It Could Happen Here - Elon Musk and The Martian Revolution feat. Mike Duncan

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

Robert and Mia talk with Revolutions Podcast host Mike Duncan about the similarities between his new series The Martian Revolution and the Trump administration and the politics that inspired the show.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, which is these days normally about the fact that it's happening here. But today we're here to talk about a show where it happens somewhere else, a place that people aren't yet But may one day be in the future We're talking about the Martian Revolution with the great Mike Duncan of the revolutions podcast Mia Wong

Joining me on this interview welcome to the show Mike. Thank you very much for having me So let's talk about this because you know I've kept up and been listening to revolutions for years and and I started seeing messages earlier this year that like, Mike Duncan is doing this fictional revolution podcast on the Martian Revolution, and it seems to map really, really closely with a lot of stuff that's happening right now in the United States. And I'm wondering kind of, to what extent did you anticipate that being an initial reaction to this when you started really finally laying down like the text for these episodes?

I did not expect that at all, not at all. What has been happening to me has been one of the most surreal six months of my life in terms of what I am writing and dropping out into the world. And then I turn on the news three weeks later, four weeks later, and I'm just watching exactly what I wrote down in the show come to life. It is horrifying and I hate it.

Yeah, welcome to the club. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you guys have to change the name of your show because there's no good about it, man. We're just here. It's just going, yeah. You know, I've had the notion to do this Martian Revolution series for years. Like, I think I first came up with it back

during like the French Revolution days, is when I was like, you know, it would be a really cool thing to do. It's like, once I've got all of these under my belt, just like make up a fictional revolution that kind of follows along, like many of the plot points of previous revolutions. And so this has been kind of like years in the making

and a lot of the sort of like plot points and ideas that I wanted to do, I wanted it to be like a monopoly corporation because I also wanted to do some like social commentary and like what are the issues that we're kind of dealing with right now? And then I'm like, okay, then there's this thing called the new protocols that is gonna help

jumpstart the revolution. And this is somebody coming in and just implementing whole new software programs and hardware programs without any care for like what it does to people. Then there's mass layoffs that are a part of this. And then deportations are like all a part of the story of how the Martian revolution gets going. And this stuff was plotted out in October.

And I gotta tell you, maybe I was naive, maybe I had my head in the sand. I thought she was gonna win, man. Like I thought Harris was gonna win the election. That's where my head was at in September and October, going into November. I was like, it'll be close, of course it will. It's a toss up.

But I think she'll pull it out in the end. It sure feels like it because they were running a terrible campaign and like they didn't have any field operations and like the whole thing just kind of seemed like she was gonna win. So for Trump to win and then start doing all of these things that were just supposed to be fictional plot points. Oh yeah.

Reference, yeah, like now I'm just like, Jesus Christ, this is terrible. Well, that's what's so interesting is because yeah, so much of the initial, as you imagine it, the opening stages of the Martian revolution in your series are based on a guy who is a, quote unquote, partly like an autod didact, right? Like a dude who is raised believing that his ideas are good because they're his ideas.

And that he can kind of jump into any field of human endeavor and make things work better than the people who have been studying and working in that field for their entire lives. And he just starts changing everything based on his whims. Now you don't have him staying up until four in the morning on ketamine benders and then tweeting out his ideas for how to change the government.

But I guess I'd say like that's the one thing that doesn't map onto right now. And I think this almost just goes inherently with the act of crafting fiction. Even your bad guys are a lot more sympathetic than our current ones. Yeah. Yeah, which I think is to your credit,

but like I've enjoyed the degree to which the decisions that are being made that are kind of making this Martian revolution inevitable are the kind of decisions that you make when you've been raised in these sorts of bubbles where you are expected to just sort of be able to run things because like that's the strata that you come from.

And it maps directly to like what we're seeing right now with these Silicon Valley guys who have spent the last few decades getting impossible amounts of money and having that convince them that they know how to do everything. But it also maps back to like Versailles. I find that compelling.

Yeah, and you know, the Timothy Werner character, he's like sort of the figure against whom the revolution is going to start after he comes in and starts doing all this stuff. Like the number one, of course, as I'm releasing this, people are just like, this is just a cardboard cutout of Elon Musk, right? And which I would point out, the first thing is like,

actually no, because I very specifically wrote it, so he was a good husband and father. Yes, he loves his kids. It's obviously not, it's obviously not Elon Musk because he loves his kids. He's allowed to be in the same room as all of them. Yeah, yeah. They like, they get along great and everything.

So obviously it's not, but honest to God, like it wasn't meant to be just Musk, but it was meant to be those tech guys, right? Like this is meant to be thinking about the guys who come in and they're like, we're going to, we're going to move fast and break things. And then what they break is like 120 years of like labor law. And that's the only thing that is actually being broken here. Like this is what, you know, what, what Uber is and all of those kinds of,

like all of that stuff that came at us in the last like 10 or 15 years. And they think that yes, because they can code well or because they had this one ability to like, you know, market something in an effective way, that that means that they are brilliant and can do everything and everywhere for everybody. And like, we're gonna reinvent this and we're gonna reinvent that.

