Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Time travel fiction

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

Daniel and Kelly talk to authors about the science and storytelling of time-travel.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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get your podcasts so y'all probably know that i'm a big fan of science fiction i watch science fiction movies, TV, I read all sorts of science fiction books all the time. Send me your suggestions, please. But something that crops up all the time fiction, something those authors and those writers can't seem to resist is time travel. The narrative opportunities opened up by being able to move your characters forward in time or go back and meet themselves or interfere with themselves or jump on another timeline. You see it everywhere these days. But you know, science has rules to it. And so time travel opens up complications, not just opportunities. And so on today's show, we're going to be talking to authors and screenwriters about how they dealt with the complications

of time travel in their fiction. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith, and I used to hold out hope for the kind of time travel you see in movies until I started spending time with Daniel. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I love crushing Kelly's dreams. And you're so good at it. It's not me. It's science. Science has been ruining everything delicious since 1547 or whatever. Yeah, no, I think you and I actually both push that agenda regularly. And, you know, while science does say that some things you always wanted to do, are impossible. It also opens doors we never expected and reveals crazy truths about the world. So

sometimes science is on the fun side of life. Well, and you know, we've got like all of human knowledge in a tiny little thing that fits in our pockets now. Like, that's pretty sweet. I have no complaints. That's right. You are listening to us because of science. Otherwise, you'd have to travel to Virginia and California to somehow simultaneously to have a conversation with us. So science has made this possible. And now you don't have to go to California. You're welcome. Sorry you don't get to come to Virginia, though. I don't think I agree that that's a benefit. But anyway, you are all auditorially transported to California. All right. Well, so today we are talking about time travel, and we're doing some incredible interviews with people who have written and made movies about time

travel. So my question for you, Daniel, if you could go back in time and see anything, and you'll had one place you could go you could only use the time machine once what would you see oh wow such a good question so many things to see you know it frustrates me that there are facts out there about the universe which would change the entire way we see ourselves in the context of our lives if we knew them you know how life began on earth for example or how humans evolved all these things are so crucial But if I only had one, I think I would want a universe-sized reveal. And I would go back to 13.6 billion years ago and see what happened just before the Big Bang. What was the state of the universe?

What was going on there? I think, yeah, that would be my choice. Oh, that's interesting. So you are not only assuming that you can travel back in time, but you are also assuming that your body can survive under conditions that it probably couldn't survive in. Like you would go back in time in like a safe protective bubble or something. Well, who built this time machine? Because if I'm responsible for it, then no, I'm not trusting it in the Big Bang. But if, you know, somebody who actually knows what they're doing, like an engineer, put this thing together, then, yeah, I'm going back to the Big Bang.

And you know what? Even if I perish, I would still like to go back and know because that knowledge would be so powerful. Knowing how our universe began, the one true story of our universe? Wow, that would be incredible to do. Would you be okay with perishing, even if it meant that the answer couldn't be transmitted back? to the presence. Like, it's enough that just you know. Maybe I could somehow leave a message for the future, you know, like in the pattern of the cosmic microwave background radiation. That would be pretty cool. Wouldn't it be amazing to be doing research like that, to see photons in the night

sky, to analyze the data, and then to see an awesome message in that data from somebody who had traveled back. Wow, that sounds like a great science fiction story. Daniel says it's 42. Okay, so this is clearly a lot of fun to think about. So it's no surprise that it shows up in a bunch of movies and TV shows and I was just at Disney and it was in like the Guardians of the Galaxy ride and my daughter was asking a bunch of questions about whether or not they were right about the Big Bang and then she zoned out five seconds into the explanation but I'll get there but you follow a lot of instances where this happens in books and movies and stuff and so we are chatting with some people you know who have written about this for pop

that's right time travel appears all over the place in science fiction and so I'm always curious, like how authors work the science of time travel into it, how they deal with the potential contradictions, you know, the mechanics of making a story work when you can basically make up the rules and the rules don't always have to be self-consistent. So today we're going to talk to two authors who have dealt with that in their books and in their movies. Books and movies, I think, are really fun and totally worth reading and watching. But first, we're going to talk about the science of time travel so that you can have in your head what's possible and what's nonsense?

Let's play a game and let's see if from our conversations I can explain if time travel is possible. I'd love to hear that. Okay, so my understanding from our conversations is that time can curve a little bit and I guess I'm not 100% able to remember and articulate the reasons why,

but time curves, it's possible. You could go back in time a little, maybe for short periods, but you couldn't do it ever if it broke causality. Did I remember those points? Your face tells me I didn't get it 100%. No, that's the right spirit of it.

