The Problem With Jon Stewart - History Meets Galaxy with Tony Gilroy and Mike Duncan

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

In an era that can feel like a tinderbox, Jon is joined by Tony Gilroy, creator of "Andor" and Oscar nominee, and Mike Duncan, bestselling author and creator of the "History of Rome" and "Revolutions" podcasts. Together, they examine what draws ordinary people into extraordinary historical moments, explore the catalysts that spark revolutions, and consider how both fictional narratives and historical analysis illuminate our present. This podcast episode is brought to you by: GROUND NEWS - Go to https://groundnews.com/stewart to see how any news story is being framed by news outlets around the world and across the political spectrum. Use my link to get 40% off unlimited access with the Vantage Subscription. SURFSHARK - Go to https://surfshark.com/stewart and use code stewart at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast> TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher & Associate Producer – Gillian Spear Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. We are back after being off for, I think, a week there, and we're taping this damn thing. What is there? Wednesday, July 9th, it's probably going to air tomorrow. As of this moment, the Epstein files are still not here. They were here. They were on a desk, and then they weren't on the desk. And then they said that they don't have the files. Apparently, a gentleman named Jesri Epstein, who was sex trafficking. hundreds of people. There were hundreds of victims of this, but apparently acted alone. There are no files. And then maybe tomorrow they will have the files. And it turns out all the files were written with lemon juice on paper. Oh, they just had to hold them up under the light.

And then they appeared again. This has been such a surreal experience. Watching this administration in this moment, look Donald Trump very clearly came to power the the fuel of his rise

was the kinetic energy of conspiracy he rode the power of quote unquote the secret knowledge to light up his

audiences to to drive them mad with injustice and how they were going to fight it there was this deep state and they all knew about it and there was a liberal conspiracy and there were children involved and they were and and trump and all his influencers and all those individuals that force amplified uh the conspiracies are what i think drew his movement together. It was, in many ways, it's the glue that holds the MAGA moment much more than I think patriotism does. It's the glue of secret knowledge of unknown forces that work against you to cause your life. And one of the main forces was this exemplified by this Epstein thing. And everybody

talked about, oh, when they got in there and they were going to, where we go one, we go all, and we're going to clean this thing up and it is so fucking bananas to watch them now try and diffuse this bomb that they planted watching pam bonding i don't know if you saw the cabinet meeting where somebody uh the the first moment they brought up epstein in the cabinet meeting and trump immediately jumps in the really you're going to talk about that guy that guy that guy, the guy that my audience has been like clamoring about for for 10 years, that's the guy you're going to bring up while children are missing in Texas. And you're like, man, you, like, you were golfing the whole weekend. What are you talking about? How dare someone ask a question?

It's desecration. You were on like the 11th hole when all this was going down. You didn't, you didn't change. And it's a very reasonable question. But to watch Pam Bondi have to go from, And it's the same that happened with Pongino and Patel. To go from conspiracy theorist to reason to expert is just, M-a, Chef's Kiss. Oh, there's a minute missing from the prison videos. They had security camera footage from the prison, but there's a minute missing from 1159 to midnight.

And that minute, man, you can fit how many conspiracies can, Can you fit on the head of a minute? Like, you can fit them all and watching Pam Bondi have to go. You know, yeah, no, listen, I get it. You know, a minute is missing. But it turns out there's a very simple explanation, and it's somewhat innocuous. So it's not the sinister motives that everybody thought it was. So I'm sure that will take all the air out of this conspiracy,

because I've just explained to you. There's a very reasonable explanation. for why that doesn't exist. Watching them dance on the head of this pin is going to be, and I will guarantee you that ultimately you're already starting to see it. It's fire Pam Bondi. It's not fired the guy who's in all the pictures with Epstein and who said, I don't know if I'm going to release the files

because there's a lot of phony stuff in there. And Trump said there was phony stuff in there. And we all know the definition of phony when it comes to Donald Trump. anything that reflects poorly on Donald Trump is phony or fake. So by the very fact that he used that word specifically tells you something very much so. And I'm sure it'll morph because somehow dear leader will find his way out of it. It'll be Pam Bondi or it'll be somehow or it'll be the Mossad or they'll come up with some fucking idea that, oh, actually Trump has been really smart.

He's got all the information. and he's using it as compromise to get ought to to bring peace to this world uh but man what an upside down it's like watching the movie speed they're all they're all they've all been in the bus driving 80 miles an hour and suddenly the driver turns out to be one of them and he's like actually i planted the bus i planted the bomb and I'm the one who said we couldn't drive less than 80. It's, man, we're in such a weird moment, man. And that's why, so we have, we have a great couple of guests today that can actually talk about this weird moment that we're in through the lens of history and through the lens of art and fiction. Two people that I just, I so admire the work that they both do.

So I want to get to that and get out of the absurdity of the moment that we're in. So let's get to them. Folks, I'm excited here. I've got two fellas. I'm huge fan of both of these individuals. We've got Tony Gilroy, who if you're fans of the Born series, the writer, sometimes director of all those great films, the creator of Andor, Rogue One obviously co-wrote, and Mike Duncan, we all know best-selling author,

and if you're a fan at all of history podcast, a creator of the history of Rome, one of the most fabulous podcasts ever done, and all those revolutions podcasts, including the upcoming, it's now over in the podcast, but as you know in the future, there will be a Martian revolution. And Mike Duncan has very graciously informed us about the various things that are going to happen in the Martian Revolution. But the reason I wanted to have you both together on the podcast in this moment, because I feel like this is one of those fraught moments in time where we all feel we may be on the precipice of one of these schisms that leads to something historic, but maybe

people always feel that way. But the reason I wanted to pull the two of you together, Mike, as a historian, I think what historians do so well is they view revolution or historical events and they deconstruct them. They allow you to take a core sample of these moments in time that we all believe we understand really well. But the historian goes through and shows you the component parts may not be what you imagine them to be. And then the artist and the writer and the director, like Tony, you take those deconstructed moments of revolution,

the ingredients, and you reconstruct them to create these beautiful works of art that kind of give insight into maybe the more emotional aspects of what these are. It's almost as though your two sides of the same coin. So I want to start with Mike, deconstructing history and revolutions.

What drew you to that? What do you find that you learn from kind of taking that fine-tooth comb and going through these large-scale movements and moments that we all think we understand, but showing us their component parts? Yeah, like, I mean, I got into revolutions. Like I started the revolutions podcast because revolutions, I think, are inherently interesting moments in time, right? Like, this is where so much is happening and like so many of the pivots of history like exist in this and it's so chaotic. There's so many. Like, there's the French revolution is inherently interesting. The Russian

revolution is inherently interesting. So I did want to like go through these and I thought it would be a make for a great, you know, format for a show. And then when I'm doing, you know, the individual revolutions, I'm not really thinking about, like, how these connect necessarily to other revolutions. I just want to explain the one that is right in front of my face right now. Like, I want to explain the revolution of 1830 and the specifics, the specific context of 1830. And then when I do the Mexican Revolution, I want to talk about the specific context of the Mexican Revolution. But then when I was all done with like these 10 seasons worth of revolutions that I had written, I did produce like, I forget how many episodes it is now, like 12 or 15

episodes where I went back through and really did a big compare and contrast of every revolution that I had covered from the English Civil Wars to the Russian Revolution. And there are sort of similar structures, similar character types, similar orders of events. There are reasons why things happen that you can sort of extract from this like an abstract structure. And then we would never want to take that abstract structure and like put it, you know, on today and say, that means this is how things will go or put it in the future and say that's how things will go. But when And things then do roll out. If we get another revolution, I'll bet you anything, you could go back through it, talk about the specific context of that particular revolution and then see, oh, yep, this is exactly like it was in the Cromwell era and exactly like it was for Robespier and Dantan. And that is sort of how things go. Because, you know, history does not. Yeah, history doesn't repeat itself, but it absolutely does rhyme. It's amazing. And Tony, as you, when you're creating these worlds, are you then going through work. like the work that Mike does, or as a fan of that,

how are you compiling those kinds of ingredients that he's talking about to create the worlds that you're creating? Because what you do so well is you make them resonate. There's a reality to them. They feel three-dimensional, which is set for an artist, for a director, for a writer, that is such, challenge what's your process like then well i mean i first of all i i need like a booster seat or flotation device to participate in a real historical conversation because i am not a pro

like i am that's what mike's here for man me and even you i mean you guys have you guys have the kind of um you know you guys have the kind of memories and the kind of minds that that that that that that that hang on to all this stuff. I'm, I, I'm liberated. I, I get, I really, I mean, in 40, 40 years of doing this, or 35, 37 years of doing this, I have never once done a true life story for a script. You can imagine how many scripts I've written. You can imagine how many things I got offered over the years. I mean, how many, and I've never done one. My brother and I touched on one, but the character was so obscure, it really didn't matter. I've even, I've even hijacked projects that were nonfiction and fought hard to turn them against

to fictionalize them, saying, I can't do this if we're going to stay real. So I get this absolute instantaneous free pass. So I don't have to tell the truth. It's really, it's, you don't have to tell the truth. But when you're building the foundation of a story to make it resonate, to make it believable, Yeah, I'm getting there. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's the best, it's the best possible situation. I can, I've listened, I've now listened to all of my, I didn't do it in order. I look today, what am I missing? What didn't I do? The only revolution I did not do with Mike was the American revolution. Oh, that's fine. I don't know why, because I, because I, I did it in school. That's the only one I didn't do. Yeah, you could skip that one. And Martian, I didn't want to get, I didn't want to have any, I didn't want to like, I didn't, for, Five years, I didn't listen to any... Oh, you didn't want to go through a whole other science fiction revolution in space after having just spent five years doing one?

