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Heat Death: From Tolkien's Orcs to Star Wars' Empire - Asher and Saul Elbein Interview · CinemaHounds - A Lorehounds Podcast

0:00
[SPEAKER_06]: Hey everybody, David here with another one of my interview projects.
0:05
[SPEAKER_06]: This time, I'm interviewing the Brothers Elbine, Asher and Saul, to writers and journalists who publish a news letter website called Heat Death.
0:17
[SPEAKER_06]: What is Heat Death?
0:18
[SPEAKER_06]: Not sure really, but we talk about it during the interview.
0:23
[SPEAKER_06]: I think it was Davey Mack, who first shared an article from Heat Destering Our Rings of Power coverage a while back, and Marilyn and I discussed it briefly on one of our bonus segments on the history and context of Orcs, and the dilemma of creating an irredeemable species.
0:46
[SPEAKER_06]: Heat Death site is a really interesting project and I've enjoyed a lot of what I've been reading over there.
0:55
[SPEAKER_06]: They not only publish their own articles, but they've been reaching out and publishing some other authors and some really interesting articles there.
1:05
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think a lot of them have a, a lot of natural crossover between the kinds of things that they're publishing and some of the shared interests we have here in the lower hounds community, especially with Tolkien and Star Wars, both of which we talk about extensively in this interview.
1:25
[SPEAKER_06]: we talk about their article, work is made into work as well as their long-running series on Star Wars, called Decline and Fall, which looks at the Star Wars story as a historian might.
1:40
[SPEAKER_06]: We also get into a little behind the scenes talk towards the end of the interview.
1:46
[SPEAKER_06]: So definitely check them out.
1:48
[SPEAKER_06]: Follow them to get updates and subscribe if that works for you.
1:53
[SPEAKER_06]: I hope to be talking with them more again in the future, so stay tuned.
1:57
[SPEAKER_06]: As always, check the show notes for links in this time I've included links for all things heat death there.
2:05
[SPEAKER_06]: As well, rate and review, if you've got something nice to say, we always enjoy reading your feedback.
2:12
[SPEAKER_06]: Discord and email contacts and links to all of our other affiliated podcasts are also in the show notes.
2:19
[SPEAKER_06]: Check the link tree.
2:20
[SPEAKER_06]: Here's my interview with Asher and Saul Elbine.
2:27
[SPEAKER_06]: Asher and Saul, welcome to the Lorehouse.
2:30
[SPEAKER_06]: Thanks for being here today.
2:31
[SPEAKER_06]: Thanks so much for having us.
2:32
[SPEAKER_06]: Good to be here.
2:33
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, pretty excited to be talking to you guys.
2:37
[SPEAKER_06]: I first came across Heat Death when one of our subscribers, pretty active user on our Discord, posted a link to the Orch article.
2:49
[SPEAKER_06]: when we were doing last the the previous season of Rings of Power coverage and the article was perfect because we had a lorecast bonus segment about orcs in the history, you know, Tolkien and what he dealt with in all that kind of stuff.
3:03
[SPEAKER_06]: And so it was like perfect timing and ever since then I had been meaning to want to catch up with you guys and like send out an invitation and then there was a recent newsletter post
3:13
[SPEAKER_06]: that you guys sent out and I caught Tansy Gardens name on there.
3:17
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm like, wait, I know that person too, and it just sort of activated me to reach out and to get in touch.
3:24
[SPEAKER_06]: I know both you guys have a lot going on, so I really appreciate you making time to be with us today.
3:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, of course.
3:30
[SPEAKER_03]: We are, I think, always happy to chat with other people who are interested in these sort of intersections of pop culture and culture.
3:36
[SPEAKER_06]: Exactly.
3:37
[SPEAKER_06]: And that is really who we are.
3:40
[SPEAKER_06]: And I just feel a lot of spiritual and intellectual can ship with what you guys have posted on your stuff.
3:46
[SPEAKER_06]: And I've been trying to catch up over the weekend, you know, reading a bunch more, especially the decline and fall series that you have on Star Wars, which is going to be one of our topics that we're going to be covering today.
3:58
[SPEAKER_06]: The other one I wanted to talk about that arc article a little bit and sort of the the
4:03
[SPEAKER_06]: And then we'll wrap it up with some behind the scenes, like goes on with heat death.
4:08
[SPEAKER_06]: What you guys are working on, but was thinking about it over the weekend in this idea, this premise that fiction as a mirror to the human condition, and I was reading through your Star Wars stuff and the political allegory of it, but the real worldness of it as well, really, really brought that home to me again that this work that we create,
4:33
[SPEAKER_06]: in these fictional worlds is this reflection or this mirror of what we as a species are up to.
4:39
[SPEAKER_05]: I would honestly like this, I would say, and I think this bar is one of the structuralists, but if you take any fastest of the crystal, every fastest of the crystal reflects every aspect of the culture.
4:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
4:51
[SPEAKER_05]: And so you can, you know, some are more interested to look at inherently, some are more generative.
4:55
[SPEAKER_05]: But I think that's one of our core beliefs that he does is that if you drill into basically any thread, well, that makes the metaphor.
5:04
[SPEAKER_05]: If you start pulling any thread, then, you know, a whole lot will come with it.
5:09
[SPEAKER_05]: Exactly.
5:09
[SPEAKER_06]: And when we were doing our rings of power coverage and Marilyn Arpecila, who is our favorite Tolkien scholar and one of our co-hosts on Laura Hounds, she and I did this Orc bonus episode and that article that I think, was it yours, Azure?
5:27
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
5:27
[SPEAKER_05]: That was awesome space.
5:29
[SPEAKER_05]: I realized recently, it's probably the best headline I've ever written, but it is
5:34
[SPEAKER_06]: So Asher, I was just curious, are you a big Tolken person?
5:39
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm both of you, but I'll start with you Asher, like, how did you end up at this topic?
5:43
[SPEAKER_06]: Like, talk to us a little bit about what generated this idea, because I think the name itself, orc is man to orc, that is such an evocative title.
5:53
[SPEAKER_06]: It's so simple, but it packs so much in it.
5:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, show all, really, really cooked with that one.
5:59
[SPEAKER_03]: The funny thing for me about my relationship with Tolkien is that I read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings when I was kid.
6:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I sort of drifted away from them for a pretty long time.
6:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, I love the movies.
6:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And but it's just somewhere along the line, I started thinking about orcs in the sort of way that orcs are portrayed both in the films and kind of my sort of gauzy,
6:23
[SPEAKER_03]: sort of memory of how they were portrayed in the books, and of course that kind of like long shadow of sort of orcs that are presented as being in the Tolkien style, right?
6:35
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, these sort of chaotic, vicious sort of like ontologically evil entities that mostly exists just to be stabbed by our heroic protagonist.
6:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know, the the various attempts by various creators to kind of
6:52
[SPEAKER_03]: flip that on its head by making them so well no they're not always evil sometimes they're like they're like cool bikers or well what if they're like more like spiritual native americans and just like all the you ended up with this with this um sort of like
7:09
[SPEAKER_03]: group of peoples that are either their evil or they are presented as being good in subversion of the idea of them being evil, which also leads to some really interesting sort of unquestioned assumptions.
7:26
[SPEAKER_03]: And this has just been something that's just been like in the back of my head for a while.
7:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't remember quite what got me
7:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Really thinking about it, but it might actually have been rings of power was coming out, and I'd recently rewatched The Lord of the Rings films, which are of course a Titanic achievement in terms of cinematic fantasy, and You know, there's people people make all kinds of jokes about some of the scenes in those movies, right?
7:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Like meets back on the menu boys, but like oh, they have menus like they have the concept of menus, but There's just something about the idea of like the orcs
8:01
[SPEAKER_03]: being soldiers and kind of like hanging out and getting into arguments with one another, which is sort of, it just pulled something in my brain.
8:09
[SPEAKER_03]: So I ended up going back and sort of re-reading some of Tolkien's sort of like ancillary writing and re-reading Lord of the Rings.
8:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And I just just started kind of jotting down some ideas and kind of before I knew at the piece really took shape around that.
8:31
[SPEAKER_03]: definitive dropping of thoughts, but the more that I dug into it, the more that I pulled on those threads, as Show will said, the more I realized that there was, there was really a lot there to sort of dig into.
8:44
[SPEAKER_06]: So I wanted to ask you a question, but I wanted to clarify, in terms of folks tracking the voices on the podcast, Show or Sol are interchangeable names here.
8:54
[SPEAKER_06]: So you might hear that.
8:54
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
8:55
[SPEAKER_05]: So Show was the Hebrew version of Sol, which the people in my family call me.
8:59
[SPEAKER_06]: great.
8:59
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, perfect.
9:00
[SPEAKER_06]: So, Ash are just commented that the title was your ideas, that accurate orchestras.
9:07
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, so I have the verified position in journalism at the hell of getting to write my own headlines or we suggest my own headlines.
9:15
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, they don't always, they don't always get picked up, but if they're good, they get picked up.
9:19
[SPEAKER_05]: I think, which is quite rare.
9:21
[SPEAKER_05]: My future career has never happened, so I, in this particular case, I wrote the headline.
9:26
[SPEAKER_05]: I'll show you a lot of the headlines too.
9:29
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think, obviously, it's a riff on man as a wolf to man, which is a, you know, a Russian saying.
9:35
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, I'm not familiar with that one.
9:36
[SPEAKER_05]: OK, so this sort of inverts that.
9:38
[SPEAKER_05]: OK, that is.
9:39
[SPEAKER_05]: And actually, I want to say a little bit about where this idea can from.
9:42
[SPEAKER_05]: So there is one of my intellectual load stars in this is a classic modern earth of anthropology called the cannibal metaphysics.
9:50
[SPEAKER_05]: by the Brazilian academic Eduardo Vierro at the University of Castro.
9:55
[SPEAKER_05]: And one of the things that he argues in that is that he argues for this perspective, he argues for this position called radical perspective, which is
10:06
[SPEAKER_05]: sort of every every creature is human to itself.
10:09
[SPEAKER_05]: So he uses this analogy that to a culture rotting me is bread to a armadillo, a wet, whole dug in the ground, is a nice cozy house.
10:23
[SPEAKER_05]: Everything is human to itself, human is almost a pronoun.
10:26
[SPEAKER_05]: So that was how we sort of
10:31
[SPEAKER_05]: orcness is normal to an orc.
10:33
[SPEAKER_05]: Of course you're accountable because there's no meat elsewhere and more door to an orc.
10:37
[SPEAKER_05]: Your lot of life is that the dark lord came back, you're his slave, you have no options, and you make the best of you can because you don't have any choices.
10:45
[SPEAKER_05]: Like that's what it is to be an orc to be an orc to be an orc to be an orc to be an orc to be a human.
10:47
[SPEAKER_06]: Right, and I think it perfectly synthesizes and encapsulates the whole conversation around having an irredeemable species.
10:58
[SPEAKER_06]: And Asher, if you want to talk a little bit about Tolkien's dilemma, how you're perceiving Tolkien's dilemma of this idea of, well, if Eru Eluvitar breathes life into something, then it's his creation.
11:11
[SPEAKER_06]: And therefore, it is of benefit, it can benefit from all of the various and sundry things that God has given to their creation.
11:21
[SPEAKER_06]: But yet, except these one group of things over here, no, you could just go ahead and stab them all you want, like it's no big deal.
11:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the thing that's really interesting about Orcs and Tolkien's legendary image, of course, they start out as essentially wicked fay, or something very equivalent to it.
11:37
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the sort of dangerous kind of mischievous, malevolent, but not tremendously more so or unusually so in the Hobbit.
11:47
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, in the Hobbit, there are
11:51
[SPEAKER_03]: basically friendly, but, you know, maybe a little flighty, and they're the forced elves, which are not unfriendly, but also kind of mischievous and dangerous.
11:59
[SPEAKER_03]: The dwarves are the dwarves, and then you have the goblins of the mountains, and the goblins of the mountains are certainly a threat, and they're certainly dangerous, but they're not really presented as being
12:09
[SPEAKER_03]: I think sort of insole that different from the other entities because Tolkien is writing essentially a children's fairy tale.
12:18
[SPEAKER_03]: As he starts working on Lord of the Rings, the construction of the orcs and the goblins becomes
12:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I think a lot more serious.
12:25
[SPEAKER_03]: It loses a lot of that kind of sense of whimsy.
12:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And in addition, behind the scenes, obviously Tolkien is working on his sort of like the back stories that were eventually collected in the summer, really, and as Tolkien is sort of building this world out, he runs into a problem that it seems like he never really is able to solve, which is,
12:49
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the elves are sometimes wise and sometimes tremendously full, like incredibly destructive in their foolishness.
12:56
[SPEAKER_03]: The dwarves can be noble and steadfast, but also greedy and pigheaded.
13:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And yet the orcs are always the great enemy, right?
13:05
[SPEAKER_03]: They're presented at presented as being the great enemy of the elves and the dwarves and eventually people.
13:11
[SPEAKER_03]: And we never really see them as anything other than that.
13:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And in that they are an eternal enemy, Tolkien starts getting really, I think, uncomfortable with this idea of where such an entity could have come from.
13:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And he toys with a couple of back stories, the one that, of course, the film presented is basically being canonical, is that the orcs are sort of elves that were captured and captive bread under presumably incredibly hideous conditions by the devil and then pressed into service by the devil's henchmen soren.
13:45
[SPEAKER_06]: and this goes into the idea that evil can't create, yes, it can only bend and manipulate and transform.