There are a couple technical issues there. You know, what do we mean when we say time curves? What we really mean is that clocks don't run the same for everybody. So, for example, if you're near a black hole, I'll see your clock running slower and you'll see my clock running faster. So that's what we mean when we say like time curves. It's really just time dilation. And you'll notice that in both those cases, clocks are running forwards. So you can have weird things like, I think this star blew up before that star, and you can think the opposite, that the order of events is different, but that's not exactly going back in time.

That's just saying there is no universal clock in the universe, and people can disagree about how fast clocks are running and the order of events. So there is some flexibility there, but actually going back in time is a whole different thing. All right. Well, it's good we revisited this conversation then. Yeah, now I'm remembering you talking about lights and the trolley and which one reaches the front and that's all making sense now. Okay, so you would say going back in time is not possible. Experiencing time at different speeds might be possible as long as that experience doesn't break causality in any way. Is that a fair summary?

That's a fair summary, but it's worth digging into the details because there actually is one place in general relativity where time travel appears to maybe be possible, though most people think that's just another place where general relativity breaks down like it does at the hearts of black holes. But let's start with the most vanilla thing. Like, why can't we just travel in time? I mean, in special relativity, we treat time like the fourth dimension, right? We have three dimensions of space, XYZ, like forward, backwards, up down, left, right. And in space, we can move all around. It'd be ridiculous to have somebody say like, hey, you can be at home and then you can never be at home again. You can't ever go back to that location.

That would be weird, right? Because in space, you can always go back to the location. It's no big deal. And if we say time is the fourth dimension, like space time is a four-dimensional object and we're grouping time together with the other bits of space, it's really weird to say, look, you can only slide forwards

along this one weird special dimension we call time and you can never go back, right? It's very weird to have one dimension be different from the other one. And so I think it's tempting in physics even to say like, hey, can't we find a way around this? Can we bend these rules? Can we somehow slide our bead backwards along this one dimension the way we can the other three, right? That would be beautiful. I want a beautiful equation that does that. And it would save us so much time. But the issue is the one you mentioned,

causality, right? We think the universe has this property where the future is caused by the past. And that immediately makes time different from space because space doesn't have this requirement that like the left half of the universe causes the right half of the universe or something. That would be really strange again. But this is something we see in the universe. The information flows forwards in time and it flows through space at a certain speed. So for example, anything I do right here right now can't influence things that are happening really far away right now because there's no time for that information to get there.

So if I shoot a laser at Alpha Centauri at some aliens, I can't kill them right now. I have to wait until that laser, that death ray, gets to Alpha Centauri in three years, then I can kill them. So there's only part of the universe that I can even influence. And that part of the universe in space time, we call a light cone. That's the region of the universe that I can influence. And that grows with time, right? If I shoot lasers and death rays in all directions right now, the portion of the universe, that I could kill with my death rays grows and grows and grows as those death rays fly out

away from me. So imagine sort of a cone where the tip is me and the cone is expanding out into space. And causality says I can only influence things in that cone. Okay. So let me see if I'm understanding. So like say I'm a very boring time traveler. All right. And so I travel back in time five minutes and I turn the light in my office off. And that's all I do. And then then I travel back to the future. Why couldn't the light still be off when I jump forward five minutes again? So you go back in time and you turn off the light, right? And so the light was on and you turned it off. And then I jumped back to the present. But the you who turned the light off experienced the light being on in the present, right? And now the light is off in the present. So

you have a contradiction. And does that you who thinks the light is off still go back in time to turn the light off when the light is already off all right see we can't even do boring things like flick light switches and here we're really implying causality we're imagining kelly is doing things by reacting to her situation and that she's making decisions about the future based on the past you're like a little causal agent you're like reacting to the information you have and making decisions and influencing the future right and already we're stuck in some sort of contradictions and that's because we're making this assumption that the universe is causal that the future depends on the past only, right, that no information from the future affects the past

because we don't know how to make sense of that. Like, we don't know how to build a theory of physics that involves causal loops like that. We don't know how that would work. It leads to contradictions, all that kind of stuff. And so we assume causality in physics. It's just a base assumption. We don't know where that comes from. We don't know that the universe has to be causal. It might be that the universe is not actually causal, that this is something we impose. on it to make sense of it because it's the way our brains work and it's the way we tell stories and it's just sort of natural and intuitive it doesn't mean the universe has to be that way it's just hard for us to make sense of anything else and it's a base assumption in all

of our theories so if causality is not required in the universe you got to throw everything out so that would be a big deal but you know the same way we used to assume that space was absolute and time was absolute those were assumptions we made at the bedrock of physics. And we did have to throw those out. And we did start again. And now we have a better theory. So, you know, I don't want to say forever this is going to be at the bedrock of physics. It's just what we have right now. So if physicists are right, right now, then you could never have any interesting space time fiction because the things you're allowed to do are so narrow. So everyone's going to have to break some of the rules of physics if they're going to bend time and

space. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yes. With one exception, there is. is one place in general relativity where you can bend these light cones. So what happens to your light cone as your approach, for example, a black hole? Well, instead of your light cone just going forward in time, it starts to bend a little bit. It bends towards the black hole.