But they have no idea what they're doing or what they're talking about. And you run into these people on Twitter all the time, this phenomenon of people being good in one area and then becoming sort of all purpose, general knowledge experts when it's like, you don't have any idea what you're talking about. And so there's a line that's in there where it's like,

where Werner, the way that he thought is, I'm smart, therefore the ideas I have must be smart. Yes. And that is something that's not about Musk, that's about like just people I run into on Twitter all the time. Oh, constantly. That's a phenomenon, that's a generalizable phenomenon. No, I mean, yeah, we talk about that constantly

on the show, like we just did that four-parter on the Zizians that, who come out of like the rationalist Bay Area tech industry cult, which is both influential and a lot of the people who wound up working at Doge and just to the general tech mindset. And it is, it's the human embodiment of that idea that like, well, I know how to code. Coding's difficult. That means I'm smart. This must mean I know how to run the schools, right? This must mean I know how to replace Medicare, right? Yep. And it's this kind of like reasoning from first principles

without ever actually like having to sit face to face with the consequences of your decisions. And I think you do a great job of showing how that cascades into a calamity. And in a way that feels very realistic, even though we're talking about Mars and there's also like gravity generators and the like. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, and what, you know, what Werner does here is so much of what Doge

basically started doing. When they start going into these systems, they start changing codes. They have no idea what are the key things that are actually underpinning our society. The most recent thing I saw that made me think of this is like they're shutting down all the regional offices of the Social Security Administration

and like all communications are now gonna be run through Twitter, right? And one of Timothy Warner's things is the centralization of all decision-making and the centralization of really everything. And in his mind, it would be more efficient if the company just had one brain and that was his brain and every decision is made by the one brain.

And so he's got all this stuff and he's got to make all these decisions, except that is, that's crazy. That is not actually how you can run anything. And it just creates all of this, like basically everybody, I forget if I wrote this in, no, I definitely did, that like the dreaded like request pending screen

that people started getting, they would submit stuff like a fuel requisition order, and it would just say request pending, and like request pending would never go away, it would just, that's what it would say. And then you look at what they're doing now, and they are trying to centralize everything. It's a generalized authoritarian power grab

But you know, they are they are doing these things. Yeah One of the things that it reminds me the most of like from the other revolutions is I immediately went wait This is our Nicholas. Mm-hmm where you know, you have less of the reform package Well, like yeah, like the way that all of the power gets concentrated and centralized into this one guy who's a micromanager and then can't do it because no human could possibly have done it, but they're not, because of just their sort of affective power and the way that they think about micromanaging anything, they're incapable of letting their subordinates do things. Yeah.

Yeah, it also scans with the loves his kids part. Good husband. Yeah. Yeah, it also scans with the loves his kids part. Good husband. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing is like, everything that's in the show also is like basically something that comes from history, right? Like, and I am trying to do that. And it is something that, you know, like Charles the first,

Louis the 16th, Tsar Nicholas, these guys are all great family men. Their kids love them and they love their kids, right? Like one of the reasons the French Revolution happened is because Louis' son died, like on the eve of the estates general and he was just not there because his son had just died. That's a real thing that happened.

And the other stuff is like that sort of centralization of power is a lot of like what I was trying to get at there was actually like the reforms that went in for the European colonial powers after the seven years war in the Anglo colonies and the Spanish colonies and the French colonies. All of those governments sort of undertook a reorganization of their colonial structures after the seven years war.

It kind of like reshuffled who had what territory. And all of those moves were about sort of an increasing presence of the metropole in colonial life. And this is what triggers the American Revolution because there was gonna be like two more customs officials in Boston Harbor. And so like we went into revolt about this. But this is also true of like the bourbon reforms

in Spanish America is that kind of like centralization of a community and of colonies that had grown very used to managing their own affairs. And so they're coming in and saying, well, yeah, this is ours. And we here on earth should be making these decisions for you Martians. And the Martians were like, well, we've been making these decisions for ourselves

for like 70 years now. That's where that stuff is coming from. And then history is always the place that I can point to. And then I have to watch it also on the TV. Yeah. Yeah, I've had that same experience of like, I'm writing out kind of like this possible, you know, this story about what a future conflict,

civil conflict in the US might look like. And I'm just taking from stuff that happened in the last like 10 years in a lot of cases that I saw in different countries and people are like, how did you like anticipate this? And my answer is like, I didn't. This is just stuff that happens all the time, right? Cause people don't learn from history as a rule.

Like no one's ever learned a lesson from history is the thing I've kept repeating to people over the last few years. As I continue to fail to learn lessons from history. Yeah, we all do. And no, well, like one of the things people over the last few years, as I continue to fail to learn lessons from history. Yeah, we all do. And no, well, like one of the things that was getting kicked around the other day was,

like I came to this point where Werner is gonna start firing people. He's gonna start firing people because he's changed the metrics for how your employment status is being rated. And he's firing just people essentially randomly, like you are firing the head of this department and now that department can't run anymore, but he's like, it'll be more efficient.

And when I was writing it, it was originally supposed to be like a kind of a more dramatic 10% across the board layoff. And as I got closer to actually trying to type that up and write it down, I was like, this doesn't actually feel believable to me. Like people are gonna really push back. And I mean this sincerely, like people are gonna push back

that nobody would be so stupid as to just across the board do a 10% layoff of something so critical as Mars is to Earth. Because in the story, Mars is absolutely critical to how Earth is able to function with the resource that they're able to get from there. And so I changed it around and actually looked to like the sullen prescriptions from Roman history

to kind of give it a different take where really it was like you woke up every day and there was like 15 more names on the list, a hundred more names on the list. And there was something equally sort of dramatic and cool about that without this like unbelievable, you know, 10% across the board cut. And I wrote a paragraph in there being like,

I know that people are gonna think that this is like unrealistic, but you just have to understand that like, throughout history, we have seen these things. Like people do stupid stuff and they stubbornly cling to it all the time. Because that is something that happens. And life as we know it is actually less,

like if I wrote up what was happening right now, like if I was just got like a window into an alternate world and we're living in a different world where Trump lost and I brought all this stuff back, they'd be like, this is implausible, like this is crazy. They would never be allowed to get away with that. They would never be allowed to do that. They're not allowed to do that.