13:52
[SPEAKER_03]: But this, this runs into the problem of if these things were not created evil, if they were created with the capacity for good that was presumably not bred out of them, presumably their state has not been wholly changed, then
14:08
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you're not raising the question of, is it permissible to kill an orc?
14:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I think if you're on World War II, it is permissible to shoot a Nazi.
14:15
[SPEAKER_03]: But you do run into the problem of, it seems like orcs have been positioned as being at constant war with the other peoples of middle-earth, basically forever, since they arrived on the scene.
14:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And that seems to be something that Tolkien never really could quite wrap his head around how he wanted to deal with it.
14:32
[SPEAKER_03]: There's the very end of Lord of the Rings presents the Orcs as soon as Sauron falls as sort of wandering away whittless as if they're sort of gollums animated by his, by his will, but that does not square with really anything in the rest of Tolkien's writing.
14:46
[SPEAKER_03]: It seems like something that he, it was a problem that he identified, but could never figure out how he wanted to solve.
14:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't think he ever really did solve it, because I think it's kind of unsolvable.
14:56
[SPEAKER_06]: I wanted to put a little asterisk here really quick and I'll come to you, Saul, is that to check in in terms of our approach to Tolkien here, I'm assuming that neither of you consider yourself Tolkien's scholars.
15:07
[SPEAKER_06]: So we're going to it from outside of the academic world of Tolkien, where there is a very intense group of amazing academics and researchers.
15:16
[SPEAKER_06]: And so we're kind of approaching this material externally with that piece of fair to say that we're... Sir, we are not scholars.
15:24
[SPEAKER_06]: We are.
15:25
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, the journal is the right.
15:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
15:29
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sorry, Azure.
15:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I would say that is certainly true.
15:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I did before writing this because I do have a little bit of an academic background go and read up on some of the Tolkien scholarship because I didn't want to fly off half cock.
15:40
[SPEAKER_03]: No one has ever said this before.
15:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
15:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, there's been quite a lot of really sharp writing on this.
15:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is some of what I'm basing my sort of assessments here on.
15:49
[SPEAKER_06]: and having worked in and around the Tolkien scholars and the Tolkien world for a couple of seasons now of rings of power and a preview season.
15:58
[SPEAKER_06]: I just wanted to make sure I caveat that for our listeners because people get rather excited about things in this world.
16:05
[SPEAKER_06]: So as they do with Star Wars, right?
16:07
[SPEAKER_06]: And we're going to get into... Namelessly so, I'd say.
16:10
[SPEAKER_06]: But anyway, saw you wanted to jump in on something.
16:12
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, okay, so don't at me, bro, you know, exactly.
16:15
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm the furthest sink from a Tolkien scholar, but I mean, on my recent rewatch of War to the Rings, it struck me that just how totalizing the power of Sauron is in the heads of anything to which he turns his attention and how much more so when he has possession of the ring, but even when he doesn't.
16:32
[SPEAKER_05]: So, I mean, the idea of the orcs wandering away is so there are a tonba that doesn't sense.
16:36
[SPEAKER_05]: But if you imagine that everybody that you've ever known has had that voice in your head forever, and then that goes away.
16:44
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, the example of the Nazis actually isn't crazy.
16:46
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, obviously nobody, it was voice in their head exactly.
16:49
[SPEAKER_05]: But I think, you know, there's plenty of historical examples of what happens after a real truly totalitarian system falls apart.
16:56
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, the kids who grew up in the Soviet Union were Stalin, was the sort of godlike figure.
17:01
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, and then you take that and actually make it literal.
17:04
[SPEAKER_05]: It's always in your head.
17:05
[SPEAKER_05]: So sometimes it looks at through your eyes.
17:07
[SPEAKER_05]: That's part of what it is to be an org.
17:09
[SPEAKER_06]: I think it's a really interesting hook to hang a future part of our conversation when we get into the star wars of it all, because I think you've touched on some really interesting things as there as well.
17:20
[SPEAKER_06]: And we on the lower hands love nothing more than to mix our IP worlds.
17:25
[SPEAKER_06]: Because again, it's the crystal facet, right?
17:27
[SPEAKER_06]: As we look at one reflection, we see others.
17:31
[SPEAKER_06]: But I think this is really interesting too, and I'm aware of some of Tolkins.
17:37
[SPEAKER_06]: I can't cite them, but I'm peripherally aware that Tolkins view of the human condition as informed by his time and the trenches.
17:49
[SPEAKER_06]: He could even see that some of his fellow soldiers were Orkish in the heavier
17:56
[SPEAKER_06]: But then we just layer in all of this, and I'm just going to throw the proverbial pot of spaghetti at the wall here.
18:04
[SPEAKER_06]: We've got biosensialism here, and just the idea of essentialism as a whole, regardless of biosensialism.
18:12
[SPEAKER_06]: and colonial language where we're other rising people and we're boxing them up into this and as you were working on the article, go through some of your thoughts and some of the things that you're encountering here.
18:26
[SPEAKER_06]: You have a great conversation to about.
18:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Homeburg's mistake or you're pointing to to sell is that solid thing or yeah, that was that was a contribution that Sol made based largely on our sort of mutual reading of some of the history around the Interactions with plain Indians and and sort of other groups like that, but show a one-at-one you talk about that a little bit
18:49
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, so another one of the intellectual load stars of heat death is Charles Mann's 491, and maybe even more so, 493.
18:56
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, and 491 opens with a sort of frame story of an anthropologist who goes to describe in the Amazon, who is very, very primitive.
19:07
[SPEAKER_05]: I forget the specifics, but they barely have those in arrows, they live, they wear rags, they have no fixed home in the
19:16
[SPEAKER_05]: builds a cosmology out of this and he says essentially this is sort of humanity in the state of nature.
19:22
[SPEAKER_05]: And what he misses is what's going on around them.
19:26
[SPEAKER_05]: These people are at the fringes of the Peruvian Breberbeum, which is one of the great extractive industry Holocaust of human history of the modern world.
19:38
[SPEAKER_05]: They have no fixed home because they were chased out of their fixed home.
19:43
[SPEAKER_05]: And if they go back there, they'll be conscripted into an unbelievably brutal extractive industry.
19:47
[SPEAKER_05]: And so to Charles Man, that represents the great category or that Americans, that Westerners in general have when they're walking out American Indians.
19:58
[SPEAKER_05]: Because they, you know, white people only penetrated the interior of the continent hundreds of years after smallpox had.
20:06
[SPEAKER_05]: They never observed Native American life and anything like, you know, a truly autognist state.
20:13
[SPEAKER_05]: And we can argue about what it even means.
20:15
[SPEAKER_05]: to house, you know, truly untouched state, obviously human culture has changed, but whatever that might have been, no white academic ever talked to anybody who saw Native American culture before the penetration of and fusion with the cultures that they represented.
20:31
[SPEAKER_05]: And if you take that category or you really sit with it, then the past becomes a truly uncharted country.
20:39
[SPEAKER_05]: And similarly, the Orcs become a truly alien people.
20:46
[SPEAKER_05]: We were talking about bio-essentialism a second ago.
20:48
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, let's take the trench example.
20:50
[SPEAKER_05]: Let's imagine that Tolkien's orkish compatriots who've been in the trenches with him for, I don't know what a tour of duty was, but let's say 18 months, let's even say four years.
20:58
[SPEAKER_05]: Let's say they'd been there for generations.
21:01
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, they're still biologically human, right?
21:03
[SPEAKER_05]: They're still just as biologically human as the people on the front lines, but they're going to look different because they're eating differently.
21:08
[SPEAKER_05]: They're sleeping differently.
21:09
[SPEAKER_05]: They're living differently.
21:10
[SPEAKER_05]: They're having very different experiences.
21:12
[SPEAKER_05]: Now that's generations.
21:13
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, middle and middle earth, Saran's been gone for thousands of years and he was present for thousands of years before that.
21:20
[SPEAKER_05]: What did that do to those peoples?
21:22
[SPEAKER_05]: Let's say they're genetically identical to elves.
21:24
[SPEAKER_05]: Let's say that you clone an orc and you get an orc.
21:26
[SPEAKER_05]: That still doesn't tell us anything about the
21:31
[SPEAKER_06]: to go back quickly too in terms of the anthropological aspect of it.
21:36
[SPEAKER_06]: Never mind the kinds of observer effects that you have by going and sitting with and talking with and studying and how people then adapt and change what the stories that you were being told or listening to.
21:49
[SPEAKER_05]: I've done a little bit of cross-cultural journalism where I'm working in Spanish, but with some these speaks a very different dialect of Spanish than a very upper middle class literary version that I know, or I'm working with a fixer or translator.
22:08
[SPEAKER_05]: And I gotta say, it is not clear to me at all when I'm getting, it's not clear to me at all to what extent what I'm getting matches what was given to me in original.
22:16
[SPEAKER_05]: I can
22:16
[SPEAKER_05]: I can pick up intimations of great literacy on the part of my interlocutor that I can't access.
22:23
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm curious as to your thoughts on essentialism or bioessentialism in the set because I don't think did Tolkien have a sense of that.
22:34
[SPEAKER_06]: It was he being reductive towards humanity or was he being reductive with creating this race.
22:41
[SPEAKER_06]: We certainly see one way that the movie deals with Jackson deals with it
22:50
[SPEAKER_06]: which is called an or a chi, right?
22:52
[SPEAKER_06]: He grows them in a little thing, but prior to that, what are we doing with essentialism and bioessentialism, which we'll leak out in, and we'll talk about modern culture in a second with that regards, but I'm curious as to what your thoughts are in this topic.
23:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, one aspect about bioessentialism that Tolken's approach to fiction makes us a little trickiest, that Tolken is very gentlemanly, and what he is, and is not willing to describe.
23:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And so the question of the Orakai is actually really interesting one, because Tolken will say, ah, yeah, saramon crossed orks and men, and he draws a really discreet veil over how that might have happened in the same way that he draws.
23:33
[SPEAKER_03]: even in his writing about, you know, about morgots, you know, abduction of potentially that morgots, you know, abducted alves and sort of bread them into orcs.
23:44
[SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't get very much into whether to what degree that was a biological process or a sorceress process or some mixture of them.
23:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And so you end up with this,
23:56
[SPEAKER_03]: thing where, you know, the elves are presented as being basically like people, you know, maybe they're a little wiser, but they're stupidities and sort of arrogance as are sort of proportionally greater as well.
24:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, the dwarves are, you know, you never really see dwarf wives, but you see enough sort of individual variation in dwarves to presume that they basically like people.
24:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And Tolkien, what Tolkien does with the Orcs is that he doesn't?
24:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Can I put a pin?
24:23
[SPEAKER_06]: Wait, something really quick, too.
24:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Please.
24:25
[SPEAKER_06]: In any of our fantasy literature, can we ever write anything that is not humanized?
24:32
[SPEAKER_06]: Star Trek, they're all just bipedal humans, right?
24:34
[SPEAKER_06]: How do we ever really depict an alien race?
24:38
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm going to make a case for Adrian Chikovsky's Children of Time.
24:40
[SPEAKER_05]: OK. A lot of time builds a pretty cohesive and believable science fiction fantasy world around a civilization of wolf spiders.
24:48
[SPEAKER_05]: It is an exception that proves the rule, though.
24:50
[SPEAKER_06]: And I would say CJ Cherath has a whole series called The Forerner series where there's a single translator on this crashed landed planet where there's these two, you know, human culture, and this other Atavi, I believe, is what they're called.
25:02
[SPEAKER_06]: And she does, I think, a pretty credible job in terms of teasing apart language.
25:06
[SPEAKER_06]: But anyway, Asher, we interrupt you, please pick back up.
25:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I was going to say that I think Tolkien,
25:13
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not really able to stop himself from writing some of the works as having personality just because, you know, there's that there's that great scene I believe it's in it's either in the two towers or return of the king I can't remember quite which but Sam over here's two or grunts.
25:29
[SPEAKER_06]: very famous conversation between Chad Brack and Gorbag.
25:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Just bitching about how awful it is to be a soldier in the Dark Lords army and how much better it be to go off and just like be a free boot or somewhere.
25:40
[SPEAKER_03]: But we don't really spend that much time with individual orcs.
25:45
[SPEAKER_03]: It's enough to that conversation is sort of notable by kind of how rare it is.
25:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
25:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's very easy to
25:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Get the sense that all orcs are a certain way.
25:56
[SPEAKER_03]: There's really there's the only other scene that gives you a sense of sort of intro orc Personality intention is that scene.
26:02
[SPEAKER_03]: I know this is in the two towers where there's sort of Representatives of three different orc armies arguing about what is to be done with
26:10
[SPEAKER_03]: uh, Marion and Pippen and you know, you've got sort of like saramons orcs arguing with the mortal orcs and there's a, there's an orcs who's come from Moria who is just completely uninterested in the dickering and it's mostly just there to like carry out some revenge for all of the like sword and sorcery hacking and slashing that happened in the previous book.
26:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And that dude ends up getting murked at the end of the argument because he tries
26:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's very easy, I think, to read, I'll add in a third really quick, sorry.
26:44
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, in the television series in the last season of Rings of Power, we get a flash of an orc baby.
26:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, yeah, I remember that.
26:52
[SPEAKER_06]: It's like an unusual, not even a wink and a nod, a giant spotlight in the face of, hey, orcs are not what you think.
26:59
[SPEAKER_06]: No, it's a moment.
27:00
[SPEAKER_03]: What's so interesting to me about Rings of Power is Rings of Power really tries to have its cake and eat it, too.
27:06
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
27:08
[SPEAKER_03]: What I think is really remarkable about what Tolkien does with the Orcs is that because he never resolves the problem, the problem just sort of sits there festering in the work.
27:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that that's actually to the works credit, because contrary to the way that I think many people digested Tolkien, especially in the sort of like long aftermath of his fiction, but even to some extent today, it's people talk about Tolkien's work as being about the great
27:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And in actual fact, I think that those books, Lord of the Rings, and you really see this, I think, in his sort of like, Ancillary writings about the Silmarillion or the sort of, like, wars between the dwarfs and the sort of orcs.
27:50
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the idea, not that there's a pure good and a pure evil.
27:54
[SPEAKER_03]: It's that there is a fundamental one might call it original sin, a flaw in the sort of basis of creation, that everybody is constantly having to deal with.
28:05
[SPEAKER_03]: great evil, but it is not grand, you know, Sauron and Morgoth sort of pretentions otherwise.
28:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Their evil is not grand.
28:14
[SPEAKER_03]: It is petty, it's totalitarian, it's vicious, but they can't really make anything, they can't really reshape reality in any sort of meaningful way.
28:22
[SPEAKER_03]: They can just sort of like fuck things up for everybody and even when they're not doing that, you know,
28:27
[SPEAKER_03]: The theoretically great and wise elves and theoretically like proud and strong dwarves are constantly causing problems for themselves to their own arrogance and pettiness and small-mindedness.
28:37
[SPEAKER_05]: And so it's really worth emphasizing how much more dwarves suck.
28:41
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, like to sorrow like living there, right?
28:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and so you end up with this, I think.
28:46
[SPEAKER_03]: folk idea of what Tolken's stories are about, wherein there is this very simplistic morality.
28:54
[SPEAKER_03]: But then when you go back and really revisit what Tolken was writing, he was fully aware of the sort of fickleness and foolishness of humanity.
29:03
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is all over those books with pretty much everyone, except the orcs.
29:08
[SPEAKER_03]: But also, just that you can just read what Tolken, the sort of the history that Tolken lays out for himself,
29:16
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, wherever these things came from, where these people came from, they have been under the thumb of one dark lord or another for a really long period of time.
29:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And even when they're not, it's not like, you know, sometimes it works for our friends and sometimes there are enemies, they do seem to get like killed on site.
29:32
[SPEAKER_03]: generally.
29:33
[SPEAKER_03]: The wars between the dwarves and the orcs are pretty openly genocidal in the way that Tolkien describes them.
29:40
[SPEAKER_03]: There's never a sense that there's ever been any real reprochement.
29:44
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just, you know, you see an orc you kill in work.
29:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And by Tolkien not solving that problem by making it really clear that they're always evil, you are left with this, oh, or the
29:58
[SPEAKER_03]: sort of accustomed to thinking of is in this sort of like folk idea of Tolkien as being, you know, as wise as the elves as braves the doors.
30:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Are these people also while they are all those things so flawed in that they're sometimes genocide errors?
30:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And if they are, what does that say about Tolkien's legendarium?
30:16
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think that's a counterreading of Tolkien.
30:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's a straight ahead reading of what Tolkien does.
30:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it really enriches his work to let that flaw just sit there rather than trying to explain it away or try and find a reason why actually it's okay to kill Orcs generally because I think that's something that many followers of Tolkien or sort of people influenced by
30:43
[SPEAKER_03]: but they didn't interrogate, let me, how to put this.
30:47
[SPEAKER_05]: Like can I, yeah, I ask you something, I'll show it.
30:49
[SPEAKER_05]: So what's the original sin?
30:50
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, he's part of a Catholic contingent Oxford, right?
30:52
[SPEAKER_05]: Is the original sin just original sin?
30:54
[SPEAKER_05]: That like, you know, Jesus, Jesus won't come for 5,000 more years to the layers.
30:58
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I think the original sin is the devil, it's, it's very like demyurgic, right?
31:03
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like the devil wants to get involved in creation and, you know, sticks his origin and allows the existence of evil into the world.
31:11
[SPEAKER_03]: or even just the existence of the capacity for evil.
31:15
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, theoretically, the elves are supposed to be created and live their entire lives in heaven in a state of grace, and then Morgoth does all the things that Morgoth does, and suddenly there's war, and there is the capacity for individual greatness, but also individual,
31:35
[SPEAKER_03]: It's, it is there very Christian books in a way that I think we all kind of know, but like when you go back in with that lens, you can really see it.
31:43
[SPEAKER_05]: It's not as obvious a word of the ring as it is on the C.S.
31:46
[SPEAKER_05]: Lewis books.
31:47
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
31:48
[SPEAKER_06]: When we talk about, it's okay to kill an orc.
31:51
[SPEAKER_06]: We actually have, in the movies, the movies have to deal with this at some level.
31:56
[SPEAKER_06]: whether explicitly or implicitly and one way that they do it is they make or a chi.
32:01
[SPEAKER_06]: Another way is through legalists and gimli, keeping kiltali, which many soldiers do in different combats throughout human history.
32:12
[SPEAKER_05]: There's even better examples.
32:14
[SPEAKER_05]: Think about how the Thelstrava ring ends.
32:16
[SPEAKER_05]: So it ends with legolas, error gorn, and gimli.
32:20
[SPEAKER_05]: Believe in it, Frodo is dead and the ring is in sarma's hands.
32:23
[SPEAKER_05]: If they have no reason not to believe that, because photos gone or the ring is gone.
32:26
[SPEAKER_05]: And they find, I think, Boramir's body.
32:28
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
32:29
[SPEAKER_05]: They find Boramir dying.
32:30
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, they find Boramir dying.
32:31
[SPEAKER_05]: And what do they do?
32:32
[SPEAKER_05]: Right, the war is lost.
32:33
[SPEAKER_05]: They're like, well, fuck it.
32:34
[SPEAKER_05]: Might as well go hunt some ore chiephers for.
32:37
[SPEAKER_05]: And I mean, there's more to it than that.
32:39
[SPEAKER_05]: They have to tip in.
32:40
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, there's a reason to them do assume that pip it in a merrier alive.
32:42
[SPEAKER_05]: Or that, frankly, if there's any ore chiephers,
32:44
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, pivot in the hands of the enemy is actually a huge asset to you, given how good he is at fucking stuff up.
32:52
[SPEAKER_05]: But yeah, but it ends with they're like, well, nothing to do now, but I guess like, you know, go kill some work before the end comes.
33:00
[SPEAKER_06]: And then that flows back out into our modern culture.
33:02
[SPEAKER_06]: And then we see in living enactments of that, some of those ideas in Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games where we have a...
33:12
[SPEAKER_06]: races or, you know, of organisms that we can freely kill so that we can be heroic, so that we get to be the heroes of the story.
33:21
[SPEAKER_05]: And an interesting counter-reading and the Blizzard Warcraft games, where the Orcs are men.
33:27
[SPEAKER_05]: Orcs are men orcs.
33:28
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
33:28
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's interesting to watch new games.
33:31
[SPEAKER_06]: I haven't checked out Daggerheart, but MCDM's new game draw steel.
33:34
[SPEAKER_06]: They don't have biosensual races.
33:37
[SPEAKER_06]: They have, here's a race and their complex, and they have a tribe, and they have motivations, and they have individuals, and you can play them.
33:43
[SPEAKER_06]: And there is no race that's sort of excluded necessarily.
33:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think what's really interesting about
33:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Orcs is that as long, basically since Tolkien created them, people have been trying to figure out their take on them and sort of like carrying out these sort of, essentially like literary arguments of like, okay, well, this is the orc, we're reacting to Tolkien's orcs, or reacting to the reaction to Tolkien's orcs.
34:08
[SPEAKER_03]: And what is so interesting is that even many of the attempts to redeem Tolkien's orcs,
34:16
[SPEAKER_03]: still position them as being in conversation with tropes about savages or sort of ideas about primitive peoples.
34:24
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like maybe you know, maybe your work is not evil, but he is, you know, he's like, he lives in a tent, right?
34:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Like he's probably maybe like a nomadic pastor list at best, you know, there's not a sense of like, oh yeah, you know, like the orcs, great merchants in the cities, you know, an industrial proletarian for sure.
34:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
34:40
[SPEAKER_03]: for sure.
34:41
[SPEAKER_03]: That's tough.
34:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
34:42
[SPEAKER_03]: You end up where even the sort of attempts to fix it, take it in what I don't think are inherently bad directions, but certainly some eyebrow racing directions.
34:52
[SPEAKER_03]: I think even Blizzard's orcs, again, the orcs are tribal or their mongles.
34:56
[SPEAKER_03]: They're always even when
35:00
[SPEAKER_03]: good or at least they could be our friends.
35:02
[SPEAKER_03]: They're always other.
35:03
[SPEAKER_03]: There's not really a sense of them as being sort of among the free peoples.
35:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm not someone who believes strongly that there is like any particular way that you shouldn't tell a story if you can get away with it or you can do it in a sort of interesting and sort of considered way.
35:24
[SPEAKER_03]: But I do think there's been a lot of
35:27
[SPEAKER_03]: not a great deal of consideration for how people have been like, well, they're bad savages, but what if they were good savages?
35:36
[SPEAKER_05]: Are you saying that no matter what orc is orc to man?
35:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I am saying that.
35:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
35:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I will say, I think Dungeons & Dragons has finally after much kicking and screaming sort of like been pulled around to actually like everybody's just a dude and everybody can just sort of come from anywhere.
35:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you want to play an orc who runs a coffee shop, go with God.
36:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And like that I think is actually a really nice change.
36:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And it took
36:06
[SPEAKER_06]: and talk about the long-term conversation and we have a rise of other games that are starting to check.
36:12
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't want to say challenge dominance, but we're going back to an early 80s state where there's just a garden of games that you can any a role player wants to go out and play.
36:23
[SPEAKER_06]: You can find all kinds of variations and cool things.
36:26
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm curious though.
36:29
[SPEAKER_06]: from your article, what kind of feedback did you guys receive?
36:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Do we get stayed back?
36:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Not very much.
36:37
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, people seem to like it on social media.
36:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't get anyone yelling at me about it.
36:40
[SPEAKER_06]: That's good.
36:41
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
36:42
[SPEAKER_06]: That's a nice thing.
36:43
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm glad, because we get yelled at for mispronouncing Galadriel.
36:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, the key thing is it's not because it's not an audio medium.
36:51
[SPEAKER_03]: No one needs to know how I pronounce any of the words I'm there.
36:54
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
36:55
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think that to your process here, we'll get into some heat death process later on, but this is a really great blending of literary criticism, anthropology and history sort of all together.
37:08
[SPEAKER_06]: This seems like a sweet spot for kinds of articles that you guys like to approach.
37:13
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, David, this is a great opportunity for us to ask here.
37:15
[SPEAKER_05]: What does he do?
37:18
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know because, I mean, there's a website, there are articles, there are indications or signals that there might be a larger community.
37:32
[SPEAKER_06]: I have not interacted with many other heat-death readers or fans.
37:37
[SPEAKER_06]: I was quite shocked to see that somebody who I've interacted with in podcast space is going to be writing an article for you guys.
37:48
[SPEAKER_06]: So then as I'm engaging in the writing and I'm trying to learn who is an author of a particular article because you guys don't always indicate who's the author, you do this interesting thing and these are some of my notes from the behind-the-scenes things.
38:04
[SPEAKER_06]: You do these really interesting things where you're breaking the fourth wall of literary stuff and you're, this is heat that stay with us.
38:10
[SPEAKER_06]: Like I love that sort of this American life sort of hook.
38:14
[SPEAKER_06]: And I'm fascinated by that.
38:16
[SPEAKER_06]: And then, yeah, anthropology, environmental, history, modern culture, like I said at the top of the episode, I feel this intellectual and spiritual kinship with whatever is going on at heat death, what I'm not really sure from one aspect to two another, all as I know is I'm reading your headlines of your articles, I'm going, oh damn, I got another thing I got to read, another thing I got to read, another thing I got to read,
38:44
[SPEAKER_06]: And then when I go through one of your articles, I don't know where I'm going to end up or why.
38:47
[SPEAKER_06]: Why am I reading about the Azerbaijan and who is the people in the conflict there that are media?
38:53
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, yes.
38:54
[SPEAKER_05]: These areas in the Armenians.
38:55
[SPEAKER_05]: The pre-figuration of the Russian nuclear war.
38:58
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, that's true.
38:58
[SPEAKER_06]: And how does that relate to Star Wars?
39:00
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm like, wait a minute.
39:01
[SPEAKER_06]: What's going on here?
39:02
[SPEAKER_06]: But I'm loving the journeys that I'm on and the intellectual landscape that I'm walking through.
39:07
[SPEAKER_06]: So
39:08
[SPEAKER_06]: That's not a explicit description of what I think he death is.
39:13
[SPEAKER_06]: It's my experience of heat death to date.
39:17
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, so I would say that heat death is a stock pot on the stove.
39:22
[SPEAKER_05]: And about four or five writes at the point when something has started to caramelize.
39:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that is a much more poetic description than mine, which is what are the all-bind brothers interested in this week?
39:34
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, I think there are, I asked you the question and we're both sitting here like talking a little bit because we've been really wrestling with like, what is the elevator pitch version of Pete does?
39:43
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, and we've stunned things like, it's the nature of culture and the culture of nature, or like, Oscar and I run a brewery the other day and I was like, maybe it's everything is evolution or evolution is everything.
39:53
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think what I can say historically, and I think that's maybe a better way to answer the question because that's what our approach is or approach is what are the roots of the thing that we're talking about.