And this is why we say, for example, when you enter a black hole, space and time get mixed up and the spatial direction is the future. Like there's only one place you can go and that's towards the center of the black hole. So your light cone bends towards the center of the black hole. That's just to give you intuition that when space gets bent, these light cones get really, really weird.

People have found arrangements of matter, like weird ways you can put stuff together, which create what they call a closed time-like curve. And this is the prediction that something would move in a loop in time. And these arrangements of matter are weird. They're like an infinite spinning cylinder of dust. Apparently creates this situation where the light cone is bent in such a way that something goes in a loop.

And that means that it is its own cause, right? Like its future is its past. It's very strange. Is this like Groundhog Day? How is this different than Groundhog Day? Well, in Groundhog Day, he remembers the other days, right? This would have to be some arrangement where your memories never change, right? Because it's always the same.

Now, nobody takes this seriously as a physical prediction. It's even less seriously taken than like the prediction that there's a singularity inside a black hole, which everybody recognizes is like, this is probably a sign. the general relativity is breaking down and needs to be replaced with another theory of quantum gravity that makes a more reasonable prediction. And most people suspect that when we do have a theory of quantum gravity, something that explains how gravity works and takes quantum mechanics into account, it will probably fix this problem. But to date, we don't know.

So, you know, when people say our current theories of physics outlaw time travel, that's true except for this weird closed time-like curve, which nobody really believes in, but technically is allowed according to theories of physics. So if you are an author out there and you want to write a really, really hard science fiction story by time travel, you can use closed timeline curves until we come up with a theory of quantum gravity.

But until then, everybody's got to deal with some way to handle this issue of getting information from the future and having information cause itself. And Daniel is available for consultation for a fee. No, absolutely. And for free. People send me your science fiction.

I'd love to read. read it and give you tips on it. All right. So on that note, let's introduce our first set of authors who had a teleporter in their amazing kids book. I had this like overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. 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 podcast. Hola, it's HoneyGerman. And my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.

I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. 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.

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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. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to? to listen to a condescending finance bro. Tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now.

When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. So it's my great pleasure to welcome to the podcast, illustrator Mark Fearing, and author and agent extraordinaire, Seth Fishman. Seth and Mark, thanks very much for joining us today.

Thanks for having us. Awesome. Thank you. These two are the pair behind the new book, Brandon, and the totally troublesome time machine, a kid's book about time travel. So, guys, we ask a lot of folks on here to talk to us about. about the science in their science fiction. But before we dig into the book,

we wanna ask you a question that we ask all of our authors, which is about teleporters in Star Trek. Do you believe that teleporters actually move you from place to place or kill you, dismantling you and recreating you somewhere else? Are they teleporters or are they death machines? I think they're sort of both.

I mean, I think that they do move, you take you apart, something you die. That's my take on it. You are fully separated and you come back together, but I don't know why you have to throw the death in there. It seems totally fine. You maybe don't know Daniel very well. This is a debate I remember having back in college,

and I'm pretty sure you have to dismantle completely and rebuild from materials. So I think there is a death involved in a rebirth from fresh new materials at the quantum level. Okay, I'll give you new body. So then why don't we improve it? Like, if you're going to get a new body anyway, Why not like, you know, always be a little bit younger when they transport you somewhere?

I think there's a lot of opportunities that have not been explored in the Star Trek universe. No diseases? Totally. Oh, man. Almost like they left open a lot of holes in this theory in Star Trek. Yeah, there's a lot of things that could be happening. All right. So let's get into the topic of your book instead of Star Trek. How did you guys end up writing a book about time travel?

Yeah, well, this is my seventh picture book. And I have discovered over time. that picture book inspiration comes from my kids usually and from me just sort of staring at their room, you know, and seeing what's going on or something that they say. And in general for this book, you know, I think time travel is something that kids think about a lot. So this came out of a question my son asked that I don't even fully remember. It was so vague, like how does time travel kind of thing work to me? And then I went straight to my childhood. The clear inspiration for me here was mainly Bill and Ted's excellent adventure.

a little Calvin and Hobbs. Classic. Nice. There's a scene that is very specific in Bill and Ted's where towards the end, when they realize that they can sort of communicate with themselves in the future without even having to go into a time machine where Ted goes, remember the trash can. And then sure enough, a trash can like falls on his dad's head. But in order to make that work, that means, okay, so he has to remember.