Maybe not. And so, and then, but this, but the reason that I listened to, it wasn't just because I was working on the show. The reason I listened to it because I've been a freak for this my whole life. So, I mean, the library in this house is just a chaos of, you know, of random books from the street and bad history books and great history books and weird things. And so I have that, I have what you were describing before. I use history as a catalog. I really get to use the entire catalog of incidents. It's almost as if it's, it's, you know, I shop for what I need as I go along.

And I have my, I have one, I have one requirement that that is above all that, which is it has to be, it has to be behavioral. It has to be relatable to character. It all has to be something. Explain that. Explain that. I mean, all of these, I, you know, I don't necessarily, I don't really have a dog in the fight of the great man or great moment philosophies of history. You know the big debates about all that.

It doesn't matter me. But when I read history, I am always, if it's not being presented to me overtly, I am always trying to dig behind what's going on for the behavioral aspect of why. is Mussolini doing this now? Why is Garibaldi doing this right now? Why would they do that? And what does he need? What is he so afraid of? What is she so desperate to have? So I, that's my, you're looking for motivation in a lot of ways. I think motivation is just motivation is a word that's just right up front. I think behavior is much more important than motivation in a way. But so I don't have, any of the moral or objective criteria or judgments or comments coming at me about truthfulness that anybody else is going to have. But I do have a very high bar in that the behavior has to be

honest. It has to be real. It has to be consistent. I have to find a way to get my people, my characters, into situations. And I can't, I can set the trap. I can set the things in motion. I can light the kindling on fire, but I cannot, once the characters are involved in the machinery, I can't manipulate the machinery to do what I want. The characters have to take it where it goes. That's my responsibility. Everybody, you know, as you know, I'm a very modern man, very tech savvy. I'm a big VPN guy.

And I'm going to tell you, Surfshark, it's a modern VPN. It's designed with the user in mind. You know, a lot of them VPNs, they're not designed for the user in mind, the utility on Surfshark are powered by robust security mechanisms, but designed to be simple and intuitive. You know, Surfshark encrypts all the data sent via the internet, protecting your passwords, private messages, photos, videos, other sensitive data from prying eyes. Which, it's not like the government has that information and is selling it all to, let's say, giant tech companies. but this one subscription allows you to install and run Surfshark on an unlimited number of devices at the same time, and they are strictly no logs.

Do you understand that? That means they don't keep your data. Finally, some great uses of Surfshark. You can overcome location-based price discrimination on plane tickets and car rentals by connecting to VPN servers in different countries. You can stay safe on public Wi-Fi by encrypting your data, making it useless for people who steal it.

You can unlock the 15 largest country Netflix libraries, including the U.S. and Japan by merely connecting to a server in the right country. Go to surfshark.com slash steward and use code Stewart to check out to get four extra months of surf shark VPN. That's surfshark.com slash steward to get four extra months of the VPN. We don't think of history in itself as a series of behaviors or motivations in those things. We see it as there's a certain inevitability to it. I mean, everything Tony just said is like what I do in revolutions. I'm obsessed with why people do the things that they do. Right.

And there are large structural forces that people are existing within, like, of course, but it is like individual choices and individual like motivations, like what is getting people up out of bed and driving them to do things. And then especially when we're talking about, like, you know, people like, Zar Nicholas or, you know, Marie Antoinette, like, you know, Zar Nicholas was not sitting down and being like, I'm going to be an evil tyrant today and oppress people. And then, and then they will, you know, they'll rise up against me, but that I don't, but I hate them. Right. No, he, he, he was convinced that he had been given, you know, his position by God and that it was his job to, like, steward this responsibility that the

Romanoff family had, you know, to reign over Russia. and hand that off to his, hand that off to his air. That's their principal motivation. That's what they're focused on. They're not focused on anything else beyond that. And inside of, you know, Nicholas's mind and Alexandria's mind, this makes a ton of sense. And what they're doing makes a ton of sense and is internally consistent with their own belief system, even though it appears from the outside to be like, well, you're just awful people

who need to be overthrown. That's nobody, nobody actually works like that. So anytime I'm reading a biography or I'm reading a history or something, I'm very much focused on you know, what is the psychological motivation for people and the things that they do? That's a huge part of the show. See, that's such an interesting. I think that's such an interesting point. And I wonder, Tony, how you deal with this in the way that you're constructing these things. I think we view that there's a difference between genuine belief and cynical manipulation. And in revolutions, there's always that moment. And Orwell sort of, you know, spoke to this, I think.

really well, that idea of the people that are in charge, are they behaving based on true belief, or are they manipulating systems for maximum power? Like Tsar Nicholas, you might look at it that way, but then when we look at like maybe the more modern revolutions where propaganda, you know, when you talk about the Nazis or Lenin and Stalin, Do they believe that what they're doing is right, ordained by God, or are they manipulating for power? Does that enter into, as you construct, either villains or heroes, Tony? No, I will say, I mean, it's going to say about Mike's, the Revolution's podcast. I mean, he's dead on.

I mean, the reason that makes it so entertaining and the reason why you listen to it so compulsively, And I just, it really, there's a lot of hours I put into that. And you don't just do that. It is personal. It is. He's delivering characters all the way through. I don't think, I don't think I agree completely with the basis of the question because it's like, I don't see, I don't see power or rebellion or, or insurrection as, I don't see anybody having. having a firmer grip on cynicism than anybody else.

I think cynicism is a, I think there's some very cynical revolutionary leaders along the way. I mean, really cynical. Right. I mean, people that are just, you know. Who are the people that come to mind for you? Well, I mean, look how Lenin uses everybody around him for kind of. Look at Mao. Right.

I mean, you talk about, look at Mao. I mean. Right. Man, I don't know if there's ever been a greater, I don't know, maybe Mike, maybe this book's discredited. Maybe Michael know more, but I think one of the most incredible books I ever read was, because I don't think there's ever been a personal

account of someone who was so close to an historical dynastic leader is Mao's doctor's book. That book that Mao's doctor wrote is like it's just, and the cynicism inside that, so I don't think anybody has. So I never look at it that. If you look at

our show, if you look at what I do, I think in general, I'm really interested in what people wake up in the morning, I guess, and what is really driving them. I think just as many Nazis were driven by who had the best parking place and who had the best corner office and who got the best typing. I don't think anybody, I don't think a whole lot of people woke up in the morning and thought, you know, it's really great. We're nationalizing the industries and I really hate Jews so much. I want to go out and do mass graves. You don't think any of them thought that?

You really, it couldn't have all been parking spaces. Oh, yeah, sure. No, yeah, no, no, no, no, no. But you can't write a character like that. That's why... Oh, that's interesting. That's why that movie, the Zone of Silence was so incredibly effective without doing anything, man.

I remember that, you know, the Auschwitz movie that was out two years ago where they never went into the camp. The zone of interest, right? There's a scene where the wife tries on the coat in the room. And you realize when she goes to the pocket that it's someone else's coat and she loves it. And it's like, man, that's where I want to live. That's where history is for me. History is in the tendency of those people to want things.

Mike can speak much more eloquently, I'm sure, about how individual behaviors get shaped into a lump and a lump gets shaped into a movement and it moves forward. And those title shifts are, you know, they're important than their story. But I can't start characters from the point of view of anything other than how much chaos they have inside of them. What do they really need? What are they afraid of? But then what is that, Mike? Is it, you know, is it the conductor or is it the orchestra? You know, does somebody in revolutions for this?

