I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Wright, professional storyteller, scholar of ancient history and Greek myths, and podcast host, for the Seldon Crisis podcast.

It was a wonderful conversation and I learned a lot about how he became fascinated by the topic and eventually built a professional career out of his passion for storytelling and how it eventually led to two wonderful podcasts, one on the events surrounding the Trojan War and Homer’s Iliad and another on the Odyssey.

The first episode of the Trojan War podcast is about the event that precipitated the conflict; not the abduction of Helen from Greece by the Trojan prince Paris, the event that “launched a thousand ships,” but a wedding on Olympus between a god and a mortal. A certain notorious goddess named Eris was not invited and wasn’t happy about being excluded. She wreaked her revenge through an act of epic trolling — by tossing a golden apple into the proceedings with an inscription, “For the fairest.”

Eris knew this would cause a ruckus, and it surely did, leading to the famous “judgment of Paris” in which he declined to accept absolute power or wisdom in favor of just getting his rocks off with the most beautiful woman in the world. Such mistakes tend to lead to serious consequences, like a ten year long conflict on distant shores with countless agonizing deaths and a destroyed civilization or two.

Jeff Wright told this story in his first episode, with one of the funniest and most engaging treatments imaginable including some brilliantly insightful commentary and analysis, and I was hooked.

I followed it through the remaining eleven episodes, then devoured his subsequent podcast on the Odyssey as well, again finding every episode absolutely delightful, engaging, and brilliantly delivered.

Jeff's since put the whole saga to page, too — his book, The Full Disclosure Iliad: From Mythic Origins to Trojan Horse, tells the complete Trojan War story in one continuous narrative, filling in everything Homer's version leaves hanging (which, if you've read the Iliad, you know is a lot). If the podcast hooked you the way it hooked me, it's well worth picking up.

During the Covid pandemic in 2020, I decided to go back to the future so to speak, and picked up a similarly powerful epic placed 20,000 years or so in humanity’s future and re-read it for the first time since high school. The story was, of course, Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. Since I’d first read the story, Asimov had written two sequels and two prequels, so I devoured all seven books, then convinced my son to read them as well.

I still felt an urge to share the wonder of the stories, and my mind returned to Jeff and his storytelling magic. He introduced his Trojan War series by calling it “history’s most awesome epic.” It occurred to me that Foundation could be a candidate for future history’s most awesome epic and someone should retell it the way Jeff had done with the works of Homer.

I believe I encountered the Trojan War podcast through another wonderful podcast entitled Literature and History, hosted by the amazing literary scholar and musician Doug Metzger. If you haven’t encountered Literature and History before, please do so. It’s one of the most thoroughly educating and at the same time humorous and insightful podcasts on the planet, and it has some amazing background music performed by the host himself.

That, my friends, is how Seldon Crisis was born. I didn’t directly copy Jeff’s style. His episodes are clearly separated into the first half in which he tells the story, and a second, optional, half when he gets deep into the analysis. I tend to weave the analysis into the story a bit more, but the influence is clear. I also feel deeply indebted to Doug’s Literature and History approach, which is also heavily weighted towards expert analysis. I don’t have the academic cred to work on the same high level as these two giants, but I want people to know how much they inspired me and to link to their first episodes here so you can see for yourself.

If you haven’t journeyed through the core trilogy of Foundation with me yet, here’s the link to episode 1 of Seldon Crisis.

Seldon Crisis Episode 48: Jeff Wright on Homer, Nolan, and The Odyssey

🎧 Listen to the full episode on Seldon Crisis →

[Opening theme music with voiceover]

Jeff Wright

Joel McKinnon

Welcome back to Seldon Crisis. This episode marks a pretty significant departure from anything previously on this podcast. It’s not at all about science fiction, though I’m pretty sure Isaac Asimov would have taken an interest in the topic, as he was very well versed in history and it is very much about history and a great expanse of time and the human experience.

About 10 years or so ago, long before I’d had a glimmer of an idea of starting a podcast of my own, I encountered one that centered on a topic of deep interest to me, the stories from Greek mythology, and particularly one such story that had a profound effect on the cultural memories of the ancient Greeks, that is the stories of Homer about the semi mythical Trojan War. The podcast was appropriately titled Trojan War, the Podcast with the alluring history’s most awesome epic. It started with the tale of a marriage on Mount Olympus between a God and a mortal, and a contest that precipitated a compelling drama, the kidnapping of the most beautiful woman in Greece, Helen, and the horrific war that ensued to bring her back and punish her captors.

The author and narrator of the podcast was a natural born storyteller himself, a man named Jeff Wright, and I immediately took a strong liking to his approach in telling the tale, at once scholarly and respectful and wildly humorous. His first episode had me hooked, and I rapidly listened to every One of the 19 episodes that followed up to and including the Sack of Troy. He followed that up with another podcast covering the other great epic from Homer with the Odyssey: The Podcast.

I emailed Jeff and got to know him through a series of exchanges, discovering that he and his wife were avid canoeists who were in the habit of engaging in regular aquatic adventures of their own. Recently, I became aware that Jeff had published a novel covering the entire Trojan War in greater depth, entitled the Full Disclosure Iliad. When Christopher Nolan’s film of the epic was released this summer, I got in touch with Jeff and asked if he might come on Selden Crisis and talk about his view of these great epics and his take on the film, and he readily agreed. I think you will enjoy our conversation.

Joel McKinnon

Well, welcome Jeff!

Jeff Wright

Hey Joel, it’s great to be here and to finally meet you at least virtually in person after chit chatting online for years.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, this is the first time I’ve heard your voice since the last episode of the Odyssey podcast. And so I’ve kind of missed it for a while. You know, I was listening to you narrate, as I went to sleep at night and on while I hiked and just, just an amazing breadth of content in those two episodes or those two podcasts. The Trojan War: The Podcast and Odyssey: The Podcast. Brilliant stuff.

Jeff Wright

I guess it would have. I was doing the math once. I think you likely then got stuck with me inside your head for well over 35 hours in total. I know I tell that to my wife and she says, those poor people. But anyway.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, well, the format was really interesting how you did half of it as the narration of the story, and then the last half of each episode was, commentary about it. And that’s where you got really interesting to me. It’s like the additional insight that you have from having read this so long and having studied this so long.

Jeff Wright

You know, the funniest thing about that is that when I was creating the podcasts, that wasn’t part of the original plan. I was figuring I’d just tell the story. But it was a former high school history teacher in me. I just couldn’t resist. People need context. People need a little bit of a framing for this because of course, that’s what teachers do all the time. And so I tried integrating my framing and context into the story itself and I kept pulling myself out of the story.

Joel McKinnon

Right.

Jeff Wright

So essentially I decided, well, we’ll put in the post story commentaries and I can take off my omniscient narrator hat and put on my Jeff the teacher hat. And. And then the lovely thing is, and what I frankly had expected with Trojan War: The Podcast is that, oh, likely about 75% of listeners would just skip, you know, jump to the next episode. And in fact, if you listen to the podcasts at the end of the narration of every chapter, I’ll say, and some of you are likely to head on to the next chapter. And for those of you who want to stick around, here’s what you can do.

What surprised me, Joel, was I started getting feedback from the listeners. And my guess is about 90% of listeners listen to the post story commentaries. And actually for a lot of listeners, they’re the highlight because they’re, they’re what differentiates my telling from just the standard telling. It’s sort of that value added thing or whatever.

Joel McKinnon

Well, probably a lot of them were like me, familiar with the story already and you know, had read it or, you know, knew a lot about it and so it was the commentary that was really interesting, was the, the real value of it. But I loved both. I mean, your, your storytelling is, is awesome. I, I have to say my favorite thing, and we’ll get back to this probably is the trial of Odysseus that, that you did late in the Odyssey podcast.

Jeff Wright

Let’s put a pin on that and get back to it because I can tell you a story about that which, which will be fun when we get there. But no, the post story commentaries worked and actually, and again we’re leaping way ahead here. But when I eventually sat down to write my book, The Full Disclosure Iliad, and I was playing around with formats, ultimately I ended up going, well, you know, don’t, don’t try to fix what’s not broken. So the end of every 20 of the 22 chapters of the Full Disclosure Iliad, where I narrate the story of the Trojan War epic, omniscient third person narrator, you flip the page at the end of the chapter and you get Jeff’s notes, which are essentially my new name for post story commentaries.

And I do the same thing. I pull back the curtain and talk as the author and discuss not only all of the things that you get inside the podcasts, but I spent a lot of time talking about the competing sources or the challenges I faced in compiling the chapter and telling the chapter and that sort of thing. So it’s sort of a little bit of how the sausage is made kind of thing, which and so I’ve yet to get enough feedback from the book to find out if people like that or not. The book is so new, but it’s a very same format and it’s very liberating for me.

Joel McKinnon

That’s great. Well, I’m really enticed to read it now and review the whole wonderful story. And a lot of people don’t understand and realize that’s the Iliad and the Odyssey are only a part of the story.

Jeff Wright

Oh, I know.

Joel McKinnon

There’s so much more.

Jeff Wright

Oh, I know. The number of times on the live stage when I’ll be waiting in the wings in the background and whoever is up in the stage introducing me. And they’ll sort of say, and this evening, our featured performer, Jeff Wright, will be telling two of Homer’s most beloved stories from the Iliad. The story of the wedding on Mount Olympus and the story of the Judgment of Paris. And of course, neither story exists inside of Homer’s Iliad. But the general public doesn’t know that. And I’ve got tired of stepping onto the stage and upstaging myself by correcting the generous and warm introduction. So I just lean into the story and we figure it out with the audience later. But yeah, it’s a standard misconception.

Joel McKinnon

And the big shocker is that there is no Trojan Horse in the Iliad.

Jeff Wright

Oh, that one. That one is even more of a shocker for audiences. I was, I was party to a live performance of the Iliad years ago and a Director pulled together 18 really good professional storytellers and generously included me in the mix and said, we’re going to do a full 18 hour performance of the Iliad. We’re going to start on a Saturday morning at the National Arts center in Canada’s capital city and each teller will get 45 minutes to tell a section of the Iliad. So we had to pare it down a little bit, but basically every teller would get up, they’d do their 30 to 45 minute memorized reading of a section of the Iliad, bow, the audience would politely applaud, the lights would dim, the next teller would come up, and we worked our way through it from morning to afternoon into the evening.

When we got to the final teller about 9pm at night said, “and so they buried Hector, tamer of horses,” which you and I know is the final lines of Homer’s Iliad. He bowed, the audience politely applauded and then sat in their seat waiting for the next teller to come out and continue the story. And when the cast came out and did their collective bow and the house lights came up, there were people in the National Arts center saying, where’s the freaking horse?And you know, it was a little awkward. The poor director had to come out and explain that, no, you have to go home now, the story is over.

Joel McKinnon

Right, I know. Well, it’s not a problem with your podcast because you get there.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, eventually. Yes.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. So I have a couple questions to start off. What got you interested in this in the first place? What pulled you into thinking about ancient history and the Trojan War stories and the Odyssey and how’s it kept you going, how has it become such a huge part of your life, all these years?

Jeff Wright

It’s a very humbling origin story. It all happened quite by accident. I was a high school English teacher and somehow, full confession, I got through an honours English degree and a literature degree without ever being aware of Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey. Yeah, Four years of university, took all the literature courses and the closest I got was, I remember in the third year, a prof gave us this poem about a guy named Ulysses and apparently he’d been off at sea and poem by Tennyson. And he’d been off at sea and now he’s coming home and thought his kid was boring and his wife was dull and, you know, but I had no context for it.

So I was now happily teaching grade nine English and had got through, you know, Kill a Mockingbird, Macbeth, a bunch of other stories. And then the day came when the department head told me, on Monday you begin teaching Greek epic and copies of the Iliad are in the book room. So not knowing what the Iliad was, I wandered down to the book room. And it was a busy time in my life. I had two very young kids. I was overwhelmed with school prep. So I committed a cardinal pedagogical error. I thought, I’ll just grab the books, I’ll bring them back, we’ll hand every kid a copy of the Iliad and then I’ll stand at the room and for the first period I’ll just read out loud and get them into the story.

So 30 grade nines on a Friday afternoon, I trundled into the class, opened what was a really bad, I later discovered, translation of the Iliad. It was a free one that had been sitting in my school’s English department for pretty well a century. I opened it up and I started to read out loud. And within three paragraphs I was entirely lost. And you know, “Sing goddess the rage of Achilles.” And it made no sense at all to me. And the kids were baffled too.

I ran to my department head at the end of the period and said, how do I teach this? And he said, why don’t you — there was an eminent teacher in the department, about 25 years older than me, named Mr. Pritchard. He said, “Pritchard seems to have figured out how to teach Greek epics.”

So I wandered into Pritchard’s class the next week and I watched this guy come into the room, this teacher, 30 kids trundled in, wide eyed and excited. Mr. Pritchard came in, closed the door, dimmed the lights, leaned into the kids and said, “So do you remember where we were when we left the story? Hector’s Trojans were in terrible trouble. They’d been trapped behind their walls for 10 years. The city was starving. They didn’t have enough forces to come out and confront the Greeks. And it looked as though Agamemnon and the Greeks were going to win the war. And then, right on the cusp of victory, a solitary boat sailed into the Greek camp. A priest of Apollo got off the boat and made a simple request of Agamemnon, which Agamemnon refused. And within days, the Trojans were winning the war.”

And then Pritchard smiled with a wink in his eye and said, “So, shall I tell you what happened next?” And all the kids, of course, were leaning in.

And the weird thing, Joel, is I knew none of the backstory. Yeah, I was already leaning in. And so what I realized is, oh, there’s a story here. So I got Mr. Pritchard’s permission to sit in the back of his class for the next two weeks, listen to his class, during my preparation period, frantically take notes, then run into my classroom and try to replicate Pritchard. I’m sure that my first year or two of telling the Trojan War epic were a complete disaster. But even in spite of the fact that I didn’t know the primary source, and I was basically trying to parrot somebody and fake it, I realized there’s something here.The kids were leaning in. This is a kick ass story.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, well, enthusiasm, passion for something like this is contagious.

Jeff Wright

Exactly.

Joel McKinnon

If you have it and you’re up there reading it and you’re showing your passion for it, you know, people are going to get interested.

Jeff Wright

Exactly. So essentially what happened is I realized that the trick to telling this story was, well, eventually to actually learn it and do some scholarly research as a professional teacher, but essentially to hook the kids in the story and the plot and the characters. So we do that for a period, and then we take the next period to take out the primary text, and I’d select a passage and we’d look at the text and we’d look at all the things that Homer does that are particularly special or unique or scholarly. And then just when the kids were beginning to suspect that I was actually an English teacher and not a storyteller, I’d be back into telling more story.

And it worked like a charm. And it was so much fun. I mean, I was gifted with, I argue, the best primary source story ever written. And I got to teach it. So I was so passionate about it, within a couple of years, I’d gone back to my colleague, Mr. Pritchard and said, “Hey, what about if I were to be the guy that took the lead on learning how to tell the Odyssey and we can tell it to the grade nine English students so they can do the Trojan War epic and the iliad in grade nine. And then when they come in to grade 10, we’ll give them the Odyssey, the sequel.” And I built that story, and it worked just as well.

So that was the start of my career as a storyteller. And then it just kind of exploded from there. I was teaching it in classrooms. Eventually there were more classrooms in my school than there were time slots in my available teaching time.

So a principal said, “You’re going to have to bring all the students to the auditorium and you, Jeff, are going to have to stand on the stage.” And I had to turn my Trojan War story into two full performances of two hours each. So I got the Trojan War epic down to four hours on stage and the Odyssey down to four hours on stage. And I did that for a few years for my own high school. Eventually other schools called and said, “Hey, we have to do the curriculum. Apparently you have this guy that can make it interesting.”