They would never be so stupid as to blow up the global economy with a bunch of tariffs that make no sense to anybody. Who wouldn't want the dollar as their reserve currency? Yeah, why would they fuck that up? None of, nothing that is happening right now is plausible in a storytelling, in a fictional storytelling setting.

Yeah, yeah. You know, this also gets something that I've been saying a lot in this show that I wanna get your take on, which is like, you know, one of the things that you wrote about in your sort of like, I guess like recap series of your experience going through the revolutions was about like,

how much of the stuff is driven by like the great idiots of history. And my God, do Elon Musk and Trump look to me like two of the greatest history? And that doesn't like guarantee that it'll happen, but like, whew. Yeah, they're there. The great idiot theory of revolutions

is a very simple thing, which is just saying that it's revolutions don't happen because some tyrant is in power and they are intolerably oppressing their people. People have been intolerably oppressed for a long time. And Trotsky's got this quote that is, if peasant discontentment was the cause of revolution, then there would be a revolution happening every single day

because the peasants are always discontented. Right. So what it takes to really have a revolution is for somebody in power to be kind of incompetent and to start doing stupid things that allow the situation to get out of hand. And on top of that, really piss off the other elites around them.

Because it's the mismanagement of the state that allows the elites that are kind of necessary for a full blown revolution. Like you need their resources and you need their money and you need them being close to a position of power to be able to pop whoever's in there at the time. And you gotta be pretty incompetent to like wreck an elite consensus, right?

Like that's, that is in and of itself catastrophically stupid if you're trying to stay in power. Yeah. And so yes, the great idiot theory is getting quite a workout lately. That's actually something else that I wanted to ask you about in terms of, like you see this in terms of Mabel Doerr, right?

Where Mabel Doerr is this kind of example of like the sort of local, I guess like local colonial elite to some extent. Yeah. I almost saw her as like, yeah, a lot of these kind of American revolutionary figures, right? Where you have this person who holds a fairly high position in the colonial state as a result of, you know,

their birth and the family they come into, but also is, identifies more as a member of that state of the colony than of the colonizing state. Yep. Yeah, and I think this is something, this is a part of the revolutionary process that I think is really, really badly understood on the left in terms of, in a lot of ways,

a necessity of parts of this elite flipping. And like the other example I think most people kind of are more familiar with is Philippe Egalité, like the Duc d'Or alone, like funding a bunch of these sort of revolutionary groups that eventually kind of like get out of his control. But can you talk a bit more about sort of the role of these sort of like elite defections and how they end up sort of funding and enabling these revolutionary movements?

Yeah, I mean, it's a mix of things. And I mean, you got it. Like Mabledore is meant to be sort of the colonial elite. And she's also meant to be sort of the liberal nobility in lots of different revolutionary settings. And she is doing that. And when she is, like, when I talk about her, like funding the Society of Martians

and like funding all of these like philanthropic, you know, enterprises to help Martians, like that's a lot of Philip Agalatay like straight up. Like that's what the Duke Dorleon was doing in, you know, 1786, 87 and 89. And so that's the role that she's playing. But you know, if the elites are unified, it is very difficult for any kind of like peasant or worker uprising to actually get traction

and succeed in overthrowing the state. Like peasant insurrections have happened throughout history without any sort of elite support. They have often accomplished great things. But when you think about the great revolutions in history, there really have always been people in the inner corridors of power who are ready to get rid of whoever the sovereign is

in that moment. And you can advance all the way to the Russian revolution. And this is the prototypical, like the workers have risen up and the army is mutinying and it is the people who overthrow the Tsar. And what that story misses is all of the people, even inside the Romanov family itself, who are like so fed up with what Nicholas and Alexander are doing that they're just like, we don't know what to do anymore, but like, he's, yeah,

I guess he's got to go. You know, like we can't get him to see reason. We can't get him to change course. We can't get him to do anything. Like the situation is completely out of hand. And without those people leaning on Nicholas to force his abdication and also to say, like we're not gonna back you up if you try to bring the hammer down on all these people, then that's when sovereigns are actually overthrown. Yes, and I love that you bring that up

because it gets to the failure to see that. And this is especially common with people who kind of idolize the 1917 revolution, but it's certainly not limited to that. I mean, in every revolution, you have people who are fans of that revolution or who see it as a model for what they want to do and also ignore the realities on the ground that like made it possible. I think one of my favorite examples is the quote that like you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.

Well, I don't know, in those pictures of the 1917 revolution, I see a lot of Mosins that used to be property of the czar, right? Like it happens all the time. And I think that we always need to be cautious of like seeing just what we want to see in revolutionary history as opposed to seeing what was there.

And the thing is, is Lenin understood this, right? Like Lenin understood what the game was and he understood what was going on. And you don't have to, like if you're a revolutionary and you're sympathetic to the communists in 1917, you don't have to say, oh, well, the elites were necessary for this first revolution and we need, you know, we need a break inside the ruling class. We need divisions inside the ruling class. That doesn't mean you have to say,

and what those people want out of overthrowing the Czar is what we want and what we're going to accept. Right. You know, obviously like the cousins of the, of Czar Nicholas and the people who are in those inner circles of power, they wanted him out of there just so they could run the empire a little bit better. They were frustrated with how poorly the empire

was being run. They didn't want a social revolution. But if you're going to take down that whole system, creating a destabilization event at the very top is necessary, but you don't have to support the ultimate aims of those people. It's just, it's an ingredient. And this is, and you see this in the course of revolutions

and you see this in 1917, you see this 1789 and then 1792 where there is that first wave of sort of revolution that overthrows the sovereign. And then there is a second wave that overthrows the people who did it first. And so, you know, you can hold out hope for, you know getting the job done without thinking that elites do play some role in all of that.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great point. This is Courtside with Laura Corenti, the podcast that's changing the game and breaking down the business of women's sports like never before. I'm Laura, the founder and CEO of Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment, your inside source on the biggest deals, power moves and game changers, writing the playbook on all things women's sports. From the heavy hitters in the front office to the powerhouse women on the pitch, we're talking to commissioners, team owners, influential athletes and the investors betting big on women's sports. We'll break down the numbers, get under the hood, and go deep on what's next.