Because I think if you look at the span of human history, oppression and violence has always been with us. But it doesn't always combust into revolution. Right. Those moments are really specific. And as we're talking about sort of character and behavior, does there have to be a conductor as you look at it? it must there be somebody? Yes. You know, when you talk about Nicholas, who is, you know, this person who believes I'm ordained

by God and these are the things I'm doing, not to be evil, but because this is, this is biblically, you know, written. How do you view that, Mike, as you look at those? Well, it's a giant, like, interplay of things, right? Like, the orchestra can play without the conductor and the conductor can wave his arms without the orchestra. and the two things like have to come together in order to make the revolution happen in the moment that it does. And yeah, like to your point, there was, you know, there's a line from Trotsky that is like if you're talking about sort of what are the, what are the things that cause a revolution?

Like, what are the triggers of a revolution? You can't really say the misery of the peasant, excuse me, the misery of the peasants is a cause of revolution because the peasants are always miserable. Right. The peasant's the nature of peasantry. It's the very nature of peasantry at the time. So you can't say like, oh, the people are miserable and therefore there's a revolution because human misery is omnipresent. So it takes all of these other things fitting together up and down the socioeconomic line from the very

inner circles of power all the way down to, yes, the peasantry is miserable and they are ready to like rise up. In my experience with revolutions, this gets sort of as I've gone through history, you know, starting with these very early modern revolutions, then moving all the way up into the 20th century, you can see revolution sort of professionalizing as a like career path and like a career choice. Because in the early days, you know, like the American Revolution, the French Revolution, like these things, they, chaotic things happen. And there are leaders and there are people trying to do things, make reforms, do this, do that. But like, usually events start to spin out of

control. Nobody's really in charge of it. And then inside of these chaotic revolutionary vacuums, leaders do pop up and movements do pop up and parties do pop up. And then those groups start to like bend events this way and that. But at least in the early days, it's never people being like, okay, we're going to sit around, we're going to stage a revolution and then it's going to work. Like the first time that even happens is in August of 1792 when they do get together and overthrow the monarchy. But that's three years into the French Revolution by the time they're even getting down to business and planning stuff like that. But then you move forward 100 years. And yeah, Lenin is a professional revolutionary. That is what he is trying to do. Like that is his job. And so he's trying to create the

conditions that will make this revolution happen. And that's the first time you really see that being exercised. Yeah, yeah. It comes along in the mid-19th century. They're definitely precursor to Lenin. But even when like the Russian revolution gets going, like where's Lenin? He's in Switzerland. Like he didn't even know it was happening. He was he had to cut a deal with the Germans just to get back there so he could lead the revolution that he had nothing to do with. And then he did. And then him and the Bolsheviks do like, you know, bend events their way. But like this is really, I mean, revolutions at their bottom are just really out of any one person's hand for sure. Right.

You know, John, I mean, it's usually, I'm curious if Mike thinks this is true. But it's in the end, it's a body in the street. It's like the guy who started Arab Spring because he started himself on fire. It's the women in Paris marching to Versailles. it's like someone just says, hey, it's raining, I don't give a fuck, we're going to march to Versailles and demand that we get our bread. I mean, and it's, in the end, it's somebody goes to the street or somebody or somebody blows up the Reichstag or somebody or the false flag or somebody does, you know, but it, it, it, uh, yeah, I'm sure the Spartacus League and, and various

revolutionary groups have a very highly articulated checklist of things that will start a revolution. But I have a sure. It's probably, it's probably pretty sad. Yeah, that could be a Thursday. It could be two years from now. That's what I'm getting to, though. It's sad, that list. It's sad, yes. But as you deconstruct these revolutions, what you end up with is in some ways a to-do list. and you have a variety of choices and options like you say the Reichstag fire or you know you have the false flag Tony you had that in Andor you have that massacre in the square and they lure them in and you see the planning of you know the empire and they're saying you have that wonderful Dejra who says you just need the right people to do the wrong thing or the wrong people to do the right. You know, you need the people who think they're the revolutionaries to commit an act that allows the

empire to massacre them. Okay, just look at that. Just look at the one thing that you've said. Because you're going to hit on a whole bunch of things that have their own, these are all part of the catalog. Right, right, right. They don't go into every revolution. probably, you know, I don't know how, but, but, you know, building the enemy you want is a key tactic.

Boy, that's a nice phrase. Building the enemy you want. Well, look, J. Edgar Hoover puts people in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. Right. You know, the Brits put IRA, you have provos. I mean, a lot of people would argue, I might agree that Netanyahu built Hamas. I mean, you know, he took apart everything else and he put, he built the enemy that he wanted. You do that. That's what she's saying there. She says, we need, we need people that'll do what you want them to do. And that is a, that is in the, that is in the, that is in the, that is in the authoritarian playbook for sure. I mean, Mike could probably give you 19 other examples where that happened. Well, I mean, the head of the SR combat organization was like taking money from the czar while also planting bombs, right? Like, yeah, there is that there, there are those connections like all the time. Again, like, But getting back to like the checklist of stuff, like those guys can have a checklist.

And you can hit every single part of the checklist and then no revolution happens. Because there isn't actually like a series of buttons that you press and then like have a revolution happen. And even like, you know, in February of 1917, the Bolsheviks, I mean that the February revolution gets going because the women went into the streets. It was national women's day. And they wanted to go. The women wanted to go out into the streets and protests. And the Bolsheviks were telling them like, no, we don't want to do this. We want to keep our gunpowder dry.

We're going to save it for May Day, which was just a couple of months away. And then they went out there and it was a bright, sunny, warm day after a long winter in St. Petersburg and the whole city just like went crazy outside of everybody's, you know, expectation of what happened. So these things, they happen or they don't, but you're never just going to sit down and do like check nine things and then and then be able to stage a revolution. That is absolutely not how these things work. Folks, you've heard me talk about this before.

and I'm going to talk about it again, and I'm not going to stop talking about it until you people get on this damn thing. Ground news. It's a website. It's an app. It's a website and an app. It's on a mission.

It's going to give readers an easier, more data-driven way to read the news. I don't understand why they didn't do this before. They prioritize critical thinking, media literacy. Everything they offer is all related back to those two ideas. Every day, they're pulling thousands of news articles from around the world.

They organize them by story. Each story comes with visual breakdowns of the political bias, ownership, and headlines. Oh, relevant to today, you bet your ass. It helps you better understand why you're seeing what you're seeing and who's behind it. Ground News is a response to that fear, anger-based media. They don't dictate how readers should think or feel. They aggregate and they organize the information and they help readers make their own informed decisions. Ground News can help you sort through the noise and get the

the heart of the news. Go to groundnews.com slash Stewart. Subscribe for 40% off the unlimited access, Vantage subscription. Brings the price down to like $5 a month. That's ground.com slash steward. Do you find is it, you know, when we think about America in the way that we've mythologized our revolution, and I think it speaks sometimes to fiction because the Star Wars universe is so interestingly, you know, I think people look at the rebel alliance as the liberals and the empire as, well, that must be conservative. The liberals, look, they're all different species and they're living together in sin and doing all kinds of different things. And the empire is much more kind of fascistic and authoritarian. And they're doing those. But revolutions don't neatly play

along the liberals are the good guys and the conservatives are the bad guys, you know. Orwell wrote his was Stalinist, you know. Yeah, I mean, no, I mean, the empire is pretty clearly fascistic, I would say. I don't think there's some fascist overtones to it. I don't know. I'm saying that I don't know if anybody gets that connection. The color palette maybe a little bit. Anyway, but they, I, you know, and look, I don't, I am, I am, I win no Star Wars trivia contests at all. But I do know the, the, what I was given was five years. I have a five year piece of the calendar. And the five years that I have is a furnace that's just about to go nuts.

So, because the empire is at this moment making a huge effort. And this is the five years prior to a new home. Five years prior to Rogue one, yeah, prior to the blowing up of the dead star and the whole. thing. So I get those five years, and I have a couple canonical incidents on the calendar that I have to pay attention to. But the general understanding of that period of time is they are consolidating power aggressively because they know they're building this energy project that will dominate everything. They are doing what every fascistic government does, which is nationalizing all the corporate entities first. They are stripping the legal system. They are rewriting. They are emasculating and

completely neutering the political organizations. I have them write a, you know, a public order resentencing directive in the first season, which just changes all of the laws about, you know, arrests and they're building factory prisons. To detention centers that are... Factory prisons. That's right. Where they're working? Yeah, where they're working and all those different things.