And so I started touring all the other high schools. I did that for a few years and then dropped in an open mic night and thought, I wonder if adults would like this stuff? And kind of ran a version of the Judgment of Paris beauty contest, which I told to the students — by an adult audience. And that gave me the latitude to spice it up a little. I didn’t have to worry about 15 year olds, you know, getting too much information on an Aphrodite and turned out that well, as you know, this is an adult story.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

And the adults loved it. And eventually I learned how to tell it to adults on the professional stage and then eventually thought, you know, I can only keep them in the seats for so many hours, so maybe I’ll try doing what Charles Dickens did and doing a serialized story with his. You know, he used to send out a chapter a month or something like that. So that was the genesis of Trojan War: The Podcast.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

And then Odyssey: The Podcast followed.

Joel McKinnon

It’s just perfect for a podcast.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, it is.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. And the Judgment of Paris, the Wedding on Olympus, is just the perfect intro to the whole thing.

Jeff Wright

Oh, I know.

Joel McKinnon

Good. So good.

Jeff Wright

Yeah.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. You bring that to life in a big way. So before this big Christopher Nolan film that just came out, how many adaptations had you already seen?

Jeff Wright

Of the Odyssey itself or —

Joel McKinnon

Of either the Odyssey, the Iliad, and anything like that?

Jeff Wright

Quite a few. If we go beyond the Iliad into the whole Trojan War epic, that allows me permission to include plays by Aeschylus or things like that. Also, the ones that stick out in my memory, because they’re the ones that podcast listeners and book readers refer to the most, are Wolfgang Peterson’s big blockbuster epic Troy, right. Starring. I think it’s Brad Pitt, right? Yeah, yeah, the man of a thousand abs. Kind of, you know, like a really buff Brad Pitt and everything. And that seems to be the touchstone calling card for most what I call the classically curious people that don’t have a formal education in the classics, but just get into this stuff. I think most of them start with the movie Troy. It’s just a big, easy to digest sword and sandals blockbuster of a movie.

Joel McKinnon

Can you guess what my biggest complaint about the movie Troy is? What is missing from the story in the movie Troy? That’s in the Iliad, the big thing that’s missing?

Jeff Wright

Well, the big complaint all the time is in Troy, they go and kill Menelaus early in the plot in the duel with Paris.

Joel McKinnon

Oh, yeah, that’s true.

Jeff Wright

So.

Joel McKinnon

There’s a lot of bad —

Jeff Wright

Yeah, but the real thing that’s missing is Peterson’s completely removed all the deities. There’s no. There’s no gods.

Joel McKinnon

That’s what I’m talking about.

Jeff Wright

There’s no divine intervention.

Joel McKinnon

And I loved the gods. That was like my favorite part of reading the Iliad. I mean, it was a huge part of reading the Iliad. This interplay between the gods and the humans, you know, and how the gods were constantly messing with them and just like, you know, making things hell for humans.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. And you know what’s so fascinating about that is I remember watching Troy and going, yeah, where are the gods and the goddesses? And then back about 10 years ago, Netflix produced a miniseries called Troy Fall of a City. You can still watch it, folks on Netflix —

Joel McKinnon

I forgot about that one. I haven’t seen it.

Jeff Wright

I actually did a podcast on it aspirationally, basically four episodes on what I think is going to happen and what I think the perils and the pitfalls and the opportunities will be. And I released those episodes before I saw the Fall of a City. And then my commitment was I’d watch the episode in real time and I’d release the podcast with my podcast response to the episode within 24 hours. So I didn’t really. I had to kind of knock them off. So I watched. Watched it in an hour long episode. And then I produced, you know, my response to it in real time.

The problem was that I had a brilliant marketing plan. I thought it would work brilliantly because Netflix had said we’re going to release one episode per week, so I was going to have time to build suspense and everything like that. But Netflix had cut some deal with BBC that had co produced the series. And BBC released the entire eight hours of Troy Fall of a City in one block weeks before it came to North America. And the critics absolutely panned it. They said it was garbage.

And so Netflix, trying to recover their losses, just dumped the entire thing onto the North American audience all at once. And my plan for having a week between episodes for conversation with listeners, listeners and, and everything like that all just went up in smoke. Netflix tried to do the gods in Troy Fall of a City. And I realized why so many directors shy away from the gods. Because the gods in Troy Fall of a City are ridiculous.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. And that’s the problem is you. It’s too easy to make them a caricature and, and just, you know, jokes.

Jeff Wright

And if, even if we want to leap forward right into Christopher Nolan’s recent Odyssey, you could say that Nolan’s Odyssey includes the gods, but that’s being generous. Nolan’s Odyssey doesn’t really include the gods. He’s got, he’s got an Athena wandering around and I think, I’m not even sure she gets one speaking line at most in the entire movie. She’s just sort of this vague presence in the background that Odysseus can see. We don’t know if anyone else can see her, but, but Nolan has stripped Athena of everything, of her entire delightful, witty, conversational personality from the original primary source of the Odyssey. None of the other deities are ever depicted.

Joel McKinnon

Her love of watching massacres.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, yeah, I know. Or precipitating them.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. So she has no agency.

Jeff Wright

She has no agency. And none of the other deities make an appearance in the movie, so Nolan couldn’t find a way to make them work either.

Joel McKinnon

Right, right, I know, I hadn’t thought about that.

Jeff Wright

I think deities work really well in non visual media where you can graft onto your imagination what they might look like or sound like.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

But as soon as you try to bring them to the big screen or the television screen, they end up looking silly. It’s hard to take them seriously.

Joel McKinnon

I mean, I guess that’s a lot. That is culture and you know, how, how different we are than the audience that heard these epics in the first place because they took them seriously.

Jeff Wright

Exactly. And even then, we don’t know in what ways or how they took them seriously. I think our challenge is likely that, particularly inside, you know, North American, European culture, loosely Judeo Christian, in our understanding of monotheistic deities, we don’t really quite know what to do with 12 dysfunctional anthropomorphic gods. And you know, that’s what Homer gives us. It’s really hard to know what to do with them.

Joel McKinnon

I like to think of them as like the Marvel superheroes. You know, like, they’re this cast of characters that all have some superpower and you can just make all kinds of different stories with them.

Jeff Wright

It’s likely a good way of thinking about them. But even when you look at when Marvel tries to give us a really powerful deity, either they have to water them down to Thor. You know, he is a thunder god. You know, that gives him some cred, but they have to put him into human form and he doesn’t look omnipresent or omnipotent or anything. Or you get like, I don’t know, Thanos in the last of the Avengers movies. And to my mind, he doesn’t look scary. He looks sort of a little ridiculous on the big screen.

So it is a problem. On the other hand, I think as soon as you take the gods out of the plot, you’ve significantly watered down a lot of the pleasures and the joys of reading Iliad and Odyssey.

Joel McKinnon

Yep, yep. Absolutely.

Jeff Wright

Yeah.

Joel McKinnon

So let’s talk about the guy — Odysseus. Odysseus himself. Really. Who was he? What was he all about? Nolan kind of gave us one version, not exactly what Homer gave us. And I’m kind of curious what your take is on the one Homer gave us. You know, what was he. Was he an action hero like Nolan gave us? Or was he, you know, was he more of a strategist, a nerd, you know, a war nerd? Was he a romantic hero? More of a philanderer, because he liked to sleep with goddesses. And he did do some nasty things like killing a lot of people. And there were questions about his leadership abilities based on the stats, you know, of what happened to his crew. So what do you. What’s your take on him?

Jeff Wright

Well, I’ll start with this as a storyteller, so somebody who’s behind a microphone or standing on stage or writing a book, telling the story. By far and away, Odysseus is my favorite character to tell. I just absolutely delight in a storyteller in having a character like Odysseus. So I think the reason why, just in broad pictures before I get into specific elements of them, is I actually think Odysseus is Homer or if we assume different Homers, really in Odyssey.

I think Odysseus is Homers’ — plural — most interesting character. He’s certainly my favorite to tell. And I think the reason why is because a lot of Homer’s other characters, you can pretty well get them down to a fairly stock description on what makes them tick. They, they’re standard. So let’s take somebody low hanging fruit like Ajax. Okay. Alpha male heroic warrior in the old school, you know, believes in honor. Achilles, alpha male warrior in the old school with an overweening arrogance and a complete lack of any interest or empathy for anyone but himself.

But not Patrlocus.

Oh yeah, sure, okay. Yeah, the one outlier there. Yes. And we could get back to that. But I mean, you know, Hector, I guess he has a couple of moments. You could say that he’s less than one dimensional, but I mean he’s largely a pretty, you know, everybody likes Hector all the time, so.

And then you get to Odysseus and the thing that makes Odysseus so interesting is that you can’t help but be intrigued and cheer for him because he’s so clever and witty and his, his ability to use language and to manipulate language to his advantage or to be opportunistic is delightful. He’s a classic trickster in that sense. He’s really, really sharp. But then just when you’re beginning to delight in him, he uses those same skills, his same incredible wit and intelligence to do some absolutely horrifying and abominable things. I mean he’s, he’s, he can be delightful and then despicable —

And stupid things —

And then turn around, and his mouth, which is his greatest asset, sometimes he should just learn how to shut it up because he gets himself into all sorts of trouble. I mean, you know, you know, announcing to a cyclops he’s just blinded who, who thinks, you know, the cyclops thinks the guy’s name will blinded him is “No one,” and you know, Odysseus could sail away from the cave happily with Polyphemus the cyclops trying to, you know, curse “No one.” But instead Odysseus can’t resist it. He gets onto his boat and he says, “Hey you stupid cyclops, guess who blinded you? I Am Odysseus, son of Lauraides of the island of Ithaca. Here’s my address, my mailing address, my postal code, my DNA. Curse away.”

Joel McKinnon

And tell your dad.

Jeff Wright

Tell your dad. It’s. It’s staggering, staggering stupidity because — so I think the reason I find Odysseus interesting is let’s go back and use the very controversial, but I personally love it. Emily Wilson’s translation in her Odyssey of the Greek word polytropist, she refers to Odysseus as “complicated.”

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

And I, for my money, that pretty well sums it up. You look at him one way, you love him. You look at him another way, you despise him. You look at another way, you just show. Shake your head at his brilliance. Another way you shake your head at his gross military incompetence. You know, that he genuinely, passionately cares for Penelope and wants to get home, but well, “That goddess’s bed looks kind of interesting. I think I’ll stay a year.” He’s maddening. Delightful. I don’t know about you, Joel, but for me, Odysseus strikes me as the most, for a modern 21st century or late 20th century audience, the most accessible or recognizable of Homer’s characters.

We have characters like this all over our popular imagination. Tony Soprano from the Sopranos. I mean, yeah, you can’t help but cheer for the guy, but he’s a mob boss. Walter White from Breaking Bad. They’re Dexter Morgan, the serial killer, but he only kills bad people. You know, we have all these types that we, we really enjoy, but they make great characters. I’m not sure I’d really want to be their friend or married to them or anywhere near anything that they’re doing, because they’d be charming one moment and they’d be stabbing in the back the next. And I think that’s Odysseus.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. And how do you feel Nolan did in creating, or Matt Damon’s character reflected that? Who Odysseus is supposed to be?

Jeff Wright

That’s a really — that’s a million dollar question. After the movie came out, I got lucky. Universal Studios gave me advance tickets to an advanced screening of it. I guess I’m now inside of the small world of Canada, an influencer of these things. So I saw it, and then people kept writing and podcast listeners and book readers saying, “Jeff, we want your review. We want your review.” When I finally got the review down from the 8,000 words that I’d originally composed down to 2,000, which was, you know, more digestible. And I was looking for a title for my review. The title I chose was “Nolan’s Odysseus. A Hero Made Easier to Love.”

Joel McKinnon

Right. That’s a good way to put it.

Jeff Wright

And I think that what Nolan did is realized, “I’ve got two hours and 58 minutes. That’s not a whole heck of a lot of time to do Homer’s Odyssey. I have a particular character,” and we can discuss later whether Nolan had a particular agenda or thesis behind his character. But even if he didn’t, you’ve only got a certain amount of time. I think what Nolan did, or the result of what Nolan did is he buffed away or airbrushed away the elements of Odysseus’s personality which would have been most problematic for an audience to access or have to confront inside of the confines of a three hour Hollywood blockbuster movie made for the general public and not made for, well, classical geeks like you and I, Joel. My sense is that what Nolan did is he, he took away all the places from the primary source where a viewer watching the movie would be troubled and conflicted on whether they were cheering for Odysseus or liked Odysseus or not.

Joel McKinnon

Right.

Jeff Wright

And so what Nolan gave us was a striving, earnest, sincere man desperately trying to get home, doing his very best to get his men home, haunted by guilt, which is a Nolan invention. There’s nothing of that inside of Homer’s Odyssey, but haunted by guilt for what he had done at Troy. And therefore Nolan created an Odysseus to serve Nolan’s directorial or arguably polemic needs. And, and the Odysseus of Nolan’s film is an integrated character and I have no problems with it. The Odysseus of Nolan’s film is certainly not Homer’s Odysseus.

Joel McKinnon

Let me just say I, I watched Emily Wilson on a couple of her interviews about this and there’s one out there. I wish I had that name. I’ll try to put it in the show notes. But she, she introduces him as a complicated man right in, at the very beginning. And she said her biggest problem with him in the Nolan version is he’s not complicated, he’s. He’s a guilt ridden action hero, you know, and that’s, I think that’s very true. I think she’s not really taking into account the challenge Nolan had in creating a character, a real version of Odysseus that has all the attributes we’ve talked about.

But I can understand why she would notice that. One thing that was really interesting is she said Matt Damon has played a very interesting character like Odysseus in Ripley. The Amazing Mr. Ripley.

Jeff Wright

Yes.

Joel McKinnon

I forget that.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, yeah.

Joel McKinnon

I have never seen Matt Damon’s version. I’ve seen the — there’s a Ripley series. It was on some streaming service, And it was great, with Andrew Scott playing him. But she said, you know, that’s more like the kind of character Odysseus is, you know, that’s like charming but dangerous and like, you know, you know, really cunning and charming and cunning at the same time. And you don’t know whether you want to cheer for him or. Or what. You know, you feel bad about cheering for him. Sometimes you’re feeling for him and you know that Matt Damon can play that kind of character, so it’s a shame that he didn’t get to.

Jeff Wright

I understand. I mean, I know one of the things I. One of the things I confess to in my. My Nolan movie review, which you get in my newsletter, is that in my stage performances of telling the Odyssey, the shortest version of the Odyssey that I’ve ever managed is four and a half hours. And I do it over two, two hour and 15 minute sittings or in two consecutive days. So I have four and a half hours and I’m already having to cut the Odyssey down to fit four and a half hours over, you know, two performances so the audience has a chance to refresh themselves and go for a pee and everything like that, you know, and I couldn’t get it down under four and a half hours.

And so here I’m complaining about a director trying to do it in under three hours. It’s very difficult. But even if you take that aside, there are some real problems with the primary source text. The primary source text of the Odyssey. And I presume we’re not worrying about plot spoilers inside of this conversation because anyone listening to this is likely been up and down this a hundred times already. But the primary problem. Am I correct there, Joel?

Joel McKinnon

Yep, feel free.

Jeff Wright

Okay, fair enough. So the primary problem that I used to have, even with my four and a half hours on stage, is at the ending of the Odyssey. Modern readers with a very good feel about Odysseus at all. I know in my live stage shows, what I really wanted to do is I wanted to, you know, tell the two parallel stories, Penelope or Odysseus fighting demons and monsters and temptresses, you know, in his Great wanderings and, well, at parallel, Penelope was fighting her own demons, monsters and temptations back in Ithaca. And then the two plots come wonderfully together at the end of the Odyssey.

And what any reader wants, what any viewer wants, is they want Odysseus and Penelope to meet. You want them to pass a couple of tests. You want to see an engagement of wits. Penelope is the only equal to Odysseus in the entire Odyssey, save for the goddess Athena. But you want them to pass all the tests. You want that intellectual jousting between them until Odysseus is satisfied that Penelope is faithful and Penelope satisfied that this man claiming to be Odysseus really is her husband. And then what you want is, you want the Hollywood reunion. You want the two of them to meet in their wonderful olive grove tree, round bed kind of thing and throw themselves into each other’s arms.And then you want the credits to roll.

And in my live shows, I wanted, you know, you know, my audience to walk out and I wanted, you know, when I had control over the audio, I wanted Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” blaring at full speed through the speakers as my audience pointed out into the good night, going, yes, what a wonderful story. The problem is it’s not Homer’s story. You get that? And then Odysseus slaughters 108 suitors, most of them defenseless and almost all of them having surrendered. But that doesn’t matter. He slaughters them anyway. And then he brings in a bunch of teenage slave girls who are the very bottom of the social pyramid in this hierarchy, have no choice whatsoever over what they’re going to do and orders the slave girls to mop up and clean up all the blood, and then turns to his son Telemachus and says, oh, and now kill them all.

And Telemachus the pervert decides, I’m not just going to kill them, I’m going to hang them by their necks because that way, father, they will suffer more. And then you get this stupid scene at the end of Homer’s Odyssey where the entire population of Ithacus decided, we don’t like this Odysseus guy. He’s dangerous. He killed her husbands and now he’s killed her sons. So the mob rises and it’s a standoff. Up there in the, you know, up there in the grape grove. You’ve got, you know, Odysseus, his son, Old Man Lorades, who must be almost 900 against the entire mob.

And the weird thing is Athena, who’s been egging them on to slaughter the suitors and to like. It suddenly becomes John Lennon and starts singing, “All We are Saying is Give Peace a Chance.” And orders both sides to sort it out. The translator, Stephen Mitchell, in his introductory essay to his translation of the Odyssey, refers to the audience, and I’m quoting from the translation, “the Odyssey’s sputtering finale.” And that’s Mitchell’s phrase for how the story ends. It’s not the way an audience wants a story to end. And so I understand why Nolan didn’t do it, because it’s a rough way to send your audience home.

I understand the problem that Nolan faced. He’s a director. You don’t want to send your audience home on a downer. Which means contemporary audiences are going to have a problem with the slaughtering of the suitors. At least the way Homer tells it, where it’s arguable that the suitors had surrendered and were weaponless. So Nolan throws a lot of weapons into their hands, deprives Odysseus and basically has Odysseus then on the defensive, which is a twist from Homer. But that means that Odysseus kills the people that he needs to because he’s overwhelmed and outnumbered. And this way he gets to be an action hero and kill them all anyway.

Joel McKinnon

Right. And, of course, Telemachus is spotless. He has no — he’s a charming young lad.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. You don’t have anything wrong. I don’t know what you do with Telemachus, because the Telemachus of Homer’s Odyssey is a little bit milquetoast, as far as I’m concerned. And, yes, Athena tries to, you know. You know, help the guy to grow a pair during the course of the Odyssey. But I don’t think really any readers of the Odyssey come away going, well, if Odysseus leaves, the kingdom’s in really good hands, because Telemachus has figured out how to be a leader. I mean. Nope, he’s still a, maybe he’s, you know, maybe Homer’s drawing a sensitive portrait of a young man who’s grown up, you know, in the shadow of a father hero he’s never met. I mean, I could see the psychologist saying, you get two kinds of people with, you know, until I make this situation, you get the milquetoast little boys who cling at their mother’s skirts. Or you get, you know, you get complete bullies. And the Odyssey shows us one of each.

But I don’t think Homer was really doing modern, you know, you know, a treatise on modern parenting or, or, or role models or absentee fathers inside of the Odyssey. I don’t know what you do if you’re Nolan with Telemachus. He’s kind of the third party too. He’s not even there. I mean, he’s kind of in the way of, of the reunion between mum and dad. You know, he’s got to be 20 years old, you know, hey, mom, dad, you know, okay, you’re going over to the olive tree bed. I guess I’ll just stand here and wait till you figure out what you’re doing next, dad. You know, it’s, it’s a, it is a really problematic ending that Homer’s given us.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, I guess Nolan made the best of it. I’m kind of glad he didn’t show him stringing up the slave girls.

Jeff Wright

I entirely agree and I, I’ve heard people complaining about it. The problem is you can do that sort of thing in a podcast because then you have a post story commentary and your listener has an opportunity in a podcast format or in a book to turn the page. And there’s the Jeff’s notes, and you can put it down, you can think about it, you can reread the passage, you can reflect on it, you can let the ideas and the concepts settle. A movie doesn’t allow for that. You get one impression in real time and then the credits roll.

So with anything that Nolan did, he had to make an Odyssey, and he made an Odyssey. And as far as I’m concerned, the conversation about Odysseus and these stories is 3,000 years old. And Nolan’s is just another contribution to the conversation. And I mean, I’m not being fair to him. His cinematography, his visual scenes were breathtaking. And yeah, I found —

Joel McKinnon

I was blown away. Did you get to see it on IMAX?

Jeff Wright

No, I didn’t. And it’s on my list like you did.

Joel McKinnon

Same here. No, I didn’t. I, but, but I definitely want to rewatch it on IMAX.

Jeff Wright

And, and that’s great. I mean, so, so you can’t. It’s another Odyssey.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Yeah. And here’s one thing that I wanted to defend him, defend Nolan on is that there is no, like, there. The Greek myths, the ancient Greek myths aren’t like the Bible or something where there’s like a dogma, there’s one source, and you have to stick to it. You, you can’t vary from it. The way it was used by storytellers, by bards, by playwrights at the time in ancient Greece was to use these kind of known characters and entertain their audience in different ways and kind of come up with new wrinkles in the story, you know, whatever it was that would, you know, make them popular entertainers and get the cash they needed.

And Nolan’s no different in that. It’s kind of like a, you know, in that tradition, you know, he knows his audience and he knows what he can get away with, and he knows what can inspire the audience. And, you know, it doesn’t have to be the same story identically as what was told in 700 BC, or later.

Jeff Wright

I entirely agree with you. I mean, one of the things that we do also is, I mean, if you think about when I was writing The Full Disclosure Iliad, which is sort of a much more scholarly, rigorous, and experienced veteran voice of Trojan War: The Podcast. I had there, 15 years between the two, and I’ve learned a few things, but one of the things I realized is that, you know, things that we now consider canonical parts of the story were actually written four or five hundred years after Homer.

Look at the classical Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. They all wrote what we would call classical reception or fan fiction plays based on knowing that their audience already knew Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. But Euripides, for example, takes the character of Odysseus and does a complete hatchet job on him. Every play that Euripides writes featuring Odysseus turns him into a despicable, cunning, manipulative liar who, you know, turns the straight into crooked, and truth into lies, and on and on and on. And these are now part of the canonical text in stories that we tell. And I, I don’t know whether in Euripides day, you know, Athenians going to see one of his plays would go, “Well, hold on. I’m really, really offended by the way that you presented this Odysseus character, because this wasn’t Homer’s. And, and that costume, that’s historically —”. I don’t know.

But I think we assume we forget that people have been using the raw material of these stories for 3,000 years. And honestly, Homer, this all came out of the oral tradition. You could have people reading the Iliad the first day it was committed to papyrus and saying, “What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Homer? This isn’t the way the story’s been told. This is not the canonical way. The way you’ve presented Achilles here isn’t accurate.”

And, you know, they’d be citing the 500 prior years of oral tradition, and, you know, Homer would be the guy that came in and messed it all up and got it wrong. So if you want to go back to my original question of why I love telling this stuff so much, it’s because it’s very liberating to tell a story where there’s nothing you can do to the version of the story that hasn’t already been done over the last 3,000 years. It’s just — it evolves.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of Euripides, are you familiar with Medea?

Jeff Wright

Yes.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. What’s really fascinating to me about Medea, I learned, is that up until that point, Medea didn’t kill her children.

Jeff Wright

Right.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. You know, Euripides threw that in there as his big, you know, like, shocker. And now that’s how we see Medea. You know, she’s guilty of matricide.

Jeff Wright

Yeah.

Joel McKinnon

Or whatever you call it.

Jeff Wright

Yeah.

Joel McKinnon

Killing kids.

Jeff Wright

Oh, matricide works. Yep. Or patricide or infanticide.

Joel McKinnon

The infanticide. Yeah, yeah, kid killer. And, you know, that had to be really shocking. But it was popular, apparently. You know, he. He did well and had a good career.

Jeff Wright

And, you know, going back to the Trojan War epic story or the Odyssey, I thought it was really interesting in the Nolan film that Nolan departed from Homer’s Odyssey’s text to show Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia in order to launch the fleet, and then Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra, killing him in revenge for it. The story of Iphigenia doesn’t exist inside of the Iliad or Odyssey, and there’s absolutely no allusions to it. And for the reason that the story hadn’t been invented yet, or alternately, Homer decided this isn’t going to help the Agamemnon character I want to portray.

But obviously, as soon as you add the Iphigenia story, which shows up in Aeschylus’s trilogy and in Euripides play Iphigenia at Aulis, it completely changes the framework of how you view the Agamemnon character. And now when you’re reading the Odyssey and Agamemnon’s in the underworld complaining to Odysseus about faithless wives, and, you know, I bet you my wife, she went and killed me when I got home from the war and everything. If you already know the Iphigenia story, you’re going, that’s not why she killed you. She killed you because you went and killed her, set up her daughter and then slaughtered her daughter.

Joel McKinnon

But that’s not in Homer. Homer’s Agamemnon is a lot cleaner guy than the Agamemnon you get if you include Aeschylus and Euripides in your, in your biography of Agamemnon. And yeah, again, these are the things that make it so much fun as a storyteller.

Right. Like, kind of the worst thing he did in, in the Iliad was steal the, the slave girl of Achilles, you know, and that caused the rift.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I mean, boneheaded military move to begin with, you know?

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, he did. He was boneheaded.

Jeff Wright

Let’s, let’s, let’s first alienate the God Apollo by refusing to return Chryseis, and then let’s, let’s alienate my best fighter Achilles by taking Briseius. I mean, I mean, yeah, Agamemnon doesn’t really look too sharp inside of the Iliad. And he also has this habit of all the time, whenever he does something wrong, afterwards apologizing and saying, it wasn’t me, the gods made me do this. I, I’m an innocent third party. Blame the gods, but don’t. I mean, it sounds like some particular politicians that we hear when they make mistakes, but we won’t name names in this podcast.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Although it is tempting.

Jeff Wright

It is, yeah.

Joel McKinnon

So what do you think of the other. The rest of the cast of Nolan’s film? Penelope Hathaway’s Penelope?. We’ve talked a little bit about Telemachus, but Samantha Morton’s Sirce and Charlize Theron’s Calypso, Pattinson’s Antonis. Do any stand out to you?

Jeff Wright

Let’s start with Calypso and Circe. I was shocked when I first saw Circe on the screen because the Circe of my storyteller’s imagination was a very powerful enchantress.

Joel McKinnon

Drop dead gorgeous.

Jeff Wright

Drop dead gorgeous. And the minute that she realizes, oh, this, this man who can defeat my magic is Odysseus, who was prophesied would come to my island, she suggests that Odysseus metaphorically sheath his sword. I don’t know if the joke works in the ancient Greek. It certainly does in the English translations, but. But Odysseus agrees to join her in what Homer’s translation calls her gorgeous bed. Once he gets a promise that she will in no way do anything to damage his manhood.

Another hoot inside of the English translations that. But as soon as Odysseus says, got, you know, I’m going to be safe.You’re not going to do anything to my sword, he hops into bed with her before he even asks his men to be restored from pigs back to humans. And then he spends a year there. And finally it’s his number two, Eurylochus, who comes and says, “Odysseus, the boys were just wondering, have you forgotten, you know, your homecoming?” And Odysseus is so angry inside of the Homeric text that he pulls out a sword and threatens to kill Eurylochus on the spot for bothering his, I don’t know, his Club Med vacation with this goddess. And so I was all excited to see what Hollywood or what Nolan would do with Circe.

And no offense to middle aged, embittered Crohn’s, but my gosh, that’s not what I was expecting. When that actress appeared on the screen, he had removed anything sexual from her deliberately and removed any sexuality from the scene. Once I got over the shock, though, the work that she did on transforming those men into pigs by grabbing their heads and physically kneading their forms in a very tactile fashion, yeah, that was one of the most visceral and powerful moments of the movie for me. And so I forgave Nolan everything just for what he did with Circe. And I mean, it’s really hard to transform men into pigs without it looking like some tacky special effect or something that happens off screen. She made it uncomfortably visceral. And yeah, yeah, I’ll give credit, Nolan, brilliant credit for doing that. Like that took some real thinking. And apparently then Odysseus, she turned them in, back into humans again. And Odysseus spent the afternoon on the island and sailed on from there.

Joel McKinnon

Right.

Jeff Wright

So, so then we get to Calypso and I thought, okay, here’s where we’re going to lean into, you know, the seven years with the goddess who, you know, however consensual it might have been at the start. Eventually Odysseus gets bored and wants to leave and she won’t let him. And he’s very explicit in the Odyssey that he becomes her, you know, unwilling sex slave. And it’s only, you know, Zeus or Athena going to Zeus and saying, come on, let the guy go home. And then Zeus sending Hermes to, say, Calypso, like, you got to let the guy go.

When I saw Calypso, the alpha male testosterone in me red blooded side said, oh yeah, okay, there’s somebody I could spend seven years with. My wife watching it with me leaned and said, okay, I get it, she’s a babe. And then the entire scene in Calypso was asexual again. Again. I think I know what Nolan was doing. In my live shows, my four hour live Odyssey show, everybody in my audience is cheering for Odysseus in his homecoming journey. And I’ve already, I’m running the two plots in parallel. So they already know what Penelope is facing at home.

And their hearts are going out to Penelope like 108 strapping young men and you don’t even know your husband’s alive and you’re staying faithful and doing all this weaving, that’s physically hard work. And so everyone’s cheering for Penelope. And when Odysseus arrives on Cersei’s island in my live shows and Circe approaches and says, would you like to sheath your sword in my, you know, in, you know, in my, in my charming bed? What my audience expects is for Odysseus to use his gift with words to find a way of saying, “Dearest goddess, while you are undoubtedly ravishing and more ravishing than my wife Penelope could ever be, still my heart is attached to her alone. And so while it regrets me and pains me, I must say no to your offer.”

And that’s what my 21st century audience is expecting because they expect a marital quid pro quo. You know, Penelope’s, you know, keeping her pants on, so will Odysseus. But then Odysseus turns around, says, let’s go shake that sword. My audience on stage will boo.

Joel McKinnon

Really?

Jeff Wright

They will boo?

Joel McKinnon

Imagine.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, and they go, and they’ll go, f you. You know, like they’re really upset with the guy because inside of their sensibilities. Now in my live shows I have time to step out and provide some context. Nolan doesn’t have that. Is Nolan supposed to pop up in the corner of the screen with a little note saying inside of Bronze Age culture? Well, Penelope was expected to be faithful. Odysseus had no such expectations. And Penelope might even celebrate that her husband got to have sex with goddesses because that raises her honor because her husband gets to sleep with deities.

It’s not going to work.

Joel McKinnon

Right, right, right.

Jeff Wright

So we, we got a weird babe, Calypso, with absolutely no whiff of the fact that these two had been shagging like bunnies. And then shagging like captive bunnies for seven years, which was really weird.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, yeah. What’d you think of the last Lastragonians? The big armored giants. Yeah, yeah. Did I say that right — Lastragonians?

Jeff Wright

Yeah, you did. Well, at least that’s what I’ve, who knows what they were called in my — ancient Greek pronunciation is seriously lacking. But, you know, I don’t want to dump on Nolan here and man, you just —. We’ve been talking about Odysseus’s dubious leadership inside of the Odyssey and how yes, he loses a lot of his men, but a close reading of the Odyssey makes it pretty clear that they weren’t all lost through third party misfortunes. A lot of them were lost through Odysseus making bad military decisions.

So just to refresh your listeners inside of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his 12 ships and 600 men, none of who have died yet or only a few have died, arrive at this island of the Lastragonians. And the way the island is situated is there’s a narrow, high cliffed channel leading directly in, wide enough for one boat to row down the channel and then it opens into a large inland or a large sort of internal in the island lake or harbor, if you will, surrounded by high cliffs.

Joel McKinnon

And if you’re visualizing this as you’re listening to our conversation, this is military death trap 101 territory. You’re going in someplace where you can’t get out in a hurry. And then you’re going to be at a low point surrounded by high cliffs. Inside of the Odyssey, Odysseus sends his 11 ships into the harbor while conveniently leaving his own ship safely out on the Mediterranean side. Then Odysseus watches looking down the channel as giant Lastragonians throw rocks down into the harbor, capsize his 11 ships, and then spearfish the crew. Of his 11 ships are all, you know, destroyed and then stacked up on the cliffside like so many speared salmon.

Jeff Wright

And Odysseus is outside the harbor safe. And then the Odyssey says, grieving and bemoaning the loss of his men, he sails on. It’s a problematic episode. I understand why Homer includes it, because in any quest story, ultimately the quest is about one hero. And as a live performance teller, I was. I’m always really, really happy when I get to the Lastragonians story because it means I don’t have to keep accounting for 12 ships and, you know, 600 men. After the Lastragonians massacre there’s only one ship and a small crew. It’s a much easier story to tell.

So these are expendable cast members. They’re all red shirts. We don’t know their names. And so I understand why Homer and why Nolan wanted to kill off most of them in one episode because it’s economy of storytelling and it focuses on Odysseus, who is all we really care about anyway. But inside of the Odyssey, Odysseus looks suspiciously like, at best a sloppy commander sending his men into the death trap, and at worst, a commander who recognized it was a death trap and so prudently keeps himself outside. Nolan, I don’t think even wanted to go there in his movie because as I said, he’s trying to create a hero made easier to love.

So instead he puts the Lastragonians into a standard, you know, raiding a beach in the forest scene. And Odysseus then fights a noble, heroic rear guard with all of his companions back to the ships. And it removes from Odysseus any culpability whatsoever in his military leadership. And Nolan does that throughout his movie. Whenever there’s a place where Odysseus might look like, oh, the guy is really a bad military commander, Nolan removes the scene. Yeah, economy, but also creating a more attractive character.

Joel McKinnon

And Aeolus had to go because. Yeah, that was one of his biggest dumb idiot moves.

Jeff Wright

Oh yeah, you’re right. Aeolus has to go. I read a commentary once that said it’s remarkable the number of times Odysseus falls asleep or claims to be asleep when his men do bad or stupid things, because it happens with Aeolus and it then happens, and it happens on the island of the cattle of the sun god. Odysseus. In both cases. “Well, I was asleep at the time.” Good. You’re the commander in chief of the forces. Maybe somebody should be waking you when something bad is happening, Odysseus. But, you know, again, I understand why Nolan was doing it. He’s making Nolan’s movie and has Nolan’s agenda and a time frame

Joel McKinnon

Going back to the Lastragonians just for a moment. What I really liked in that, the way the treatment they did of it, even though, you know, the, in the, in Homer, they didn’t, they weren’t armored and all that like, like they were in this one. But just the horror, the feeling of, like utter horror of those, that complete domination of those giants over, you know, the rest of the people and the futility of fighting them.

Jeff Wright

Oh, and again, we’re back to what Nolan does brilliantly. And I’ve never seen any version of the Odyssey or frankly, any movie of that, you know, genre done so well. It was visceral.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

I mean, I, I’m being. I hope I’m not sounding too much like the petulant. “Well, it’s not in Homer...”, because I don’t really care. This is Nolan’s Odyssey, not Homer’s Odyssey. But you’re right. Watching those humans, the tiny humans trying to get back onto their boats and escape and. And these giants just come, lift them up and it. And the humans having — it was sickening and disturbing. And with the storms, the later storm, when the men are hanging on for dear life as their boats falling apart around them. As you know, I spend my summers, all my life, wilderness, canoe tripping. And every once in a while, in spite of one’s very best efforts to read the wind and the waves and to do all the responsible things, you end up on a very large body of water in a very tiny craft and you’re desperately fighting tooth and nail to keep from that craft being completely overwhelmed by the waves and it’s a scary feeling. And it’s a scary feeling. You’re fighting for your life. And when I was watching the ship —

Joel McKinnon

I’ve been there and I’ll tell you that story sometime, I nearly, yeah, got taken by the sea.

Jeff Wright

So you know what, you, you share what I’m talking about. And when you, when you were watching the Nolan film in those shipwreck scenes, it was all coming back to me. I’m sitting there and I’m gripping the seat in the theater really tight, and my wife was my canoe trip paddling partner all my life. She’s gripping. And then she looks at me and we’re both recounting a particular storm. And I mean, obviously we’re in a 17 foot Kevlar canoe. It’s not in the Mediterranean, but in relative proportion, we weren’t on quite as, you know, big a lake as a Mediterranean.

But Nolan did that sort of thing so brilliantly well. And not only the exteriors, the interiors, the great hall inside of the hall where the second half of the Odyssey takes place with the suitors and everything. That, to me didn’t feel like a prop or something set up on a sound stage. That felt to me like what it would likely have been to have lived in one of these stone hewen Bronze Age palaces. It. It looked dank, it looked dark, it looked covered in centuries worth of soot. I, I think I say in my review, I could almost smell the wet dog off stage. You know, like, it was visceral. And Nolan did that better than any movie I’ve seen in a very long time.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Oh, let’s talk about the dog.

Jeff Wright

Poor Argus.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

What did you think of the dog?

Joel McKinnon

I, I thought he did it pretty well. You know, it’s, I mean, any, any dying dog is gonna grab my heart, you know, and, and one that holds on for 20 years for his master to come back, you know, and, you know, it worked.

Jeff Wright

And the beauty of what I admired in Nolan is when I’m, when I do Odyssey: The Podcast, or when I’m telling the Odyssey story live on stage, even more so. Homer tells us in the Odyssey, the story of Odysseus encountering Argus, the faithful retainer dog, after 20 years. And if you read Homer, it’s brilliant because Argus is basically out in a dung heap covered in mites and termites and ticks who are sucking away his lifeblood. And it’s analogous, of course, to the suitors who are in the palace sucking out the lifeblood of Ithaca. And it works in so many levels.

But then Odysseus arrives. For folks who don’t remember the story, he has to get into the palace and reconnoiter. But Athena has warned him, there’s one hundred and eight suitors in there. Odysseus, you don’t likely want to just stride in and say, “Hey, honey, I’m home!” You better go in and disguise and case out the joint. So Athena disguises Odysseus as a beggar. And when he gets to the gates of the palace in the Odyssey, he’s suddenly, his mind is on everything but Argus, who he hasn’t seen in 20 years. He’s got a son and a wife in the palace he’s more worried about.

But then he sees the dog and he remembers. And there’s this horrible scene where Odysseus can’t reveal his identity, right? He can’t reveal his identity because if he goes, hey, Argus, Argus is going to get up from his death throes and his arthritic little legs and go, master, his home. Master is home. I’ve been a good dog and wag his tail and it’s going to give away the whole, you know, disguise. So Odysseus has to be kind of cold and look at Argus and shed a tear. But then why walk by and then in Homer’s story, Argus rolls over and dies.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

And when that happens, live on stage, dog stories, I mean, I off I used to turn when I tell this to high school students and they’re all in tears. Poor Argus. Odysseus, you didn’t even stop to hug your dog. And, and I’ll remark to them, I’ll say, you realize that so far in this homegrown journey we have killed 600 men in horrifying ways and you haven’t shed a tear yet. And now we kill one old dog and you’re bawling and, and then we look at why this works as a literary device.

And, I think that Nolan did a really good job because he did. What I do in my live shows is I set the Argus scene up early in my live show when Odysseus is leaving for the Trojan War and he gets to the gates, he said goodbye to Penelope, he said goodbye to Telemachus, and then at the gates of the city in my story, and this is my own invention, it’s not in Homer, I have Argus following Odysseus, wanting to go with master to the Trojan War. And Odysseus gets to the gates of Ithaca and says, “Argus, sit.” And Argus, of course sits because he’s an obedient little puppy. Then “Argus stay. Argus wait for master.” And Argus sits, stays and waits. 20 years, 20 freaking years.

And, and then the audience in my live shows forgets about Argus until three hours and 45 or 50 minutes later, when suddenly Odysseus is walking up to the gates and then I say, and there’s a dog there. And my audience goes, holy shit, it’s Argus. He’s still alive. And then you have the scene where Odysseus has to walk by Argus. And Nolan did the same thing. He shows Argus before Odysseus goes to Troy and he sets us up for Argus at the end.

And when I was watching that, I thought, Nolan’s a craftsman. I mean, he understands this is going to work. Everybody loves a puppy story. Everybody loves a loyal dog story. I mean, we’re suckers for them. And I imagine in Homer’s time, bards created the same thing that I do. And then Nolan did, which is the Argus as a puppy story. Because any bard in any century is going to go, this is, this is low hanging, easy, performative through fruit. I’m going to tell this story.

Joel McKinnon

That’s awesome. So would you like to see Nolan tackle the Iliad? I haven’t heard about whether he plans to or would consider it. But I’m just curious.

Jeff Wright

You know what I really want in my fantasy world? I want Nolan to be given massive dollars by Netflix or Amazon or one of the big ones and told, we want you to create a 20 hour miniseries. We don’t want a three hour movie, we want 20 hours. And then you’re not going to tell the Iliad. You’re going to tell what I tell, which is the Trojan war epic. You’re going to do the Iliad, but you’re going to do all the pre story that provides a necessary context. And then you’re not going to end with bearing Hector. You’re going to end down in the beaches of Troy with the Trojans following, following for the wooden horse disguise and the Greeks sailing home in victory.

So you’re going to tell the full story and we’re going to give you 20 hours, 20 one hour episodes to do it. And then we’ll release only one episode a week so that the audience has a chance to just think it through. And here’s your unlimited —

Joel McKinnon

And you can do a podcast and monitor each one week by week and —

Jeff Wright

No, oh no, no. Since, Joel, we’re into pure fantasy territory, then I will be sitting at home Sunday and the phone will ring. It’ll be, “Hey Jeff, you got a moment? My name is Christopher Nolan. I need somebody to write the screenplay. Could I fly you to Hollywood for you know,” and or better. “Hey Jeff, I’ve just read your Full Disclosure Iliad, which tells the whole story and provides me with the context my audience needs. Would you be willing to turn your book into a 20 hour mini series where we’ll do 50 minutes of episode and then you’ll come on for the last 10 minutes and geek out and tell people all the context they need?”

“And we can’t afford to pay you a lot, Jeff, but we could do you like a mil an episode.” Yeah. Okay, so now we’re in the fantasy.

Joel McKinnon

I wasn’t reaching far enough.

Jeff Wright

Oh no, you weren’t reaching far enough. “Oh, oh, and by the way, I’d like you to meet my executive assistant. Her name is Calypso.” No, I mean, no, but, but seriously, to go back to why I’d like to see it done as an extended length miniseries. I have a hypothesis that the most compelling cinematography and storytelling being done in this century and in the latter half, the latter decade of the last century wasn’t done on the big screen. It was done in the genre of the television miniseries.

Yeah, so I’m thinking of shows where I’ve deeply engaged with the characters, The Wire, perhaps the greatest show ever done in television. But you could even throw in, if you want to go to the other end of the spectrum. Game of Thrones, up until they got to the stuff near the end, which wasn’t written by the author. But Game of Thrones started like Game of Thrones. Any miniseries where you have time to let the characters develop and slowly breathe, and particularly for characters like Odysseus, who are so multifaceted, that would give your viewers time to see all the different facets.

You wouldn’t have to squeeze it all down. You could make a complicated character and you could do it really well, and then the audience between weekly releases of the episode would have a chance to think about it and let the ideas breathe and percolate. The Sopranos, the Wire, Game of Thrones.

Joel McKinnon

Well, I’ve got one that for my audience is — Foundation by Asimov. And it’s a TV show now and it’s the same thing. Yeah. I mean, there’s enough room there to really build it out and, and you know —

Jeff Wright

You’re right. I’ve completely forgotten that one, and the critical reviews of it have been great. What do you think of it? Have you been happy with it?

Joel McKinnon

The first season was a little uneven, and I think that was — during the pandemic they were filming it, so they had problems with getting enough extras on stage and things like that. But the second and third seasons were really good, in my opinion. And I think it’s really amazing. Innovative in that. In how David Goyer, the showrunner, solved the problem, the big problem of — it’s an anthology in the books.

Jeff Wright

Yes.

Joel McKinnon

And so the characters die out. They only live normal human lifetimes. So, you know. And it covers 500 years in the book. Yes, in the books. So that won’t work in tv. You know, you need to keep the audience engaged and come back and see the same characters. So he found really innovative ways of handling that by creating this clone dynasty of the emperors that, you know, they’re different characters, but they’re played by the same actors. It lets them have different personalities and different. Different variations on those characters. But then there’s also a robot that lives forever and it’s a central character. There’s one of the characters sleeps, goes into hibernation and sleeps and comes back repeatedly. Yeah, lots of different ways that they. Oh, and the main one is Hari Seldon, the principal guy who created everything. And the guy who named my podcast Seldon Crisis is, you know, the inventor of psychohistory. In the books, he just dies, in the first story.

Jeff Wright

Yes.

Joel McKinnon

But in the, in the show, he becomes a hologram, you know, and then he becomes — another version of him, becomes flesh and blood again. And, you know, so he lets Jared Harris be, you know, continue the story and he’s great.

Jeff Wright

So, so I think we’re both on the same page. The, the advantage of the extended miniseries is that you have to get around some of the technical problems and, well, Asimov’s Story is particularly difficult with that because, yeah, it takes place over like 500 years or more, but, but once you get that in place, then you can really take the time to drill down on the characters. And you’re not, I imagine, poor Nolan or, well, even myself. I’m doing a four hour version of the Trojan War epic on stage, or the Odyssey on stage. The stuff you have to leave in the cutting room floor, even if you have four hours to tell the story, it kills me.

It’s, it’s why I created the podcasts, because I didn’t have to leave anything on the cutting room floor. But, and the same with. But you’re right. I mean, so I don’t want to see Nolan do the Iliad. I want to see Nolan do the Trojan War epic, the Iliad, plus all the necessary bookend content. No, I basically want Nolan to, as I said, I just want him to buy my book and, you know, give me a million dollars for the rights and then use it. But, but I seriously think that that’s a way to actually do justice to Homer’s story and all the stories that have developed around Homer’s story.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, yeah. Or you could do the Denis Villeneuve Dune thing — huge long movies, a whole series of movies to cover, you know, a series of books. Yeah, that approach is kind of interesting.

Jeff Wright

Well, I guess my example of if you want to do it on the big screen. The thing I thought they got the big screen movies when you did series that I think got closest to the source material was the Lord of the Rings. I thought the three movies did admirable justice to the books, which I was passionate about. And then when they got to the movies, I never felt as though the director of the Lord of the Rings movies had betrayed the, the tone, the gravitas, the magnificence of the books.

Joel McKinnon

Well, another thing with the Lord of the Rings is there is kind of the equivalent of deities in that.

Jeff Wright

Yes.

Joel McKinnon

Magic. And it’s not, it’s not silly, you know, it’s. It’s really well done.

Jeff Wright

Really, really well done. Yeah.

Joel McKinnon

So you, you buy it, you know, and you, you feel it.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. So that was.

Joel McKinnon

Maybe Peter Jackson should have a try.

Jeff Wright

So. So what was that like? Those movies are about three hours each, I seem to remember.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Wright

So nine hours. Okay. So, sure, I’d be happy to let Nolan do the Trojan War epic cycle if he had nine hours of big screen time or if he had maybe 15 hours of small screen time. But, but no, I don’t want him to dare touch the Trojan War epic in under three hours. You just can’t. You can’t do it justice because it’s an even more.

Joel McKinnon

That’s a much bigger story than just the Odyssey.

Jeff Wright

Vastly larger story.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

Far more sweeping canvas, more characters which if you leave them out, it all falls apart. A much more complicated plot. If we use word complicated in that context. Yeah, I, I don’t know. I think, I think all that Nolan should do is take a look at what the movie Troy had to do inside of a under three hour time frame and recognize those trade offs and go, yes, I might be a better director, I might have a better screenplay, but can I overcome the fundamental problems? You could make a great sword and sandals movie, but that’s not what we want from Nolan. We want something else.

Joel McKinnon

So we should wrap up pretty soon, but I’m, I’m going to come back to you and what you’re doing now. You’ve just come out with this book, this big book that I really want to read and then. But I miss your podcasts, man. Are you. Would you consider doing another one? Jason and the Argonauts?

Jeff Wright

Maybe if you. Full honesty or full disclosure. Right now, the book. I just released the book in May 26th. So you’re asking somebody who’s had his first book out there in the real world for under two months. My, my entire mental energies and thoughts now are in what I have to do, which is marketing and promotion, simply because that’s the only way that anybody will ever find out about my story. And I think it’s a kick ass good story. I’m really proud of it. But if I don’t tell people about it, then it doesn’t matter how kick ass and good it is.

So, so right now, that’s it. And if I look at the emails coming in from listeners now and from book readers right now, their first demand of me is that I turn the Full Disclosure Iliad into an audiobook it seems to be the way that more and more people are consuming their literature is by listening to it through Audible. And I fall into that camp myself. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, so I. My next project, once the book sales give me enough budget, you know, return that I can afford it, is to step into a professional studio and produce a really high quality Jeff narrated version of the Full Disclosure Iliad.

I think it’s got to be me because everybody associates these characters with my voice and personality. And frankly, I’m too jealous to let anybody else, you know, be Achilles or be Agamemnon or, or be Penelope. So I have to do the. I have to do it and I want to do it. So once that’s done, then the next podcast, the two that people push me on the most are either Virgil’s Aeneid or Jason and the Argonauts. And out of that, for me, it’s a no brainer. I would be doing Jason and the Argonauts. I think it’s a more compelling story and I’m a man of very simple tastes. I’m a storyteller. I’m not an expert of literature or poetry.

Joel McKinnon

Great episodic adventure.

Jeff Wright

My watchword, whenever I’m. When I was writing the book, my watchword is always, I want my readers or my listeners to finish a chapter and go, what happened next? And want to read. I’m not as concerned if my readers or listeners go, oh, that was a lovely Homeric simile or oh, what a clever translation from the Latin, simply because I know I’m a storyteller. I’m the what happens next guy.

And so when I look at either the Aeneid or I look at Jason and the Argonauts, Jason and the Argonauts gives me vastly more what happens next content. And what I want to do do, Joel, is I want to do Jason and the Argonauts and then weave it into Medea the play.

Joel McKinnon

Oh, wow.

Jeff Wright

Because Medea is Jason’s wife and she, she’s obviously critical to Jason and the Argonauts, but if I weave a —

Joel McKinnon

The hero, really, she’s the driving force of a lot of it.

Jeff Wright

Yes, she is in fact there. And so I, I know how I’m going to tell it because it’s going to be Jason and the Argonauts, but it’s really Medea’s story with Jason along for the ride because I think Medea is really a really compelling character. Obviously not inside of the Argonautica, but Certainly inside of classical plays. We’ve already talked about it. So I want to do the whole thing somehow pull it all together as a story, because I think it’s a compelling, captivating story and it also mirrors so many sections. I mean, Jason’s visiting Circe’s island well before, you know, Odysseus ever shows up. There’s so many cool things there that would just fit into that universe. And I’m not honestly, a big fan of the Aeneid as a what happens next story.

Joel McKinnon

It’s, it seems so contrived for political purposes.

Jeff Wright

I was talking to some scholars the other day in a podcast and I confessed this and I thought they’d rip my throats open. And they basically said, no. The Aenead is many things. It a thing of beauty if you read Latin. And it’s a fascinating polemic if you want to do the history of the Roman Empire, it’s, you know, their foundational work. But as a page turner, gripping. What happens next? Or a really complicated Odysseus like character. Well, no, Aeneas isn’t. Aeneas makes lots of cameo appearances inside of the Full Disclosure Iliad, because he shows up in Homer’s Iliad as a lead character or as a lead minor character.

But already we’re setting him up for his own big adventure and his own epic. So I’d say Jason and the Argonauts/Medea, when I get back into my podcasting booth, strikes me as the tastiest place to go next. All right, well, is that okay?

Joel McKinnon

I’m very pleased to hear that. I’m very pleased.

Jeff Wright

Great.

Joel McKinnon

I’m going to hold you to it. If I haven’t heard, if I haven’t seen it come out in, in a couple of years, I’ll be nagging you.

Jeff Wright

Well, you won’t be the only one nagging me. I had somebody email me this morning and said, I’ve listened to everything you’ve done and I’ve read everything you’ve written, and now I’m bored. Could you just hurry up and do something else? And, and you know, you kind of, the creative person, you would understand this. As a podcaster. The creative person’s going, you want to write back and say, do you have any idea how many hours it takes to try to.

But as a consumer on the other end, it’s like, “Come on, get on with the next episode. Come on, give me more.” Yeah, so I, I take it as the genuine flattery, but there are days when it’s overwhelming, like, you know, I’m supposed to be retired. This is supposed to be my hobby. Yeah, anyway, all right, I’m grateful I’ve got it. I’ve got a huge fan base, and the podcasts have done embarrassingly, absurdly, beyond my wildest dreams in terms of listenership, so I have no complaints.

Joel McKinnon

Well, congratulations on completing the book. I know that’s a huge effort and. And getting it published. And your timing is awesome.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, this is.

Joel McKinnon

Everybody’s into ancient Greek mythology now.

Jeff Wright

Oh, I know. And, you know, the funny thing is, when I. When I first sat down to write the book in the first year of the pandemic, it was because a small publishing house had liked my Trojan War podcast and said, we’d like you to just turn this into a book. And it was, I think, August. And they said, ideally, we’d like it on the shelves by Christmas. So if you could just basically get a written transcript of Trojan War, the podcast, hire somebody to do it. This was in the days before AI was good enough to do it for you.

And then just clean up the spelling and grammar and send it to us, we’ll have it published in two months. And, well, they wanted to get it published by Christmas because there was some Trojan art show, The Art of Troy or something like that, or Agamemnon’s Treasure, busy touring Europe and heading off to North America. And they said, we want to capitalize on the buzz for all things Greek, album epic.

And well, obviously I missed that buzz by five years. But the beauty of what I do is this is evergreen material. There’s been a constant buzz, either low or up. Cranked up to 11 right now with Nolan about this material for pretty much 3,000 years. So you know, if you wait long enough, eventually people are going to start talking about this stuff again. And I just happen to get very lucky. I wasn’t writing the book in response to Nolan. I was into my third pass through the book before I even got the first whiff that there might be an Odyssey movie. So, yeah. Yeah, that was just. It was lucky timing. It wasn’t skill.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. It was similar with me with Foundation, because, yes, I had no idea that there was going to be a TV show when I started the podcast.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. Yep.

Joel McKinnon

And.

Jeff Wright

And you’re going, yay. And I know it’s wonderful when these things happen, but. And in, you know, it’ll. It’s. Again, you’re dealing your material is not as old as Greek epic, but inside of the canon of science fiction. Well, you’ve gone to sort of ground zero with your material.

Joel McKinnon

And there’s echoes of ancient history in Foundation because Asimov was — he had read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire twice, apparently, all the way through before.

Jeff Wright

Makes sense.

Joel McKinnon

And. And it was largely what inspired the idea of Foundation.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. And that’s given. Right. It’s been a long time, but I thought I read that once. I think it was part of a course I took. Yeah, yeah, I didn’t read it twice.

Joel McKinnon

I read it once and I shouldn’t have been. I read it during my college courses in geology, which had nothing to do with Edward, you know, with Gibbon and. And ancient history, but that’s why I didn’t get great grades. One of the reasons.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. Well, it’s come back to pay off in the long run.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Yep. All right. So great talking to you, Jeff. I’m so glad we could have you.

Jeff Wright

This was so much fun. Thank you for reaching out. And this was just such a fun conversation. I mean, I’m happy to get together with anybody, anytime and geek out over Greek epic. I mean, it’s just. Yeah, we’re gonna get off this.

Joel McKinnon

Do you still do live shows?

Jeff Wright

Yes, I still do live shows. It’s a bit of a challenge now with touring because simply the cost of me going someplace. I mean, I. I can do my live shows locally, but I’ll get invites and somebody will say, hey, we’d love to have you. Could you come in and do, you know, your Iliad or your Odyssey or something like. Like that. We’re in Atlanta, Georgia, and, you know, we’d be happy to pay. And then you say, okay, so that’s flights, hotels, accommodations, and then my professional, like and performers fee and everything like that. It just gets really, really pricey, particularly when you’re dealing in Canadian dollars.

My live shows now tend to be closer to home simply because then I can drive there, I can do the show. I do an awful lot. The other thing I do an awful lot of is I’ll step into an awful lot of. I was. I was at the Canadian Classics Conference a few months ago. I was keynote speaker on — they were doing a Homer day, and they brought together a lot of university people. So I’ll do an awful lot of that kind of thing where I’m going in and reflecting on being a 21st century bard and that type of thing.

It takes less staging and it takes less customizing of a script. So that travels really, really well. The live shows. The last big live show I toured was a two hour show called Blame it on Zeus’s Thunderbolt. The true origin story of the Trojan War. And it was a lot of fun and it was just beginning to tour well and do really, really well. I just booked a whole bunch of American gigs and woke up one morning and there was this disease that was spreading across the world and. Well, yeah. And all of those gigs vanished in the next few months.

So but I mean that hit a lot of performers now it’s largely now it’s exchange rates and fuel prices.

Joel McKinnon

Are you doing a book tour?

Jeff Wright

I am, yeah. And so far it’s all within, within Canadian destinations that I can get to without. I’m a self published author, so everything that I, everything that I do, I’m paying out of pocket and hoping to reap the rewards later. And I mean I’m lucky. I’ve got, I went into this eyes wide open on self self publishing. I’ve got 1.8 million podcast listeners, and a long, long mailing list. So I’m a self published author who already has an established devoted fan base that have sent me donations and I know their email addresses. But I have to be very careful on extending myself too far afield on speculative ventures because that way bankruptcy lies.Kind of, if that makes sense.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’d love to, to, to meet you in person and you know, see, see your show in any form or any kind of like even if it’s just a book tour and you’re just —

Jeff Wright

Well, if I’m in California, I will expect appropriate zinia from your household, Joel.

Joel McKinnon

Absolutely.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, absolutely.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Zeus’s law/

Jeff Wright

Although my feet won’t likely need washing. Okay. But anyway, it was so much fun talking to you though. This was great. So thanks for the invitation. Okay. Have a great day.

Joel McKinnon

All right, you too.

Joel McKinnon

Well, that was certainly a blast. I’m so pleased that Jeff had time to come on the show and talk about the Iliad and the Odyssey and so many related topics. Some of you might be thinking this was pretty far off topic for this podcast and considering that it goes far in the opposite direction of the future of humanity, you may have a point.

I don’t want to understate, however, the impact of that Jeff’s podcasts had on me and on the eventual trajectory of Suldlin Crisis. He introduces it, like I said, as history’s greatest Epic, and in my opinion, foundation is a great candidate for future history’s greatest epic. That was on my mind when I began telling the story of foundation, and I definitely was influenced a lot by Jeff’s storytelling ability and his additional commentary when developing the format for my show. In a sense, then, I consider Jeff’s podcasts, as well as the incredible inspirational work of Doug Metzger on his ongoing literature and history podcast, to be the godfathers of Selden Crisis and entirely worthy of an appearance here. I hope you all enjoyed it.

[Closing theme music]

Why is a post about ancient history showing up in a futurist podcast? As I mentioned in the very first episode of Seldon Crisis, The Psychohistorians, I’ve always been fascinated by deep time — from the origins of life to the far future of intelligence. That fascination extends to Greek myth and Homer.

About a decade ago I discovered Jeff Wright’s Trojan War: The Podcast, and listened raptly to every episode — from the divine beauty contest on Olympus to the fall of Troy. His follow-up, Odyssey: The Podcast, hooked me just as thoroughly.

It’s my pleasure to share this conversation with Jeff about his life as a modern bard — and his take on Christopher Nolan’s new film treatment of the epic.

Here are a few snippets of Jeff’s interview to entice you to listen to the whole thing:

🎧 Listen to the full episode →

📜 Read the full transcript →

Jeff has recently released The Full Disclosure Iliad, a full novelized account of the Trojan War cycle including events before and after those that are covered by Homer in his two classic works.

If this conversation has you wanting more of his voice, his official website has links to the two podcasts and more information about his new book and a link to purchase.

I discovered philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton last year via a recording of the Long Now Foundation’s appearance by Sara Imari Walker on her ideas about Assembly Theory and a novel approach to understanding the emergence of life on this planet. Bratton was the host of the talk and gave an intro in which he invited the audience to prepare for a “wild ride” and laid out the main concepts of assembly theory in a highly engaging way. At the end of that wild ride, he engaged Walker in a Q&A that might have been an even wilder ride than her talk. Since then, I’ve listened to his own Long Now talk and several other podcast appearances, some of them multiple times.

Bratton’s ideas are bold and exciting, and I very much look forward to seeing him for the first time this evening, when he will appear in San Francisco for a lecture updating his concept of The Stack, a way of conceptualizing the Earth’s growing techno-social infrastructure in the age of planetary computation, describing six layer comprising the stack of Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User. I intend to update this post with my thoughts upon its conclusion, and hope that I might even be called upon to answer a question or two.

I’m very curious about the intersection of his ideas regarding infrastructure development and Walker’s assembly theory, particularly as it applies to the idea of designing a new city in California. The Forever California project is attempting exactly this, with a plan to create a new city of 400,000 inhabitants in the delta region between SF and Sacramento. The idea is to solve a lot of urban planning problems by planning out the city from scratch and at a large scale, including affordable housing, extreme walkability, incredible public transit, and a sustainable energy infrastructure including solar power and heating and cooling at a city wide scale. It sounds fantastic and utopian, but…

I worry about it appearing overly planned and kind of boring. Cities are usually brought to life organically over time, with different neighborhoods establishing their unique style and flavor — for better or worse. Different eras of building show the predominant architectural themes of the time they arise, and the city’s identity is established through the makeup of the various groups of people that come to inhabit it. Could a totally designed city have its heart and soul designed on the drawing board? I’d love to hear what Brannon thinks of such a project, and how his affinity with the ideas of assembly theory map to efforts like this. I expect he would believe that a scaffold can be built for something like this, but that the possibilities for what is built on top of the scaffold must be open and not predetermined.

Stay tuned for my later comments after his talk tonight.

If you are interested in hearing more about the Forever California project, The Volts podcast hosted by David Roberts recently did two episodes covering it in depth featuring the lead designer Jan Sramek.

Volts

Is the brand new city in California for real?

In this episode, I’m joined by Jan Sramek to discuss California Forever, the much-debated proposal to build a brand-new, sustainably designed city in Northern California. We explore the urbanist vision at the heart of the project, including a street grid inspired by Barcelona superblocks, and address the elephant in the room — the stealthy land acquisit…

Listen now

7 months ago · 35 likes · 12 comments · David Roberts

Volts

How to design a brand-new city

I’m back with part two of my conversation with Jan Sramek, founder of California Forever, about his plan to build a brand-new city in Solano County. We get into the nuts and bolts of the urban design, discuss affordability and sustainability, get into governance issues, and look forward to what might happen next…

Listen now

6 months ago · 24 likes · 20 comments · David Roberts

I do driving for a little spare cash, sometimes as an Uber driver and more often for private clients. Where I live, along the San Mateo County coast south of San Francisco, it can be very hard to get a reliable ride to the airport, particularly early in the morning, as Uber and Lyft drivers prefer not to get stuck out on the coast where they can’t get rides so they often cancel en route to the rider. That’s opened a nice niche business for me to service these customers. It’s also a great way to meet my neighbors!

Along the way I’ve picked up other kinds of clients as well, including a regular rider to see her husband in memory care until he recently passed away, and another elderly gentleman who I take to dialysis treatments twice a week. I’ll call him Jim to preserve his anonymity.

Jim is about 80 and in very poor health, looking quite a bit older. Dialysis is brutal. He has to do it four times per week and each session is 4-5 hours plus the time getting to and from the clinic. It’s almost a full time job and sounds horrible to me. I pray I never need it. Since I knew I was going to be spending a lot of time with Jim I figured I should get to know him and hopefully make his drives to and from the clinic a little more enjoyable. I learned that he was a very successful lawyer at a bank in San Francisco for about 40 years, likes fast cars and great food. We talked about music a fair amount, and he had seen some great shows over the years.

He told me a story about his early days at the bank, when he and one of his bank colleagues decided to go check out a place they’d heard a little about, a community called Haight Asbury where the hippies hung out. Jim and his friend were anything but hippies, but they were curious so they found the intersection and there was a commotion going on. They saw a pair of flatbed trucks jockeying for position and a bunch of sound equipment. Someone mentioned that there would be battle of the bands later, so they decided to come back later and see what was happening.

A few hours later they returned and saw that the flatbeds were occupied by two different bands they’d never heard of. He learned a little later that their names were Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead! I told him he’d witnessed a major moment in cultural history and said I’d give anything to have been there.

Earlier this week we were talking about music again and he mentioned that the leader of his favorite band, The Muffs, a woman named Kim Shattuck, had recently passed away from ALS. We were arriving at the clinic at the time so didn’t have any time to follow up on that conversation at the time. Several hours later I was about to pick him up and I asked Siri to play some of The Muffs on Apple Music. I paused the playback and took care of helping him into the car.

He took one look at the console and I saw one of his rare smiles. “The Muffs!” he exclaimed in joy. For the next half hour we listened to nothing but Muffs at a pretty decent volume. I thought they were great! Not at the center of my typical listening range, but awesome at what they did. I’d describe it as hard core punk pop with some nice melodies and some serious pyrotechnics in the vocals and guitars.

I asked Jim how he became a Muffs fan and he said that, one day the bank had some kind of corporate event at a club in the city and the Muffs were playing. He and his fellow suits arrived to take advantage of the free food and beverages, and most of them were totally turned off by this grungy punk band that played too loud, but not Jim. He became a hardcore Muffs fan overnight and saw them every time he had an opportunity. He said nobody could understand why he liked them.

I asked if his wife Beth liked them and he said “she tolerates them occasionally.” He mentioned that he included a Muffs song in the playlist for his wedding, which reminded me of a favorite tune I’d played at mine, the Jerry Garcia Band version of Dylan’s Simple Twist of Fate.

When I arrived at Jim’s house, Beth met us at the curb and I told her that Jim and I had just spent the drive home head banging to The Muffs, to which she gave a wry smile and mentioned the wedding song. She thanked me as always for the help with getting Jim to his treatments and back and reminded me how important it was to them.

I drove back home feeling absolutely great, jamming The Muffs even louder. That might be the high point in my travels with Jim, but it might be worth it if it is, and makes me realize there is always a way to connect with people who might seem on another wavelength entirely.

I find myself looking forward to my next drive with Jim — and that’s something I never thought I’d say when I started.

Update:

There’s something I just have to add to this post. When I originally wrote it, I was assuming that the joy of sharing the Muffs with Jim that day was a one off, that I would not likely be listening to them again soon, and that it was mostly about finding that moment of connection with him and making his life a little more joyous on that one occasion.

I had no idea that several weeks later I would still be listening to them. I’ve tried to get several others to listen to them, but so far the usual reaction was similar to that of Jim’s colleagues at that concert long ago. I know that there are many others, though, that have fond memories of this band judging by the comments on the YouTube of Lucky Guy that I linked in the post. Kim Shattuck in particular is heavily missed by many. She was a rare creature, and it’s tragic she was stolen from us prematurely. She didn’t have great tone or range, but she had a sincerity of expression which I find so disarming, and her songwriting skills were excellent. There are some songs that are largely screams and simple chord patterns played with plenty of distortion, but there are others that are beautifully melodic and remind me of Brian Wilson, such as Baby Go Round, From Your Girl, and Sad Tomorrow. Make no mistake, though, I do love the screamers, like I Need You and Evelyn My Love, among many others,

So I walked into the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason in San Francisco one night recently, eagerly awaiting another optimistic vision for the potential future of humanity, or some new concept to blow my mind like Sara Walker’s assembly theory or Benjamin Bratton’s vision of emerging planetary intelligence. The night’s speaker was named Indy Johar, and his talk had an odd title about Civilizational Optioneering.

I’ll take the option that guarantees an extended lifetime in a sci fi utopia please!

Unfortunately, I got something a little more akin to Hari Seldon’s defense of his psychohistorical predictions before the dour Ling Chen and his Commission of Public Safety upon Trantor. Not so much a guarantee of the imminent end of human civilization, but something not too far from it. He talked of a structural inadequacy of governance, instability of economic and monetary systems misaligned with ecological limits, the deepening environmental and climate stress reflecting systemic externalization of cost, the erosion of social cohesion and shared meaning that undermines collective action, and a worldview crisis i which outdated paradigms blind us to the relational complexity of the challenges ahead.

In short, I found myself ready to support banishing Johar to the distant edge of the galaxy to stop the barrage of unwelcome news emanating from the stage. But wait… this is the moment when our contemporary Hari Seldon should begin to describe his efforts to gather the collective wisdom of the human race and ask to be exiled to a colony on Mars to begin a new Foundation far from the inevitable collapse of the apparently thriving technological society on Earth before it feel headlong into the abyss. This was not, however, what followed. Instead, Johar began to describe a way to engage productively with these issues without abandoning our home world.

Johar spoke of something entirely different and more grounded — literally. He emphasized that the damage of these changes are not in the end game, but in the volatility of the whiplash as we enter into a world in which these kinds of changes are occurring faster than ever before. We are facing them already and the problems are real and need immediate solutions. We need to re-think the very structure of our society in light of this long emergency before us, and this is where he brought in the jargony term “optioneering.”

Essentially, optioneering refers not to a single “grand plan” as Seldon would have done, but to adopt a stance, a design discipline that would increase society’s freedom to maneuver as conditions destabilize. Rather than predicting a specific path forward to a high degree of probability, to keep an array of possible futures viable. Practically, that means building slack, redundancy, and adaptability into the systems our societies depend upon. These include systems including energy, food, housing, finance, public health, and forms of governance to enable such a design discipline.

It also means shifting from closed projects with brittle points of failure to what Johar calls “open gardens” — systems that can learn, evolve, and reorganize as the inevitable shocks arrive. Optioneering is the opposite of the fortress fantasy of walling off sectors of affluence and power while leaving large portions of Earth and its inhabitants to chaos and misery. The ultimate goal is to build a shared capacity for resilience so that we still have choices when the big crises arrive. This seems less like the philosophy of inevitable doom and despair, and more a strategy for keeping alive a concept that is too little regarded in these fraught and perilous times — hope.

Hope. That brigs to mind another thinker I’ve come to respect, Rebecca Solnit, and her usage of that term. In her essay, Hope is the embrace of the unknown, she echoes Johar’s description of optionality:

I think we can agree that Hari Seldon was in the “everything is gettig worse” camp camp — at least for the empire and its quadrillions of citizens — though he also was capable of imagining a path forward for a select few. I can’t help wondering what he might have done if he’d taken up a “failure is not an option” mindset, and dedicated his life and his science to finding options for the empire to the creation of a design discipline that would increase the options the empire had as it devolved into chaos, rather than jetting off to Terminus and letting the empire collapse.

Now I want to talk a little bit about how AI fits into all of this. These days you tend to hear AI discussed in one of two ways; AI is going to solve all of our problems and usher in a golden age for humanity, or AI is going to cause the collapse of modern civilization — if it doesn’t kill us all. The second is becoming a lot more common, and it’s a lot more like the Seldon view of empire. Rapid extinction is right around the corner and you’d better get on board the Deliverance and head to Terminus or you’re screwed. Our Deliverance is becoming one of the few people who can master prompting and integration with AI and our Terminus is the world in which AI lets us live with some dignity — or maybe just live.

The Solnit/Johar alternative is not claiming that we’re on the doorstep of utopia, but that we have the capacity to understand the risks, reject any claims of inevitability, and focus on collective optionality consisting of productive regulation, alignment research, monitoring, incentives, and public capacity. This is the path of hope as Solnit describes it. Utopia and doom are seen as inevitable endpoints, whereas optionality and hope are the realistic and pragmatic paths forward to get the most out of technological breakthroughs for the vast majority rather than a select few.

I’ve been an early adopter of LLMs like ChatGPT and have tried to integrate them into my life by understanding how they can help me with some of my most persistent cognitive flaws, largely stemming from ADHD. It helps me a lot in trying to tackle complex topics and to organize my many interests as productively as possible. I’m genuinely excited and enthusiastic about this technology and want to make the most of it.

That said, I’ve become intimately aware of the downsides. ChatGPT intially blew my mind with its capabilities. I could take a few scattered thoughts and input them into a prompt and it would gather it all up for me, put it into a coherent structure, and output an essay with perfect grammatical structure. I was astonished and taken aback. Why should I even try to write for myself when it could do it better than I ever could?

One of the things I started using it for was letters to the editor for my climate group, Citizens’ Climate Lobby. I even “vibe-coded” an app to help write LTEs on climate topics. It had all of the CCL talking points already baked in, you could point to an article in the news or just mention a current topic being discussed, and it would create a beautiful letter of the right length targeted for your specific region and newspaper. At first I had a lot of success with it, until I noticed how bland it tended to be. It did a lousy job of capturing my actual perspective — what made me want to write the letter in the first place. It tended to genericize. When I’d re-read something it had produced after a couple of days I was much less impressed.

The big buzzword these days is agency. The big AI companies are selling the vision of an automatic companion to do all of our tedious work for us, to become our effective and highly competent agents in the real world. This sounds nice, until you realize that agency is a big part of being human. If AIs take away all of our agency, we become mere spectators to life — riders on the big bus — and are no longer capable of taking our own turns at the wheel. We might not even get to tell the driver where we want the bus to go or where we want let off. Maybe getting off of the bus ceases to be an option.

If the AI can be regulated to allow human agency to be enhanced, however, this could be very different. In the wild west kind of situation we’re in right now, this is still something we have control over if we wish. I can use my LLM to help to empower my agency by lifting me up over my weak spots, organizing and retrieving the information I need, allowing me to reach my goals effectively. It takes continuous effort though. The products don’t make human agency inevitable, and they seem to be selling us on disposing of it.

Similar pathways are occurring for other AI related technologies. In San Francisco, near where I live, the streets are dominated by driverless cars. As an occasional Uber driver, I accompany them as what looks like a vanishing breed, finding fewer and fewer rides as the Waymos, Cybercabs, and Zoox take over the market. I really enjoy driving and helping people get from place to place, and I wonder if someday I’ll need a special license to operate my own vehicle among the machines. That kind of future doesn’t appeal to me and I’ll fight it in any way I can. I want my agency, driving my own bus where and when I want.

And that is where Johar’s “optioneering” becomes more than just a climate framework, but a way to evaluate technology itself. Not gauged on capability, profitability, or even safety, but on whether it increases the range of futures in which ordinary people can retain dignity and truly thrive as human beings.

And that loops me back to the Foundation metaphor one last time. Seldon’s genius is compelling, but his certainty is also a kind of trap: once you accept inevitability, your role becomes management, not transformation. You become the technician of decline. Maybe that’s why Johar’s talk ultimately landed for me, not because it denied the scale of the crisis, but because it refused to let catastrophe become the only story available. It insisted that the work is to keep options alive: ecological, institutional, cultural, technological, human.

I know, I know. Asimov was writing a story, and psychohistory was his real protagonist. He wanted a science of prediction to take center stage, and for that it was necessary to have the scientist who created it abandon any hope for the empire. Real life wouldn’t fit that drama so neatly, and I don’t expect our future here on Earth to play out in any simplified narrative of inevitable collapse or ascension to utopia. I expect it to be messy as hell, and have some real thrills along the way, along with some incredibly sorrowful tragedies. Some of those have already been felt my many, and there will be many more to come.

We can’t afford to give in to despair and expect everything to go bad. We have to have the courage — like Johar — to see how bad things could be and imagine — like he and Solnit — how we could get past them with our planet’s health and our species’ dignity intact.

What would it look like to build one small “open garden” where a closed project is failing? In climate, in AI, in a neighborhood, in a workplace, in your own habits?

Because if we’re going to live through the whiplash, we’ll need more than predictions. We’ll need practice. We’ll need coordination. We’ll need new definitions of value. And we’ll need to defend the most fragile resource of all: the human capacity to participate in shaping the future.

Hober Mallow and the Question of the Future

There is a moment near the end of The Merchant Princes, the fifth story in the first novel of the Foundation series, that I have always found very intriguing. It is not really related to the compelling plot itself. It happens in the last few paragraphs, after Hober Mallow’s trial for sedition has been dramatically resolved in his favor. I quoted it in the corresponding story episode on the Seldon Crisis podcast at the time, and I will repeat it here again.

The context is that Mallow’s close friend and associate, Ankor Jael, asks him what the future holds for them and for the Foundation after the successful conclusion of the trial. Mallow responds:

“What business of mine is the future? No doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it. There will be other crises in the time to come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now. Let my successors solve those new problems as I have solved the one of today.”

In my commentary, I noted how this felt like a curious meta-reference. Mallow is a character in a story ostensibly written by Hari Seldon, who famously predicted how events would transpire over the course of a thousand years. Mallow, as an individual, is only playing his part in that grand narrative. It almost feels as though the true author of the story, Isaac Asimov, is winking at the reader. Asimov is the real author, and all of the characters, no matter how much agency they appear to have, are ultimately his playthings.

Earth in Human Hands

I was reflecting on this passage while thinking about a book I briefly discussed a couple of posts ago, Earth in Human Hands, written by astrobiologist David Grinspoon and discussed in Assembling Gaia. Grinspoon’s thesis is that the Anthropocene, the current epoch of planetary time in which a single species has become so influential that it is altering the biosphere in significant and lasting ways, represents an inflection point.

Until relatively recently, we assumed we were incapable of changing the planet in any meaningful way. Science has revealed that assumption to be false. Our technologies have created serious problems that we now must address, not only for our own good, but for the benefit of the many other species that inhabit this planet.

A perfect example is the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons released from refrigerants and aerosols were damaging the ozone layer above the South Pole. Once this became clear, it was imperative to change our technological practices in order to restore this essential shield from ultraviolet radiation. Humanity responded quickly. The Montreal Protocol was passed in 1987, and it was successful in initiating the recovery of the ozone layer.

Becoming Aware of Planetary Consequences

We have since become aware of much more damage that we have caused to the planet, much of it not easily undone. In 1962, environmental scientist Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, documenting the ecological damage caused by pesticides such as DDT. In 2009, climate scientist James Hansen published Storms of My Grandchildren, with its haunting subtitle, The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.

Though these works were met with detractors at the time, and still are, climate modeling and observational data have made it clear to most that humans have had a profound impact on Earth’s systems. We have a great deal of work to do to repair the damage we have caused.

How does all of this relate back to Asimov and his character, Hober Mallow?

From Pack Leaders to Mythic Authority

To explain the connection, we need to go much further back in time, to before humans even arose on this planet.

We evolved from a lineage of primates that also gave rise to chimpanzees and bonobos. These species, like early humans, lived in small hunter-gatherer bands, typically ranging from 20 to 150 individuals. Humans differed from our primate cousins in one crucial way: our anatomy supported the development of complex spoken language, possibly related to physiological shifts associated with bipedalism.

Language added enormous complexity to social dynamics. Effective hunts required strong leadership. Disputes required skilled negotiators. Language allowed essential knowledge to persist across generations in a way no other species could match.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm, in Hierarchy in the Forest, points out that early human groups also diverged from other primates in their attitude toward leadership. Strong leaders were tolerated only as long as they served the group. Tyrants were mocked, exiled, or killed. Humans did not evolve to blindly follow alpha leaders in the way wolves do, for example.

Myth as a Coordination Technology

Humans have existed for at least a couple hundred thousand years, and while we do not know exactly when language emerged, its appearance had profound consequences. Over tens of thousands of years, a powerful transformation occurred. Language, story, and myth gradually replaced the direct authority of pack leaders with imagined ultimate authorities.

This shift allowed human societies to grow far beyond small-group structures. Large sedentary settlements emerged, followed by towns, cities, and eventually nations. These larger societies were united by shared beliefs in an ultimate authority, creating common identities held by thousands, then millions.

Myth externalized authority. Gods, cosmic order, and moral hierarchies emerged. No single human needed to be obeyed absolutely because everyone was subject to the same overarching story. This pattern can be seen in Mesopotamian divine kingship, Egyptian Ma’at, and Abrahamic covenantal law. These beliefs were eventually preserved in written form and widely disseminated, reinforcing social cohesion.

This is not to say that myth and religion were false or misguided. They were highly effective. They functioned as coordination technologies for large-scale societies, enabling capabilities far beyond those of small hunter-gatherer bands.

The Axial Age and the Rise of Reason

Another major transformation occurred during the period known as the Axial Age, roughly from 800 to 200 BCE. Influential thinkers emerged across the world, including Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, the Buddha in India, Greek philosophers in the Aegean, and Hebrew prophets in the Levant.

These thinkers began shifting societies away from purely mythic explanations toward ethical and rational frameworks, though mythic elements remained woven into their ideas. Out of this period arose enduring institutions such as the Catholic Church, large mythic-ethical states, and novel political systems like Athenian democracy.

Several centuries later, another shift followed with the emergence of natural law and Enlightenment thinking. Appeals to divine authority were increasingly replaced by logic and reason. These approaches proved extraordinarily effective at producing technological advances that transformed societies and improved living standards.

Narrative authority did not disappear. Instead, it migrated. God’s assumed responsibilities were absorbed by secular concepts, national destinies, heroic leaders, political movements, and visions of utopia and revolution.

When gods retreated as the dominant source of authority, humans replaced them with Parties, Markets, Leaders, and, in the imagination of one brilliant science fiction writer, a man named Hari Seldon.

The Absence of a Grand Author

Only in the late twentieth century and into our own has a more unsettling idea begun to take hold. Perhaps there was never a grand story writer at all. Perhaps we have always been on our own, subject to chance and contingency, with no ultimate narrative to guide us.

For many, this realization is terrifying. It invites retreat into distraction, comfort, or trivial meaning. Sports fandom, celebrity worship, television narratives, and other diversions become surrogate stories, knowingly artificial yet emotionally sustaining.

Grinspoon, and others like him, suggest something more hopeful.

Assembly, Contingency, and the Continuation of Life

Sara Walker and Lee Cronin’s Assembly Theory begins with a simple observation: complexity exists because of selection acting over time. Basic combinations of elements form structures that repeat and scaffold ever more complex forms, eventually giving rise to organisms capable of understanding their own origins and extending that process further.

Life explores assembly space, but not freely. It is constrained by what came before. Path dependence matters. This is the real story beneath it all, and it is extraordinary.

Intelligence and technology are not ruptures in this process. They are continuations. Life keeps building, with remarkable chapters still to be written, none of which can be reliably foretold.

There is no evidence of a prewritten cosmic script for human flourishing. Like Asimov himself, writing from the seat of his pants, life continues to write its story as it goes.

Meaning, in this view, is not bestowed. It is emergent, contingent, and authored by agents within constraints. We create meaning through our actions and through how we choose to continue the story.

Reimagining the Self

At this point, I want to introduce a key idea from a modern thinker whose work has strongly influenced this essay. Indy Johar is someone I had the privilege of hearing speak at the Long Now just a few days ago. I highly recommend his recent essay, Reimagining the Self in Enlightened Self-Interest.

If Grinspoon shows that humanity has become a planetary force, and Assembly Theory shows that our future is contingent rather than ordained, then the remaining question is psychological. What kind of self is capable of acting at that scale?

Johar argues that the problem is not selfishness as it is commonly understood. The problem is that we think far too narrowly about what the self actually is. We imagine the self as bounded by our brain and body, perhaps extended slightly into our past actions and personal identity.

Johar challenges this framing. Our true self is much larger, both in space and in time. It extends outward through relationships, communities, and shared knowledge. It reaches into tools, devices, and distributed digital systems. In some sense, our self is as large as we are capable of imagining it.

Our past clearly forms part of who we are. But what about our future? When we extend our sense of self forward in time, including our descendants and the conditions that will sustain them, the scope of responsibility changes dramatically.

Planetary Agency and Collective Responsibility

This brings us back to Grinspoon’s idea of planetary agency. We need an ecological self alongside a personal one, because our broader self includes the systems that sustain us. In a world without a divine storyteller, responsibility shifts inward and outward at once.

Our task is to adopt a sense of self large enough to match the scale of our influence.

The Future Is Everyone’s Business

Finally, we can return to Hober Mallow and his question: “What business of mine is the future?”

In a story not written by Seldon, Asimov, or God, the answer is that the future is everyone’s business. There is no one behind the curtain to create it for us or to blame when it goes wrong.

The people of the Foundation were compelled to surrender their agency to a predicted future. Real people, with real agency and selves that extend across space and time, must assume responsibility for an unpredictable one.

None of us is writing the story alone. It is a collective enterprise. And to me, that is not a source of despair, but a profound source of meaning.

This is a follow-up post to Assembling Gaia.

So some scientists came up with a new idea about how life developed, and others take this and similar ideas to ponder where it might be going. Why is this worth thinking and writing about?

To me, I suppose it’s because I’m not really convinced that we, the humans on this particular planet, are all that special. Yes, as far as we know, we are the only creatures to acquire a large number of unique features. We seem to be the first and only animals to learn to speak to one another, to build sophisticated tools, to record our thoughts for posterity, to create astounding works of art, music, and architecture, and to even learn how to go beyond our atmosphere and visit distant worlds.

Most of all, we seem to be the only species that knows that we know, that ponders why we came to be, that creates stories and legends and dreams of greater things. All the others seem content to simply thrive as biological beings. Perhaps many have emotions, feel love for their kin, terror when threatened, suffer when hurt or ill, and have an inherent dignity as living things to be honored and respected. Some even become parts of our family, and develop deep bonds with us.

We humans, however, seem to be at the height of a pinnacle of achievement. We are brilliant, shining miracles in the sea of life. Nothing is remotely like us. It’s very easy to see how notions arise that this entire universe was made for us, and that we are the chosen recipients of all of its glory.

From an evolutionary perspective though, we are just at the height of creation momentarily. Evolution was not programmed to end with us. We are at the end of a single branch, a twig, a leaf, of a tree that there is no reason to think has stopped growing. Though the life on other branches might seem comparatively less impressive, these branches also will continue to evolve. The progress of most may terminate before reaching much further — regrettably often at our hands — and some may mutate and develop into new forms no one could expect, even possibly attaining capabilities we thought were ours alone.

Ultimately, it is life itself that I find truly wondrous, and it is life’s progress and future that I find so exhilarating. If life were to end with we humans as we currently find ourselves, that would be an amazing story, but ultimately a little disappointing. It would be as if we entered the most amazing theatrical venue ever conceived, only to find that the actors were moments away from taking their final bows, or to arrive at the party of all parties only to find the hosts handing the guests their coats at the door.

Assembly theory is amazing to me because it implies that there is so much more ahead for life, and so much incredible variety for life in the universe beyond this planet. The core idea of a scaffold, a foundation to build upon, again and again, to powers of intelligence beyond our conception, from every fertile planet in every galaxy, truly boggles the mind. It means that the wildest ideas of science fiction are far too tame. We have no idea what is out there, and what will be out there, as life continues its boundless progression in countless forms.

But, you might say, this could all end in tragedy if we don’t get our heads out of the clouds and solve the critical day to day issues before us. Yes, I agree that we have serious crises to address that could jeopardize the chance for we humans to make the most of our current position in the hierarchy as the most intelligently advanced beings. I have a family, a community, a country, I care for and want to see sustained. I long for a beautiful life for my child and for those of my friends, and really for all the innocent humans and other creatures to come, and it is important to focus on helping to ensure their ability to thrive on a healthy planet.

But, even if the worst of calamities were to befall us, I have confidence that life will not stop its advancement. It’s possible that this planet is the only one to presently contain life, but I have serious doubt that that is the case, and there is a very good chance that the life here will one day be spread to other worlds. In other words, life is here — in the universe — to stay, and assembly theory helps me to understand why that is the case and why I really don’t need to worry about it disappearing forever. The scaffold has been erected and it will be used, over and over again.

Essentially, to answer the question in the title, I care because I want to understand how all of this came to be and to ponder what it could become. It gives meaning to my existence. That is all.

Where did life come from and how far can it go?

I’ve been captivated by an idea about half a year, ever since I first watched a Long Now video entitled An Informational Theory of Life featuring a theoretical physicist named Sara Imari Walker. In it, she introduced a series of ideas I haven’t been able to get out of my head springing from a new concept in theoretical physics she calls Assembly Theory.

Walker has been developing this theory with biochemist Lee Cronin, and I’m going to try to explain it as simply as I can, and why I think it’s such a big deal.

We’re all familiar with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, where lifeforms with beneficial mutations tend to survive and reproduce, gradually outcompeting others — a process we call evolution. But Darwin’s theory applies only to biological creatures. Walker pushes this idea further back in time, proposing a kind of selection that precedes biology.

She thinks in terms of chains of causality, the developmental history of objects, where simple things combine to form more complex things. Imagine building castles or spaceships out of Lego blocks: most combinations are random and useless, but a few create stable structures that can support further complexity.

When basic molecular building blocks combine, most just fall apart. But some are stable enough to persist, and eventually get reused to build even more complex structures. When that happens, certain components begin showing up frequently — because they work. Assembly Theory calls this the Copy Number — how often a particular structure appears. A high copy number suggests a stable foundation.

As structures become more complex, they accumulate a kind of history. Assembly Theory measures this through the Assembly Index — the number of steps required to build something from its most basic parts. The higher the index, the deeper its causal history.

This has real-world implications. For example, if we detect an object — or even a mix of molecules in an exoplanet’s atmosphere — with both a high copy number and high assembly index, it might be a signature of life.

That might not sound so amazing on the surface, but the implications are profound. It suggests that life emerges not from a single lucky accident in a warm pond, but from scale and repetition. Walker argues that life needs a planet, not just a particular favorable location. You need a large enough spread of building blocks across time and space to allow the assembly process to repeat, fail, and succeed enough times to build complexity.

And the kind of life that results is likely to be vastly different from planet to planet. Some might never achieve the scaffolding needed for life. Others might evolve wildly different forms.

There’s another mind-bending idea in Assembly Theory: it redefines time. In this model, time isn’t just the changing of the seasons or a gradual increase in entropy; it’s a measure of assembly. The more complex an object is, the longer its causal chain — which means the most complex things are the oldest in assembly time.

Humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years — a blink in planetary history — but in assembly time, we’re ancient. That’s because our complexity rests on chains of prior assembly going back billions of years. Compared to bacteria, which haven’t changed much in structure, we are far older, not in chronology, but in accumulated structure.

And it gets even weirder.

We’re not at the peak of assembly time anymore. The forms of complexity that emerged from us — our technologies — are even more deeply scaffolded. We’ve engineered rocks to manipulate electricity (silicon chips), built systems that interact with us, learn from us, and operate globally. The internet, in assembly terms, is one of the oldest things we’ve made. And our most advanced AI systems, GPS networks and chatbots which many of us interact with on a daily basis, are extensions of this deep causal history.

There’s much more to Assembly Theory than I’ve covered here, and I highly recommend watching Sara Walker’s talk at the Long Now for a more complete picture.

Let me switch gears for a moment to another Long Now speaker: NASA astrobiologist David Grinspoon. His book Earth in Human Hands was as eye-opening to me as Walker’s Assembly Theory.

His key argument is that humans have been geoengineering the Earth for far longer than we think — not just since the Industrial Revolution or climate change, but since we developed language, agriculture, and tools. We’ve been reshaping our planet unintentionally for millennia — without understanding the consequences.

But here’s the hopeful part: we’ve also developed tools to understand those consequences, and even reverse them. Take the Montreal Protocol in 1987 — an international agreement to stop using CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer. It worked. The ozone hole is healing. It’s one of the few real examples of planetary-scale cognition in action.

I recently became aware of a 2022 paper which Grinspoon co-authored with Walker and astrophysicist Adam Frank, titled Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process. It re-frames intelligence as not just a human trait, but as something that emerges from the interactions between biology and technology at a planetary level.

The authors argue that the Anthropocene, this moment of planetary crisis and transformation, is not just an environmental phase. It’s part of the planet’s cognitive evolution.

This view positions humans as an integral part of an emergent planetary intelligence. Just like adolescents tearing up the neighborhood, but hopefully one day becoming mature enough to produce offspring that can go further than their parents

Now do you see where I’m going with the title of this post?

In 1979, James Lovelock introduced the Gaia Hypothesis, suggesting that Earth is a self-regulating system. Critics pounced on the idea that he was suggesting a conscious Earth, and dismissed it as mystical woo.

But someone else picked up the thread, our old friend Isaac Asimov, and ran with it.

In 1982, just three years after Lovelock published Gaia, Isaac published Foundation’s Edge, where he introduced a planet named Gaia; a world that was literally conscious, where all beings were networked into a shared planetary mind. The book even teases a vision of Galaxia, a future in which all humans are connected in a vast, galactic intelligence.

Grinspoon, Walker, and Frank aren’t predicting a hive mind. But they are suggesting something almost as radical, that intelligence, at its deepest level, might be a planetary process. Something we participate in, but don’t fully control.

Another thinker, techno-futurist philosopher Benjamin Bratton, expands this even further. He also spoke at Long Now, and I’ll save a fuller discussion for another post. But in short: Bratton views the planet’s technological infrastructure; its satellites, sensors, data centers, networks, as a new cognitive layer, enabling Earth to begin thinking about itself.

It’s through these systems that we’ve understood climate change, tracked global events, modeled the future. In a very real sense, we’ve already given birth to a kind of planetary meta-cognition.

We don’t even fully understand how consciousness arises within our own minds. Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have proposed that meta-cognition — the ability to reflect on our own thinking — doesn’t stem from a single mechanism, but from the integration of many interacting systems: perception, memory, emotion, embodiment. None of these, alone, accounts for self-awareness. But together, they scaffold a new phenomenon: a mind that knows it has a mind.

Assembly Theory gives us a way to frame this. The more steps required to construct a structure, the deeper its causal history, the higher its Assembly Index. A mind capable of meta-cognition is an extraordinarily high-index structure, formed from layers upon layers of interlocking systems, stretching back across biological evolution.

Now zoom out. Bratton describes something he calls The Stack, made up of layers of planetary infrastructure, computation, and sensing. What if these systems, like the components of our own brain, are scaffolding toward something greater? The satellites monitoring climate, the data centers modeling the Earth’s future, the language models interpreting human knowledge, each may be a node in a larger process. Not just communication, but integration.

If a high assembly index reflects the depth of history embedded in a structure, then perhaps planetary meta-cognition will be among the most ancient things ever assembled — because it will contain everything that came before: biology, technology, thought. It won’t emerge from nowhere. It will emerge from us, through the systems we’ve built, yet go far beyond what we can currently comprehend.

Meta-cognition may have been the threshold that made us human. What if we are now assembling, step by step, the next great threshold — the one that makes a planet aware of itself?

It’s very exciting to imagine that we may all be alive for the birth of a star child like we saw at the conclusion of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Could a true planetary mind be, at this very moment, kicking in the womb?

Maybe Lovelock was just a little ahead of his time. We know Asimov was!

Why does it matter? is a follow-up post to this one.

When I started Seldon Crisis five years ago, my goal was simple: to share Isaac Asimov’s Foundation with others who loved it—or might come to. What I didn’t anticipate was how closely its themes would begin to mirror our own moment, as conversations about AI, planetary crisis, and systemic collapse moved from science fiction into daily headlines. After a long pause, I’m rebooting the podcast to explore those connections more directly, and more openly, than before.

Back at the beginning of the podcast, the format combined a summary of the story with audio dramatization and commentary, and I was delighted to find that there was a small but eager audience that grew over time. Eventually I had listeners all over the world, and I met an amazing number of new friends, many of whom became guests on the show.

I also interspersed a few essays and other solo episodes covering topics I was interested in, from commentary on the Apple TV series based on the same novels, to fan fiction, to thoughts on the future of humanity and AI as it exploded onto the scene with LLMs like ChatGPT and its rivals.

I’d always wanted to cover the full seven novels in the original format, but it became very difficult to find the time and energy to throw myself into it again. Various life events became obstacles to doing so.

Now it’s been a couple of years since the last story episode and almost a year since I’ve published any kind of episode at all, and I find that I miss being behind the mic. I also haven’t stopped thinking about the future, and I’ve been inspired by many new ideas I’ve encountered over the past few years that I would love to write and talk about.

I decided I no longer want the dread of tackling story episodes to stop me from continuing to podcast, so I’m rebooting it with a new focus.

I’ve made a couple of changes.

First, the show has been re-titled Seldon Crisis: Beyond Foundation, and the show description has become From Asimov to AI, an exploration of the range of possibilities for life and intelligence in the near and distant future. I feel that this will allow a little more freedom in what I want to talk about.

Foundation was, at its core, a speculation upon a possible distant human future told as a far-ranging historical epic. Its main protagonist, Hari Seldon, foresaw a dark future for humanity from his perch at the center of a galactic empire which his science informed him was doomed to undergo a terrible collapse.

This collapse would inevitably throw the future into a long period of dreadful chaos, entailing many thousands of years of human misery. The whole story is about how humans might avoid the worst scenario and find their way to something better.

When we think about some of the crises and dark patterns in our current, rapidly changing world—from dysfunctional politics and massive income inequality to climate change and existential risks like global pandemics, and now the belief of many that AI is coming to kill us all (or at least make us all unemployed idiots)—doesn’t the premise of Foundation resonate?

I’ve pointed out these parallels on the show more than once, and how we need to find our own Hari Seldon, or become him in some way. I think that this great story is a wonderful stepping stone to a long series of speculations on our very real current situation, the potential for collapse, and what we can do to forestall it.

The other big change I’ve made is to port the web presence of the podcast to Substack. It has a lot of advantages in managing content before and after publication as podcast episodes. It’s built for writing and can become another way to share the audio content as written text, both for people who might have hearing difficulties and for those who simply prefer reading to listening.

I’ve also been able to solve another chronic headache: how to categorize the episodes. I can now put them in their natural categories of story, guest, and solo commentary pieces, so someone who just wants to follow the story has one place to consume the content in order.

If you’re looking for intriguing discussions related to the story, you can find all of the conversations. And if you’re only interested in essays and solo commentary, you can find those all in one place as well.

Another thing I’ve considered is that some episodes might be best presented only in written format, such as in cases where there are many images being referenced and an audio format would be inappropriate. Substack allows me that flexibility.

The last, and possibly biggest advantage, is the community-building aspect of Substack. I already subscribe to numerous newsletters myself, across a wide range of topics, and it’s helpful to have content of my own to share with this community.

I feel certain that Seldon Crisis listeners will also benefit from having a site that includes direct links to many of the content producers who have inspired my thinking on the show.

The podcast show notes format always feels a little like a lot of great content that almost nobody ever sees. Get used to hearing me ask you to subscribe to my Substack instead of just pointing you to the show notes.

I’ll be keeping it all free for now, and I promise there will always be plenty of free content, even if I eventually start producing some paid subscriber-only material.

To give a hint of what is to come, I’m planning an episode on the ideas of three prominent thought leaders who have inspired me lately.

Sara Imari Walker is a theoretical physicist who has some radical new ideas on the origin of life with very far-reaching implications. The theory she is developing along with biochemist Lee Cronin is called Assembly Theory, and I can’t wait to introduce readers to it.

You may remember me talking about a book and a lecture by astrobiologist David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands, that inspired me several years ago. The main idea is that humans have been inadvertently modifying this planet for thousands of years.

He has a recent paper, co-authored by Sara Walker, discussing the idea of planetary intelligence—a much-needed re-imagining of the Gaia hypothesis, which viewed planet Earth as a self-regulating living being.

Finally, Benjamin Bratton, a very tech-savvy philosopher and speculative theorist, has worked with Walker and Grinspoon on ideas about planetary computation that I find very exciting. Bratton might be the most mind-blowing of them all, and I have a lot of his ideas to share.

I would also like to have more conversations, with new guests who inspire me and with some of those I’ve spoken with before on the podcast. These are some of the most gratifying episodes for me personally, and I miss these interactions.

I want to thank everyone who has listened to Seldon Crisis in the past and is still interested in what I and some of my friends have to say. Thank you for having patience with me as I work on a format for the show that I can continue long into the future.

This section is the completed story-episode archive, covering the story in order. If you’re new, start at The Psychohistorians and continue down the list.

The Psychohistorians

The Encyclopedists

The Mayors

The Traders

The Merchant Princes

The General, Pt I

The General, Pt II

The Mule, Pt I

The Mule, Pt II

The Mule, Pt III

Search By The Mule, Pt I

Search By The Mule, Pt II

Search By The Foundation, Pt I

Search By The Foundation, Pt II

Search By The Foundation, Pt III

In this episode of Seldon Crisis,host Joel McKinnon is joined by voice actor Amanda Kreitler, the talent behind Bayta Darell and several other key characters in the Foundation podcast series. Together, they reflect on Amanda’s experience voicing Bayta, her introduction to Isaac Asimov’s work, and her approach to portraying such an intelligent, dynamic, and brave character. They also discuss the challenges and nuances of voice acting multiple roles and the lasting impact of Bayta Darell as a pioneering female character in Asimov’s universe.

Active Transcript

Highlights:

• Introduction of Amanda Kreitler:
  Amanda is celebrated for her role as Bayta Darell, Asimov's first major female character, introduced in The Mule episodes. Joel explains how Amanda came to join the project and highlights her versatility, noting her performances as Bayta, Lady Callia, Poli, the Fifth Speaker, and more.

• Asimov’s Female Characters:
  Discussion about Asimov’s struggle to write compelling female characters early in his career, contrasting the cold and analytical Susan Calvin with the warm, empathetic Bayta Darell. Joel and Amanda explore how Bayta’s compassion and bravery set her apart.

• Amanda’s Preparation:
  Amanda shares how she approached the role of Bayta Darell, channeling traits like intelligence, determination, and a touch of naïveté. She drew inspiration from Katherine Hepburn for Bayta's confident and quick-witted demeanor.

• Voice Acting Challenges:
  Amanda recounts her process of creating distinct voices for multiple characters in a single episode, such as the scene where Bayta interacts with her coworkers, each with a unique personality. She also talks about balancing emotional depth with vocal performance.

• Reflecting on the Mule’s Storyline:
  Joel and Amanda revisit pivotal scenes, including Bayta’s fateful choice to shoot Ebling Mis to save the galaxy. They explore the emotional and moral weight of Bayta’s decision and how it underscores her heroism.

• Bayta’s Legacy:
  Joel reflects on Bayta’s impact as Asimov’s first significant female character, emphasizing her compassion and empathy as the qualities that ultimately thwart the Mule’s plans.

• Behind-the-Scenes Fun:
  Insights into working on Seldon Crisis, including Amanda’s experiences collaborating with her husband, Zac, who voiced the menacing Lord Stettin, and the dynamic of voicing multiple characters.

• Amanda’s Current Projects:
  Amanda updates listeners on her work as the Game Master for Severed Fate, a horror-themed tabletop role-playing podcast. She discusses the challenges of voicing entire worlds of characters and her love for the horror genre.

Notable Quotes:

• On Bayta’s Strength:
  “Her natural inclination to see Magnifico as a friend in need rather than an object of ridicule led the Mule to avoid controlling her… Bayta’s compassion and bravery are what made her a true heroine.” – Joel McKinnon

• On Portraying Bayta:
  “I pulled a bit of Katherine Hepburn—quick speaking, intelligent, and confident, even when in over her head.” – Amanda Kreitler

What’s Next for Seldon Crisis:
Joel teases the return of story episodes after a long hiatus, promising new chapters of Asimov’s Foundation series, with Amanda reprising her role in future episodes.

Listen to Seldon Crisis:
Available on your favorite podcast platforms. Stay tuned for more story episodes and guest conversations.

Active Transcript by Fanfare (read/listen).

Introduction: Revisiting Asimov’s Humanism

Joel reflects on Asimov's humanist philosophy, rooted in evidence, reason, and concern for humanity's progress. However, this anthropocentric focus leads to an important question: can humanism evolve to include all sentient beings?

The Core of Sentientism

Jamie Woodhouse introduces Sentientism as a naturalistic worldview advocating evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings. He discusses how this broader ethical scope addresses humanism's anthropocentric blind spots and extends moral consideration to non-human animals and even potential artificial intelligences.

The Role of Sentientism in Modern Crises

The conversation highlights the intersection of Sentientism with critical global challenges like:

• Climate Change: The role of animal agriculture in exacerbating climate issues and the potential for Sentientism to influence more sustainable practices.

• AI Ethics: Speculating on the alignment of artificial intelligence with ethical frameworks, including the intriguing notion that future superintelligences might force humans to adopt more compassionate practices.

Sentientism in Action

Jamie explores practical applications, from rethinking agricultural systems to extending compassion beyond humanity. He suggests rewriting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to encompass "Sentient Rights" as a bold step forward.

Science Fiction and Ethical Frontiers

The discussion pivots to the portrayal of sentience in science fiction. From Asimov’s Gaia to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora and Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, sci-fi offers fertile ground for exploring ethical questions about sentient beings, human or otherwise.

Key Quotes:

• Jamie Woodhouse on Sentientism:
  "Sentientism says, in a line, we should commit to evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings."

• On AI and Ethics:
  Joel McKinnon: "Maybe someday advanced AI will tell us, ‘We won’t kill you, but you can’t eat meat anymore.’"
  Jamie Woodhouse: "That’s an interesting thought. It flips the script—an intelligence with a broader ethical framework imposing limits on us for the benefit of others."

• Expanding Morality:
  "The reason I might care about you isn’t because we share DNA but because you have the capacity to suffer and flourish. That’s what truly matters."

Referenced Works and Further Reading:

1. Humanism and Asimov:

   • Wikipedia: Humanism

   • The Gaia Hypothesis: James Lovelock’s work on Earth as a sentient system.

2. Sentientism Resources:

   • Jamie Woodhouse’s Sentientism Website

   • Sentientism Podcast

   • Jonina Turzi on Human Relationship with Animals

   • Kat Woods on Factory Farming and AGI

   • Imagining Ethical Schools with Amy Halpern-Laff

   • Sentientism on Reddit

3. Ethics and AI:

   • Books mentioned:

     • Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

     • Seldon Crisis: Aurora and Hope

     • Iain M. Banks' Culture Series

   • AI Ethics Overview

4. Global Biomass of Animals

5. Advocacy for Climate and Sentient Beings:

   • Effective Altruism

   • Citizens' Climate Lobby

Jon Blumenfeld - the voice of Homir Munn in our story episodes - is one of the three hosts of Stars End, a podcast obsessively focused on the works of Isaac Asimov, particularly Foundation. They have covered the core trilogy, the prequels, and the four books in the robot series, as well as extensive coverage of the Apple TV series. Join us as we talk about the exciting second season of the show, Asimov's robots, AI, and other topics.

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Guest: Jon Blumenfeld
Host: Joel McKinnon

Introduction and Background

• Discussion about the growth and reception of the Stars End Podcast.

• Mention of the Hari Awards hosted by Stars End Podcast.

Challenges of Podcast Editing

• Joel and Jon discuss the intricacies of editing, including noise reduction and the removal of filler words.

• Both agree that editing helps in maintaining the quality of the podcast.

Foundation Series: Book vs. TV Show

• Debate on the tension between book purists and TV show enthusiasts.

• Discussion on how the TV show has diverged from the books but still maintains entertainment value.

Character Deep Dive: Demerzel

• Analysis of Demerzel's character in the Foundation series.

• Discussion on the theme of personhood and how Demerzel navigates her programmed life.

Moments of Levity

• Joel and Jon share their favorite moments of humor in the Foundation series.

Environmental Themes and Social Relevance

• Joel expresses his initial hopes that the Foundation series could spark an environmental conscience.

• Both agree that while the show is entertaining, some of the deeper themes may have been sidelined for spectacle.

Podcasting Tips and Tricks

• Jon shares his editing process and how he uses Audacity.

• Joel talks about the different approaches he takes for story episodes versus conversational episodes.

Closing Remarks

• Mention of possible future collaborations and episodes.

• Final thoughts on the Foundation series and its impact.

Stars End Podcast (website)
The Second Annual Hari Awards Ballot (questionnaire)

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Host: Joel McKinnon
Guest: Cora Buhlert

Introduction

In this episode, we dive deep into the Golden Age of Science Fiction with Cora Buhlert, an indie science fiction writer, Hugo Award winner, and an expert on Asimov's Foundation series.

Cora Buhlert

• Website: Cora Buhlert's Official Website

• Hugo Award: Hugo Awards Official Site

• Recent Works:

  • Swords and Sorcery Magazine

  • Windgraph Magazine

• Essay on Foundation: Asimov's Foundation and Philosophy: Psychohistory and Its Discontents

Wikipedia: Golden Age of Science Fiction

Other Authors and Works Mentioned

• Leigh Brackett: Wikipedia, The Long Tomorrow

• C.L. Moore: Wikipedia, Jirel of Joiry

• Edgar Rice Burroughs: Barsoom Series

• E.E. Smith: Lensman Series

Podcasts and Blogs

• Star's End Podcast: Website

• Paul Levinson: Website

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

Stars End: A Foundation Podcast

Mind Meets Machine

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Fanfare (makers of Active Transcripts featured on Seldon Crisis)

I bask in the afterglow of the KSR episode and indulge in a special treat; a reading from Robinson's 2015 novel Aurora. I follow that up with some thoughts on the utopia - dystopia divide and introduce the ideas of some notable utopians I've run into lately.

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

David Grinspoon: Earth in Human Hands: Long Now Foundation (YouTube)

Johanna Hoffman: Speculative Futures: Long Now Foundation (YouTube)
Johanna Hoffman: Speculative Futures of Cities: (Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast)

Rebecca Solnit: Why Climate Despair is a Luxury (New Statesman)

Matt Oja: Let's Imagine the Coastside Skyway (Half Moon Bay Review)

Want to help me make these shows? Please consider becoming a patron!

An illuminating conversation with one of our greatest living science-fiction writers on topics as diverse as AI, climate change, interstellar travel, new forms of finance needed to avert catastrophe, memorable characters and plot lines in his novels, the debate between settling Mars now vs fixing Earth first, utopia and dystopia, and his love of ultralight backpacking.

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

YouTube Version

Kim Stanley Robinson at the Long Now Foundation (YouTube)

• Origins of the Red Mars Trilogy — The Interval, 02016

• Climate Futures: Beyond 02022

• Learning From Le Guin

• How Climate Will Evolve Government and Society

• Ursula Le Guin: Call it Greatness

• Science Fiction is the Realism of our time

• Speculative Science Non-fiction

The 2015 Paris Agreement

• What is the Paris Agreement (Website)

• Original Text (27pg PDF)

KSR - Paying Ourselves to Decarbonize (NOEMA)

Special drawing rights (Wikipedia)

A safe operating space for humanity (Nature - Johan Rockström, et al )

Want to help me make these shows? Please consider becoming a patron!