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All of the beauty reflected right back at us. It was everything. Tune in to Locatora Radio Season 10. Now that's what I call a podcast. Listen to Locatora Radio Season 10 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about, sort of shifting gears a little bit, was about how you were thinking about the deportations when you were writing it and

how you were thinking about the way that kind of this like generalized anti-deportation organizing like turns into that and the sort of mutual aid networks that the Society of Martians are doing like directly turns into this thing. And that's also something that I don't know, it feels very presciencecience in ways even though it was written out before a lot of this stuff happens. Yeah, the deportation stuff is just because of my own personal political commitments over the course of my adult life. Right, which is that we have an insanely cruel immigration system. this country.

And they say like, oh, we've got this open borders. We do not have open borders. It is actually really, really hard to navigate your way properly through the American immigration system. That's true. The system itself is broken. And we did all of this. We did the worst of the horrors with Trump, right?

Like obviously that is on my mind with, you know, with family separations and putting people in camps and abusing people and rounding people up, like all of this stuff, which happened under Trump, yes, but it also happened under Obama for eight years and it happened for another four years under Biden. It's just that we kind of stopped talking about it because it wasn't Trump who was doing it. And there is a through line of cruelty inside of this system towards immigrants. So that issue of deportation and like rounding people up

and evicting them, especially those who have lived in this place their entire life. Like that's one of the points that I make. Like the people who are being fired are like born and raised on Mars. Like one of the points that I make. Like, the people who are being fired are like born and raised on Mars. Like one of the main characters, Alexandra Claire, she is a fourth generation Martian, and she just gets caught up in these like stupid layoffs that Timothy Werner is pushing through.

And now the only choice that she has is to either hide or get deported to Saturn, where and nobody's ever come back from Saturn. We have no idea what happens on Saturn because all they know and nobody's ever come back from Saturn. We have no idea what happens on Saturn because all they know is that nobody ever comes back from Saturn. And this is a thing, like taking people who were born and raised in America, this is the only place that they have ever known, right?

Even if they came here when they were like one, like, okay, they weren't born here, but like they here since they were one. And then you're like, okay, we're gonna send you back to Mexico. They're not from Mexico. They don't know anybody in Mexico. They don't probably even speak Spanish half the time, you know?

And doing this to people is cruel. It is unconscionable what we do to people. And so, yeah, like, so when I was thinking to myself, okay, I'm gonna write this like fictional revolution and it's gonna be on Mars. What are some of the things that I wanna do that will make the revolution happen? Yeah, some of this is like a little bit of like,

these are Mike's political interests and the deportation issue and trying to highlight the horror of the deportation issue and laud those who would hide those people and help those people and bring those people food. Like the bravest people going are the ones who like go out and leave water jugs out the middle of the desert so people don't die, right?

And the cruelest thing is these guys who go out and then break those. Like knowing that people are gonna die of dehydration and die of starvation, but just not care because they don't care about those people. That's one of the sickest things to me. Like it's just, there's information coming out now that there's that horrible video of that ICE agent

smashing the window of that woman's car to deport her. And then the information's come out that he is a deputized volunteer border guy. And you know, what's really happened if you look at it is we've kind of recreated in a decentralized form the Einsatzgruppe, right? Like instead of having a centralized state having to raise these organizations that are going to be carrying out this kind of violence, like it's largely become something that vigilantes have gotten into on

their own as part of like just their special interest in hurting people at scale. And it's such a uniquely, it's so uniquely tied to like this American scale. And it's such a uniquely, it's so uniquely tied to like this American individualism. It's such a uniquely sick thing about the way things work here, that that's happening. Like that wouldn't have happened, not that Germany is, not that German culture in the 30s was better,

but it just wouldn't have happened because it was a different kind of culture. Yeah, for sure. And then it's really important to remember that this is not just a Trump problem. Yeah. Like what he's doing right now is like, of course, like we are entering next levels

beyond next levels of what he's doing. And even, you know, just this morning, we've got an American citizen who has been held and they are not being released despite the passport and the social security card being shown to the judge. And the judge is like, I can't actually release this person. That's sort of where we're at now.

But this has been an ongoing thing for 20 years across both parties and both administrations. And nothing really has like sort of churned my stomach more since Trump got elected than all of the Democrats and people doing like sort of post-mortems on the election and being like, well, you know, we really should be tougher on the border. And we really should sort of like buy into this framing that there is this like invasion

and we just need to do border enforcement better. Like, and they're then even moving positioning themselves to a place where it's like, Trump's not even doing a good job protecting the border. And like, there was somebody, I forget even who it was, but somebody, one of them senators like tweeted, you know, this time last year, Biden had deported this many people and Trump isn't even deporting that many people. And he was like trying to make this point that like Trump wasn't following through on his promises or something, but it's like, do you even hear yourself?