40:03
[SPEAKER_05]: And the roots of this thing were we were both getting the feeling of like sort of tiredness and innovation as we interact with media.
40:10
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think the best example of the media that produced that feeling was Disney Properties and particularly Marvel.
40:18
[SPEAKER_05]: Really, it was just a fast wasteland of not quite art, really.
40:25
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, like art, flavor, product, and at some point we just realized that was a really interesting and generative thread to pull out.
40:35
[SPEAKER_05]: What is that really felt like it was not just
40:40
[SPEAKER_05]: and Avengers movie, but also really kind of tied into the experience of being alive in this era.
40:47
[SPEAKER_05]: And of course we're both working journalists too.
40:49
[SPEAKER_05]: There was a similar feeling in covering politics.
40:51
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know.
40:51
[SPEAKER_05]: I've been thinking a lot, actually.
40:54
[SPEAKER_05]: Another sort of very, very heat-dethy property is the rise of Skywalker, the last of the last of the, there's that moment in there.
41:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Oscar Isaac looking like a man who knows the check is clearing but the money hasn't arrived yet says somehow Palpatine has returned and he looks dead inside as he says it it is a remarkable moment because he's probably acting he's a very good actor but he sure doesn't look like he's acting he looks like he looks like he's worried his career is dying as he says it but also but also somehow Palpatine came back he did
41:35
[SPEAKER_06]: So I'm going to put a pin in this part, and I'm going to put a label on this pin called the Inchitification of Pop Culture.
41:41
[SPEAKER_06]: And we're talking about at the bottom of the episode, because this is a great segue into starting to talk about your series decline in fall, Star Wars as an imperial chronicle.
41:52
[SPEAKER_05]: Everything is Star Wars.
41:53
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, evolution is everything, but everything is also stars.
41:55
[SPEAKER_04]: everything in America anyway.
41:57
[SPEAKER_04]: Everything is everything.
41:58
[SPEAKER_04]: That's it.
41:59
[SPEAKER_04]: That's it.
42:00
[SPEAKER_04]: That's it.
42:00
[SPEAKER_04]: That's it.
42:01
[SPEAKER_04]: That's it.
42:01
[SPEAKER_04]: That's it.
42:02
[SPEAKER_04]: That's it.
42:03
[SPEAKER_06]: That's it.
42:04
[SPEAKER_06]: That's it.
42:05
[SPEAKER_06]: In this conversation, first I want to throw it to either one of you to describe the project overall, but I also want to put this little caveat that there is this.
42:15
[SPEAKER_06]: level of the project that I'm observing, which is both fictional analysis and political allegory.
42:23
[SPEAKER_06]: So our conversation can bioforcate at any point along the route here, and we're going to be twisting in and back around itself.
42:31
[SPEAKER_06]: So with that, Ashur, you've got to... Also, Ashur, he's missing a couple threads.
42:36
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
42:38
[SPEAKER_06]: Because I'm trying to read all the articles and understand the flow and I'm dipping in it out.
42:42
[SPEAKER_06]: So I absolutely don't have all the threads.
42:45
[SPEAKER_06]: So set it up for us.
42:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Why don't you mention the threads?
42:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I was going to talk about how the project came to be.
42:50
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, that's good.
42:51
[SPEAKER_05]: And David, I'm about...
42:53
[SPEAKER_05]: So basically, we can see the bit as being sort of like three to four-man strands.
42:57
[SPEAKER_05]: Awesome.
42:58
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay.
42:58
[SPEAKER_05]: All of which kind of get tied off in the mid 20 times with
43:04
[SPEAKER_05]: So one thread is an in-universe historical allegory, which is, you know, this tale of the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire.
43:13
[SPEAKER_05]: The story opens, in episode one, with this burrowk, but the very functional empire running into trouble, it ends in an period of complete anarchy in the galaxy.
43:23
[SPEAKER_05]: Everything's falling apart.
43:24
[SPEAKER_05]: That's one narrative.
43:26
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
43:26
[SPEAKER_05]: The frame story around that is George Lucas' attempt to create this epic, which he sees self-consciously as an allegory for an American decline or collapse of democracy.
43:39
[SPEAKER_06]: at the same time that he's consuming a whole kinds of different media and other pop culture and trying to process three.
43:45
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, that's right.
43:46
[SPEAKER_05]: That's right.
43:46
[SPEAKER_05]: Which also feeds into this, but that sort of like sort of more minor tributaries.
43:50
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
43:50
[SPEAKER_05]: And the final thing is the actual, the actual existing history of the American Empire as it enters the neoliberal period, as a new deal coalition cracks up and something new emerges.
44:04
[SPEAKER_05]: And I guess, and actually there's
44:09
[SPEAKER_05]: which is how Lucas' vision becomes part of this imperial disney project.
44:16
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
44:17
[SPEAKER_06]: The story of the IP of the intellectual property itself is shaping the story of what stories are being told to us.
44:25
[SPEAKER_06]: So we can't discount it from when we look at Asoka or we look at what is it, Mandalorian and Baby Grogu movie coming out and all these things we cannot discount that.
44:36
[SPEAKER_05]: And we both grew up on the expanded universe books, which we're, especially now, you can read them very much as, and to say for free, for listeners who don't know, these were the books that came out in the 90s, I'll certainly want to say more about this.
44:49
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, a lot of our listeners will be very familiar with you.
44:51
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, so as for those who aren't elder millennials, their their books about what happened after the death star was blowing up at the end of the turn of the Jedi.
45:00
[SPEAKER_05]: Of course, there are no more Star Wars movies, so that's all we've got.
45:03
[SPEAKER_05]: There will never be anything else, let's write some books.
45:05
[SPEAKER_05]: And what happens afterwards, of course, is liberal democracy, guys.
45:07
[SPEAKER_05]: The end of history.
45:08
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, obviously, if you take away the tyrant, I know, I know it's more complicated than that.
45:13
[SPEAKER_05]: There's a world of disorder in a lot of ways that it ends up being these remapings of the 90s conflicts, like the Balkan Wars, especially onto the Star Wars universe.
45:21
[SPEAKER_05]: But overall, like peace returns to the galaxy and a flawed, but practical, liberal democracy, somewhat united states, somewhat united nations returns.
45:32
[SPEAKER_05]: When Disney by Star Wars,
45:36
[SPEAKER_05]: And in many ways, a much more interesting, as well as much more depleted universe.
45:43
[SPEAKER_05]: But that's the Star Wars that we grew up with.
45:45
[SPEAKER_05]: And that Star Wars is explicitly a political allegory, a political product.
45:49
[SPEAKER_06]: And when we move as a whole industry of television, well, TV is doing something different.
45:55
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't want to say that.
45:55
[SPEAKER_06]: But from movies, at least, we're not coming from creator vision.
45:59
[SPEAKER_06]: Hey, I got this really cool story that I want to tell
46:04
[SPEAKER_06]: We're going from the studio going, hey, we own some shit.
46:07
[SPEAKER_06]: You and you go make this movie where a bunch of people fight and make sure that we get it out by this state so that we can hit these milestones and metrics.
46:16
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, we're driving profit over creative storytelling.
46:20
[SPEAKER_06]: That's a really good point.
46:21
[SPEAKER_06]: But Asher, I'm curious to know more from your side on that.
46:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, so two things.
46:27
[SPEAKER_03]: There's one sort of addendum to Shoal's point I want to make, which is that the very end of the 90s expanded universe, which of course, as the sort of, you know, lasted into the, into the odds, there's a very interesting thing that happens, which is that Star Wars, because Star Wars can't end, and Star Wars has to keep having Star Wars in it.
46:49
[SPEAKER_03]: As we get into the arts, there is a sort of infection in universe, complete crack-up of the kind of 90s, martial, new republic that is bringing liberal democracy to the rest of the galaxy and like, to the sort of imperial remnant.
47:06
[SPEAKER_03]: There's just a sort of dizzying turnover of different governments and characters getting killed.
47:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Because again, the story has to go on.
47:14
[SPEAKER_03]: You end up in a
47:16
[SPEAKER_03]: permanent state of crisis a law like the Marvel or DC universes where every summer a city has gotten flattened or you know the president has turned into a chimpanzee or whatever.
47:25
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think one of the things that's really interesting about Star Wars is to look at it both on its own terms but also as a serial narrative and thus under the sort of constraints of serial narrative in addition to everything else because the constraints of serial narrative
47:45
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a world where Star Wars stories moved away from the new Republic out into the front here of the Unknown Regions, and that didn't happen, because people wanted to keep reading about Han Luke and Leia, and that meant Han Luke and Leia had to keep having adventures, which meant that the project that they spent their entire life's fighting for had to fail.
48:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, right, right, right, right, which is what ends up of course happening in a way that didn't upset anybody and that people were totally normal about in the sequel movies.
48:13
[SPEAKER_03]: So to take a step back and look at where the client involved kind of came from was that it sort of arose out of conversations that we were having and there's about a dozen articles, right?
48:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, about about about a half dozen full articles, I think.
48:27
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
48:27
[SPEAKER_05]: Approximately 1,000 with another several hundred new members, just like Subjectively.
48:33
[SPEAKER_05]: They're meeting.
48:34
[SPEAKER_05]: They're meeting.
48:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
48:36
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot.
48:36
[SPEAKER_03]: So we initially were just talking a lot about the fact that, you know, the period from the prequels to the end of the sequels does not cover a vast amount of time.
48:47
[SPEAKER_03]: It's about 70 or 80 years.
48:49
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you look at a sort of equivalent chunk in various areas of, I guess we could
48:57
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the 70 to 80 year period from before World War I to the mid 60s or 70s covers a truly incredible amount of stuff happening.
49:08
[SPEAKER_03]: The same is true of the period around what you might call the sort of the exciting renaissance of the Italian wars and the discovery of the new world and the sort of extractive crack up of the sort of build up of all these extraction industries that are pumping.
49:21
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, more and more resources into Europe and fueling bigger and bigger wars that are sort of rippling out in all these ways.
49:26
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we were just sort of talking about like what would happen if you tried to read Star Wars as history, which is something that very people have tried to do, I think generally always interestingly and productively, it's one of the few fictional
49:39
[SPEAKER_03]: to stay in that level of scrutiny, if you try.
49:42
[SPEAKER_05]: Which was Wyman's point.
49:44
[SPEAKER_05]: Patrick Wyman of Tides of History, it was like... America's larger story and yes.
49:48
[SPEAKER_04]: That's right, big, big friend of course.
49:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we were talking a lot about this.
49:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think we initially, it took a couple of different shapes.
49:57
[SPEAKER_03]: We sort of toyed around with the idea of it as a podcast.
50:00
[SPEAKER_03]: We pitched it a little bit as a sort of a big,
50:03
[SPEAKER_03]: sort of like united feature and road of treatment for that and when we were kind of both a little bit at loose ends during the pandemic and trying to figure out what we were going to be doing with our copious spare time we we were like well maybe this the heat death project and it's sort of evolved into I think a much more sprawling and kind of idiosyncratic version under our pens because we could just sort of follow areas that we were interested in in a way that
50:31
[SPEAKER_03]: If this is the 10,000 word version of this entire saga is very different than I don't even want to think about how many thousands of words were on now, but more all the time, hopefully.
50:41
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, I'm counting 12 exactly articles under the declining fall hashtag on your on your website.
50:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of those are free or free previews.
50:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
50:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Freeviews, if you will.
50:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Like three of them, though.
50:51
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
50:51
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, I think probably the 10,000 word version is the piece Acerot called The Long Star War.
50:56
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
50:56
[SPEAKER_06]: And I've read a couple of them that seem to be historian writing.
51:02
[SPEAKER_06]: what happened in a movie not explaining the movie per se but hey i'm a historian and i'm sitting back at my point of view and now i'm going to recount these events and what led from one thing to the next but then we go to decline in fall annex kosher torture and we get into the end or of it all that takes a very different turn and so it seems like there's a mixture of treatments here let me say i don't have to say answers your question but but to us i don't know that
51:30
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, so I think the most fully realized of the decline of all story is treats a specific movement in the film franchise, we've together in universe history, out of universe history, that's shading into the in universe history and corporate life history.
51:49
[SPEAKER_05]: And they don't, they don't want to do that.
51:50
[SPEAKER_05]: Like the indoor piece you're talking about doesn't do that.
51:53
[SPEAKER_05]: It's explicitly a treatment of the idea of
51:57
[SPEAKER_05]: how an empire could have all out of the republic with anybody quietness.
52:01
[SPEAKER_06]: Right, and I was really picking up on some of the notes on a violence in the use of violence, which is it was then also making me think back to some of the orc related stuff.
52:10
[SPEAKER_06]: With orcs, habituated to violence is there.
52:14
[SPEAKER_06]: What's in the note here?
52:15
[SPEAKER_06]: I've got orcs, the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy could orcish violence be reactive and not innate.
52:21
[SPEAKER_06]: And when we're looking at a empire that's
52:25
[SPEAKER_06]: breaking up in the need to use violence as the only way to get the yoke of the empire off of you now you're loosened and you're condemned to use the tools of your enemy to to effectuate that.
52:38
[SPEAKER_05]: David, walk it back further than that.
52:40
[SPEAKER_05]: The Republic is cracking up.
52:42
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
52:42
[SPEAKER_05]: The Republic doesn't have a standing army.
52:44
[SPEAKER_05]: It's going to fall apart where we're going to have a civil war, true civil war for the first time in living memory.
52:50
[SPEAKER_05]: The Jedi are completely
52:53
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
52:54
[SPEAKER_05]: And then how does that, how does your answer to that question, you know, after you have successfully held the order together through a succession of civil wars, what does that look like 20 years later?
53:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
53:04
[SPEAKER_05]: And I guess it's just certainly this thing we talk about a lot, like, you know, the imperial leadership that gets blown up on the dust start, many of those are over-public guys, like they would have kept doing their jobs under the Republic.
53:14
[SPEAKER_06]: Quite possibly.
53:15
[SPEAKER_06]: They're institutionalists in a way.
53:17
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, yeah, and I think the fact that one of the, I think the smartest things that George Lucas did in the prequel trilogy is he kept the iconography of the Republic as what became the imperial iconography.
53:30
[SPEAKER_05]: He could have, he could have been a coup.
53:32
[SPEAKER_05]: could have been a start break.
53:33
[SPEAKER_05]: You could have been Palpatine Seas' power and now all the iconography is different.
53:36
[SPEAKER_05]: And he's invented this thing called the Star Destroyer and it's got this very angry shape.
53:40
[SPEAKER_05]: Like he could have done that, that would have been many ways been an obvious choice to make and he didn't do that and that was an incredibly powerful thematic choice because what it says is forms can say the same as everything changes.
53:51
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that's a really important point too because when we see Clone Trooper Armour merge into Storm Trooper Armour, when we see Venitor class ships turning to Star Destroyers,
53:59
[SPEAKER_06]: that the visual iconography, I'm an elder Jen Xer, so I saw a new open the theater.
54:06
[SPEAKER_06]: And when we walk out of there, we're like, oh, those are Nazis.
54:09
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, it's okay to blow them up, right?
54:11
[SPEAKER_06]: Because they're wearing, you know, those kinds of uniforms.
54:14
[SPEAKER_06]: And I grew up on a steady diet of World War II America, GI Joe, Saturday, Matt, Nate television shows.
54:20
[SPEAKER_06]: And so, you know, that's the diet that I was fed along.
54:24
[SPEAKER_06]: And so,
54:25
[SPEAKER_06]: This idea of American imperialism and that it's okay to use violence in these particular times, because we're on the right side of the story.
54:34
[SPEAKER_05]: Burakai, also countrypers.
54:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's a real point.
54:38
[SPEAKER_05]: Do we know, do we know if the stormtroopers buy the time of a new hopper constructs?
54:41
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, I just seem there because that's cheap.
54:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, then that's been pretty well established at this point in the sort of like Ancillary materials.
54:48
[SPEAKER_05]: a good conjecture volunteer army.
54:50
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, that's a good point.
54:51
[SPEAKER_05]: That's a good point.
54:51
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I think it's, well, Lucas just waited to go volunteer, right?
54:54
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, and he doesn't see anything weird about that.
54:56
[SPEAKER_05]: He's not like, I am going to go work for the evil fascist, but, you know, what either like, I'm down for it or, you know, it's what you got to do if you want to follow.
55:03
[SPEAKER_05]: He's like, no, man, I'm just going to work.
55:04
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm going to go join the army.
55:05
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm going to go work for the government.
55:06
[SPEAKER_06]: which is a very relatable story, where at least for our American military, where do a lot of our volunteers come from?
55:12
[SPEAKER_05]: Lucas from, to all appearances, he's from Northeastern Nebraska.
55:16
[SPEAKER_06]: Exactly.
55:17
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
55:17
[SPEAKER_06]: I want to pivot really quick.
55:19
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know that I've seen any...
55:22
[SPEAKER_06]: articles post and or so I'd love to get your guys' hot takes on the series as a whole fucking rules that was great and and specifically any things that you're holding onto that are any ideas or perspectives that you are exciting you.
55:39
[SPEAKER_03]: I sort of joked to show well after watching the first couple episodes of the first season that it is like decline and fall the TV show.
55:45
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, we can only assume that they've been reading us.
55:49
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
55:50
[SPEAKER_06]: Tony is a regular reading.
55:51
[SPEAKER_06]: Did he subscribe?
55:52
[SPEAKER_06]: Is he a patron?
55:53
[SPEAKER_05]: He's got a wish.
55:54
[SPEAKER_05]: He's got to be.
55:55
[SPEAKER_05]: He's under an assumed email for sure.
55:57
[SPEAKER_05]: Of course.
55:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
55:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that what
56:01
[SPEAKER_03]: really spoke to certainly me and I think I think shit will as well is that, you know, Star Wars is fun when it's silly.
56:09
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not someone who's like, oh, Star Wars, you know, there are a lot of people who get very annoyed when Star Wars is ever silly or ridiculous.
56:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Part of the appeal of Star Wars is that Nixon, what if Nixon was an evil space wizard that had, you know, chimpanzees and one movie until we thought better of that.
56:26
[SPEAKER_03]: But the thing that I really liked about Andor is
56:28
[SPEAKER_03]: It takes the sort of material reality of the universe in which it takes place very serious.
56:33
[SPEAKER_03]: And that makes it a very historically informed, like very clearly, very historically informed, a very interested in the ways that sort of historical revolutions happen.
56:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And that makes it an incredibly
56:48
[SPEAKER_03]: rich texts to read in the sort of material way that we like to approach this.
56:54
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the things about heat death is that we don't ignore the force, but we are not, I think, super interested in the sort of mythic aspect of Star Wars storytelling.
57:04
[SPEAKER_03]: That is a very well-trod ground.
57:06
[SPEAKER_03]: We are annoyed by the Jedi.
57:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Show all is annoyed by the Jedi.
57:10
[SPEAKER_03]: I would say I'm I like a lightsaber fight as much as the next guy But I think that there's like there's there's there's been so much quasi Joseph Campbell mythical cod storytelling that has come out of Star Wars and
57:27
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not that I don't think you can do interesting stuff with this just that mostly people don't and there's not really very much to say about it that I think interests us.
57:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And so what my feeling about Andor was that I would not have been upset to see the force occur like be more present in Andor but
57:44
[SPEAKER_03]: That's mostly just because I trust that Tony Gioro would have come up with something interesting to do with it and everything every other sort of aspect of the sort of like early formation of the rebellion the way that he engaged with it was so Interested in the nuances and complexities and in personality conflicts that it's a delight I don't think we're ever gonna get anything like it again
58:05
[SPEAKER_06]: There's an interesting thought too with Star Wars.
58:08
[SPEAKER_06]: There is the Clone Wars aspect of it all, and skeletons in crew aspect of it all all the way through.
58:15
[SPEAKER_06]: And behind it, there's this really strange mysticism as to with the mother and the daughter and these sort of lay lines, these cosmic lay lines, and
58:26
[SPEAKER_03]: space whales, it's very what it would be dangerous to say cobalistic in nature possibly but but again there's a mystery behind the mystery well but what's interesting about that is that that is in a sense it's apocryphal right it's not apocryphal because you know floney for there are people who like his work um and god love them but floney has the keys to the car now and so that stuff is pretty well baked in but it's hard to know how much of that is part of
58:56
[SPEAKER_03]: original sense of what Star Wars mysticism is, which really seems to be sort of making, you know, making no assumptions about Lucas' own spiritual life.
59:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Sort of California burnout Buddhism a little bit.
59:09
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, that's pretty, it is certainly Goisha.
59:11
[SPEAKER_05]: We can certainly say that, right?
59:13
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it's not even Jewish Buddhism.
59:14
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
59:15
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think that, because I know a little bit, I've watched a little bit of various parts of felonies sort of Star Wars properties.
59:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And I know it's expanded into there's time travel and laylines and sort of embodiment of the force.
59:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is not, I don't want to get into it as well.
59:34
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not my Star Wars, but it's not my Star Wars.
59:37
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not the way that I'm sort of accustomed to thinking about Star Wars.
59:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And it has never added anything
59:42
[SPEAKER_03]: for me.
59:43
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not saying that it shouldn't be there.
59:45
[SPEAKER_03]: It just, it doesn't speak to me.
59:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think the way that we've been, you know, we've taken a little bit of a hands-off approach to a lot of the floney material in heat death.
59:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I like the Clone Wars fine, and I like rebels a decent amount, but it just doesn't feel like it's something that has
1:00:08
[SPEAKER_03]: felt like it's in line with the kind of story that we're trying to tell.
1:00:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we've sort of batted out of a little bit and we'll probably batt out at a little bit more as time goes on.
1:00:18
[SPEAKER_03]: But we're sort of not, there's a couple of really good Star Wars books that are very much in line with recording the sort of,
1:00:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Disney continuity.
1:00:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're not exactly not doing the Disney continuity, but we're not exactly doing the Disney continuity either.
1:00:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about rebels.
1:00:37
[SPEAKER_06]: Great.
1:00:37
[SPEAKER_03]: We're mostly focusing on the films and and or because we really like Andy or and it's our newsletter and we can do that if we want to.
1:00:47
[SPEAKER_05]: There's a lot of take.
1:00:48
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, it's not really a hot take because this is, but this is the way that we've been thinking about it.
1:00:52
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, is anything ever a hot take on heat death?
1:00:55
[SPEAKER_05]: We do not, they're all hot takes, it is called heat death.
1:00:58
[SPEAKER_05]: They're not hot takes because the universe is now very cold.
1:01:01
[SPEAKER_05]: Getting cooler all the time.
1:01:03
[SPEAKER_05]: But locally, sometimes it gets hotter.
1:01:07
[SPEAKER_05]: So I was talking about the destruction of the expanded universe when Disney took over the property.
1:01:14
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think having grown up with this idea that the way the story and the trilogy inevitably ends is with peace and democracy of some court however often interrupted, Disney presents a real downer.
1:01:29
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean like it just all falls apart, you know, they take over the empire and then nothing.
1:01:34
[SPEAKER_05]: But I remember when I was watching the Force Awakens as much as it's like a confused mess of a movie and as much as the political situation specifically as confused there was something that felt really right about the idea that like layout organic actually is completely incapable of running a functional polity.
1:01:49
[SPEAKER_05]: There's actually something that feels much truer in the idea that after
1:01:54
[SPEAKER_05]: you know, the rag tag rubbles sees the capital.
1:01:57
[SPEAKER_05]: They're not able to put this shit back together.
1:01:59
[SPEAKER_05]: That's actually usually what happens, right?
1:02:01
[SPEAKER_05]: It's not generally the case that there's the big pivotal battle and then suddenly like the insurgents take over and everything goes great and they're able to put their guns down and it's generally respected and they follow the rule of law.
1:02:13
[SPEAKER_05]: None of these people have lived in a world of rule of law.
1:02:16
[SPEAKER_05]: The only order they've ever noticed in the Empire's order, which is rule by force, and specifically an order created to terrify.
1:02:24
[SPEAKER_05]: So, what I think I really liked about Android this time is that it really puts its finger in a much smarter way than JJ Abrams is able to do on that dichotomy.
1:02:36
[SPEAKER_05]: It says,
1:02:38
[SPEAKER_05]: what kinds of people are attracted to their belly in?
1:02:40
[SPEAKER_05]: What kind of circumstances are evolutionary favorable to rebellion?
1:02:46
[SPEAKER_05]: And what kind of empire provokes their rebellion?
1:02:52
[SPEAKER_05]: And one thing that I think
1:02:57
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, there's this very, very capable imperial bureaucracy that's kind of like all jogging for position.
1:03:04
[SPEAKER_05]: There's these sort of like tragic comic moments that sort of recall, to me like Hannah R. Ernst, I have been into her slum where I've come in as just this like, he's just like an office-style dipshit.
1:03:15
[SPEAKER_05]: He's got the big Holocaust project and he wants everybody understand how hard he was working on and how we sabotage my office.
1:03:21
[SPEAKER_05]: There's some,
1:03:23
[SPEAKER_05]: where it's like you've got these people who are at the absolute top of the game who are working for the evil space wizard.
1:03:30
[SPEAKER_05]: Like why are they building a Death Star?
1:03:33
[SPEAKER_05]: It doesn't make any sense for them to be building a Death Star.
1:03:35
[SPEAKER_05]: It except as an entire theory of power built on nobody's ever going to like what you have to do or just a sort of pathological worship of the ability to blow things up.
1:03:44
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think all of that in less capable hands could have done a real mess.
1:03:49
[SPEAKER_05]: I think in Andor, it ends up kind of the sort of soulful meditation on power and violence.
1:03:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Also, very funny, screamer of a, it's not even exactly a running joke, but just the structure of the sort of ultimate downfall of the ultimate big gun weapon being imperial, stupid imperial
1:04:09
[SPEAKER_03]: in a way that somehow manages to wipe out the entire upper echelon of the security service and the entire basically joint chiefs of staff in like the space of a week.
1:04:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, hilarious.
1:04:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, it's so fucking fun.
1:04:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, yeah, 10 days.
1:04:24
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
1:04:25
[SPEAKER_05]: And it's all because Deja Miro just wanted, what would you see even watch?
1:04:29
[SPEAKER_05]: One of the promotion, like she wanted the recognition, like she wanted what did she want?
1:04:33
[SPEAKER_05]: She wanted to be involved.
1:04:34
[SPEAKER_05]: She wanted to be involved.
1:04:35
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
1:04:35
[SPEAKER_06]: I was working on an idea about accelerationism and, you know, Lutheran as an accelerationist.
1:04:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Mm-hmm.
1:04:44
[SPEAKER_05]: Absolutely.
1:04:45
[SPEAKER_06]: And is Dedra Miro also, she's not an accelerationist, but she uses accelerationist tactics to achieve certain ends.
1:04:56
[SPEAKER_06]: And so I was starting to think about that that's an interesting,
1:05:00
[SPEAKER_06]: look at these two characters who are in this cat and mouse game for the entire two seasons.