And then a future, one of him needs to set up the trash can back in the past. such that it will release off a timer and at that very moment fall down on his dad's head. And that is such a powerful thing that you could just be there and say, remember the trash, remember the, there was also like a recording device. And so I really thought that was just so fascinating

and so I was puzzling that over my head. So the book is built out of the idea of what about a kid being able to sort of call into being with the time machine the solutions to his problem. to his problems. That's where it built out for me. And then I was lucky enough to be able to work with Mark on this process. It's such a perfect exploration of the medium via his art. So I'm super happy about it. When you all talk to other people, including Seth, your kids, about how time travel works, are you all kind of on the same page? Or do you get a lot of different people

with different ideas about time travel? I can say quickly, there's a lot of debate about time travel. Every since I was a kid, my dad read a lot. And I remember reading the time machine as a kid and trying to figure out how this could possibly work. And then you get older and you come like Slaughterhouse Five, you know, and you start really thinking about space and time, right, travel. And so it's a great playground. And I think Seth just has a kid's take on it, which is not easy to do. This is complicated stuff.

And I imagine, I'm looking forward to reading it. I substitute teach primary school on occasion. And I look forward to reading the book one day and seeing how the kids take to it. Because it's a big idea. That's what's so fascinating about it. Well, do you think time travel is more complex for kids to understand or for adults? It's sort of mind bending and counterintuitive, but is that easier for kids who haven't learned all the details of causality and physics so they don't have the objections?

Does it make more sense to a kid's mind or to an adult? What do you think? I think that's exactly right, that it's easier because they don't have those what if moments or how about this moments at the same time. isn't that like what these books are about is like basically grabbing those moments when you're in high school thing like, grandfather paradox, whoa!

And like, how do we do that? So there's a page in this book that also everything came out of this one joke that I started. So it's this page where past and future, the main character's name is Brandon, are fighting each other. And he decides that past Brandon

is going to teach future Brandon a lesson. So before he goes to bed, he sets up a pie trap and then the way I wrote it it's just literally impossible to actually illustrate this way which is what Mark had the challenge is doing and that's why I want to ask you this question is like how did you approach this but the idea that I puzzled with is putting a pie he puts his pie trap and then he gets into bed himself and he goes to sleep and when he wakes up that pie trap hits him in the face so it's actually hitting future Brandon but it's very much him but future Brandon's like ah pass Brandon but he set it up so it's his fault

And I wrote that in in every edit for the first, like, five rounds were like, it's too confusing. And I was like, this is the reason why I wrote this book. It's going to be in there. And Mark's like, he's shaking his head right now because it's like so hard to do. So Mark, tell me, like, when you got here, like, how did you get around? How did you figure it out? You know, and picture books are interesting. I've done about 30 of them now.

And because of the media age we live in, a lot of authors tend to think in more animated terms, like jokes developing through time. And, of course, in a book, you are locked to a single image on a page. those are difficult things to try to communicate. And I think a lot of it has to do with the style and sort of the tone that you bring to it and allowing readers to bring their own meaning to it as they look at it. And they kind of fill in the frames like in a storyboard, I think. But those are difficult issues. There's a lot of very funny ideas.

I'm working at a new book right now, and it's like they were totally inspired by the Simpsons because they want these cutaways to things which don't work as well in a picture. your book as they do in Family Guy or The Simpsons. So there's always a little bit of stress, I think, on that, and even in my own work I write. So you just approach it and hope you can find the right tone and let the reader bring as much as possible in their mind to what's happening in between. That's like a form of time travel itself, because you're filling in the gaps between each panel, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's narrative art is great at that. That's what we're asking you to do is fill in those panels. And if you can find the right way to do that, you bring motion. to the reader. If I can follow up on that, Mark, I'd love to hear about how you made your illustration choices. When I was reading it, I was actually thinking Calvin and Hobbs, the transmogrifier box and all that stuff.

Did you have a conversation with Seth about what was in his mind? Did this come just from your reading of the text? How does that all work? In picture books, you tend never to speak to the author. In fact, it's kind of nice that Seth and I have been able to discuss this stuff and work together because there's many books I've done that I've never talked to an author of at all. Why?

What? why not? Publishers are looking to combine a author's point of view and an artist's point of view to create something sort of greater than either of them. If Seth as an agent, you would know how to describe this better. Oh, I hate it. I think it's absurd. I think it's probably more built out of protectionism by a publisher of like whoever might be the bigger name person. If I'm really honest, the idea that there's not even like a form that I should fill out to like give some benchmarks. It's basically just the script. An author can right in art direction.