I mean, they're on a big power grab. And the other really liberating thing about what I'm doing, I suppose, the other thing that makes it easy, there's a lot of things that are hard about it. It makes it easy is not just that I don't have to tell the truth or have to be beholden to any specific revolution. But I also, I don't really have to. have anybody espousing their ideology of what they want the galaxy to look like when the fight is over. Oh, wow.

I don't have anybody saying, when we're done, this is what it's going to look like. And I thought in the beginning, when it came on the show, that that was going to really be a very big thing for me. I think probably somewhere in this office, I have a couple weeks of work on that, trying to figure out how I was going to try to deal with that. And I gradually realized that I just didn't really need to do that. And I thought, how long can I get away with that? And then it turned out to be, I don't miss it at all. People don't miss that.

It's, it's. Man, you just blew my mind because I hadn't thought of it that way, Tony. But you're right. In the entirety of that five-year period and with Rogue One, I don't think I ever remember. There's no moment like there is like with Padme saying, so this is how Liberty dies. No, no one's saying when this is still over, we're really going to have collective bargaining. That's because, that's because Tom, that's because Tom, that's because Tony's a really good writer.

That's why you don't hear. That's why you don't hear that line. I'm an old sneaky writer. But it's surprising to me that that, I mean, I have some, I mean, I tiptoe around it. I have a thing very early on where Forrest Whitaker's character, because he's a real, he's a real outlier, you know, partisan uncontrollable. And he has a, he has a long speech with, Donald Scars guy. Yeah.

And he says, man, what are you? Are you? And he names like seven different groups. And some of the names I just made up for the moment, you know, human cultists and the Maya Pay Brigade and different things I've put in there. Which who are you? But I never, I never pin them down to what it is they want. That fight is going to come later on.

I do want to suggest that that fight is going to come in coalition. And I do spend a lot of energy as in every revolution and every revolution in every revolution that Mike's dealing with, I mean, fighting, fighting authority is just one third of the battle. Right. One third is trying to get food. The other third is trying to get food. And the other third is fighting with the people you're working with.

Mike, how, when you look at those real revolutions, the thing that Tony's talking about, sort of that governing philosophy, the isms that are associated with it, what part does that play in being able to coalesce these kind of revolutionary groups into something that is more successful or less successful. How much of it is ideology and what the world should look like? Well, I think in the beginning, Tony gets it right because it usually is opposition to a single

shared enemy, some kind of opponent that you all share a common hostility towards. created or otherwise like created or imagined okay yeah and it's usually and the way i describe it is like basically whatever you want whatever it happens to be on the ideological spectrum there's a there's an obstacle to getting what you want and so a lot of people like the king is the obstacle to me i'm a liberal noble i just want to reform things and then like over here you have the communists the king is an obstacle to me because i want full you know i want full luxury communism and we got to get rid of the king so that makes these two sides at least in that part of the revolution allies, of course, because everybody's sharing the same obstacle.

And so that brings this huge disparate group together and they all charge at that one obstacle together and they blow it up. And then, yes, they are left with what to do next. And in the revolutions podcast, this started, this pattern showed up very, very early on, which is any revolutionary group that wins immediately breaks into at least two factions and they start fighting each other. Is that the most fraught stage, Mike, that you, that you see in, in the, types of movements that sort of power vacuum? Every stage is fraught. But oh, yeah, dude, a power vacuum

is incredibly. Nobody likes a power vacuum. Yeah, because you're just making it up as you go, right? We declared a provisional government on whose authority? We don't know, but we just declared it. And hopefully people will believe it because all this stuff just exists in our mind, you know, like sovereignty and accepting like who has power and who doesn't. These are all just like emotional states and psychological states getting back to that. And so, but when when they achieve power, they're going to wind up fighting with each other because even though they shared an obstacle, they did not share an ultimate goal. And so this is, so I call this the entropy of victory, which is that any time a group achieves

victory, then they just start to spread apart. And usually it breaks down into some kind of binary because then these guys over here roughly say to themselves, well, our new obstacles, those guys over there. And these guys are saying, well, more obstacles, those guys over there. And then they start fighting. This group wins. And then they split. This group wins.

And then they split. And then suddenly he got rope spirit blowing his own jaw off because he's about to get overthrown. And then Frankenstein wakes up. And it turns out he's not dead after all. Yeah, he's not dead after all. Yeah. Oh, my God. Napoleon the 19th.

Yeah. And Tony, this is what's so brilliant about sort of how you construct these in the fictionalized universe. And even Star Wars and show, it's a new hope. And then it's, you know, or it's, uh, Rogue One. But then it's the empire strikes back. And then it's the force away, you know, this ebb and flow of, I don't have to worry about any of that, John. I just had to do Andor. I just do an Andor. Right. And I could not have been more disappointed with what they decided to do with those sequel movies because, you know, the whole point of the original three movies is like, we defeated the empire. Now we're going to go forward and, and let's see what happens next. And the idea that there is not drama and conflict and incredibly fascinating things to deal with. You know, after you've overthrown the empire, now you're trying to, like, restore the old. Republic and how does that work. Right, right. That stuff, that stuff is all over the place.

It is beautiful fodder. And now we're left with sort of a franchise that like you end the sixth movie and they're dancing on Endor because everything is great. And then the first scene of the next movie is like, oh, we're a resistance again. We're fighting who? Like what is the new? I don't know what any of this. I thought we beat all these guys. Mike said that. I just want to make sure Mike said that. I'm saying it's a nobody else has to. Yeah. Yeah. I was. I was really, yeah, thank you. I was really bummed out by that because those and people talk about like you know when I do the show like nothing ends on Bastille Day right like nothing ends when the Tsar is overthrown. That's the middle of the show or even just still occurring in the first third of the show and then is everything that

happened. And they haven't even introduced the new character of Napoleon yet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These guys show are showing up like very, very late in the game. And yeah. So all of that stuff is as fascinating and as much a part of the revolutionary process as the initial overthrow, which is like the first wave of the revolution is usually united. It's usually very democratic. Words like freedom and liberty are just like on everyone's lips. And we see this all the time. And then as soon as you get power, then it's every, every group starts breaking against every other group. Tony, I thought what was so interesting about and or is, you know, what he's talking. The way that you handled, you know, this idea of of what Cassian Andor's journey to it, what was so interesting is oftentimes in fiction,

there's sort of this idea of the ordained. There's Neo or there's Skywalker. Cassian Andor is just some guy. Like he doesn't, he's not a revolutionary. He has to be like kind of roped into this and his conditions become so extreme that it seems like his behavior really changes. How did you resist that kind of ordained trope? Oh, I mean, it was, well, it was baked into the very concept of what I was doing.

They tried to do several other prequel shows with the same idea. And they, you know, what's the smart? What's the obvious thing to do? So they wanted to have a show where Cassian and K2 would go do adventures and stuff. So they tried to do that a couple times. And after they did the first one, it was very slick, the script and the package and everything. But it was Kathy Kennedy sent it over to me, not to work on, but just for advice, and said, hey, what do you think about this? And I go, well, you know, this is very smart and slick and entertaining.

I go, but I don't know what the hell you're going to do after episode five. I mean, what are you going to do? Just storm the citadel every week? There's nothing to do. You'll die on the vine here. I mean, there's just, there's no story protein here at all. Right. I said, well, what should we do?

And I said, well, man, if I was going to do this show, you take this guy back to a roach and take him on the, pick him up on the worst day of his life and try to see how far away from, you know, in Rogue One, he's all singing, all dancing revolutionary warrior leader. I mean, he has every skill there is. Right. He's a butterfly. So like, how far away from that could you take somebody to get there in five years? And that was too radical for them at that moment. moment. But when they came back, they came back a year and a half later and go, you know, that idea is, it sounds so crazy. So it was baked in for me. I don't see any other way that you would do it.

I don't see how you'd get there. And I don't want to make it seem like I've got a chalkboard here and a calculator. But like, I do want to pull from the menu of what radicalizes a human being. What are the stations of the cross that makes somebody wake up to political consciousness and then past political consciousness? How does somebody wake up to the point of personal sacrifice and ultimate sacrifice, really? And so that first season is him, you know, is me. You know, I'm kind of working the menu there. I mean, he's a thief.

he's a killer, nobody wants to see him, he's broke, he's cynical, he'll be a mercenary, he'll stay a mercenary, he'll go on a party with the money that they stole. And everybody that he meets along the way, his mother even, and every single person has an effect on him. I have a Trotsky character who spins ideology to him. You know, Nemek reads his manifesto. He meets people along the way whose whole families were slaughtered, there's people there for revenge. He meets all these other influences. And then all of that was, I try to, you know, pack that musket as tight as I can. And then I send him to prison. And in the prison, the only way he's going to get out of the prison is to lead a revolution

because no one else is going to do it. And so he builds a mini revolution in the prison. And by the time he gets out on the success of that, he's fully committed. And that's so, I mean, I'm trying to show what it takes to get somebody all the way there. And if you look at the characters that, you know, the Mike's dealing with in the show all the time. I mean, I don't know. I mean, some of these people are there instantly. I mean, if you're in the Haitian revolution and you're, you know, you're a slave, it's pretty easy to figure out where you want to get, I would think.

But it is interesting how often prison seems to play a role in either the hardening of these revolutionaries or of the awakening of them or of in the, you know, setting that feeling of like, and now this will be. Look at Hitler. Who more than Hitler? If he didn't have time to write that fucking book, what would happen? I mean, holy cow. I mean, really. But it is those little moments. And again, this is one of the brilliant things.

And I'll ask Tony about this because then and they go to Mike. but the brilliant thing about, I think, the rogue universe and the Andor universe is you take this one moment that is the climax of the very first Star Wars movie, which is this one in a million trust the force shot of a, you know, a bomb into an air duct that goes in and you build out this entire world of how did they make that shot? how did they get it turns out the guy who designed it was doing it under direct he had placed that in there but they had to get that there's there's this whole universe in this one moment and it's so brilliant that you you you played that out and created this entire world of that one shot you go tablespoon by tablespoon, you don't ever look at it as a big thing. You just go step by step. You can't look at it as it. It's like he goes into a brothel to look for his sister. You could say, oh, if he doesn't go in the brothel, look for his sister, you don't blow the Death Star. Of course,

you could look at everything that way. But it is, it is stitch by stitch and what feels good and what's behaviorally right and what's politically interesting and what will people really believe? And, yeah. Mike, when you look at the actual history, I think it's easy. It's easy. for us when we look at fictionalized representations to think of the inevitability of revolutions or the inevitability of the victors are you surprised by the lack of inevitability and and the way that they fall apart and and and all the ups and downs that occur that that these moments where we look at it as oh sure the assassination of an archduke how could that not lead to to revolution right is is that is that what's surprising to you as you delve into these?

Well, I mean, surprised isn't the right word because I mean, I got into revolutions after, you know, like doing the entire history of the Roman Empire, which is, again, like those aren't necessarily revolutions, but you can definitely see how nothing is inevitable. And there's, there are times in history where it just feels like every single thing is locking into place to make a revolution happen and the revolution is going to explode. and then just like nothing happens. It fizzles out. There's, you know, if you look at what was going on between like 195 and

1968 in the United States, like there's every reason to believe there was going to be a full-blown revolution in the United States at that time. There's all a lot of the pieces. The 20s and 30s. I look at the anarchists of the 20s, the absolute economic collapse of the late 20s in the early 30s. It's almost stunning that there's not a revolution. Yeah.

And then there are times like in French history, there was, there was, damn near a revolution in France in the early 1820s that was basically called on account of rain. Like everybody started getting in Paris, like everybody starts getting together. And it just rained so hard that day. Like literally that people were not as able to get together and storm out into the streets. Whereas in February of 1917, the opposite happened. Like I said, when the women went out, it just so happened to be like a very balmy spring day after a long winter. And so like everybody's like, yeah, let's go out into the streets. Let's let's do a thing. And then that, becomes the revolution. And then there are other times where nobody expects a revolution to

break out. Nobody thinks anything is going to happen. And then the next thing you know, things start run away from it. Like I wrote this biography of Lafayette. And there's a really funny moment where they're having all these battles with King Charles in early 1830. Like he's annulled elections. He's rewriting election laws. He's canceling free press. And they're like, we're going to have these battles with him. But like we're going to come back like for the fall session and do all this stuff. And there's a note from Lafayette saying, like, I'm going to leave Paris and I'm going to go back home to LaGrange because like nothing's going to happen over the summer. And then like literally 36 hours later, people are manning the barricades in Paris and Charles is on his way to being overthrown. And like Lafayette has to immediately turn around and come back to Paris because the revolution he did not think was going to happen suddenly broke out, you know, contrary to anybody's expectation.

So that stuff is the stuff of history. And nothing is ever inevitable. Like nothing is written. And you might think it is, but it is not. And then things will happen that will surprise you and things that you absolutely are dead certain will happen. Just do not happen at all. Look, you know, the holidays are over.

Let's face facts. Christmas gifts, you got crushed. Why? Why do you have to buy a favorite? You just bought them last year. And it all adds up. Luckily, MidMobil is here to help you cut back on overspending on wireless this January. I don't even want to say it.

I don't even want to tell you. It's too good. 50% off unlimited premium wireless. Minmobile's end of the year sale, still going on, but only until the end of the month, which is January. So get on it. Cut out big wireless, bloated plans and unnecessary monthly charges with 50% off, 3, 6, 12 months of unlimited,

nation's largest 5G network, high-speed data, unlimited talk, and text. You could use your own phone. God, how much more do you people want? How demanding what is wrong with you? Mint Mobile plan, bring your phone number. This January, quit overspending on wireless with 50% off unlimited premium wireless. Plan started $15 a month at mintmobile.com slash TWS. That's mintmobile.com slash TWS.

Limited time offer. Upfront payments of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months, plan required, $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra, initial plan term, Only over 35 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Capable device required, available to speed and coverage varies. CementMobile.com. So Tony creates these incredibly just layered plays of behavior and things that,

and how people become these revolutionaries and what they have to do to do it. And you're looking at, you know, the different ingredients that went into these things, but we all live in the present. And it's really difficult. I have a hard time doing this, not looking at the present and gathering up those ingredients that you guys put into, that Tony, you put into this brilliant show about a revolutionary, and Mike, you put into deconstructing, and not look at the ingredients in this moment and think, boy, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, are in a Tinderbox. There's there's not an ingredient. John, John, we're in it. We're in a well that's like a history. Oh yeah. Don't don't even don't even worry about that man.

Oh yeah. People are, people are flicking matches at a Tinder box right now. Now whether or not it's going to go off nobody knows but dude yeah, we're good. We're there. We've been there for years. Where has all the karma gone? I mean, that's what I want to know. It sucks. Really, man. No, I mean, I think, uh, I wondered if this question was going to come up because it is. That's what I've been leading up to, for God's sake. The inert sort of muffled response that we just had, the sort of stunned past six months is just, it would be, I'd be really interesting to hear Mike's podcast in 75 years about this moment, what it would be like, how he would cover, you know, for like six months, it's just like nothing happened. I mean, people just, so, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, we're current, we're currently in about, I don't know, episode 13 or 14 of a treatment of, you know, the revolutionary upheavals of the,

you know, middle 21st century. It may be. Yeah. Like, we would be, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, something broke out tomorrow, it would be the easiest thing in the world to explain the big, major structural forces and like individual incidents that brought us to this point. It would be very easy to tell that story. And it's not hard to predict what the, I mean, if I was, people talk about the predictive quality of the show, oh, the show is like, and we're even, I mean, we were, you know,

I've been ducking those questions for four months while we've been out selling. I'm a little bit more, I'm a little bit more freed up at this point. But I mean, the, you know, as the show started to click out, all these things started to happen. We have Gorman and the, and the mineral rights. And that happens right when Greenland happens and we have the immigration issues. We have ICE and we have the senator from Iran arrested from the Senate at the same time that Padilla is being arrested from the right. And we're like, oh my God, you know, all right. So if we're so predictive, it's really, you know, it's not hard to predict a couple things that are going to definitely happen. I mean, I shocked that there has not been an immigration Kent State moment at this point. I mean,

that just seems inevitable. Something bad is absolutely going to happen at. And I, ice and a nice conflict and and whether it's false flag or whether it's an accident or whether it's fully motivated that's going to happen that's going to trigger uh you know martial law or an attempt a reaction right totally totally we always forget and you think about kent state and you think oh that's the moment that the revolution but in truth public opinion and we had talked about this previously i think with another guest the public opinion after kent state was fuck those students and there was the hard hat. Generally in this country,

there were Nixon played that there were the hard hat riots in New York where Yeah, but I think it hardened each side. It hardened each side. Yes, I would agree with that. I mean, I was, you know,

what you would think is it would have, it would have lit a fire under a popular uprising in a way that didn't occur because of the view that, law and order was under attack and that Kent State represented chaos that the society led in there. And that's, you know, when I look at MacArthur Park, you see a tank and a bunch of

guys rolling through there. When I look at what's happening to press freedom and those other things, it's hard to contextualize it in the pantheon of moments that lead to revolution. like Mike, is the barred a revolution in a society like ours higher than it was in the 1800s where society is maybe not as industrialized, not as developed? Was it easier to inflame revolution then? I don't know if it was easier or less, easier or harder by comparison. The United States of America right now does not seem particularly primed for a giant revolution. Honestly, like, I think the thing that we are dealing with right now is not like, are we on the verge of revolutionary upheaval? I don't see that.