1:05:07
[SPEAKER_05]: So Officer Steering, Deedrow only does five years in Arcana five because sort of a rebel operation paperclip springs her and realizes that she has to complete any uses as long as you give her a lot of credit.
1:05:20
[SPEAKER_03]: I was also going to say I think Deedrow and Lutheran share a
1:05:26
[SPEAKER_03]: operational policy which is when in doubt pulled the fire alarm and see what happens.
1:05:31
[SPEAKER_05]: Mm-hmm.
1:05:31
[SPEAKER_05]: Chaos is a ladder.
1:05:32
[SPEAKER_05]: Thought verbal dual between them and like the second to last episode, or third to last episode you're incredible.
1:05:37
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
1:05:38
[SPEAKER_06]: My last question for the on the Star Wars topic, then we can begin to wrap it up a little bit.
1:05:42
[SPEAKER_06]: Is Farix a Marxist anarchy as Bacoonin would have envisioned it?
1:05:46
[SPEAKER_06]: I've just been listening to the Revolution's podcast all about the Soviet Revolution and Tony Gilroy noted fan of the Revolution and he was on the on the daily show with John Stewart recently with Mike Duncan and which is what then I was like oh I need to go listen to it to his wait Gilroy Gilroy was with Duncan on the daily show yeah well the John Stewart's podcast oh my god
1:06:06
[SPEAKER_03]: which let me let me recommend for those of you who don't know Mike Mike Duncan has the most recent season of his Revolutions podcast is a fictional telling of the revolution on Mars.
1:06:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:06:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Incredible work of science fiction.
1:06:20
[SPEAKER_03]: I was completely wrapped listening to it waiting for every episode to drop.
1:06:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Goes really well as a companion piece to Andorc actually.
1:06:27
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay great.
1:06:29
[SPEAKER_06]: I
1:06:32
[SPEAKER_06]: given that Gil Roy is noted that a lot of his vibes come from the stories around the Russian revolution in that era.
1:06:42
[SPEAKER_06]: That's a good place to just jump in.
1:06:45
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's a really nice listen, 30 minutes or so, and he's really good at just delivering the stuff.
1:06:53
[SPEAKER_06]: And so I was learning all this history that I had
1:06:55
[SPEAKER_06]: vaguely intellectually aware of, and I was like, oh, wow, that's really interesting.
1:06:58
[SPEAKER_06]: So I'm really fascinated to with this idea of pharynx, which is this kind of anarchy, right?
1:07:03
[SPEAKER_06]: This sort of each to his own and to their need, kind of thing.
1:07:07
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, there's a weird corporate control, you know, out there, but we're here doing our things and we look after ourselves and yeah, we've got our own internal squabbles and people are being people.
1:07:17
[SPEAKER_05]: What I think it's really interesting about pharynx, and this doesn't really answer your question, but it maybe points in in another direction.
1:07:23
[SPEAKER_05]: which is that what's really interesting about pharynx is that I mean how long has the empire been a ago been the dominant force when when the movie opens like 15 years?
1:07:30
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean pharynx is still basically independent.
1:07:33
[SPEAKER_05]: There's these sort of like strange islands of corporate independence.
1:07:37
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think one of the things that we get from Andor that's really interesting is the idea of imperial control is like very heterogenous.
1:07:43
[SPEAKER_05]: the empire isn't everywhere.
1:07:45
[SPEAKER_05]: In fact, the empire isn't most places.
1:07:47
[SPEAKER_05]: Like maybe part of the reason why Luke wants to go join the empire is like who the fuck knows what the empire is, really?
1:07:52
[SPEAKER_05]: Like those were creating stations, you know, down by the Cantina, you go when you turn 18 and who really knows what happens after that.
1:07:59
[SPEAKER_06]: It's so big that you can't actually see the shape of
1:08:02
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but we can because we have this omniscient point of view, but it's then it's thin too.
1:08:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so thin.
1:08:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Like this is this indoor shows.
1:08:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, which indoor, I think makes a lot of hay out of, you know, the scene on the, I forget the name of the, the planet where the sort of fairx crew is hiding out of the beginning of season two.
1:08:20
[SPEAKER_03]: But oh, space, Iowa.
1:08:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, space Iowa, the thing that kicks that into motion is that, oh my god, an imperial inspection is coming through for the first time in three or four years longer, even.
1:08:31
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's really interesting.
1:08:33
[SPEAKER_03]: That says something about how the empire is not nearly as integrated into, I mean, that's a little bit like,
1:08:42
[SPEAKER_03]: imagining that, you know, you're in space Iowa and you have no interaction with any federal and see whatsoever for 15 years.
1:08:51
[SPEAKER_03]: That's crazy.
1:08:52
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a that's a crazy thought.
1:08:53
[SPEAKER_06]: But yet the threat of violence looms that if you don't produce, then the boot's going to come down.
1:08:59
[SPEAKER_05]: But this is where the Death Star starts to become interesting because while you could try to build a
1:09:05
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, with all kinds of political officers and, yeah, cadre, sure, public work.
1:09:10
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, you know, this is the civilian core and uniform sort of just, yeah.
1:09:14
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, you got it.
1:09:15
[SPEAKER_05]: Scouts, sports, sure.
1:09:17
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, you know, it's a big galaxy.
1:09:20
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, we have a very thin, textual record, even with all that we have, given the size of the galaxy.
1:09:25
[SPEAKER_05]: So who's to say that all that's not happening?
1:09:27
[SPEAKER_05]: But we do know what the number one priority is of the Empire, and it is the desk.
1:09:32
[SPEAKER_05]: Not even garrisons on every planet, right, which would require, again, that mass recruitment or conscription apparatus, one gun that travels around the galaxy, the big threat.
1:09:41
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's a clear strategic choice that they're making, which is we can't be everywhere all the time.
1:09:46
[SPEAKER_06]: So we just need to have this floating gun that we can go, but in buddy's face at any given time.
1:09:51
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, there's a sort of...
1:09:52
[SPEAKER_05]: watching Lord of the Rings this time there there's some definite overlaps between Lord of the Rings and Star Wars I mean there's sort of like Palpatine is like the Ghost of Morgoth right that keeps coming back.
1:10:02
[SPEAKER_05]: I wonder if there isn't something sort of similarly religious about it and that with a kind of state that Palpatine wants to build is such an outgrowth of who he is as a person
1:10:14
[SPEAKER_05]: and such an accuracy-the-nave-trip evil.
1:10:16
[SPEAKER_05]: It's not that the empire couldn't do that thing.
1:10:19
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, I think we all growing up watching this media to assume that they had.
1:10:22
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, we assumed that they were garrisons everywhere, right?
1:10:24
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, I think all of this assumed that it was like, sort of like, Nazi Germany, the state was everywhere.
1:10:27
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, you roll into Mos Eisley, and there's troopers on patrols.
1:10:30
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
1:10:30
[SPEAKER_06]: But they're troopers on patrol, because...
1:10:32
[SPEAKER_05]: But the troopers are in patrol, because they're looking for the MacArthur.
1:10:36
[SPEAKER_05]: And they're looking for the ring of power, right?
1:10:37
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, they're not generally there.
1:10:39
[SPEAKER_05]: It's very weird that they're there.
1:10:40
[SPEAKER_05]: It's where it seems very weird that they're there.
1:10:42
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, I think it's weird that they're doing checkpoints because they do have a spy, right?
1:10:45
[SPEAKER_06]: There's a spy who reports in on the Millennium Falcon, right?
1:10:48
[SPEAKER_06]: So they have a bit of an infrastructure.
1:10:51
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
1:10:51
[SPEAKER_05]: There isn't a tell.
1:10:52
[SPEAKER_06]: They maybe it's a very light hand, and they don't show in less they need.
1:10:55
[SPEAKER_05]: So this is the other thing about Android.
1:10:56
[SPEAKER_05]: We know that they work with corporations, contractors.
1:10:59
[SPEAKER_05]: They work with organized crime.
1:11:01
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, I think it's like it's less polluted in our chasm than like in our capital itself.
1:11:05
[SPEAKER_05]: They're happy to work with the huts.
1:11:08
[SPEAKER_05]: They're happy to work.
1:11:09
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, we can't get our forces out into that area, but the huts already have a degree of control, so let's just co-op to them a little bit.
1:11:16
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I think it's much more paramilitary, much more parapilies, much more sort of...
1:11:22
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a gangster gangster, isn't it?
1:11:24
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, yeah.
1:11:24
[SPEAKER_06]: And we'll use whatever we need to, wherever we need to, to maintain our upper echelon apparatus.
1:11:30
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a gangster state with elements of an impersonal law and order.
1:11:37
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, you know what it actually is?
1:11:39
[SPEAKER_05]: So in Latin America, they used the phrase Manodura, like strong hand or iron hand, which is for a very, it's like what Rodrigo Dirt did you rotate it in the Philippines?
1:11:48
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
1:11:49
[SPEAKER_05]: So it sort of trump has some elements of this approach, it's things have gotten so bad that we need a strong guy.
1:11:55
[SPEAKER_05]: What's up, man?
1:11:56
[SPEAKER_06]: Where is the set cut?
1:11:57
[SPEAKER_06]: Or is that, um, see cut?
1:11:59
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, yeah.
1:12:00
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I'll solve it, or I'll solve it, or we've got them all, our sort of grounds here with this kind of.
1:12:03
[SPEAKER_05]: This specific, uh, we're branding it back kind of.
1:12:07
[SPEAKER_06]: Which is an interesting, I think, opens up a whole other conversation, which is,
1:12:11
[SPEAKER_06]: Why is that a reaction at a almost species level?
1:12:18
[SPEAKER_06]: We see time and time again, and is it a reaction to conditions?
1:12:24
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, we could say, right now, there's a lot of weird stuff going on in the Earth, especially around our climate, and having surety of leadership, does that provide, does that answer something, some sort of uneasy feeling in our collective psyches?
1:12:38
[SPEAKER_03]: from a pistol to a man?
1:12:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe, but you can flip it and say that the concept of the mandate of heaven in a lot of Chinese history is often, especially with the sort of propagandizing around this Ming uprising against the Yuan Mongol dynasty was, oh, we've had a lot of floods and we've had a lot of famines and nature is not working right and dragons have been seen in the rivers and that
1:13:06
[SPEAKER_03]: We're linked in a few's got to go.
1:13:07
[SPEAKER_06]: It's time right or Nile.
1:13:09
[SPEAKER_05]: Hey, I am the intermediary so that the agriculture can continue because we have water on a sick good floods but floods and famines also like there aren't no natural disasters right yeah mismanagement and in a highly organized state for the grain to get from you know grain planet you know to where people are eating it requires a lot of order and if that
1:13:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, I think that there is, you know, certainly the rise of
1:13:37
[SPEAKER_03]: breakdown or perceived breakdown, provides a lot of potential accelerant for this kind of very personalist leadership of, you know, I alone can fix this.
1:13:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:13:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think there have been times in history where you do end up with pretty capable administrators that come in on a wave of reform and sometimes that's political reform and sometimes that's reform at the point of a sword.
1:13:59
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, a lot of time, what you actually get is somebody coming in saying,
1:14:04
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, now that I'm in charge, everything's going to be different, and what really changes is where the spoils go, is into their pockets instead of whoever was the guy beforehand.
1:14:12
[SPEAKER_06]: Which gets into this whole thing about human nature and scarcity, where you respond to scarcity.
1:14:17
[SPEAKER_06]: Toys on the playground, scarcity, grain in the universe, scarcity.
1:14:21
[SPEAKER_05]: I will say one thing that maybe is another, for assembling a list of potential, keep deaf taglines for the future elevator pitches.
1:14:29
[SPEAKER_05]: There is no human nature.
1:14:31
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
1:14:32
[SPEAKER_05]: Does that land for you, Osher?
1:14:33
[SPEAKER_05]: I like it.
1:14:33
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a big galaxy.
1:14:35
[SPEAKER_03]: I think, but to sort of like peel that out a little bit, the idea of human nature is really an argument about what we think humans do and the answer what humans do is everything.
1:14:45
[SPEAKER_06]: Like everything that's within our sphere of physical control, the things we can build and the things that we can envision.
1:14:50
[SPEAKER_06]: We don't, we can't teleport, we don't have telekinesis.
1:14:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think that there is a tendency in historiography and generally like thinking about the past to say, ah, well, like human nature is what we do and they must have done that in the past too.
1:15:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's certainly, you know, there is, we're all human, we're right.
1:15:15
[SPEAKER_03]: We're all human, but that also means that there is a tremendous diversity of behavior and cultural approaches, and I don't mean that in a way if everybody is different, but rather in a way of expanding what we think of as human nature away from the idea that there is a one-set way that people react to things, which I think if, you know, when you really engage with history, you start seeing that there's all kinds of different, along with all the commonalities, there's a ton of differences that
1:15:42
[SPEAKER_03]: are culturally mediated or environmentally mediated or just you know just down to whoever was in the chair on the day and they're on particular weird disfunctions or functions.
1:15:52
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're just like us, we're your little bastards.
1:15:55
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I can't remember where I pulled this quote up an out of your platform but archaeology of worn out narratives.
1:16:02
[SPEAKER_06]: Mm hmm.
1:16:05
[SPEAKER_06]: That's good.
1:16:06
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not was offshore.
1:16:07
[SPEAKER_06]: I might have been
1:16:09
[SPEAKER_06]: question of insuitification and we put a pin in it earlier and now sort of coming back to it.