And then it's totally up for the artist to do whatever they want with it, which is totally fine. But I reached out to Mark because I wanted to say, thank you, it was looking great. I usually like to wait for them to get their stamp on it so that the stamp is in. And then there's a conversation in my mind. I don't want to like get in there too early,

but I find it crazy. It's a weird way. And I think finding the right tone, I illustrate in a couple different ways. I'm not one style. I wanted to find that cartoony, that's fun, that's frivolous, that I think one of the reviews called it retro which bothered me for a week i had to call my agent and say am i retro now is this

my career over but uh i wanted that looseness i wanted that sort of new yorker style cartoon looseness to it i didn't want it to be battened down and painted so those are all just sort of art direction things that you come up with when you're working on it and and set was happy with it which is great i'm glad and uh it was a lot of fun to draw and be silly with it and creating the time machine in any way you know i wanted and being inspired i loved your time machine thanks yeah it's a tone thing with art i love with the christmas lights and the shower curtain and it's like you can really imagine that a kid had a ton of fun in there and they were like little reading books in there also in between traveling through time it's a fort it's a

adventure it's a fort it's an escape and that's kind of what a time machine is in a way so how much research goes into scenes like when he goes back in time to visit the dinosaurs did you have to do like a bunch of research on the, you know, current state of what we think dinosaurs looked like, or was it more like you had a picture in your mind and that's what you went with? You know, some books demand a more encyclopedic approach if you are creating something. I wanted it to be more fun and a little more fantastic, and I do keep up on my paleontology and archaeology. I'm a geek. I love watching the newest discoveries, you know. So I try to create something that sort of looks like you might imagine it more than being

an encyclopedic with it. Don't sell yourself short. For those you don't know, I write nonfiction books too. Those have a much higher level of you have fact checkers. Reviews will rag on you if you say something that's metaphorical, you know, like you're in trouble. Here, though, there's a specific run of scenes, which is what Mark was referring to with dinosaurs. I gave sample art pieces or like links to places showing what I thought with each one, I mean, where they are from the science base. All I wanted was feathers on the dinosaur. Like, that's really what I cared about. Right? Because I think that the idea, if you ever see a dinosaur without feather on it now, most dinosaurs, I'm like, what are we doing? Like we're teaching our kids poorly, right? And then we had other ones like the Colossus of Roads. We went back and forth. We had to do research because I always thought the Colossus of Roads was straddling the harbor and the boats went under. But after some research, it seems like, well, we don't 100% know. Most suggest that he was standing to one side. So we actually did do real research to try and play that in there. And sometimes it's me and the author, sometimes it's the artist and sometimes actually. The copy editor sneaks in there and is like,

here's some stuff you didn't know. But so we did go back and forth for sure. I was always curious about your portrayal of Alexander Hamilton because, you know, now he's such an iconic figure, but it's also like Lin-Manuel Miranda Miranda, which is not what he looks like, of course. So I was like, oh, you know, in my head it's all these different thoughts there. I try to look stuff up, definitely. The Colossil Rhodes is interesting because I was an ancient art history major in undergrad.

What path haven't they gone down? So that stuff is fascinating to me. And there is a lot of debate. It is still very much debatable about exactly what that was. There's contradictory information. And, of course, I'll take a shortcut to what's most visually interesting. At a certain point, I'm like, I don't care. This is a lot of fun to draw if we do this.

So there is some back and forth where I would rather push it to be interesting visually than maybe what was actually constructed. But yeah, we did have some notes on that. But it's certainly not like a book where you're doing history of New York architecture or something where you're going to have people who are like, Those are not the right size bricks and 1720, they only, you know, but it was fun, you know, kept it fun and I appreciated the notes. That's right. I remember, and we did debate about the colossal roads. I remember looking that up myself in a couple books and online. Well, that really touches

for me one of the exciting things about the possibility of time travel because there are so many big questions about the universe whose answers are just facts, facts that are lost to history. You know, what do the dinosaurs look like? How did the universe begin? How did humans evolve? All these things we could just know the answers to, if we could just go back and, you know, watch, it would be fascinating. So it's so tantalizing to imagine that you could actually get these answers. It really tickles that bone for me. So I feel like that's a great place to ask a final question, which is if you could go back in time to anywhere, what would you go back and see? I'm going to take sort of the easy answer that's not checking anything in my own history, which I wanted my character

to explore. But like you said, you're ancient art. I was ancient Rome history. major and i've always wanted to see rome at the height and get the walk around and see what that's like so i'd probably wander through there and then you know find out those answers and then tell the historians and then tell them what their methods were wrong and then we'll have to revise everything you know that's what i want no i just want to go take a look at it yeah i'm very close i think just hearing the latin that was spoken you know what was being spoken in the streets of rome in a hundred a d or 50 bc would be fascinating because we have so many questions i think i'd be tempted to go, Alexander the Great would be a real pull to see what exactly was going on.

