when you read the book, you see that it's in there. But when you watch the show,

you like can see that there's, you know, parabolic motion and they're really considering gravity. And it really, it feels almost like you're in a British naval battle, you know. I like how they really centered an alien being that could sort of mind control. That's what I thought was the cool thing. But I guess we come from different fields. Bring it back to parasites. Everybody sees a part of themselves in it, right? Well, Daniel and I are big, big fans of parasites.

What's your favorite parasite? Talk some plasma Gandhi. Yeah, yeah. I go for the classics. Yeah, that's the best one for sure. I mean, I'm sure that the reason that I'm a very aggressive person is because I'm filled with with cat poop uh at this point it's not cat poop it's just a lot of little cysts in your brain i'm actually working on to one of our next episodes maybe the one after this one is going to be

about that parasite and mind control and how actually the evidence is really thin for a lot of this stuff and and it's like really hard to pull apart like is tie infected because he's aggressive or did the parasite make him aggressive you don't know maybe his aggressive behaviors caused him to encounter the parasite and there's like a correlation. Like I was aggressively owning cats. Yeah, sure. Are you aggressive about not washing your hands after changing the litter box or something? If you're just too manly to wash your hands, that's how you get it.

All right. No, I'm actually, Daniel will attest to this. I'm actually freaked out people who don't watch their hands. It's true. What the hell's wrong with you? Wash your damn hands. I know. I am the kind of person who in a restroom if somebody walks out without washing, I'll be like,

oh, gosh, this happens to everyone sometimes. You forgot to wash your hands. And they'll be like, turn around, turn around, you turn around. I'm a parasitologist, go, wash your hands now. Do you ever do that? Do you ever say, like, look, I'm a parasitologist. Don't make me catalog all the things that are on your hands right now. You should wash those.

I don't say about washing your hands, because that's like more bacteria, which is not quite what I do. But I will say, like, when we're, you know, eating sushi, I'll be like, I'm a parasitologist. Don't make me catalog all the stuff that's in the wrong. raw food that you're eating. Is that Jeney? Hi, Jeney!

Good to see you. She didn't know I was going to be talking to you. Oh. Yay. Oh, I hope I get to see you again soon, Jeney. For, yeah, for the folks who aren't watching the video. She says she hopes she gets to see you again soon. Oh, good.

All right. Tye's amazing wife just came by who I talked about at the beginning of the show. That's Dr. Wife to you, man. I'm sorry. She is. Put a little respect in that. From Oxford, right? Doctor from Oxford.

No, Cambridge, Cambridge. I'm wearing my Cambridge sweatser right now, which I did not go to Cambridge about my way to it. Nice. That's close enough. It's all in the family. It's all good. So back to parasites. Yeah, I feel like I'm, I don't have a PhD, but I am PhD adjacent. So, yeah, I feel like I should get the same respect as if I. It doesn't work that way. All but dissertation and classwork. Yeah. Yeah. All but doing any of the world. So back to parasites and the expands, did parasites in our actual world inspire the protomel? molecule behavior at all in your story, like the mind control aspects of it? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, anytime you start dealing with stuff that's messing with consciousness

and repurposing somebody else's body to their own ends, you're kind of in that playground. Yeah, and the protomolecule does, it goes through sort of phases. In the early phase, it is very much a parasite. It is very much a, in my sort of original. creation of it back before even Daniel showed up. It was sort of a this weird mix of like Ebola and what's the what's the mold that grows out of um ant's heads? Cardriceps. Yeah. Cordyceps. Yeah. So it's it was sort of a mix of the two. I had written a short story many, many years ago. One of the scenes takes

place in a health camp where they are treating people who have Ebola. And so I did a bunch of reading about Ebola and there's a phase of Ebola that they call the zombie phase where it has basically melted your brain and you're still ambulatory. So you're sort of wandering around with a melted brain but you can still walk and your and your stomach, you're vomiting up your stomach lining because your internal organs are melting. And the stuff that you vomit up, the black bile that you vomit up is the single most infectious substance on earth. If you get that shit on you, you have Ebola. So that always fast, the horror of that fascinated me. I'm a horror writer at heart. And then the idea of if there was something that infected you and took you through that

zombie phase like Ebola does, but it had a purpose. It had, it had to design. There was a, it was a goal that it was trying to get to in the way that cordyceps does with the ants. It infects them, makes them climb up the tree, makes them explode so that they infect other ants, right? But it has a design. It has a thing that is trying to achieve by taking over the ant. So that combination of it's taking over humans, it's making them very infectious so that other humans get infected and ultimately when it has enough infected humans, it's trying to achieve something. I just found that sort of cool and horrifying at the same time. So that was really ultimately where it sort of came from. So you said this was from a short story? The research I did on Ebola. Yeah. What's the name of

the story? And I don't think that one ever got pulled. There's an opportunity there, but your stories about parasites should always be published. Have you read Peeps? Scott Westerfeld? I've eaten Peeps. I don't think that counts to them. Scott Westervelt, who is a lovely writer. I've never met him as a human being.