1:16:16
[SPEAKER_06]: I kind of feel like at times what we're trying to do on the
1:16:24
[SPEAKER_06]: But more just trying to feed our own minds and souls, is to find these deeper meanings and to examine the sphere of our own consciousness and the fractal nature of our own consciousness through narrative stories, primarily television, followed by movies, followed by books of music.
1:16:42
[SPEAKER_06]: And right now, it just feels like the inshitification
1:16:47
[SPEAKER_06]: overtaking us.
1:16:48
[SPEAKER_06]: And I feel like, you know, we're swimming in this.
1:16:52
[SPEAKER_06]: There was a really interesting podcast I listened to the other day on the Vox media on today explained and they had a podcast.
1:16:59
[SPEAKER_06]: The topic was this is your brain off books.
1:17:02
[SPEAKER_06]: And we're starting to look at the TikTokification of thought processes and knowledge.
1:17:08
[SPEAKER_06]: Obviously, we have AI and what's that that's doing for people.
1:17:13
[SPEAKER_06]: They
1:17:18
[SPEAKER_06]: but that we're in this time where, what is the value of information and what is the value of thinking about information?
1:17:27
[SPEAKER_06]: Information, fact and fiction are now equal, right?
1:17:32
[SPEAKER_06]: Truth and lie don't have any differentiation when you have AI that can generate visual images and movies and right-hole PhD thesis in a blink of an eye,
1:17:44
[SPEAKER_06]: versus, hey, I really worked on this article.
1:17:47
[SPEAKER_06]: Whether I use AI or not to help me write the article, but it was like, my idea's I struggled with that I wrestled with that I crafted it.
1:17:53
[SPEAKER_06]: I had a podcast, I had an interview, or we watched the show, we took our time, we actually broke down the episode, we had our human reactions to it and thought about it, and these are the things that we're thinking about it.
1:18:05
[SPEAKER_06]: versus the insuitification of Star Wars.
1:18:07
[SPEAKER_06]: Disney bought it for $4 billion.
1:18:10
[SPEAKER_06]: $4 fucking billion dollars.
1:18:13
[SPEAKER_06]: Like that's a ridiculous sum.
1:18:16
[SPEAKER_06]: And what are they doing with it?
1:18:17
[SPEAKER_06]: Right?
1:18:18
[SPEAKER_06]: It's becoming inshitter.
1:18:20
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure they don't know what they're doing with it.
1:18:22
[SPEAKER_05]: But clearly don't seem to know what they're doing with it.
1:18:24
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, that class like the question of it was an odd first thing.
1:18:27
[SPEAKER_05]: George Lucas knew what he was doing.
1:18:29
[SPEAKER_05]: We might not have liked it or agreed with it.
1:18:31
[SPEAKER_05]: But he was, there was a person, you know, an embody a person with an embodied life experience and things that kept them up at night.
1:18:38
[SPEAKER_06]: And he come and did some other animal to help him.
1:18:40
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, sure, you know, he was, he chose, you know, like everyone else.
1:18:42
[SPEAKER_05]: He chose what to be influenced by and what not to be influenced by.
1:18:45
[SPEAKER_05]: He, you know, had a particular hobby horses.
1:18:48
[SPEAKER_05]: He had a weird love of made-up names.
1:18:51
[SPEAKER_05]: that were like sort of like, like, you know, scrambled to Kenzian.
1:18:54
[SPEAKER_06]: Like whatever, like, you know, he was like, with a predator that he was married to.
1:18:58
[SPEAKER_05]: He didn't really go, yeah, dudes are dudes to do, it's right.
1:19:00
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
1:19:01
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, he's, like, Star Wars, what grew out of a human brain.
1:19:04
[SPEAKER_05]: And then it made the jump into this thing that was fundamentally on or even anti-human, which was, you know, a corporate control, anti-luckish property.
1:19:12
[SPEAKER_05]: Which, by the way, Disney also grew out of an altar.
1:19:16
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't like Disney, I don't like his vision.
1:19:20
[SPEAKER_05]: He was a person with a vision of his own prejudices.
1:19:23
[SPEAKER_05]: I would argue that as we left the anti-Semitism and racial pathologies of Walt Disney, to we have left the interesting humanism of George Lucas.
1:19:36
[SPEAKER_03]: But also, also some racial pathologies there for the story.
1:19:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, good for people.
1:19:41
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, yeah, for, yeah, that's a good point.
1:19:44
[SPEAKER_05]: But the thing that I would say that that I like where I draw hoat from, and I think where we've drawn hoat from, because we see the same thing, right?
1:19:53
[SPEAKER_05]: Like that's why we started writing.
1:19:54
[SPEAKER_06]: And which is one of my questions about heat death, why heat death?
1:19:57
[SPEAKER_06]: Like what is it that these two brothers, that how do you both end it up as journalists?
1:20:01
[SPEAKER_06]: Because entropy is everything.
1:20:03
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, because entropy is everywhere.
1:20:05
[SPEAKER_05]: You can't get away from it.
1:20:06
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
1:20:06
[SPEAKER_05]: The the one rule the universe and it sucks, but this is the rule is that ordered systems decay and we specifically as a species are an incredibly effective means of transitioning order into disorders.
1:20:19
[SPEAKER_05]: What we do like we eat order.
1:20:20
[SPEAKER_05]: We should add disorder.
1:20:21
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, we eat order and we excrete disorder through literal heat or through or through our actions.
1:20:26
[SPEAKER_05]: our civilization turns order into disorder.
1:20:28
[SPEAKER_05]: There's no other way to live.
1:20:29
[SPEAKER_05]: That's that is the particular fate of life.
1:20:32
[SPEAKER_05]: So within that context, then I think we look at, isn't he death as a project encountered to that?
1:20:39
[SPEAKER_05]: Are you, I think it's paradoxical, but yeah, I mean, I think to us, we saw the landscape and we said, look at all these things that they have left for us to play with, to make something beautiful.
1:20:50
[SPEAKER_05]: Look at all the terrain that has been seeded,
1:20:53
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think we thought, you know, to, I mean, to us, the big question is how did things get here and where do we go next?
1:20:58
[SPEAKER_05]: And the question of how did things get here is a historical artistic one.
1:21:03
[SPEAKER_05]: And in the case of Star Wars, the question of how Lucas's empire became Disney's empire, and what that tells us about our current age, that's, I think, an exciting and generative product.
1:21:14
[SPEAKER_05]: In a way that is made more exciting by the fact that most Star Wars isn't like indoor.
1:21:20
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, does that land for you?
1:21:23
[SPEAKER_03]: No, it does.
1:21:24
[SPEAKER_03]: It does.
1:21:25
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that the way that I think about this, when I'm sitting down to write something or sort of editing someone's work, or even sort of reviewing the pictures that I've been getting recently, is what is the approach to storytelling or thinking or this topic that I haven't seen before, that I have not heard
1:21:46
[SPEAKER_03]: over and over and over because part of the genesis of heat death for me was actually Game of Thrones, which was the particular waking up after too long of a nap, bad mouth-feel.
1:22:01
[SPEAKER_03]: endlessly, regurgitated, hey, did you know that the last season was bad?
1:22:06
[SPEAKER_03]: How do I know that the last season was bad?
1:22:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, everybody on YouTube is saying the exact same three things, which is not making an argument of the last season of Game of Thrones's secret genus.
1:22:17
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's fine, but there was a way, there was an exhaustion.
1:22:21
[SPEAKER_03]: of just hearing the same thing over and over and over just regurgitated over and over and over, which was, let me hear someone sit down and say something new about this.
1:22:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Let me hear someone sit down and figure out a different approach, like come in through the side door, like something, anything different, because I will die if I am at another party and another person comes in and like Star Wars YouTube's outmate for like 15 minutes.
1:22:48
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, I want to hear what individual people think.
1:22:52
[SPEAKER_03]: I am not interested in hearing constant, reheated, and rehashed cultural narratives around this stuff.
1:22:59
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think that's what we try to strive for on the lower hounds.
1:23:03
[SPEAKER_06]: And we're also in that balance game of being critical without being negative.
1:23:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you can be negative, but be negative in a way that you've put some thought into and not something you just heard somebody say critique or criticism.
1:23:19
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, right.
1:23:20
[SPEAKER_06]: I love a pan.
1:23:21
[SPEAKER_06]: Sure.
1:23:21
[SPEAKER_06]: We have to be very careful on podcasts because we're also entertainment and when we have straight into negative criticism, you know, negatively sounding criticism, we get feedback in arrangement equals engagement.
1:23:36
[SPEAKER_06]: We don't get emails for nothing.
1:23:37
[SPEAKER_06]: We put out all these great podcasts and then we say something wrong or we go off on a little bit of a tangent, maybe we talk a little shit.
1:23:45
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, and wow, you know, hey, you just spoiled my experience of this thing with the final with the last of us for this last season.
1:23:54
[SPEAKER_06]: Both John and I loved season one.
1:23:56
[SPEAKER_06]: John's played all the games he has a big fan of it.
1:24:00
[SPEAKER_06]: And we just had to say on the microphone, look, we're going to talk bad.
1:24:05
[SPEAKER_06]: And if you don't like that, please do yourself a favor and do us a favor.
1:24:10
[SPEAKER_06]: And just don't listen to this podcast.
1:24:11
[SPEAKER_06]: There's no reason to do that.
1:24:13
[SPEAKER_06]: Right now, if you think you're going to have a counter point of view on it.
1:24:17
[SPEAKER_06]: And that seemed to work, and people were like, oh, thank you for your freshness.
1:24:21
[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you for your approach on this.
1:24:22
[SPEAKER_06]: But it is very easy to stray into these things because we are entertainment, but we're trying to be entertainment that is nutritious.
1:24:30
[SPEAKER_06]: We're trying to offer a point of view or a thought about something that's human, that's us.
1:24:37
[SPEAKER_06]: I took time
1:24:38
[SPEAKER_06]: And I took this episode, just 45, 50 minutes of television, and I spent three to four hours preparing for this podcast.
1:24:47
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm cooking you a meal.
1:24:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
1:24:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
1:24:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:24:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I like a little bit of fast food now and then I'm not I'm not talking I'm not I'm not I'm not putting on airs and graces here.
1:24:56
[SPEAKER_03]: When we I think sit down to do something for heat death and the same way that we we do for our professional right thing.
1:25:02
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we're very much wanting to create something that we put some thought into that we put some of ourselves into and if that means that we're talking shit then you're going to get hopefully some well considered shit talk that is prepared as carefully and with as much thought as anything else and it's not just there to be a cheap big Mac for you right.
1:25:25
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think yes, so maybe here's how I tied it up, as I'd say, if you know what doesn't are as sure soul, like if you know it feels like a bad meal, then you can sort of work from that to get, you know, that's the shadow of maybe what a good meal is.
1:25:40
[SPEAKER_05]: If you know what doesn't what leaves you feeling empty, and that sort of like marginally slick on the back of your metaphorical college, what's the opposite?
1:25:48
[SPEAKER_06]: You need a pint of ice cream in the next morning, you feel hung over and depressed for the next week because you've just flooded your
1:25:54
[SPEAKER_06]: You're you're got with sugar.
1:25:55
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, sure.
1:25:56
[SPEAKER_05]: If you're lucky.
1:25:56
[SPEAKER_05]: It's the next morning, right?
1:25:57
[SPEAKER_05]: We did kind of be that we're talking about, right?
1:25:59
[SPEAKER_06]: But the idea is is that be present to yourself.
1:26:02
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
1:26:03
[SPEAKER_05]: And also, there's a sort of sort of a tantric like flip.
1:26:06
[SPEAKER_05]: You can do where you say everybody is having the same experience of watching this shit and not feeling nourished.
1:26:11
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
1:26:11
[SPEAKER_05]: We are suddenly all in community again.
1:26:15
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
1:26:15
[SPEAKER_05]: So what do we do with that?
1:26:17
[SPEAKER_05]: Right?
1:26:17
[SPEAKER_05]: Like how do we how do we pick up the
1:26:20
[SPEAKER_06]: So that pivots me into some questions about heat death and heat death's community like you're taking pitches You're bringing in some other authors.
1:26:28
[SPEAKER_06]: It seems like at this point I was curious.
1:26:32
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm a technical question if you guys like ghost as a as a platform.
1:26:35
[SPEAKER_06]: So yeah
1:26:36
[SPEAKER_03]: You mean if we like it a lot, it's good versus substack because we've been sort of struggling like do we do substack do we do medium do we do ghost we I don't remember why we decided to do ghost instead of substack I think I was a little uncomfortable with substack a decision which I have to say has only proved I feel like I called that one right around the time they started sending up push notifications from Nazis
1:27:01
[SPEAKER_05]: So, their interface is good, like their interface is good as the one thing.
1:27:04
[SPEAKER_05]: It's like, you know, if you want a Twitter replacement, that's like a main page of the internet.
1:27:09
[SPEAKER_05]: There isn't bad.
1:27:10
[SPEAKER_05]: I will say it's very, very, very AI-heavy.
1:27:13
[SPEAKER_05]: In-suitification.
1:27:14
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not sure I actually want to interact with these orders in that way.
1:27:17
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
1:27:18
[SPEAKER_05]: But I've got friends who use it as a sort of a replacement for which we're used to be and seem happy with it.
1:27:22
[SPEAKER_05]: And we've, by the decisions we've made, we've walked ourselves out of that interface.
1:27:25
[SPEAKER_06]: And it seems like Ghost has a the nice balance point between being a blogger style site and a newsletter sub-stack site.
1:27:34
[SPEAKER_06]: Like there's enough of a technological overlap between those two ends of a, I don't want to call it a spectrum, but at least those two, two areas that goes, and Ghost lets you own your own stuff.