What was that? What was he? I'm always partial to Athens about 480 BC or something. I'd love to see what was shaken. Mark, looks like we have to do like a history book together here. Yeah, I love it. We don't know where Alexander the Great ended up being buried, right? We do not. You could figure that out. That would, if we could go to the end of it, we don't really know how he died. We don't know the mood of. That's why I don't think time travel could exist because wouldn't we have seen some people poking around these places by now, wouldn't there? But I think Seth and I are a lot closer than yeah, I imagine, but that would be fascinating or to see Caesar and try to understand what was going on there. Oh, fascinating. Fascinating. All right. Thanks,

everybody. So the book is called Brandon and the totally troublesome time machine. It's a picture book for kids, but it touches on the kid inside all of us who wants to go back in time and get the answers to all of these deep questions. Seth and Mark, thanks very much for coming and talking to us. You're welcome. Thank you for having us. This was so fun. Thanks, guys. Your entire identity has been fabricated.

Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests

and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to. be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets, Season 12, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations 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've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success.

I feel like this is my destiny. 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 Vibras 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 the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me.

But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro, tell you how to manage your money again? Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates,

I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt and it weighs on you.

It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio 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, 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 two, 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. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having an 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. 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. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence, So tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors.

And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So it's my great pleasure to welcome the podcast, my old friend, Brad King. He runs a video game company. He writes science fiction, and he went to Los Alamos, middle school, and high school with me.

Bradley, so nice to see you again. So nice to see you. Daniel, I appreciate you emphasize the word old there. I just want to say I'm very excited to see you again. and I'm excited to meet Kelly. Daniel was like a really, he was in speech and debate. That's really where I think we got to know each other. And Daniel was a year ahead of me and I think really kind of a funny, wise, grounding force in an otherwise kind of chaotic motley crew, you know, like very intelligent people, but a little manic.

So, yeah, it's great to interact with you as an adult also. I didn't know you did speech and debate. Oh, yes, absolutely. Extemporaneous baloney and Lincoln Douglas debate. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. And that brought you here. Dot, dot, dot.

Here we are. Exactly. So before we talk about your exciting movie, we have a question we ask all science fiction writers to sort of put them on the spectrum. In your opinion, what does a teleporter do in Star Trek? Does it actually move your atoms from here to there? Or does it disassemble you and rebuild you somewhere else? Is it a murder machine?

Oh, this question, this is very contentious. I'm sure you're aware, yeah. I'll answer it. There's also an aspect of it that I feel like is more contentious that I usually get into. But, I mean, I can't get at the heads of the writers exactly. I'm an optimist, and I like the idea that they are actually being transported. However, I recognize that I think it's probably more likely that they're being disassembled and then just recreated. And when I get into this with the scientist friends, especially, there's one in particular who he says it doesn't matter because even if you're murdered, the fact that the copy of you is the exact same and moves forward.

For all intents and purposes, that means you live on. Of course, my point of view is well, but the me prior to teleportation is dead. Like my story has completed and now there's a new story. He'll argue very well that my point of view is invalid and that, you know, it doesn't matter whether you get to someone or not. It's the same. So does that mean you wouldn't step into a teleporter, but he would? I'm like a cat. I'm so curious.

I would get in. You know, like I. Really? Yeah. I mean, I assume hopefully that afterwards, whatever happened, I would either be blissfully unaware that I had been murdered or get to continue on. Hope the murder was quick and painless. Yeah, then who cares what happens after that?

That's the hope. But if you guys figure something out otherwise in your field, please let me know before I get in. We'll call you up to be a guinea pig on our next experiment since you're so optimistic. Great. Since you are totally willing to jump into these sci-fi sort of pieces of technology, were you always into sci-fi or what got you into science fiction and movies oh thank you that's a great question you know i grew up on star wars i think like a lot of us in that era and uh i also was really into fantasy and played dungeons and dragons and you know all that i think growing up in los alamos of course i was around a lot of

science and i was hyper aware of science as a thing i also recognized early on that i probably wasn't going to go into science i just don't think i had the dedication you know or interest and I really admired, you know, all the scientists and all of the smart people around. And so it's very possible that that, you know, combined with my formative entertainment youth sort of tilted me in the direction of science fiction. So I think, yeah, post-high school, I was constantly sort of going back to science fiction as a genre. And so what's the first piece of science fiction writing that you did?

