Elon Musk and The Martian Revolution feat. Mike Duncan

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about
it happening here, which is, you know, 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,

(00:26):
with the great Mike Duncan of the Revolutions podcast Mia
Wong joining me on this interview. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Mike, Thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
So let's talk about this because you know, I've kept
up and been listening to Revolutions for years, 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

(00:57):
anticipate that being an initial reaction to this when you
started really finally laying down like the text for these episodes.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
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

(01:26):
wrote down in the show come to life. It is
horrifying and I hate it.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah, welcome to the club.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
Yeah yeah, I mean, you guys have to change the
name of your show because there's no good about it.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Man, We're just here. It's just going.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
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, what would be
a really cool thing to do. It's like, once I've
got all these under my belt, just like make up
a fictional revolution that kind of follows along like many
the plot points of previous revolutions. And so this has

(02:03):
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. You know, 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 you know, and then I'm like, Okay, then there's
this thing called the New Protocols that is going to
you know, help jump start the revolution. And this is

(02:24):
somebody coming in and just you know, 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 you know,
like all a part of the story of how the
Martian Revolution gets going. And you know, this stuff was
plotted out in October. And I got to tell you,

(02:46):
you know, maybe I was naive, maybe I had my
head in the sand. I thought she was going to win. Yeah, man,
like I thought Harris was going to win the election.
That's where I That's where my head was at in
September and October, going into November. I was like, it'll
be close. Of course, well 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

(03:08):
like the whole thing just kind of seemed like she
was going to win, so for Trump to win and
then start doing all of these things that were just
supposed to be fictional plot points. Oh they were references. Yeah,
Like now I'm just like Jesus Christ. This is terrible.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Well, that's what's so so interesting is because yeah, so
much of so much of the initial like as you
imagine it, the opening stages of like the Martian Revolution
in your series are based on like a guy who
is a quote unquote like partly like an auto dite act, right,
like a dude who is raised believing that his ideas

(03:46):
are good because they're his ideas, and yet 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 changed everything based on his whims. Now,
you don't have him staying up until four in the
morning on ketamine bendors and then tweeting out his ideas

(04:07):
for how to change the government. But I guess I'd say,
like that's the one the one thing that doesn't map
onto right now. And I think this is this almost
just goes inherently with the active crafting fiction. Even your
bad guys are a lot more sympathetic than our current ones. Yeah,
which I think is to your credit. But like I've

(04:27):
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

(04:48):
with these Silicon Valley guys who have spent the last
few decades getting impossible amounts of money and having that
convinced them that they know how to do everything. But
it also maps back to like Versailles. I find that compelling.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, and you know, the Timothy Werner character, he's like
sort of the figure against whom the revolution is going
to start, Yeah, 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

(05:22):
good husband and father. Yes, Oh, it's it's obviously not.
It's obviously not Elan Musk because he loves his kids.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
He's allowed to be in the same room as all
of them.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
Yeah, yeah, they like they get along great and everything. Yeah,
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 gonna we're gonna move fast and break things, right,
and then what they break is like one hundred and
twenty years of like labor law, and that's the only

(05:53):
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 that stuff that came out
Adison the last like ten or fifteen years. And they
think that yes, because they can code well, or because
they have 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,

(06:15):
and like we're going to reinvent this and we're going
to 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, yes, 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 the line, there's a line that's in there where

(06:36):
it's like 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.
That's a phenomena that's a generalizable phenomenon.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
No, I mean yeah, we talk about that constantly on
the show, Like we just did that four parter are
on the Zizians. That out of like the rationalist Bay
Area tech industry cult, which is both influential that 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 it a code coding's difficult. That means I'm smart.