I can't speak to that, but he knows his way around a book, wrote a teenage romance vampire book that is also introductory parasitology. What? And it's called Peeps? Peeps. Peeps. P.E. Yeah, peeps. Just like the thing. It stands actually, I think, in the book for Parasite Positive. All right. Awesome. I can't wait to check that out. It's like if Twilight was being secretly used to teach people science. If only. Seriously, it's a great, it's a great little book. I read it to my kid when she was of the age, and it stuck. Peeps or Twilight? Peeps.

Peeps. Twilight was not a thing for us. Yeah. My kids aren't old enough for that yet. I'm not sure I am. All right. So I'll give you this idea and, you know, you just cut me in a little bit when you write the book about it.

Parasites that manipulate host behavior, very underrepresented in the literature are the trophically transmitted parasites. Sort of like toxoplasma gondi, but like this fish that I study that has the brain infecting parasites. Like, I found a bunch of like viruses where it's transmitted from one person or another where you bite each. other, but not a lot of these trophically transmitted things. And I, you know, there's a real opportunity there. There's some of the best zombie makers out there. I don't know what trophically

transferred. Oh, I should have said, yeah, sorry. That's, you're good. So, tropically transmitted means it goes from like when one, when a predator eats something else. So for example, when those rodents that are attracted to the smell of cat urine, I'm a science communicator, but I'm awful at identifying my own ecology jargon. But so like when a mouse is attracted to the smell of cat urine and the cat eats it and then gets infected, that's trophic transmission. And I studied a fish with a brain infecting parasite and when a bird eats the fish, that's how it gets transmitted up the trophic levels. And this is when you stopped eating sushi. This is, I'm guessing. That was when I stopped eating sushi. That or when I had this job where over the summer I had to

jump into dump trucks full of dead fish, that put me off of fish also. Yeah, I can see that. It was my worst job. That seems legit. Can I ask one more physics question since we've been talking about cat piss and rats for a minute. I was really interested in this Epstein drive. I love that you guys invented a scientist who came up with this new drive. How much did you think through the physics of the Epstein drive, this fusion-powered drive that moves so many of your ships through the solar system? It is based on a paper I read many years ago about a way to maximize, I mean, because you

can't get around the rocket equation. You have to throw something out the back of the ship. You have to. And that is the problem. And I had read a paper many, I might have been in Omni or a similar magazine way back in the day of a way to take the exhaust and throw it almost at light speed, like throw it so hard at the back of the ship that even tiny amounts of matter are imparting a lot of thrust. And I just sort of stole that idea. Physically, it doesn't actually work. It doesn't make any sense.

Your ship would just melt from the heat. If you're generating that much energy in a fusion reactor in the middle of your ship, you have to have a way to get rid of that heat. And we just sort of go, the heat is fixed. There's a heat solution. They invented it. Thank God we invented the heat machine. Other than that, I mean, the physics behind throwing stuff out the back of the ship really,

really hard, those make sense. And we're not ever going to say what paper that was. so that when it was discredited, we're not taking down with it. Plus, I probably misunderstood everything the guy said. It would probably be, or he or she would probably be very offended that I had used their paper to create my terrible fictional spaceship engine. Well, before I was a particle physicist, I was actually a budding young plasma physicist, and I worked in a plasma physics group in your backyard, Daniel, in Los Alamos.

And there's a guy there, Glenn Worden, who's a plasma physicist, who's been writing a series of about how plasma-powered engines are the only way we could ever, like, intercept an asteroid or get around the solar system. So I think you guys were ahead of your time. The science is now catching up to you. Well, this is one of those things where when you're vague enough, you get to take credit for everything. All right, writing advice. On that note, we're going to wrap things up. You told us a little bit about the history behind your new book, but I don't think you ever said the name of your new book? The new book is

The Mercy of God. It's the first in a trilogy called The Captives War. And are they going to come out one year at a time or something like that? If I can get Ty to sit in the goddamn chair, yes. Good luck, Daniel.

He stops wasting time on podcasts and does some writing. Well, we hope you're successful with that, Daniel. And good luck to both of you. And thank you so much for being on the show. I had a lot of fun. Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you.

We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at daniel and Kelly.org. Or you can find us on social media.

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I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious. In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Nielbornet and I discuss flight anxiety. What is not a norm is to allow it to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do, the things that you were meant to do. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to spend our own money?

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Hi, it's Honey German And I'm back with season two of my podcast Grasias, come again We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities You didn't have to audition?

No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs.

And, of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dacus Come Again on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you.

When you think about, motion regulation. You're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.