Oh, my gosh, that's really hard. I have the first piece of fantasy writing I did because in gate in elementary school, they made us print a book. So I have that on the shelf, but sci-fi. I'm not sure I have a fun answer for that. You know, I just started writing little short stories. I remember in college. So then tell us how you decided to write a movie with sort of time travel and, you know,

seeing the future or the son of aspects. You sent me before we talked, this incredible spreadsheet you put together where you, like, broke down the time travel, motivations and mechanisms and all sorts of movies. You must have thought about this deeply before you got into it. I break down a lot of movies. I'm very interested in sort of borderline obsessed with the patterns. in storytelling. And so I will watch movies and I have a constantly shifting sort of template where all, you know, feed in all of the information. And I don't think it's as useful of a guide for

creating stories, but more maybe as a reflective or diagnostic tool afterwards or after an outline to say, you know, am I sort of in line with satisfying entertainment? But I also want to ask for it. There's a lot of soft data in that table. You know, a lot of it is conjecture. Like you can say, oh, well, most science, sci-fi movies either look to the past or look to the future. But a lot of them do both, you know, or they look to the past, but because the character's goals are to correct an impending disaster, they're also looking forward. So take all of it with a grain of salt, obviously. I had a similar spreadsheet for zombie movies for a project I was working on once. And I actually found I enjoyed the movies more because I was thinking about them on like multiple levels and how they connected.

Did it increase your joy or decrease your joy to be like filling in boxes as you were watching stuff? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first time I watched something, I try to just enjoy it. Like, I don't do this on first viewing. But yes, I think it enhances my enjoyment. And I think the discovery process of patterns, again, it's like a drug to me. You know, when I observe a pattern, I get really excited. And so especially with time travel movies, which can be pretty complicated, you know,

a primer is a really great example where the infinite sort of time loopage, the diagrams they have online, are really interesting to look at. And so how did you land on this particular sort of mechanism for your movie, this information from the future, these questions about can you avoid? what you see happening in the future. What about those themes opens up new stories for you or what story that you wanted to tell with those sort of topics and mechanisms? I have a lot of anxiety. A lot of it focused on the future.

And I also was undiagnosed ADHD for a very long time. So I have time blindness. You know, there's a lot of things around time that I think have sort of plagued me unconsciously and sometimes I was working out through my art. But I would say I can't take credit for the initial idea. my co-writer and producer, B.P. Cooper, we were just sort of obsessing about my favorite time travel movie at the time crimes, which I don't know if you guys have seen that. It's amazing. You should see it. Yeah. Incredible. And he had seen a movie called Timeline where I think they sent a camera back into the past to take a picture of the stars to ascertain the year that they were able to send something back at. And he just said, you know, off the cuff. He's like, oh, what about a camera that takes pictures of the future? And for some reason, my brain, you know, locked on to that. And I went away for a weekend and just sort of roughly outlined the whole movie, you know, and then came

back in for the next two weeks, we've worked on it. But I struggle with anxiety about the future. And I also as an artist, I'm constantly struggling with inspiration and wanting to, you know, somehow get ahead of the difficulty of not understanding where a piece of artwork or a story is going to go, even though that is, you know, the satisfying part is the discovery in the, you know, solving the puzzles, but it also carries a lot of emotional challenges along with it. So the idea of being able to see art ahead of time. sounds, you know, amazing to me.

But in your movie, it doesn't exactly give them confidence or let them relax, or it causes tension in the movie. Yes, right. Well, you know, I mean, it's cinema and it's a story, so we have to create as much conflict as possible. But I think all the themes that can be explored via time travel are very fruitful and exciting. Yeah, it throws me.

So what are the challenges of writing a movie like this, where the rules are a little bit fuzzy, where you get to basically make up the rules yourself instead of just like, a movie that happens in our universe according to our laws of physics where you're already bound by rules everybody understands that's a great question i was a little nervous about getting on this podcast because i have friends who are into you know hard science fiction right so the idea behind hard science fiction is that all the science is real and if it's set in the future that it's at least not violating any of the known laws of science right now and i'm very obviously more of a soft science fiction writer i almost treat it like fantasy and i've had people say well why don't you just

write fantasy then you know why i guess a general argument like why does soft sci-fi even exist but i don't know i guess i do like fantasy also but the rule i try to set for myself to really address your question is if i need science to do something that it can't currently i try not to take an element from the periodic table and make it do something that we know it can't do i would rather invent a new element i just don't have a bunch of people from los alamos eye rolling you know i'm I love soft sci-fi. And I feel like as long as you create a world and then you're consistent with the rules that you've created for that world. I'm just there to have fun. I'm not there to fact-check. That's my personal philosophy. Thank you, Kelly. I appreciate your support. I appreciate it. And even as particle physicists, we can enjoy soft science fiction also. Just because I grew up in Los Angeles doesn't mean I rule my eyes when something weird happens in a movie. Wow. So much support here. So much solidarity. I really appreciate it. Hey, it's a positive vibe kind of podcast. We weren't going to ask you on the podcast. And then, you know, quiz you on general reality.