(07:17):
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,

(07:39):
even though we're talking about Mars. And there's also like
gravity generators in the light.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's and what you know, what
Werner does here is so much of what Doze 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

(08:04):
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
going to be run through Twitter. Right. And one of
Timothy Werner'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

(08:24):
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,

(08:46):
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 that they are trying to centralize everything that
it's it's a generalized authoritarian power grab, but you know
they are, they are doing these things. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (09:08):
One of the things that it reminds me the most of,
like from the other revolutions, is I immediately went, wait,
this is ur Nicholas, 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 and
there's one guy who's a micromanager and then can't do
it because like no human could possibly have done it.
But they're not they're you know, because of just there

(09:30):
they're sort of affective power and the way that they
think about micromagic anything they're incapable of, like letting their
subordinates do things.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
It also scans with the loves his kids part.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
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 it is something that you know,
like Charles the First, Louis, sixteenth Zar Nicholas, these guys
are all great family men. Their kids love them and
they love their ki right. Like one of the reasons
the French Revolution happened is because Louis's son died, like

(10:04):
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
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

(10:27):
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
metropol in colonial life. And this is what triggers, you know,
the American Revolution, because there was going to be like
two more customs officials in Boston Harbor and so like

(10:48):
we went into refolt about this. Yeah, but this is
also true of like the Bourbon Reforms in Spanish America.
Is that kind of like centralization of a community 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,

(11:10):
we've been making these decisions for ourselves for like seventy
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.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
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 is civil conflict in
the US might look like, and I'm I'm just taking
from stuff that happened in the last like ten years
in a lot of cases that I saw in different countries,
And people are like, how you know, how did you

(11:43):
like anticipate this, And my answer is like, I didn't.
This is just stuff that happens all the time, right,
because people don't learn the mastery 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.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
Yeah, we all do and no. But like one of
the things that's getting kicked around the other day was like,
had I came to this point where Werner is going
to start firing people? He's going to 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

(12:21):
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 ten percent 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 going to really
push back, and I mean this sincerely, like people are

(12:44):
going to push back that nobody would be so stupid
as to just across the board to a ten percent
layoff of something so critical, as you know, 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. So I changed
it around and actually look to like the sullen prescriptions
from from Roman history to kind of give it a

(13:06):
different take, where really it was like you woke up
every day and there was like fifteen more names on
the list, one hundred more names on the list, and
there was something equally sort of dramatic and cool about
that without this like unbelievable, you know, ten percent across
the board cut. And I wrote a paragraph in there
being like I know that people are going to think
that this is like unrealistic, but you just have to
understand that, like throughout history we have seen these things,

(13:27):
like people do stupid stuff and they stubbornly cling to
it all the time. Yea, 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

(13:47):
be like this is implausible, Like this is crazy. They
would never be allowed to get away with that. They
would never be 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.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
Wouldn't want their reserve currency. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:02):
Yeah, none of nothing that is happening right now is
plausible in the in a storytelling in a fictional storytelling setting, Yeah, yeah,
you know this.

Speaker 4 (14:12):
This this is also gets something that I've been saying
on this show that I want I want to get
your take on, which is, like, you know, one of
the things that you you wrote about in your sort
of like I guess like recap series of your experience
going through the Revolutions was about like how how much
of the stuff is driven by like the Great idiots
of history and my god, Elon Muskins Trump look to
me like two of the gretty dacy history and that

(14:34):
doesn't like guarantee that it'll happen, but like.

Speaker 3 (14:38):
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, like people have been
intolerably oppressed for a long time. And like Trotsky's got

(14:59):
this quote 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

(15:20):
elites around them, because it's the mismanagement of the state
that allows the elites that 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've got
to be pretty incompetent to like wreck an elite consensus, right,

(15:43):
Like 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.

Speaker 4 (15:53):
That's actually something else that I wanted to ask you
about in terms of, like you see this in terms
of Mabel Door right where Mabel Door is this kind
of example of like the sort of local I guess
said local colonial elite to some extent.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (16:26):
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, the necessity of parts of this
elite flipping and like the other The example I think
most people kind of are more familiar with is fleepygality,
like the Duke de orlone like funding a bunch of
these sort of revolutionary groups that eventually kind of like

(16:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
Yeah, I mean it's a it's a mix of things,
and I mean you got it. Like Mabel door 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
like and when she is, like when I talk about
her like funding the Society of Martians and like funding
all these like philanthropic you know, enterprises to help Martians,

(17:21):
Like that's a lot of philipicality, like straight up like
that that's what the Duke Doorleon was doing in you know,
seventeen eighty six, eighty seven, and eighty nine. 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

(17:42):
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

(18:05):
that moment. And you know, you can advance all the
way to the Russian Revolution, and this is you know,
this is the prototypical like the workers have risen up
and the army is mutinying, and it is the people
who overthrow this are And what that story misses is
all of the people, even inside the Romanov family itself,

(18:25):
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,

(18:48):
we're not going to back you up. If you try
to bring the hammer down on all these people, then
that's when sovereigns are actually overthrown.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
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 idolized the
nineteen seventeen 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.