Like, do you even hear yourself? Like, do you even hear yourself? Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I can't, you know, stomach the fact that the Democrats are gonna take away from all this, that the American people love cruelty towards immigrants and that we need to lean into that. And then you see the polls before all the tariffs stuff and all this stuff is going on

and Trump is still sitting in like 50% approval and it's like I don't maybe they're right. Maybe the American people really do just love this. So I mean, I think the other the other side of that, though, and this is, you know, part of the reason I brought up specifically like the resistance to it was that like the other aspect of of the kind of individualism of American culture was that it also meant that there, you know, a bunch of people went out to the desert, like our co worker James spent a lot of time during the Biden administration, like at these, I mean, just like the open air prisons they'd built in the middle of the fucking

desert, like on the border. And you know, and like, like one of the stories that he covered extensively was that like, probably most of these people would have died if it wasn't for like literally border volunteers, like passing food and water to the bars. And that's something that I was thinking about a lot, looking at the mutual aid networks and looking at the kind of mutual aid networks that trans people are building up right now.

And like, I mean, I, okay, like there's, I mean, there's always been a million mutual aid networks because it's just impossible to survive if you're trans without like getting stuff from other trans people. We're not supposed to do anything alone, man. We're not supposed to do anything alone. Well, right, yeah, that's- We're not supposed to do anything alone, man. We're not supposed to do anything alone. Well, right, yeah, that's... We're not supposed to be doing anything alone.

And that's honestly the most optimistic thing about your podcast is that Martian society develops this very communal, because we're living in an artificial habitat, and if shit goes really wrong, everyone dies at once. So you have to have this more collaborative, collective attitude towards safety and security that is just so completely absent from American culture.

It's the thing that continually sends me into the darkest spirals is because there's no fixing the fundamental underlying problems without fixing that. Yeah, and like on Mars, that sort of communal stuff is like, they're also living in close quarters Yeah, so you can't really be somebody who? Needs to be alone right? That's that's a thing and then also like in terms of like the early Colonization of Mars like yeah, you have to do this stuff together and like there's there's a like when I was doing like cultural

like there's cultural background like like works and music that was going on that the Martians were creating. And I didn't quite get into this, but there is a song that I've got like half written called the Ballad of Lonely Joe, which is like a, it's like a Martian folk song about Lonely Joe who went off and tried to like do it himself. But I mean, he never comes back and now Lonely Joe

like wanders the red sands of Mars because like he tried to go out and not do it like with the group and not do it with the community because you can't survive alone on Mars. But to your other point, like one of the things that I definitely wrote into the show is that everybody on Mars has a skin chip in their hand and the skin chip in their hand is what like opens door. It like literally opens doors and it gives them access to the commissary and it gives them access to restaurants.

It gives them access to food and employment. Like everything goes through that skin chip. And when the people get fired by Werner, their skin chips just get turned off effectively. And it doesn't open doors anymore. They can't get food anymore. They are living inside of a society that they literally cannot interact with anymore.

And so it took other Martians around them. And so there's a thing in the show called the No Doors Movement, which is Martians jamming open doors so that the people who have, they were called the annulled because their contracts were annulled. But so that the annulled could get from here to there

without needing their skinship. Yeah, those are the kinds of things that are necessary and those are the kinds of things that are gonna protect people. And I hope that those things are going on out there. And I hope that none of us publicly state right now what we may or may not be doing on that front. Let's just go ahead and keep that where it's at.

I'm a big fan of the don't fed post on social media or in your podcasts thing. Yeah. Yeah That's something you touch on there. I think is interesting About about the way that I being forced to live together like creates this consciousness It reminds me a lot of there. I was a student I was an anthropology student and one of the things that we've read was this sort of classic of, I guess, I guess you call it like structuralist Marxists, like anthropology from the eighties. It's this book called We Eat the Minds and the Minds Eat Us, which is about these indigenous Bolivian tin miners. And one of the things that always struck me about that was, you know, like because they're

all, they're all literally like sleeping next to each other, like in these rooms, you can literally hear like the stomach of like the child next to you, like rumbling at night because they don't have enough food. And that like turns them into like one of the most militant sort of like working class, I mean, for like a hundred years, they are like, like they're syndicalists and then they're communists and like they're, they're one of those militant things. And I, I don't know. It's, it's interesting to me that, that this is like this aspect of the society that, that you've, you know, you sort of drawn out of, of these historical revolutions where a key element of it again, is, is this sort of collectivity. And also there's this,

like, if you look at like the trajectory of like the modern American state and the modern, just the modern development of capitalism, it's been specifically trying to make that stuff not happen by kicking people into suburbs and trying to physically alienate people. I was wondering how much you were thinking about that kind of stuff when you were writing the cultural aspects of this. Sure. No, that stuff is all in my mind. And like I said, we're not meant to do anything alone.

Like humans are communal creatures. Like you don't go anywhere in history, like all the way back to the dawn of the species. You do not find individual humans like living by themselves. We have always done this as a group. This has always been a group project. And like, when you go back, this is something that comes out of sort of like,

I studied a lot of like political theory in school and the state of nature sort of works. You know, these thought experiments that like Thomas Paine would do or Rousseau would do. And, you know, it's like, how did we come together? Why did we come together? Well, let's first imagine like an individual human wandering through the forest

and like they encounter another one. So they come together for defense and they come together, you know, to share food and do some division of labor. And it's like, no, there's no such thing as a human wandering alone. That's not a thing. Like any outgrowth that comes from our description of what human society is like,

whether it's defense or the division of labor, begins with the fact that we are already a group. There is a mother, there is a child, there is a father, there are aunts and uncles and other, like whatever the group is, we are always doing this as a group. And hyper individualization and hyper atomization of our society is something that is trying to undo

one of the most fundamental parts of what it means to be human. This is something that I thought about a lot too, because when I started having kids, and, you know, I have two kids, and the model for, like, having a family at this point is like you have a mother, a father, or whatever, you have kids, but the point being that they are a unit

that is unto itself, and they live in their own house, and they have to supply their own food, and they are in charge of getting their own money and everything that happens is just up to that little nuclear family. And the nuclear family is not really how we've ever done it before. There's always been a broad network,

a broad family friend network that has been a part of raising our kids and having our families. And if something bad happens, we don't just say, oh, wow, bad luck for them, you support that person. And that is something that we've really gotten away from as a society, obviously. And it's something that we've been pulled away from purposefully, right?