1:27:46
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, you have some choices about where things are hosted and how things are hosted.
1:27:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:27:51
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a very good sort of like meat and potatoes.
1:27:53
[SPEAKER_03]: hosting.
1:27:54
[SPEAKER_03]: It does everything you need it to do.
1:27:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe it doesn't have the bells and whistles, but honestly, that just means that we focus on the actual thing that we're making and not, you know, stuff that doesn't really matter.
1:28:04
[SPEAKER_05]: Unfortunately, we don't get to share hosting this amount of glaciers, which has been a real blow.
1:28:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I know, every day I cry that, you know, we are not basking in that particular radiance.
1:28:13
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a real halo.
1:28:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Don't worry, this thing I don't understand.
1:28:16
[SPEAKER_06]: Ah, yeah, I hit thoughts, but I don't understand.
1:28:19
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
1:28:21
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, it was interesting to watch his trajectory, too, as sort of a very, very, very, very, very, a very heat-deserved trajectory.
1:28:27
[SPEAKER_06]: Right, exactly.
1:28:28
[SPEAKER_06]: As Recline almost went there too, but he seemed to have pulled himself back.
1:28:32
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
1:28:33
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
1:28:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:28:34
[SPEAKER_06]: And if you talk to who is the Polster, the gambler guy?
1:28:38
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh my god, yeah.
1:28:40
[SPEAKER_06]: Silver.
1:28:40
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
1:28:41
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, that was, oh, I'm just putting this down for a while.
1:28:44
[SPEAKER_06]: and he seems to be back on a better wicked now.
1:28:46
[SPEAKER_06]: But anyway, in terms of upcoming topics and who you guys are working with, it sounds like you're trying to pull in some more authors is that new or is that always been part of the project?
1:28:59
[SPEAKER_06]: No, for us idea.
1:29:00
[SPEAKER_05]: This new, we've done a little bit of it before.
1:29:01
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, it's new.
1:29:02
[SPEAKER_05]: It's an explicit attempt to try and find like my advice as to connect with broader communities.
1:29:08
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
1:29:09
[SPEAKER_05]: And in a sense, it's like, you know, you talk about fiction being a mirror, a sync by seeing how people relate to the project and what they pitch us, we discover what the project is.
1:29:16
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, man, I like that.
1:29:18
[SPEAKER_06]: And do you have any themes or ideas that you can share now with what's coming up or do you want to play that close a little bit?
1:29:24
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not a matter of playing it close so much as that I have a bunch of pitches that do to sort of family stuff within the brothers' all-bind.
1:29:32
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a lot of new products.
1:29:34
[SPEAKER_04]: We're... Yeah, it's a baby.
1:29:36
[SPEAKER_04]: Luzzle tough.
1:29:38
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, well.
1:29:38
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, yeah.
1:29:39
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, fingers preemptive, muzzle tough.
1:29:41
[SPEAKER_06]: The sauce have out certainly.
1:29:42
[SPEAKER_03]: So that just meant that there's I have a bunch of pitches in my in box that I've been looking through and sort of doing preliminary screening up before I send them to send them to show and what do you do when you're working with presumptive authors usually you know I'm I'm asking it's very weird I have to say to be on the this side of the editor desk where you know I'm like oh have you have you written anywhere before like you know what what is the shape of that you would like this essay to be and it's
1:30:10
[SPEAKER_03]: The thing that's a little tricky about is that sometimes I'll get pitches.
1:30:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I've gotten a couple of pitches, so much I haven't even afforded to show all that are just like, they're really good pitches, but they're not eat that.
1:30:18
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
1:30:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Where I have to be like, oh, you should have you thought about taking it to this publication or that.
1:30:23
[SPEAKER_05]: What without, without, you know, talking at a turn.
1:30:25
[SPEAKER_05]: What makes them not see death pitches?
1:30:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there was someone who wanted to do a reported piece about a,
1:30:38
[SPEAKER_03]: convention of political impersonators.
1:30:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Not he does.
1:30:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, not he does.
1:30:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Could be he does, not obviously he does.
1:30:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it would be I would have a little bit of trouble explaining what might make it.
1:30:50
[SPEAKER_03]: He does.
1:30:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we could have workshopped it to get it there, but it was a good enough pitch that I was like, you should take this somewhere else also.
1:30:56
[SPEAKER_03]: The other thing is we have right now a somewhat small ping subscriber base, which is enough to pay for
1:31:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Sun, you know, pay out some amount of money as a sort of like small on a rarian for people who write for us.
1:31:09
[SPEAKER_06]: That caught my eye in one of your last newsletters and I and I subscribed because of that.
1:31:13
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, thank you.
1:31:14
[SPEAKER_05]: Great.
1:31:15
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, that money goes to that in hosting.
1:31:17
[SPEAKER_05]: We don't take any money off of the release at this point.
1:31:19
[SPEAKER_06]: Exactly.
1:31:19
[SPEAKER_06]: And I recognize that because we have a lot of co-hosts who are not full-time podcasters, but they cover certain topics with us, we make sure that we honor the creative relationship with them.
1:31:28
[SPEAKER_06]: And we pay out flat fees on whatever the mechanics of it are for podcasting versus a written piece.
1:31:35
[SPEAKER_06]: but we make sure that the creative relationship is appreciated and not extractive, I guess, who we could say.
1:31:41
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
1:31:42
[SPEAKER_05]: What we essentially offer people is a little bit of money for your time, but it won't cover your time.
1:31:48
[SPEAKER_05]: No.
1:31:48
[SPEAKER_05]: Like if you're writing for us, we're good, right?
1:31:50
[SPEAKER_06]: But I acknowledge you.
1:31:51
[SPEAKER_06]: You spend time on this and therefore I and you, I see the value of what you're giving.
1:31:58
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
1:31:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And what we're giving you is you're going to come out away with something that you're going to be able to do it right and as a as a club and we don't we don't take any rights except for the right to run the piece first on Pete die you're going to come away with with a piece that you can then.
1:32:15
[SPEAKER_03]: You own it completely if you want to further develop it somewhere else, if you want to do anything with it, it's yours.
1:32:21
[SPEAKER_03]: It would be frankly criminal to try and grab any rights for the amount of money, which is like if you're 50 to $70 that we can pay.
1:32:30
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're basically renting it off you for the world-day view, this version of its world-day view, and then you can take and do with it whatever you place.
1:32:39
[SPEAKER_06]: I think it's a interesting place to wrap up.
1:32:42
[SPEAKER_06]: There's, I have so many open notes on the outline that I created for this.
1:32:48
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think this has just been a fascinating and fun conversation.
1:32:52
[SPEAKER_06]: One of the things I always like, I stole this as a recline.
1:32:55
[SPEAKER_06]: What three things?
1:32:57
[SPEAKER_06]: He does out on books.
1:32:58
[SPEAKER_06]: I like to just open it up to anything, movies, TV,
1:33:02
[SPEAKER_06]: articles, music, what are three things that are each of you that has your attention captivated right now, something that's giving you nutrition or giving you big mac fields?
1:33:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I just finished a biography of Mary and Seet Cooper, the creator or sort of like primary co-creator of King Kong, which is called Living Dangerously.
1:33:23
[SPEAKER_03]: which is a really engaging and enjoyable biography, but also did make me realize that I think I have a King Kong novel in me, which is a terrible thing for an author who's got a bunch of book projects already to realize.
1:33:37
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm going to shamelessly plug a friend podcast of ours every single sci-fi film ever.
1:33:42
[SPEAKER_06]: I think on is running the history of sci-fi on screen and King Kong was
1:33:50
[SPEAKER_06]: What she usually does is bring into academics and then oh, that sounds great.
1:33:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, hot take about King Kong that shit still rules There's some classics you return to you like I can see why this was influential for the time But that sucker moves so what else other to Saw and really like Superman.
1:34:07
[SPEAKER_03]: I thought that Superman felt like a Sort of enjoyably personal and like kind of like idiosyncratic super hero film, which is not always something that you can depend on
1:34:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And a very interesting film to watch from the perspective of a diaspora American Jew.
1:34:25
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I think my third one is that in terms of like sort of big Mac quality, Netflix's K-Pop Demon Hunters is a incredibly made,
1:34:37
[SPEAKER_03]: sloppy burger that you will eat and be thinking about for the whole rest of the week, even though you know you shouldn't eat more of it any time soon or you'll feel sick to your stomach, but in terms of perfect trash, it can't recommend it highly enough.
1:34:52
[SPEAKER_03]: as a dad to a nine and a half year old I can tell you all that it's taking the the youth by storm on repeat in your household I'm sure it's only repeat in my household with my partner who is a tape-op girl.
1:35:07
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, my wife too is um
1:35:08
[SPEAKER_05]: So my big Mac recently, my wife's got into the rookie, a truly trash Nathan Phillian beer call.
1:35:17
[SPEAKER_05]: What I like about the rookie is that part of the reason is that there's been the pop culture conservative turn against the cities.
1:35:26
[SPEAKER_05]: If they're watching shit like this, no wonder they think cities are
1:35:30
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, these guys, like, in the ABNC plot, there's like four murders per episode.
1:35:35
[SPEAKER_05]: It's like one person didn't also handle it.
1:35:37
[SPEAKER_05]: Some people are just giving it being murdered like flies.
1:35:39
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
1:35:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that the Nathan Philly and show?
1:35:41
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, that's right.
1:35:42
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
1:35:42
[SPEAKER_05]: I like that, dude.
1:35:43
[SPEAKER_05]: He sells it.
1:35:44
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, it's pretty good, bad.
1:35:46
[SPEAKER_05]: It's still bad, though.
1:35:48
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know.
1:35:48
[SPEAKER_05]: It's like an homage to a cop show.
1:35:50
[SPEAKER_05]: Seven away.
1:35:51
[SPEAKER_05]: Seven away.
1:35:51
[SPEAKER_05]: It's in the 126 episodes, that is.
1:35:53
[SPEAKER_05]: It's not, you know, it's, like, justified for idiots.
1:35:58
[SPEAKER_05]: So I just finished John Ganses when the clock broke, which felt like a really wonderful work of unpistorical archaeology.
1:36:07
[SPEAKER_05]: It traces, it doesn't make these points too explicitly because it doesn't have to, but it's a deep reading of the election season of 1992, which ends up being this kind of master role, historical prefiguring of our current moment.
1:36:22
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think really, I think explains and explores the role of the untanny and the missiles and the unconscious in American politics in a way that I think is very rare.
1:36:34
[SPEAKER_05]: And I've just started reading Roller's Raiders and Traders, which is Patrick Wyman, just interviewed the writer of, which is an epic history of the horse, being sort of the the key explainer of your Asian history, which I'm only a little bit of ways into it, but I'm really enjoying it.
1:36:51
[SPEAKER_06]: where can folks find you what besides your website, which is I believe he deaf.io, I'll put a link in the show notes.
1:36:59
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, so he deaf slash goes dot dash goes.io.
1:37:03
[SPEAKER_05]: You can find mostly I write for the hell.
1:37:05
[SPEAKER_05]: We're on the staff writer and you can find me there on Blue Sky.
1:37:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And you can find me at
1:37:12
[SPEAKER_03]: numerous publications, but mostly these days, the New York Times, Nat Geo, and Scientific American.
1:37:20
[SPEAKER_03]: You can also find me at blue sky at osherlbine or at my website osherlbine.com, which has a sort of updating list of features, but it has not been recently updated, so I need to do that.
1:37:34
[SPEAKER_05]: Also, if you like what we've been putting down here, you should buy osher's book of short stories.
1:37:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, my ghost days, ghost days, which is a book of short stories about an apple action which at the turn of the century, encountering various sort of spooks, haints, and the sort of downstream effects of extraction in apple laughter.
1:37:55
[SPEAKER_06]: Is anybody optioned it yet?
1:37:56
[SPEAKER_06]: That sounds interesting.
1:37:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Boy, I sure, you know, from your lips to god's ears.
1:38:01
[SPEAKER_04]: Listen, Tony, we know you're listening.
1:38:04
[SPEAKER_04]: Iager's a regular listener.
1:38:06
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm taking offers if anybody would like to.
1:38:08
[SPEAKER_04]: That's all I say.
1:38:09
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not entertained, Iager's offer, all right.
1:38:11
[SPEAKER_06]: But I'm just throwing it off the guy.
1:38:12
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably not, but he's got these get connections.
1:38:16
[SPEAKER_06]: I just want to encourage everyone, go check out HeatDeath and subscribe.
1:38:21
[SPEAKER_06]: I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I hope we can find some space to do some more conversations in the not too distant future.
1:38:31
[SPEAKER_05]: When we get to the new Republic period, let's talk again.
1:38:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
1:38:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, maybe a little sooner than that.
1:38:37
[SPEAKER_03]: We're not moving super fast there.
1:38:40
[SPEAKER_06]: Fair enough.
1:38:41
[SPEAKER_06]: All right, Saul and Asher Albine from Heta.
1:38:44
[SPEAKER_06]: Thanks for being with us today.
1:38:46
[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you.
1:38:47
[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you so much for having us.
1:38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The Lower Hound's podcast is produced in published by the Lower Hounds.
1:38:53
[SPEAKER_00]: You can send questions and feedback and voicemails at the Lower Hound's.com slash contact.
1:38:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Get early and add free access to all Lower Hound's podcasts at patreon.com slash the Lower Hounds.
1:39:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Any opinions stated or are as personally and do not reflect the opinion of or belong to any employers or other entities.
1:39:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.