(19:18):
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.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
Well, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
In those pictures of the nineteen seventeen 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.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
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
nineteen seventeen, 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.

(20:04):
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 Zar 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.

(20:26):
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 nineteen seventeen. You see this seventeen
eighty nine and then seventeen ninety two where there is

(20:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
Right, Yeah, I think that's a great point.

Speaker 4 (21:19):
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 emortians are doing like directly turns into

(21:40):
this thing. And that's something that I don't know, It
feels very prescients in ways, even though it was written
out before a lot of this stuff happens.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
Yeah, the deportation stuff is just because of my own
personal political commitments all over the course of my adult life, right,
which is that we have an insanely cruel immigration system
in this country, you know, and and you know, we
they say like, oh, we've got this like open borders,

(22:10):
Like we do not have open borders. It is actually
really really hard to like navigate your way properly through
the American immigration system. That's true. The system itself is broken.
And we did all of this, you know, 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

(22:31):
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 there is a through line of cruelty inside of
this system towards immigrants. So that issue of deportation and

(22:55):
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 main characters, Alexandra Clare she is
a fourth generation Martian, and she just gets caught up
in these like stupid layoffs that Timothy Werner is pushing through.

(23:16):
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 is that nobody
ever comes back from Saturn. And this is a thing
like taking people who are 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,

(23:37):
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, so when I was thinking
to myself, Okay, I'm all right, this like fictional revolution,

(24:00):
it's going to be on Mars. What are some of
the things that I want to do that will make
the revolution happen. Yeah, some of this does is like
a little bit of like this is 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

(24:20):
those people food. Like the bravest people going are the
ones who like go out and leave you know, water
jugs out in 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 knowing that people
are going to knowing that people are going to like
die of dehydration and die of starvation, but just not
care because they don't care about those people.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
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 informations 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 Eindsetsgrupa, right,

(25:06):
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 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 it's such a uniquely it's so uniquely tied

(25:26):
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 you
know that German culture in the thirties was better, but
it just wouldn't have happened because it was a different
kind of culture.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
Yeah, for sure. And then it's really important to remember
that this is not just a Trump problem, 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

(26:04):
being shown to the judge, and the judge is like,
I don't I can't actually release this person. Yeah, that's
sort of where we're at now. But this has been
an ongoing thing for twenty 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

(26:25):
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 then even moving positioning themselves to
a place where it's like Trump's not even doing a

(26:46):
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 was like do you
even hear yourself? Like do you even hear yourself? Yeah, yeah,

(27:07):
it really is And I can't, you know, stomach the
fact that the Democrats are are going to take away
from all this that the American people love cruelty towards
immigrants and that we need to lean into that. Yes,
And then you see the polls before all the tariffs
stuff and all this stuff is going on, and he
Trump is still sitting in like fifty percent approval, and
it's like, I don't know, maybe they're right, Maybe the

(27:28):
American people really do just love this.

Speaker 4 (27:30):
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 it like the other aspect 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 coworker James spent a lot
of time during the Biden administration like at these just
like the open air prisons they built in the middle
of the fucking desert, like on the border, and you know,

(27:53):
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 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,

(28:13):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:21):
We're not supposed to do anything alone, man, We're not
supposed to do anything I want. Yeah, well right, yeah,
that's nothing. We're not supposed to be doing anything alone. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:28):
And that's honestly the most optimistic thing about your podcast
is that, like Martian society develops this very communal because
it's we're living in like an artificial habitat and if
shit goes really wrong, everyone dies at once. You have
to have this more collaborative, collective attitude towards safety and
security that is just so completely absent from American culture.