or anything. Oh, gosh. I would fail if we did that. Do you enjoy other time travel movies? So you've made that spreadsheet. So you've clearly watched a lot of them. Do you have like pet peeves for things that people do in time travel movies or things you really like?

Yes. I should clarify this document was very hastily thrown together. I actually have hundreds of movie breakdowns. And I meant to tackle this earlier in the week and give you guys something really comprehensive. I just did not have time. So this was me very hastily this morning. You're like, oh, what can I get them?

You just go into your time machine and go back and do it. and come back to the podcast. Exactly. We'll wait. Yeah. I think, you know, depending on what's going on with me, I can either be more filled with regret or more obsessed with the future. And so that might color which time travel movies I'm, you know, more interested in.

You know, time loops, I think are really fascinating. I'm interested in explorer, you know, so many time travel movies. Again, it's like, oh, is it regrettable the past or we're looking at the future and inevitably it brings the characters back ideally to this stage. of being more present in the moment and sort of, you know, having acceptance, basically, like that's correcting their false philosophy. But I think something that hasn't been explored that much in time travel is using time loops to explore the problem of confirmation bias, which seems like a really big problem,

you know, our growing problem, our society, right? Like people getting these echo chambers and they get obsessed, you know, they sort of form these like neural grooves. And I think I try to touch on that a little bit in my movie. It's almost a throw away, but it's like the characters are so. certain they will die if they deviate from these photographs. But then the scientist shows up part way through and says, I don't think that's necessarily true. You know, and we never resolve that, which I like, but I would like to explore that more deeply because I feel like people seem to be

getting more polarized into their little paths of confirmation bias. And it seems like a problem. So you've written a movie about time travel, but you're also just a natural storyteller. Tell me, why do you think people are so drawn to movies about time travel? I mean, nobody's experienced it. So it's not something we all connect with or resonate with. And yet people seem to accept it. It's not like something weird and alien in stories. Why is it something that we find so easy to connect with when we've never had this kind of experience? Right. Again, I don't want to hammer the regret or future worry thing, but I do think those are universal experiences and often define people's lives, you know, especially if something terrible has happened in the past or

they're very concerned about something terrible upcoming. And so if I had to peg something, I would say probably once people grasp the mechanics of the time travel movie, it's easy for them to get into those emotions, you know, and access their own anxiety in one direction or another, I think. So we feel like constrained by the mechanics of time in our universe and we want to break out of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Theoretically attached to regret as a yearning to be able to go back and change what you did wrong. And future worry attached to that is a desire to be able to go forward. And of course, consciously, logically, we know we can't do that. But once you get put in a fantasy world where you can, I think it becomes compelling.

So then let me ask you a personal question, which is if I built a time machine that lets you go back in time and change something in your life, what would you do? Would you use it to go back and inform Bradley about the consequences of the decision? Or would you, like, go deep into the past and learn something scientific? I'd like to think I've had enough therapy to say that I wouldn't go back to try to change anything, you know, and that it's like that I appreciate how, you know, my mistakes have formed me. I would say in this moment, I'm in a very challenging phase. And so I would be more tempted to try to go back and change something, although thanks to time travel movies and books,

you know, we're all sort of hyper aware of the perils of going back and changing things. But by studying something, going back to any other era and just being able to sit there and observe, you know, I think would be from a nonfiction standpoint. I was a great. But from a fiction standpoint, you know, the verisimilitude that you could probably extract from some other era would just be gold, you know. All right. Wonderful. Well, thanks very much for coming on the Pod. Everybody, this is Bradley King, and he's one of the writers and the director of Time Laps, a really fun movie. You can all check out. And Bradley's working on several new projects, so we hope to hear more from you soon. Great. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

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 danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. 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 emotion regulation, we'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 iHeartRadio app,

podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, season two, 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. One Tribe save my life twice.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast. 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? No thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of

I feel uses, like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth.

He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 audition 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. achievement and a whole lot of laughs.

And of course, the great vivras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dacias Come Again on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.