Are we on the verge of civil conflict? Yes. Are we on the verge of a regime actually succeeding at planting itself in an authoritarian way and just getting away with that? Yeah, that's absolutely the thing that I'm most afraid of because I don't see the kind of large scale aggressive action that would make me think that. that a revolution is on the way. I certainly do not see the disaffected elites being willing to do anything outside of their comfort zone, which is something that I think is essential for any revolutionary project. And that's, you know, Tony nailed this one. Um, you know, with, with the monmothamas of the world. Like, what are the monmothmas of the world doing right now? They're, they're certainly not

engaged in revolutionary upheaval. We just had a guy get elected, uh, he was about to be elected as mayor of New York and everybody just like wanting to turn on him and like talk about his SAT scores because is one of the great obsessions going, speaking of Ken State, and which box you checked on his Columbia? One of the great obsessions of American elites is like elite college admissions. Like it's so crazy how obsessed people are with like elite college behavior. Right. Talk about that.

That's interesting. Tony, talk about Mon Muffin because what a crucial figure. Revolutions were sort of steeped in this mythology that revolutions are from the ground up. But it really isn't that way without the elites. I was also really fascinated. I mean, I was also really fascinated with the, you know, the early Christians that started, you know, bringing down the Roman Empire who began to be elites who began to believe in Christianity and became undermining the power structure. I thought the batter Meinhoff group was always really interesting. I thought Red Brigade and wealth. And the idea of also money. I really wanted to get very initially, revolutions really need money. I have a question for Mike, though. I'm really curious, but did you just. you said before, do you think, I see, I'm curious whether, it seems to me there's two authoritarian efforts going on simultaneously. It seems to me that you have the one that you know about

the, you know, with the Emperor Palpatine in the White House, but it seems to me that there's a tech rike that's simultaneously on a parallel track that's like, that's using him as a host organism and using that clown car of all these other idiots and just like just sort of quietly cooking along. That's interesting. Getting everything they want. And like I don't know whether I can think of another comp on his list of revolutions where you have, you know, a shadow authority that's really actually more frightening probably than the

idiots that are. I still adhere to the clown car idiot stumble bum. I don't think they're in charge of anything other than staying out of judgment. jail. But the other thing is really terrifying, this tech rake that's just, they have wide open field now. Is there a comp in history where there's been two, I don't know. Man, that's a really good question. But I completely, I mean, Peter Thiel is more frightening than anybody else that's out there. Did you see his interview with Ross Stodhead of the Times where he said he asked him, should humanity survive? And there's this really long, they're talking about how Greta Tunberg might be

the Antichrist. And there's all the. other things. And they say, should humanity survive? And there's kind of a heavy silence. And in that moment, you're just like, oh my God, this is the guy we just gave his company all of our data. What are we? Yep. This is the guy who eats Bond villains, man. He is like, he is. Because and that's, and that's the social and economic world that we all live in, right? We're all attached to our phones. We're all attached to the internet. Like, everything runs through them. And yeah, Silicon Valley, there's a wing of Silicon Valley that is developing and has developed a deeply anti-democratic and deeply anti-human ideology, that they just want to kind of like float above it all. And they do not

care what happens to the rest of us. Transhumanism, let's go to Mars. Yeah, man. So maybe they want a revolution. Maybe it's in their best interest that in two years there is a revolution, you know? Maybe it is in their interest. Which goes back to kind of our original talk about cynicism. Who's conducting, you know? Yeah. Okay, I'll write my next season then. Yeah, the next season is that The Kent State happens on the eve of the elections, and he cancels the elections, and he declares martial law. And who's really happy is, you know, the guy owns Palantir, you know. Right. Mike, is there, do you find in these moments of revolution, what do changes in either technology or, you know, the way that we go from agrarian societies to, you know, industrialized societies, we go from lack of communication to a print.

press. What do these kinds of really transformational moments in the way that we live, does that sow a certain instability and create more opportunity for these revolutions, more opportunity for people to weaponize these new technologies or these new industrialists? What have you seen with that? Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, because it can be big stuff. Like, I mean, industrialization is transferring like agrarian and old feudal societies. into something new. And that creates different incentives. It creates different elites. Right. That's one of the

big ones. It creates a whole new set of elites who are making money off something that you do not be able to make money off of before. And narrows the and narrows it. Yep. And then you have people living in completely different environments than their parents were. And usually the first run of things is going to be very exploitive towards like, you know, the peasants who are coming into the factories. Like, is it better a little bit? Yeah, you make a little bit more money. But like it's awful. It's. brutal, it's exploitive. And so those things, yeah, those, that churns, um, discontentment and that churns chaos inside of the society. That's the big stuff. And then also like, you know, changes in communications technology. Right. The way, the way that we spread ideas, the way that we share

ideas, like if you don't have a printing press and then you do have a printing press, the big thing about this is when you get that first wave of the printing press, like things are just hitting the market. Things are just being said and thrown out there. And ideas that you've never been able to confront or think about before or suddenly in front of your face. The French revolution with, you know, basically invents daily journalism, right? That didn't really exist before the French Revolution, which, you know, people are just trying to chronicle events in real time and spread, you know, pamphlets and newsletters. But because there was something new happening like every single day, there was always something to comment on. And nobody had ever dealt with

that kind of flood of paper before, right? And you can't censor that. You can't control that as the regime. And so what we find in basically all states, and really if you start getting down to like what are the like the, the basic causes of revolution. And a lot of it is a state's inability to adapt to changing circumstances. And if the state can adapt to the changing circumstances, if it can co-op these new elites, if it can maybe ameliorate a little bit the suffering of these people, if it can make this change. Okay, there's a, there's a, like in Britain, there's a huge middle class that isn't allowed the vote and they're starting to get really restless. So let's give them the vote.

And those changes are the things that really head off like revolution. Or a really big mistake. Or a really big mistake. I mean, that's right? There are some really big mistake. Right. Well, I mean, Mike can give the historical comps, but like, you know, a breakout virus in February that we didn't prepare for because we have, you know, Captain.

Crunch is the head of the FDA. Right. And everybody dies. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, good luck then. You'll have a revolution. There are comps.

I'm trying to think what, I mean, all these are filled with so many mistakes. All these people, I mean, I mean, the czars and I mean, they all just, I mean, but a big mistake, World War I was a mistake for Russia, right? Yeah. Oh, sure. It was. I mean, if they didn't do that, if Russia stayed out, they would have been cool. Everything would have been fun.

And this is, and this is like the big, like the big takeaway from revolutions that people know is my great idiot theory of revolution. Yes. Which is right, which is not the great man theory, but like, yes, the great idiot. It does take a certain kind of moron to like actually blow it so bad that you get overthrown. These are, these are some of the dumbest motherfuckers I have ever met in my life. Well, watching, when you listen to your pocket on Rome, watching in slow motion, the Romans destroying this 100 year period of more egalitarian, more democratic, to watch them destroy it by just taking away farmland and you're just you're watching it in slow motion going why would you do that? Why are you doing this? And Charles, I mean, Charles the first who is the first sort of any, he wind up

being the sort of prototype for all my future leaders that get overthrown. This is during like the Cromwell era in England. Like nobody wanted to chop his head off. Like nobody wanted to kill him. They just wanted some reform. All they wanted was like, we just want parliament to control the budget and maybe like have a veto over war in peace. And he's just like, well. We're not looking to decapitate. Yeah, like I can't do that so like they had to chop his head off in the end like nobody wanted that. He takes the cake. He really does. Oh yeah. Yeah, he does. And then and then when I, and then it was cool because that was the very first season. And then I see that behavior like over and over and over again. Like the Revolution of 1830, which is, you know, that's another Charles. Like don't have King Charles's

is like one of the one of the one of the lessons. One of the lessons. Yeah, one of the lessons of the lessons of revolutions was don't have Charles. But like there was no reason for him to get overthrown. He drops these four ordinances like in the middle of the night, basically like, unknowifying the elections and canceling free speech. And really what gets Paris going in 1830 is like the printers have all just been put out of a job. And they're the ones who are the most pissed off and the ones who are going into the streets. The British government that is running the North American colonies like after the seven years war just fumbled away those colonies. Like there is no reason for them to have been so obtuse.

politically that they wind up losing control of the eastern seaboard of North America. How do you not know we don't love tea? We love tea. Like how do you not? Why would you make it more expensive? Yeah, like these are mistakes that are being made. And so you don't get revolutions usually against some hyper-competent tyrannical government. It's not just the fact of that there are a dictatorship or there's a lot of oppression that's going on. It's because that you need that structure and also somebody who's running it really badly. So my much so that the elites inside of that. Because as long as the elites are together, like there's not going to be a revolution.

But if you get somebody who's really doing a bad job, then other elites are going to be like, we are really frustrated with you and we would like you to go now, please. And it is, in some ways, it is like watching a movie, Tony, in that, or even a horror movie where you're just like, don't go in the house. Like, don't drop those ordinances. Don't, please don't consolidate the farmland. Like, you're just shouting at these dudes. not to do that. But I wonder, in a parallel to now, isn't there anybody within the government going,

don't militarize our cities. Don't just because you need vindication over those you don't think voted for you. Don't this revenge fantasy is going to. That's how I feel right now. Like we're watching this in slow motion. I, uh, I do not know how, as sophisticated as I may appear and as educated or not, or I still, you'd be shocked at how baffled I am by, I still do not understand people who do things that they know or wrong when the cost is not like your children's hand or something or, or your, I don't understand. I don't understand the lack of, and collective and not. It's not collective. Now it's like a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's just, it's stadiums full of people doing what they know is wrong and just doing it and going along. And nobody's standing up.

And I'm just fascinated by that. I don't know how to package that. I don't know if that's, it's hard to see an historical comp for that because I've never seen anything in any other show that's like, that's on that scale. But there's an entire city now. All of our, I mean, so many people in America are doing things that they actually know or wrong. They know it. And yet, well, Mike, does that, does that stem from, as you watch through history, as long as they're doing it to the right people, as long as the bad

actions are being exercised on the so-called deserving enemies of the state? Yep. Is that how this tends to propagate? I hope that's the answer. I mean, I mean, dude, it sure, it sure seems like it because, you know, like, I'm not too far off because I have studied all of this history. And yet, you know, I've come into the last like 10, 15 years of politics. And, you know, like, I cut my teeth during the Bush years and during the build, like, selling of the Iraq war and like watching people just like, let's just haul off. And defatifying a country and oh, that turns into an insurgency. Let's just haul off. Right.

Let's just haul off invade and occupy an entire country. Sure. And like, this is getting like 90% approval. Like, yeah, people will buy into those things. and they will go along with them. And I think that, like, you know, to be like, not to be a downer, but like, if he had never, if Trump had never gotten into the tariff business and really started poking at like the economic parts of the empire, if he had stuck strictly, which I think he's doing now,

if he'd stuck strictly to just like, let's just like terrorize, terrorize and drive out all of the, all of people who are Hispanic or people who are Muslim and just target them, America was going along with that. American elites were going along with that. The American public was going along with that. And it would have worked pretty seamlessly. And then if they had, if they were not doing, if they, if they, if they slow rolled this a little bit more, if they had waited before they started going after the ice cream vendor who's been there for 30 years. And all these other like beloved parts of the community. I think the United States of America goes along with it. And like, in total. Yeah. And it has a broad approval. I've always said they didn't, they didn't vote for foreign wars. They voted for civil war. I mean, in many respects, that's what they're after. And to Andor, you know, we can we can kind of tie these things together. Like, Palpatine is being a great idiot. Like when he gets going on the Death Star.

The Death Star is stupid. Like, the Death Star does not need to be there. I think that the Empire as such could have insidiously moved from system to system a little bit here, a little bit there. Built it up. The next thing you know, like you're paying taxes to the Empire, you're paying taxes to the Empire. But he gets going on this like huge dramatic fantasy of like having a big orbit space that like blows up planets. Right. And that's what leads to like the Gorman massacre.

And one of those little bits of point like at the cannon along the way is that the Gorman massacre like like triggers these systems to go into revolt. And it creates a dramatic moment that did not have that did not need to happen. And I was skeptical, I think, early on of how quickly the empire was supposed to take place between like the prequel movies and the original trilogy. I was like, that's such a short amount of time. Like, it's only like 19 years. Like, it felt in the first movie like they'd been around forever. And now having watched and or at the same time that I'm watching what's going on in the United States, I'm like, oh, 19 years. No, that tracks.

Yeah. It's actually two decades is a wildly long time. Yeah, that's actually kind of a long time. Yeah, it's a bit of a long time. And that's the weird thing about history. When you deconstruct it, if you look at it on the overall, you think, oh, it's, but if you take core samples, There's really only the only core samples that you'll get is like seven to eight years of peace and stability in a moment. Like the moment you widen out the time horizon, you see that these things happen really quickly and really violently.

And I want to end it with, you know, we talked about kind of deconstructing revolution, reconstructing them for art. You've done that now, Mike, with the Martian revolution. And I thought what was so brilliant about that is it's fiction, but it's almost more predictive now that your fiction predicts the time we're living in now in a really prescient way. And I wanted you to talk about that a little bit just, and you too, Tony, of are you surprised at the works that you've both created out of, examining behavior and out of examining the way that people might be turned into something that's different from who they were, the journey that their characters might be taking, is actually more predictive of the moment we're living in than the news. Well, yeah. And when I was right, so I wrote The Martian Revolution, it's 29 episodes long,

and I started it back in October, and then was coming out with early episodes of stuff that I'd plotted out kind of for years, like things that I wanted to happen, mostly because I wanted to like critique, as you said, like the tech oligarch part of society that I'm really scared of. And so there's like, there's a monopoly corporation and there's an idiot that's running it that's sitting on all these things. But there was meant to be inside of this. Like one of the things those guys do is they just come in like, you know, like private equity style and they just buy something and then they just fire a bunch of people.

Right. And so that's a part of what's going on on Mars is like mass indiscriminate firings that they don't know, like, who does what, how or why they do it. And then it's like a doge. Yeah. And then, I mean, literally like three weeks later, they're starting up doge. And I'm like, I do not like this at all. And then there was also meant to be like, and again, I started this project.

Like, I did not, look, I did not think Trump was going to win that election. I had, I guess, one last shred of naive hope that we wouldn't do this. And so once all those people get fired on Mars, there's a mass deportation business to all of this. where they are coming around and they are rounding up these people because if you don't have a job on Mars, you've got to get off of Mars. And so like mass deportations are a part of it. And then several weeks after I dropped those episodes, suddenly we're doing, you know, mass deportations in America. So I did not enjoy controlling the lathe of heaven. I know like how Tony felt about it. Like I certainly, I certainly started

writing different things. I was, Tony, I was, I'm literally watching Andor's mining resources underneath Gorman, the materials that they need to fuel the Death Star as they're signing the mineral agreement in Ukraine. It's happening as I'm watching it. I mean, you're asking how it, I mean, mostly it makes me, my overwhelming feeling over the past three months and going out and sell the show is really, it's, it's sadness. I mean, it's sad. There's a really, there's a Tolkien, um, had a whole thing about.

he didn't like allegory. He didn't like people making comps to his work, to World War. But he was really into applicability. He wanted it to be applicable to your life. So I'm not exactly sure how wide that he takes that term. But to me, it's been shocking to go around the world. We went around the world selling the show. And every place we went, because I really didn't want to,

particularly in the beginning, I didn't want to have the show get ghettoized by being, left or right or political or whatever. I was really, we're really surfing through. But every journalist, every interview that we did, everywhere we went, people were finding ways to take things the same incident and make it applicable for them. Oh, this is Gaza. This is Ukraine. This is Northern Ireland. This is this. This is me. Man, this is me. This is us. And that's, it's very sad. I do worry, as I said before, I do worry that we're into a different, we're into a different situation with tech. I wonder if like, if, if the, if our fallacy is that we've been going

along going, oh, here's all these revolutions and we know everything about a revolution. And Mike's done all these shows about it. And Tony's written all this stuff. And it's all, it's all codified. And you just pick one from column A from column B. I wonder if, if there isn't another page in the book that we haven't seen. And that's the book, that's the page that we're on now. And that, that's the one that worries me the most of all. Then the tech side of it, the AI side of it and the lack of, um, any kind of accountability to that is that's what that's what would keep me up at night more than anything. I think you're absolutely right. And I think, you know, like we talked about earlier,

these new communications and these new technologies are wildly disruptive. And I think if I were going to take, uh, maybe a hopeful sign of it, it's that, to me and maybe to you guys, I don't know how you interact with it, it is novel and it is alien. And I don't, and I find it discomforting in a way that surprises me. But my hope is that for my kids and maybe even for their kids, their adaptation to it, that it will be native and it will be less destructive, that their brains, that the human instinct will be, you know, when we talk about the printing press comes in and everybody thinks, and that ushered in the Enlightenment. But what they forget is, it actually ushered in 100 years

of like fucking killing witches. Like, it just, it ramped up people into all kinds of prejudices. But the hope is, is that people's brains. Yeah, dude, dude, Mike and Tony just bit, he huge size. Like, is that how we're going to end this? Just the other two of us being like, come on, man. Okay. You know, Mike and I are going to start. We have to go, we have some prepping to do. We have to go back to our prep. Yeah, dude.