(28:50):
It's the thing that continually sends me into the darkest
spirals is because there's there's no fixing the fundamental underlying
problems without fixing that.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
Yeah, And like on Mars, you know that 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 the 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

(29:21):
there's cultural background like like works and and you know,
like 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 and then
he never comes back, and now Lonely Joe like wanders

(29:41):
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. Yeah, 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
hands and is what like opens door. It like literally

(30:02):
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 skinship.
And when the people get fired by Werner, their skin
chips just get turned off effectively, and it doesn't it
doesn't open doors anymore. They can't get food anymore. They
have they are living inside of a society that they

(30:23):
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 their contracts were annulled. Yeah,
but so so that the annulled could get from here
to there without needing their skinship. Yeah. Those are the

(30:45):
kinds of things that you know are are necessary, and
those are the kinds of things that are going to
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 that front. So let's just go ahead and
keep that words at.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
I'm a big fan of the don't fed post on
social media or in your podcast thing.

Speaker 4 (31:11):
Yeah, something you touched on there. I think is interesting
about the way that being forced to live together like
creates this consciousness. It reminds me a lot of But
I was a student. I was an anthropology student, and
one of the things that we read was this this
sort of classic of I guess, I guess you'd call
it like structurals Marxists, like anthropology from the eighties. But

(31:33):
it's this book called We the Mines and the Minds
eat Us, which is about these indigenous Bolivion tin miners.
And one of the things that I 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 I don't even have food, and that like turns

(31:55):
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 their communists
and like they're they're one of those Milton 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've sort of drawn out of of
these historical revolutions where a key element of it again

(32:17):
is this sort of cllactivity. And also there's this like
if you look at like the trajectory of like the
modern American state and like the modern just the modern
development of capitalism, it's been specifically trying to make that
stuff not happen by like kicking people into suburbs and
like trying to physically alienate people. And I was, I
don't know, I was wondering how much you were sort
of thinking about that kind of stuff when you were

(32:38):
like writing the cultural aspects of this.

Speaker 3 (32:41):
Sure, No, that's that stuff is all in my mind.
And like I said, like 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 this 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.

(33:02):
And like when you go back, because this is something
that comes out of sort of like I study a
lot of like political theory in school and those state
of nature sort of works, you know, these thought experiments
that like Thomas Pain 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

(33:23):
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 there are aunts and uncles

(33:46):
and others. Like whatever the group is, there's we are
always doing this as a group. And hyper individualization and
hyper adamization 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,

(34:08):
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.

(34:31):
And the nuclear family is not really how we've ever
done it before. Now, there's always been a broad network,
a broad family friend network that has been a part
of you know, raising our kids and having our families.
And you know, if something bad happens, we don't just say,
oh wow, bad luck for them. You know, you support
that person. And that is something that we've really gotten

(34:52):
away from as a society obviously.

Speaker 2 (34:54):
And it's something that we've been pulled away from purposefully.
Right like the atomization is isn't It isn't just a
byproduct of incentives, right like is a It is a
directed move. I mean, you just got to 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.

(35:15):
And I'm not saying this in like the conspiratorial since
I'm saying this a 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.

Speaker 3 (35:32):
In part, right, I was.

Speaker 4 (35:34):
Actually about to quote literally that exact thing. But the
interesting part to me about that Thatcher line is that everyone,
almost everyone who quotes that line only quotes the part
about their are only individuals and then leaves out the
part about the family. Yes, which I think is a
really important connection to to what you were saying, where
it's like your vision of the family is also still
fundamentally this isolated group, because yes, they still need some

(35:56):
kind of collective because again, you can't just like leave it,
leave a baby like out in the woods.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
It just dies.

Speaker 4 (36:03):
Right, But like they had, they had to like create
this version to to be the like the political base
of their thing. They had to create this this one
collective that would be cut off from everything else that
had normally made it a collective.