Like the atomization isn't just a byproduct of incentives, right? Like it is a directed move. I mean, you just gotta look back to some of the shit Thatproduct of incentives, right? Like it is a directed move. I mean, you just gotta look back to some of the shit Thatcher was saying, right? There's no such thing as a society. There are men and women and there are families, right? This is a directed change.

And I'm not saying this in like the conspiratorial sense. I'm saying this at a, this is what a lot of people, a lot of the worst people in our society believe because it's convenient for them. And they have pushed to make that belief more common and done so by funding think tanks and funding media organizations in part. Right. I was actually about to quote literally that exact thing, but the interesting part to me about the Thatcher line is that everyone,

almost everyone who quotes that line only quotes the part about there are only individuals and then leaves out the part about the family. Yes. Which I think is a really important connection to what you were saying, where it's like, your vision of the family is also still fundamentally this isolated group because they still need some kind of collective because again, you can't just like leave a baby like out in the woods. It just dies. Right. But like they had to like create this version

to be the like the political base of their thing. They had to create this one collective that would be cut off from everything else that had normally made it a collective. Yep. You know, people think these days that that atomized nuclear family is like the law of nature, right? That this is like, this is the way it's always been. And like, that's not true. It's just not true. There's a great line, I don't have it right in front of me at the moment, but in Tocqueville's Ancien Regime and the French Revolution,

which is really dynamite book everybody should read. At the end of it, he lays it out. He's writing this in like the 1840s and 1850s. And he straight up says that like what liberal capitalism is doing, which he was, I mean, he's a conservative liberal. Like it's not like he's on the left or anything, but he's watching as the atomization of families

and individuals is happening. And he's like, and that's how, that's what tyranny thrives on. Tyranny thrives when everybody is disconnected from everybody else and everybody is in competition with everybody else, because that's the other key part of it is your family is now pitted against every other family in terms of like getting money, getting jobs,

like getting that, getting this other thing. Like we're all scrambling out there in a competition to get a little bit more, a little bit better, or just have enough. Like I feel this every time I have to sign the kids up for like summer camp, you know? Like I'm at war with every other family in the neighborhood because I'm just trying to get my kid into this camp

and some people aren't gonna make it and other people will and you gotta be there and you gotta have strategies about when to log on to the thing. Like, because they're pitting us against each other, like all the time, in all of those little subtle ways. Yep. This is Courtside with Laura Corenti,

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know, on the one hand, there is this kind of, like, collective society, but on the other hand, you know, this is a society entirely ruled by corporations, right? And it is literally every single aspect of it is specifically designed to get to do this pitting each other, like, pitting people against each other. And yet, anyway, somehow they, you know, even if it is by accident, which is to be fair, how a lot of revolutions start, they do it. I think the key thing is here is that we see throughout time, like really extreme societies that try to mold people in certain ways with the idea of permanently changing them. And what happens in the past, at least to every one of those societies, is that the society dies and people go on being people.

Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. There's no, there's no year zero. There's no creating a new, there's no, there's no new man. Right. No, that's not ever going to happen.

That's actually, I mean, just, I wouldn't even have thought that I'm gonna tie this back again to Tocqueville, which the reason I would recommend Ancien Résime is because that is a book about how much of the revolution was a continuation of what was going on before it. And not actually caused by the revolutionary break. And even if you believe in the revolution and believe it was this,

I actually believe in the revolution because it accomplished these great things. But there was no year zero thing that happened. A lot of this stuff like is just on a continuum. And, you know, like, I don't wanna get in a fight with somebody about whether human nature is a thing that exists or doesn't exist like as an abstract thing because I'm not sure that it's true,

but there sure are a lot of things that keep popping up, right? like as an abstract thing because I'm not sure that it's true, but there sure are a lot of things that keep popping up, right? Like we're interested in sex and we have to eat food and we live in shelters and we make music and there does seem to be some very like human qualities that exist across all time and across all space. And if you just say to yourself like,

well, like, I mean, this is one of the things I'm very sympathetic to anarchists, but like there's a point with anarchism, like especially the early stuff, where their idea was that if you smash the state and you destroy the state, then humans will be allowed to flourish in their natural goodness and communalism,

which is, you know, a little bit what we are moving towards right now, but I'm not sure even that exists, because if you crash the state out, it's not the state that's necessarily making us this way. There is stuff inside of human nature that we created the state to begin with. So the whole thing is like a very, it's a balancing act

that has gone way too far in a certain direction. Yeah, and I think that's something I always try to keep in mind. Like, it's not that societies can't alter or improve aspects of how things are, right? By changing the incentives, by altering the way things work. You can reduce the prevalence of certain problems. You can make things better in some ways, but there's certain stuff that you're just never going to... Like, when I look at what the white supremacists

want to do, right? Well, you're never going to get people to stop mingling with other kinds of people. You simply can't. It's never worked and it never will, right? Like that's an impossible dream. So I can just say like, that's a thing, no matter how tightly you grab ahold of the reins of state

and how many weapons you deploy, you simply won't succeed in the longterm at doing this because it's just not something we can do. You can't stop people from mingling. This is actually one of my points about immigration and migration. Is that no matter how tightly you try to control it, no matter, you could build every wall you want,

you can make it as hard as you want, people are still gonna move here. People are still gonna move away from here. People are still gonna go from here to there and from there to here. And that is something that is going to happen no matter what. And especially if we're going into the 21st century with all of its various climate disasters that are facing us. On route. Yeah. It it's gonna make, yeah, it's already making some places less habitable and other places will be more habitable. And what's gonna happen is the people who are living in less habitable areas are gonna wanna go to where

there are areas that are still habitable. And so there's gonna be movements of people. And the question before us in the 21st century is not, you know, can we keep people in the places that they are now and, you know, like sort keep people in the places that they are now and sort of lock in rigidly to like these xenophobic nation states and that will actually stop those migrations from happening

or do we open ourselves up to the idea that this is going to happen and simply make it more humane and more rational? That's the question. It's not whether the migrations will happen or not. It's simply how cruel they will be when they happen. And right now we are choosing maximum cruelty. Yep.

Sucks. Yeah. It sucks. It does. That's so much of our present society is like, well, yeah, this is the cruelest way I can imagine this happening. And we are staring down the barrel of the worst

case scenario, right? Like that's, that's the thing everyone's had to make peace with. You know, even, even once Trump won, there was still a degree of like, well, I guess we'll see and we've seen, right? And, and we do just kind of have to guide off that without pretending it's otherwise. Like the, that, that's one of the few things that does give me hope is that the people who are insistent upon pretending otherwise

seem to be getting increasingly marginalized. I mean, we'll see, Gavin Newsom still hasn't been sort of choked off of access to the public, but you know, the statements he's been making recently about Abrego Garcia, it's just like, yeah, I just can't imagine this guy being the future of the Democratic Party if this is just looking at where popular discourse is right now.

Right, and there's a lot of them who would like it to be the future of the Democratic Party because they don't care as much as Republicans don't care about the lives of these people who are living on this earth, who are living, breathing human beings, who are just someplace else and living in a world where like, yeah, the United States and Europe,

we suck up the world's wealth and resources. Like that's where the Imperial Center of the globe. And people are like, oh, and even when people say like, well, why do people come here? And there's a kind of a standard American exceptionalist notion, which is like, oh, and even when people say like, well, why do people come here? And there's a kind of a standard American exceptionalist notion, which is like, well, they come here because they want freedom and freedom is what America offers

and like the American dream and all that stuff, like the entrepreneurial spirit, et cetera, et cetera. But mostly it's because this is where you can come and get the world's money. Yeah. This is where it all is. It's sitting in my pocket, it's sitting in your pocket, right, we are the ones who have all of the world's money. Yeah. This is where it all is. It's sitting in my pocket, it's sitting in your pocket. We are the ones who have all of the world's money.

And so that is why they are coming here. Yep. So you just have to like fit that in your brain. And what is happening is this constant division between like Americans being more important than anybody else. And I understand why that exists politically. And even these questions of like citizens

versus non-citizens, like one of the things that got me when I was reading Bakunin was like, it was a throwaway line. It wasn't even like a point he was making, but he referred to something as mere citizenship, which kind of struck me because I grew up very liberal. Like I come from like the liberal suburbs of Seattle and I had very liberal notions. And citizenship in sort of the liberal imagination is the highest thing that you can be, be a citizen

of a polity with rights. There's a constitution, you get to participate in the government. Like citizen and citizenship are these words that had great profound meaning. And really kind of like knock me sideways to have them be like mere citizenship, right? You've been reduced to simply a part of a polity and your humanity has been taken away from you. You're no longer being recognized as a human being, you're being recognized as a citizen. And if you're not a citizen,

then you just don't count at all. And it totally wipes out their humanity. So not only do I not have humanity because I'm simply a part of some polity, rather than being me, Mike Duncan, a human being, but it's erasing our human obligations to each other, to non-citizens. And the idea, like, and you just see this very casually,

like right now, like all over the place, it's just like, they're not citizens, so they don't deserve due process. They're not citizens so we can just send them to El Salvadorian torture prisons and it's fine because they're not citizens and therefore they don't have rights. It's like, what about, you know,

just being a person thinking about other people? And one of the greatest, one of my very favorite, and I know I'm steamrolling here, I'll let you get a word in edgewise here in a second, but I forget what the court case was, but there was a court case out of Texas, you know, like back in like the 60s, when they decided that the Texas school districts

had to open the schools to undocumented children. And they said that because it says in the 14th amendment, persons, it doesn't say citizens. And they were resting a lot of this on the notion that like, it says person has these rights, not citizen has these rights. And this is what conservatives and MAGA hate, hate, hate, hate this is why they're gonna try to undo

the 14th amendment. But to have the Supreme Court at one point in the past be like, no, you have to do this because you owe an obligation to them as a person, not just as a citizen. That's like mind blowing. I could not see the Supreme Court today making that same decision, but like that's the kernel of something really good,

I think for the future of humanity, rather than like clinging to this like citizen or non-citizen thing. Yeah, I guess kind of for me, the most important belief I ever came to was the understanding that like, I don't care about citizenship and I don't care about who is supposed to be

in a specific place, right? I think one of the most toxic ideas possible is that like your rights as a person are dependent on where you were born. That's just the thing I'll never believe. And it's the fight we've lost the worst as the left, or I should even say getting beyond left and right, because I really think those are not the most useful ways

to look at things. It's like human beings, the fact that that battle, the battle to just see people as humans with inherent value as humans, regardless on their place of birth. The fact that that has been botched so badly is maybe the greatest calamity of the 21st century. Although there's a few, there's a few contenders. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, there's a lot.

Well, and it's so, it's so deeply ingrained. This is something I'm going to talk about more like in a different place, but like one of the things that's been driving me the most up the walls is like so I've had to read like every single piece Of terrorist cover tariff coverage has been written by like fucking all these analysts all of these media people Like and every single one of them only fucking talks about its impact on Americans Right. Yep. And if you look at the like the Liberation Day like turf tariff package, right? The single country that is the most far from this is Sri Lanka Yep like turf tariff package, right? The single country that is the most rough from this is Sri Lanka. And if those tariffs go back into effect in like, in like 50 days,

whatever, whatever, like 80 days, like the entire country of Sri Lanka is fucked. They're doomed. They're completely fucked. And all of these countries, you know, all these countries need US dollars in order to like literally

to buy fucking fuel. And then suddenly, oh, wait, hold on, you can't do exports to the US and like the entire, this something that affects literally the entire world, right? You can look at the tariff rates on every single country, like in the world and everyone writing about it only writes about its effect upon the US because there's this just like, like there's this, this, this pure sort of Ameri-centrism thing where like people and

this, I see this on the left too, too was like they fundamentally don't see anyone who's not in the US as human and the people in the US who are seen as like people who seems like humans who you know like think and feel and like act and like hurt in the same ways that we do like that's only a thing that happens if you're a very specific kind of American citizen and if you're not or God help you you were born in like most of the, like the rest of the world, which is again, an unhittiest super majority of everyone on earth, you just, you don't matter.

And- Yep, they don't. Yeah. Not in all this. And like, I mean, to bring it back to the Martian revolution, like one of the things that is happening right now, like in the series, you know, it's gonna be 30 episodes long and I'm writing episode 23 right now,

but like we've gone through the revolution. There's been, I don't wanna give away too many spoilers, but obviously like they win at certain points, otherwise it wouldn't be a very interesting story. And there is a debate right now among the victorious Martian revolutionaries about who should count inside of the Martian constitution and this thing called the Republic of Mars that they have just declared. They're no longer a part of a corporation. They're going to be this thing

called the Republic of Mars. And there is a guy who is passionately committed to Mars and to the Martian people, and he hates earthlings and he doesn't trust earthlings, and there's no reason for him to trust earthlings. They have tried to screw them over a bunch of times, and it caused nothing but pain. And so, but there are a bunch of earthborn earthlings on Mars, and he wants to exclude them from the Republic of Mars. And if you're born on Mars,

then you should get to participate. And if you're not, then you shouldn't have rights. You shouldn't be a part of this project. And I would love to just, I would love to deport you. That's what he's gonna be arguing. And then there is another side that has a more universalist take on this. And my character, Alexandra Claire,

who is like a D-class, she comes out of the Warrens, which you can just, now that's basically like the working class. You know, she's like, when Earthlings come here, yeah, I don't like it when they bungle things because they're new and they don't know what they're doing. Like I'm as annoyed by the new guy as anybody, but like they've suffered right alongside me,

like suffering the same conditions. Like the fact that they were born on earth doesn't mean that they're not suffering right now, that their contracts weren't annulled, that they are not suffering from the new protocols. Like, and you know, when, during these revolutions did they hold neutron guns in their hands and fight and die for Mars?

Yeah, they did. And so probably we should say that it's not Martian good, Earthling bad, but like, let's just open it up to everybody and we will sort out like, you know, who's, you know, who's in on this and who's, who's actually trying to undermine us because, you know, there is, there are loyalist fifth columnists

that they are gonna have to deal with. Yeah. Well, I think we're encroaching on an hour here, so I think we need to probably call this for the day. But Mike, I really appreciate your time. You've been so generous and I can't wait to see where you end. I know that you're also can't wait to see

where you land on all of this. Right, right, right. I've got all the plot points, you know, I know where it's going, but just getting there is, it's weird because sometimes when you write fiction, characters are like, you weren't supposed to do that, and now I've got to deal with that. And like, what are you, well,

she wouldn't do that in this moment. So I guess I was gonna have her do it, but I just can't believe that she would ever do that in that situation, so I guess she can't do it, and I she wouldn't do that in this moment. So I guess I was gonna have her do it, but I just can't believe that she would ever do that in that situation, so I guess she can't do it, and I'll have to figure that out. And that's my weekly struggle these days. Yeah, yeah, that's the struggle of releasing fiction before you're entirely done with it.

Yeah, well, I write, I mean, I wake up every Monday morning with a blank piece of paper and have to have that week's episode done by Sunday night. So I'm writing these in real time. Yeah. Well, I congratulate you on trapping yourself in such an exquisite hell. I'm enjoying listening to it.

And I know everyone else is as well. Oh, it's great. I love it. All right. That's the episode, everybody. Thank you. Bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one.

I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. It could be a family show. We're not quite sure.

We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless D***less Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. You get your podcast. I'm ready to fight. Oh, this is fighting words. Okay, I'll put the hammer back. Hi, I'm George M. Johnson,

a bestselling author with the second most banned book in America. Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back. Part of the power of Black queer creativity is the fact that we got us, you know? We are the greatest culture makers in world history. Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests trading blows

with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious. He was out of his mind, and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You Feeling This Too is a horror anthology podcast. It brings different creators to tell 10 vile, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, grotesque, horrific stories on what scares them the most. You're feeling this too. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.