Yeah, I got to, I got to work on my bunker. I got to go to the bunker. I'm talking about our ability to evolve. Come on. Yeah, look, I will say one thing, though, because one of the things, I mean, we didn't touch on this, but like, and or dropped into this moment that is talking about resistance to a creeping authoritarian regime. Yes.

That text becomes a part of this political moment, right? the fact that that was given to people right now in this moment, like, however few or many actually read it in here, people are processing what is happening right now. Right. Right. Like, I go to protest and I see signs that say I have friends everywhere. Like, that stuff is out there. It's out there.

And you do see it. And I got friends everywhere. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'll go with that hope. There you go, Tony. Yeah, no. And your show and Mike, your podcast. become part of my kids' brain's ability

to evolve to this moment in a more resilient way. I truly mean that. I'm not trying to like... I hope so. Fucking kiss your ass here, but like... Sure. I truly believe that the work that you're doing, Tony,

and the work that you're doing, Mike, goes into their brains. And it does change the way that they interact with tech in this moment. Well... And it's a positive. I'm glad I was young when I was young. That's a good point. Yeah, the 90s, the 90s were good.

It was a good time. The 90s were good. But remember, too, and this is the thing we forget, we thought the world was spinning out of control. No, I know. I know. I grew up. Every good person this country produced got fucking shot in the head.

No, I know. You know, look, we have to remain that that's strong. And I so appreciate you guys doing the work that you do. it's so engrossing and such a pleasure to watch and it's so just thorough and all-encompassing and real and not contrived and I just appreciate you both really truly tremendously and thank you both for adding good things into this sickly soup but we're we're honored to have Tony Gilroy who obviously created and or and so many other wonderful things. Mike Duncan, best-selling author, creator, History of Rome Revolutions podcast.

Guys, thank you so much for spending the time. I really appreciate it. A pleasure. Thanks very much, yeah. Damn, I love those guys. Oh, good. It's wild to see how intentional they are about everything that they layer into their work, how carefully...

Table spoon by tablespoon, as they said, yeah. I think it might even be teaspoon by teaspoon. I think it might even be small. I think a tablespoon is almost a cudger. A little heavy-handed. It's a little heavy-handed. But how about it? I don't even know if this was on the air,

but at the end, they were both like exchanging numbers. You set them up, John. I set them up. You're a matchmaker. Give yourself a little credit. Me next. Yeah. But so good and so interesting.

And so interesting how, you know, I think for Tony, like, I think he's so used to like selling and or as, yes, the character to like, like, so to get an opportunity to like hang with with Mike, talk about it as an allegory. Yes. And to talk about it through history. It seemed to like, he seemed pleased. Yeah, he did. Yeah. I mean, that was so. The show obviously resonated so much with, you know, everyone wants to kind of apply it to the moment that you're.

in, but just hearing them zoom out too. And like what a student of history, they both are. It was so satisfying, I guess, just to hear them sort of like build that narrative, layer it on top of all of these, like, very real things that have happened. That's right. And to hear from them exactly why their work seems predictive to us is because it's not new, because there are these patterns. But I also love how precise they are.

Like, when you say to him, like, when you think about their motivation, motivations and he's like, eh, not motivations, behavior. Like, they're really, I think whenever I talk to people whose work I really admire, I'm always struck by the precision in which they operate. Yeah, and that comes through in both of their work so clearly. Right? Yeah. No, fantastic. I was so glad to get a chance to do that. I don't know who put them to get. Probably Katie Gray, her and her putting people together. She's a matchmaker.

Brittany, what do we got for our questions today? John, you once compared Dick Cheney to Darth Vader. What Star Wars character would Stephen Miller be? Oh, Jesus. I don't even know if there's a... I don't know that that universe has conjured up. I think it would probably be kind of one of those characters that they mentioned, but, you know, like Darth Sidious.

Like one of those that's like, And my teacher taught me, taught me the power of a life and death. His name was Sidious. You know, it's one of, and it would be a sibilant. There'd always be that like, in one of those characters. It would be, yeah. I feel like when Tony said, like, the characters that are interesting to write, you know, the Nazis that are like the clock punchers and stuff.

Like, Stephen Miller, you're not interesting enough to write. I don't think you're too despicable. Yeah. And also almost too much two dimensional. Yeah. You can't even see him in glorious bastards where he's like, wait, wait, we have to wait for the cream for the strudel. You know what I mean? Like you can't even do that shit.

Like it just, all right. What else we got? All right. The Democrats launched plans for Project 2029. Do you think they finally figured out how to win copycating and going on podcasts? Because their 2029 is so fucking idiotic and it's the same idiots that. put together all the plans that haven't worked out in the first place. They're not understanding where the energy and the desire rests in this country.

They have no idea. They're looking in the wrong place, and their project 2029 is going to be a rehash of all the consultant-driven, careful nonsense that has put them in this place of that in a moment when the Republican Congress is passing one of the most devastating bills that we have seen in this country in forever to just put out pictures of Hakeem Jeffries from an angle that makes him look six years old holding a baseball bat and you're like it doesn't look like you're going to fight. It looks like you're going to tee ball. And that's where they're all going. So, you know, hopefully this Project 2029 that they've done is just a draft. on a Google Doc that they can put into edit mode

and have people go in there and make some real changes and hopefully understand the desperation of the moment that people are feeling. Because right now. Yeah. Do you think anyone's getting it right? Yeah, I think there are a lot of young people who's much more populist campaigns.

I mean, obviously, Donnie is getting all the attention in New York and for very good reasons, but there's a lot of young candidates that are, it's not even about the savvy in which they use social media or the way that they've gotten attention. It's the burning, I think, authenticity of how they feel about the inequities and upside-down nature of the society that we're building.

Like we talked about in the podcast, You know, when you start consolidating and taking people's farmland and just creating more and more elites with larger and larger farmland, that's a recipe for stupidity. And so seeing the bottom up energy of some of these candidates, I think they're getting it right. They're not being, I think, in any way nurtured or helped by the party elites. In fact, I think they're being resisted. And I think it's stupidity and suicidal on the part of the party elites. I think they're making a huge mistake. It's, yeah, it's both shocking and unsurprising to watch the Democrats

responsible. Right. I mean, they're trying to discredit it. Yeah. But there's such a shocking disparity between the authenticity. Like you're juxtaposing, let's say, Mom Donnie speaking to camera, talking with, you know, so much, like, ex-executive. and feeling about things that affect the city like a plate of food.

How much does this cost? And juxtapose that with a single picture that was, you know, canned and I don't know. It's not produced. There's just a stark difference between even the message and how it's being said, not just the capturing on social media even. Totally. Well, it's like anything else. The Project 29 they're doing and the party elite smack of what is so inauthent.

about like taglines on movies. Like, you know, and people feel it. It's not of a reality. It's of a process that is put into place by people who don't experience reality to try and describe what they think will be a winning message. As opposed to taking in the reality of the emotions and channeling those into positive, you know, change for people.

And I think you're exactly right, Lauren, about the specificity of Mom Dani when he's not just platitudes about affordability. It's really deconstructing how that inaffordability has been created and how we might battle back. Yeah, it just shows people how their city works more. I think there's a point to that. Yeah, policies he understands and believes in. Who would have thought that would be a winning recipe?

As they say, so you're saying, the strategy is authenticity. I like it. I like the cut of your jib. Very, very nice program. Thank you guys, as always, for putting together just a banger. I really love talking to those guys.

Lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mehmettovich, video editor and engineer Rob Vitolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, researcher and associate producer Jillian Spear, executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie Gray. And we will see you guys next week. Bye-bye.

The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions. Podcasts.