Speaker 3 (36:16):
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 Tokeville's austieon Regime
in the French Revolution, which is really dynamite book everybody

(36:38):
should read, at the end of it, he lays it
out he's writing this in like the eighteen forties and
eighteen fifties, and he's he straight up says that like
what liberal capitalism is doing, which he was himself. I mean,
he's a conservative liberal. Like it's not like he's on
the left or anything, but he's he's watching as the
atomization of families and individuals is happening, and he's like,

(37:02):
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

(37:22):
scrambling out there in a competition to get a little
bit more, a little bit better, or just you know,
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 going to make it
and other people will, and you got to be there,
and you gotta have strategies about ending to log onto
the thing like because they because they they're pitting us

(37:45):
against each other like all the time, in all those
little subtle ways. Yep.

Speaker 4 (38:00):
That's what's optimistic kind of about the Martian Revolution is like,
you know, on the one hand, there is this kind
of like collective society, but on the other hand, you know,
this is a this is a society entirely ruled by corporations,
right and it is it is literally every single aspect
of it is specifically designed to get to do this,
pitting each other like people against each other. And yet anyways,

(38:21):
somehow they you know, even even if it is by accident,
which is to be fair, how a lot of revolutions start,
they they do it.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
Mm hmm, yeah, Yeah, there's no there's no year zero
they're create new There's there's no there's no new Man
right now, that's not ever going to happen. That's actually
I mean, just I wouldn't even have thought that. I'm
going to tie this back again to Tofield, which the
reason I would recommend Onnian Regime is because that is
a book about how much of the revolution was a

(39:11):
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 way,
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 want to get in

(39:32):
a fight with somebody about whether human nature is a
thing that exists or doesn't exist like an as an
abstract thing, because 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 do there does seem to

(39:53):
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,

(40:17):
you know a little bit what we are moving towards
right now. But I'm not sure even that exists, because
if you if you crash the state out, it's not
the state that's necessarily making us this way. There is
there is stuff inside of human nature that's that we
created the state to begin with. So the whole, the
whole thing is like a very it's a balancing act
that has gone way too far in a certain direction.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, And I think that's something I always I always
try to keep in mind, like it's not that societies
can't alter or improve aspects of like how things are
right by changing the incentives, but by altering like the
way things work, you can reduce the prevalence of certain problems.
You can make things better in some ways. But there's

(40:59):
so and stuff that you're just never going to Like
when I look at 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, that's an impossible dream. So I can
just say, like, that's a thing. No matter how tightly
you grab a hold of the reins of state and

(41:20):
how many weapons you deploy, you simply won't succeed in
the long term of doing this because it's just not
something we can do. You can't stop people from mingling.

Speaker 3 (41:28):
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 as hard as you want, people are
still going to move here. People are still going to
move away from here. People are still going to go
from here to there and from there to here, and
that is something that is going to happen no matter what,

(41:50):
and especially if we're going into the twenty first century
with all of its various climate disasters that are facing us. Route,
yeah is going to make such Yeah, it's gonna. It's gonna.
It's already making some places less habitable and other places
will be more habitable. And what's going to happen is
that people who are living in less habitable areas are
going to want to go to where there are areas
that are still habitable. And so there is there's going

(42:12):
to be movements of people. And the question before us
in the twenty first century is not, you know, can
we keep people in the places that they are now
and you know, like 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

(42:33):
simply make it more humane and more 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.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yep, sucks, Yeah, it does. Like that's that's so much
of our our present society is like, well, yeah, this
is the cruelest way I can imagine this happening, you know,
like and we are we are staring down the barrel
of the worst case scenario, right, Like that's the thing
everyone's had to make peace with. You know, even once

(43:08):
Trump won, there was still a degree of like, well,
I guess we'll see and we've seen, right, and we
do just kind of have to guide off that without
pretending it's otherwise. Like the 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 Newsen still hasn't

(43:29):
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 I
can't imagine this guy being the future of the Democratic Party.
If this is just looking at where popular discourse is
right now.

Speaker 3 (43:50):
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

(44:13):
and resources, like that's where the imperial center of the globe,
and people are like, oh that. And even when people
say like, well, why do people come here, and you know,
there's a kind of a standard American exceptionalist notion which
is like, well, they come here because they want their
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

(44:35):
because this is where you can come and get the
world's money. Yeah, this is where it always. 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,
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 is this this constant division

(44:56):
between like Americans being more important and anybody else, and
I understand why that exists politically, and even these questions
are like citizens versus non citizens. Like one of the
things that got me when I was reading Bakunin was
like he had it was a throwaway line. It wasn't
even like a point he was making, but he referred

(45:16):
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

(45:37):
are these words that had great, profound meaning, and it
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

(45:58):
at all. And it totally went 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,

(46:20):
so they don't deserve due process. They're not citizens, so
we can just send them to Al Salvadoran 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 one of my very favorite.
And I know i'm steamrolling here. I'll I'll let you
get a word in edgewise here in a second. But

(46:42):
there the I forget what the court case was, but
there was a court case out of Texas, you know,
like back in like the sixties, when they decided that
the Texas school districts had to open the schools to
undocumented children. And they they said that because it says
in the Fourteenth Amendment persons. It doesn't say citizens. And

(47:03):
they were resting a lot of this on the notion
that like it's it says person has these rights, not
citizen has these rights. And this is what conservatives and
MAGA hate, hate hate, This is why they're going to
try to undo the fourteenth 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.

(47:24):
That's like mind blowing. I could not see the Supreme
Court today making that same decision, But like, that's 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.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
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

(48:00):
were born. Yeah, that's just the thing I'll never believe.
And it's the fight we've lost. The worst as the
left or you know, 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 that battle, the battle
to just see people as humans with inherent value as humans,

(48:20):
regardless on their place of birth, the fact that has
been botched so badly is maybe the greatest calamity of
the twenty first century. Although there's a few, there's a
few contenders, don't get me wrong.

Speaker 3 (48:31):
Yeah, there's a lot well, And it's so.

Speaker 4 (48:34):
It's so deeply ingrained. Something I'm going to talk about
more like in different places, 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 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

(48:55):
at the like the Liberation Day like turf tariff package, right,
the single country that is the most from this is
Sri Lanka. And if those tariffs go back into effect
in like in like fifty days whatever, like eighty days.
Like the entire country of Shri Lanka is fucked. They're doomed,
They're completely fucked. And all of these countries, you know,
these countries need US dollars in order to like literally

(49:16):
to buy fucking fuel. And then suddenly, oh wait, hold on,
you can't do experts of the US, and like the
entire is something that affects literally the entire world. Right,
you can look at the terrif 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 Americ centrism thing where like people and this I

(49:38):
see this on the left too, where's like they fundamentally
don't see anyone who's not in the US as human,
and the people in the US who are 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 way 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

(50:00):
you, you were born in like most of the like the
rest of the world, which is again it hitteous super
majority of everyone on Earth. You just you don't matter, and.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
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 going to be
thirty episodes long, and I'm writing episode twenty three right now.
But like we've gone through the revolution, there's been I
don't want to give away too many spoilers, but obviously

(50:32):
like they win, you know 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

(50:53):
there is a guy who is passionately committed to Mars
and to the Martian people, and he hates Earthlings, 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 earth born 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

(51:15):
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 going to be arguing. And then there
is another side that has a more universalist take on this,
And my character Alexandra Clair, who's like a d class.
She comes out of the warrants she can just that's

(51:36):
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,

(51:56):
that their contracts weren't annulled, that they are not suffering
from the new protocol, 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

(52:17):
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 going to have
to deal with.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
Yeah, well, uh, I think we're encroaching on an hour here,
so we're I think we need to probably uh 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.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
This, right right right, I've got all the plot points,
you know, I know where it's going, but just getting
there is is. Yeah, 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 do you well, she wouldn't do that in this moment,
So I guess I was going to have her do it,
but I just can't believe that she would ever do

(53:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's the struggle of releasing fiction before
you're entirely done with it.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
Yeah, well, I write it. I mean I wake up,
I wake up every Monday morning with a blank piece
of paper and have to have that week's episode done
by Sunday night, And so I'm writing these in real time. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
Well, I congratulate you on trapping yourself in such an
exquisite Hell, I'm enjoying listening to it, and I know
everyone else's is.

Speaker 3 (53:29):
Well, it's great.

Speaker 1 (53:30):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
All right, that's the episode, everybody, Thank you by.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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now find sources for It Could Happen Here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening,