00:00:44.560From the very start, Star Trek was always an allegory for the world that we live in and a way to reflect on where we are and where we're going.
00:00:52.640That's why I love Star Trek, and why it's such a big theme in my book, More Everything Forever,
00:00:57.780where there are, by the way, a few hidden Star Trek references that a careful reader might find
00:01:03.000in addition to the obvious mentions in the text. But Star Trek is also a large part of why I invited
00:01:08.840this week's guest, Chanda Prescott Weinstein, to talk with me. Chanda is one of the few people I
00:01:14.720know who is indisputably an even bigger Star Trek fan than I am. She's also a scientist, an author,
00:01:20.980and a true delight. We had a lot of fun. Let's get to it.
00:01:25.540Welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine. This week I'm delighted to have as my guest
00:01:29.920Chanda Prescott-Weinstein, a professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire.
00:01:35.860Chanda, thank you for being on Dreaming Against the Machine. Welcome.
00:02:16.640But I do want to talk with you about Star Trek because one of the things that you and I have in common is that we're both huge Star Trek fans and we're both pretty angry about the way that people have misused Star Trek out in the world.
00:02:32.660Absolutely. I was just telling some people yesterday that, you know, when we talk about the distance between the Star Trek that we see on television versus the situation we find ourselves in right now, I think it's actually really great. And spoiler alert for people who haven't watched season one of Discovery, I'm sorry, but it's Mirrorverse Lorca who thinks Elon Musk is a hero. It's Mirrorverse Lorca.
00:03:25.020universe he's you know he doesn't have the goatee but he's he's evil Lorca yeah exactly huh okay
00:03:31.540well I think that's gonna do a great job of setting the tone for the rest of the episode
00:03:35.500I mean the real question is do we live in the mirror I mean I think that's like the concern
00:03:41.920right like are we in the Star Trek 2020s or are we actually full-on mirror verse I think that that
00:03:48.000is oh god now now we're gonna have a spoiler for season one of the good place this is the bad place
00:03:55.000Yes. Yeah, it's not much of a spoiler. No, no. But, oh, God, is this the Mirrorverse or not? That is not a question that's occurred to me. I've just been, you know, like in the canonical Star Trek timeline, we're overdue for something called the Eugenics Wars. And that does seem like that might be coming up.
00:04:18.020Partly because it's primarily a television franchise, right? Everything has to be dramatic
00:04:23.260and kind of dressed up. And so I do think that sometimes people have this feeling like, oh,
00:04:28.260it's going to be this very violent hands-on thing. And clearly there are elements of that
00:04:33.320happening right now with like the kidnappings by the ICE, Gestapo pulling people off the street,
00:04:39.360regardless of citizenship, but definitely kind of color dependent selection process
00:04:44.140us happening there, right? But I do think that with the technology stuff, that it's maybe not
00:04:49.960necessarily going to off the bat have that feeling of it's very obvious and in your face that this
00:04:55.700is happening, but it's going to be quieter, kind of a creep. What I saw recently people are calling
00:05:01.060securitization, which I think is also something that you kind of touch on in your book, that it
00:05:06.060just kind of becomes part of your life in a slow way. And suddenly you're in the midst of these
00:05:11.120kind of battles and don't even know that they've been happening yeah behind your back kind of the
00:05:15.860sort of slow boiling of the frog rather than all at once yeah exactly um sorry i'm still stuck on
00:05:22.560this question of whether we're in the mirror verse okay so i i should jump in for our listeners who
00:05:27.600have not seen star trek of of which i assume there may be a couple first of all go watch star trek
00:06:53.640How did you become a Star Trek mega nerd?
00:06:55.700I talk a little bit about this in The Edge of Spacetime, partly because, you know, when I actually hear the word space, I still hear that in William Shatner's Space, The Final Frontier, right?
00:07:09.800And I also hear it in Patrick Stewart's voice where he does Space, The Final Frontier, right?
00:11:06.100I read about this there okay yeah I uh uh by the time this episode of the podcast airs
00:11:14.580I recorded an interview there I was interviewed at that set for a docu-series with Kara Swisher
00:11:21.720which is an extremely awesome like one of the most surreal and bizarre experiences of my life
00:11:27.240yeah I strongly recommend checking it out although I will say like I'm I'm roughly your age I think
00:11:32.720slightly younger you know one of my first cinematic memories is is going to see star trek
00:11:37.040six which uh came out when i was about six yeah no if if it had been the next generation set
00:11:47.640i think i would have just lost my shit i would yeah i would have been crying too hard to be
00:11:54.320interviewed or something like that um but original series you know i i love the original series but0.62
00:12:00.720it's it doesn't like hold the same place in my heart as the next generation does something that
00:12:06.100i think about a lot with watching these sets and thinking about how they envision what the future
00:12:11.380will look like and the distance between that because i was recently re-watching the voyage
00:12:15.120home for an essay i've been working on for ryan magazine about whales actually and i was just like
00:12:22.500looking at their understanding of what a screen would look like in the 24th century yeah yeah
00:12:29.220And I'm always wondering, for example, with New Trek, like Star Trek Discovery, even Starfleet Academy, which is set over a thousand years into the future, right?
00:12:43.520And I always worry about this because it's like, what if they don't have tablets anymore and they really do install things in their brains?
00:12:48.500And it really is like a horror show of people being monitored inside their, especially now, I just worry about, I'm a tech geek, but the tech scares me so much now.
00:12:59.220I don't think that science fiction forms a template for what tech we should develop.
00:13:07.580The tech scares me too, but I guess I don't think about that as much in the context of
00:13:14.440Star Trek just because I don't think of Star Trek as a show about technology.
00:13:19.360I think about it as a show about people.
00:13:21.500It's aspirational, but I think that it's, you know, it's about an aspiration for what a good future could look like, not in terms of the technology, but in terms of how we relate to each other. Right?
00:13:34.820I totally agree. I think, like, even, you know, the many different humanoid species is clearly just about, like, the different ways of being human, right? In a not very subtle way.
00:13:48.720Yeah, and also The Next Generation. I mean, even Data is very clearly meant to be about a reflection of ourselves, not about robots. One of my favorite episodes of any Star Trek series is that episode from The Next Generation. I think it's called The Measure of a Man.
00:14:08.040Yeah. Where Data, I don't want to say that Data is on trial. It's that Data's, you know, humanity is on trial.
00:14:17.740They're trying to determine whether or not data is a person or a piece of property. And Star Trek being Star Trek and not being particularly subtle, especially, you know, in those first two series, they have Patrick Stewart just sort of look right at the camera and say, oh, this is about slavery.
00:14:37.680Right. I guess in terms of thinking about technology, I feel that the showrunners at different stages have all tried to grapple with technology in their own way and their own. So sometimes they're telling us about their own relationship. Right. I think we see that especially in New Trek.
00:14:56.280And also, you know, The Measure of a Man, I think, really blossomed when the Discovery
00:15:02.940writers took it up in season two of Discovery to do the storyline about the Kelpians and
00:15:11.420And they have Doug Jones as Saru playing this character who's like figuring out his
00:15:17.400relationship to his people who are still enslaved, the enslavers, and the question of how you
00:15:21.540make peace afterwards, which is kind of like Deep Space Nine and TNG all brought together.
00:15:27.900I actually think I freaked Doug Jones out at the convention last year because I was like,
00:15:32.920I've been watching that season very closely because I was working on a paper about Black
00:15:36.780mothers and daughters in Star Trek. And I realized that they had you as this white man actor do this
00:15:44.080really powerful storyline that's really in some ways about Black American history. And I just
00:15:49.320thought you did a really beautiful job and I think Doug did not know how to process like
00:15:53.580if I say thank you is it racist like but I think the way that they could take things out of the
00:16:00.740context where we expect to see them and instead of making the the lead character Michael Burnham
00:16:06.320who's a black woman the vehicle for let's talk about race and enslavement actually have someone
00:16:11.400who looks completely different play that role and tell that story is really powerful so I think
00:16:16.140You're totally right. And it's interesting to see how they rehash old Trek into new Trek repeatedly.
00:16:24.380Yeah. Star Trek has always been, like from the first season of the first series, very interested in talking about race.
00:16:33.920I think very interested. And I think there's kind of a love-hate relationship that critical race theory scholars have with Star Trek.
00:16:42.280Because on the one hand, there's like, so if you go into the scholarship and the literature, on the one hand, everybody recognizes the power of like the first interracial kiss on television.
00:16:51.780The fact that, you know, Roddenberry's initial pilot for the show had a white woman, his wife, Majel Roddenberry, as the first officer.
00:17:06.080And Lucille Ball is actually the one who saved the show.
00:17:09.460She came in and was like, give him a second chance.0.82
00:17:12.280And so he was like, fine, I will put someone that is received as a white actor in the second role.
00:17:19.100But now I'm going to put a Japanese American guy.0.99
00:17:22.260I'm going to put this Black American woman.1.00
00:17:25.080She's not there to be a sex object most of the time.1.00
00:17:28.540She does have these very short dresses.
00:17:31.280And then they have this first interracial kiss between her and the captain.
00:17:37.000There's also, they add a Russian who's maybe a Soviet.
00:17:41.340it. We don't really know what happened in the second season. So there is that version of like
00:17:47.660the liberal multicultural framework. And then on the other hand, there is like this very intense
00:17:52.660reinforcement of the biology of race through having these different species that have these
00:17:59.500very essentialist characteristics, right? And that are intended like the first iteration of
00:18:05.260the Klingons. The Klingons are clearly supposed to be the Russians. The Vulcans are clearly
00:18:10.000supposed to be some pan-Asian racist trope representation and it's meant to be like a
00:18:15.680positive trope but it is a trope nonetheless right absolutely yeah and Star Trek continues
00:18:22.360to struggle with that around um species and whether people's culture is like somehow
00:18:31.060biologically hardwired yeah I think that's a place where Trek still struggles no that sounds
00:18:37.240right to me i mean see now now i'm going to get into the deep cuts there's an episode of the next
00:18:41.840generation where they were clearly trying to have their cake and eat it too on that one
00:18:45.340where they uh you know there's this big reveal that actually all of the species are all descended
00:18:52.020from a common ancestor and yeah it's sort of like what's uncomfortable about or one of the
00:19:00.060things that's uncomfortable about something like lord of the rings right um in that like yes
00:19:06.960Tolkien, you know, we know that he hated the Nazis, but he also, you know, talked about the race of men and the race of elves and the race of dwarves and also like certain kinds of, and also just racism within the world itself, like certain kinds of men are just better because of their blood.
00:19:29.800I mean, I saw an essay somewhere on Facebook a couple months ago that was talking about the problem of the, I guess, humanity of the orcs, which is like, they're just like a species that you can just genocide because they're fundamentally bad. Is that kind of the setup?
00:19:44.120yeah no I think this was I mean Tolkien apparently struggled with that in his in his own writing and
00:19:50.200letters yeah but um yeah no now now as if Star Trek wasn't bad enough now we're becoming Tolkien
00:19:56.900ultra nerds as well this is this is great this is going to be such an accessible episode I read
00:20:01.940Lord of the Rings so many times that my dad actually took the books away from me when I was
00:20:06.020like 13 or 14 he was like you have to read something else and I think what I moved on to
00:20:10.840was Charles Dickens, which I also obsessively read until I read an essay by George Orwell
00:20:16.560criticizing Dickens. So Orwell was like, Dickens' solution to every problem was benevolent rich
00:20:22.880people, and this is not a systematic solution. And I was like, well, fuck. And that ruined Dickens0.99
00:20:28.860for me completely. George Orwell is really great for ruining various things with extremely good
00:20:35.760trenchant points of view. There was a line that he had in an essay of his that I read just a
00:20:40.480couple years ago that just ruined the idea of utopias right he's uh he he said like most
00:20:47.980imaginers of utopia are people are like someone who has a toothache who thinks that you know
00:20:54.340happiness consists in not having a toothache and they just want to have like this infinite
00:20:59.440extension of something that was only valuable because it was temporary and uh and so then you
00:21:06.380know that gets us to all of these people who want to live forever and and you know as as much as
00:21:13.060okay bringing it back to star trek uh there were all sorts of problems in season one of picard
00:21:18.160but i did like that picard did not want to live forever i will say i i mean within the fandom
00:21:24.880right star trek infamously the first season is always terrible this is actually why like0.98
00:21:30.520the new show Starfleet Academy really stands out because actually I think it had a very strong
00:21:36.620first season like a fairly consistent there are a couple of episodes where I was like
00:21:40.200whereas Picard I feel like the first half of that season I just kind of want to go into the
00:21:45.200writer's room and be like hey can we talk about this yeah but then it kind of sings in the last
00:21:50.480four episodes and I just feel like we needed more seven of nine Gary Ryan is the best thing
00:21:56.120about the show picard absolutely we need as we need a show where it's just about captain seven
00:22:02.180she's amazing jerry ryan is like super amazing she was the best part of that show i um i actually
00:22:08.680haven't seen starfleet academy yet because i i canceled my paramount plus subscription because
00:22:13.400of all of the horrible connections that paramount has to the trump administration and fascism and
00:22:20.020I'm very upset that Star Trek is, like, produced and hosted by this company that is, like, in deep with Trump.
00:22:44.200I will say my feeling about what Starfleet Academy did is I really do feel that they understood the assignment, that they saw what happened with Discovery, including I really feel like Paramount really meddled with Discovery by forcing Discovery to be a launch for Strange New Worlds.
00:23:01.720And Strange New Worlds was clearly there to satisfy the racist segment of the fandom that was upset that a black woman was finally the lead of a show.
00:23:11.980And so they were like, no, no, we've got a white dude-led one coming, and we're actually going to use a significant chunk of her show to launch his show.
00:23:20.160I do think that there was an element of that, but I really feel like this writer's room for Starfleet Academy paid attention to that and also said to themselves, we may not get more than one or two seasons, right?
00:23:29.880Like, we're definitely getting two, but we may not get anything beyond that.
00:23:33.840And they were like, we're going all in.
00:23:39.000By the way, like when they first started advertising it, I was like, this show is going to be queer. And everyone was like, no, it's going to be like Dawson's Creek in space. And I was like, you don't know how to read a poster. And I just want to say I was right. And y'all were wrong. So wrong. So queer. So black. The aliens, even in the background, the elaborate black hairstyles that they've been doing.
00:24:00.620And I really feel like they were just like, if we only get two seasons, we understand the assignment, which is to tell people, to tell trans people, to tell queer people, to tell Black people, stay with us, stay in the fight, stay alive. We want you here. And it is still possible for us to have this future.
00:24:17.220because the show is really about what happens when you have to rebuild after catastrophe.
00:24:23.100And I think we all need to be reminded that rebuilding after catastrophe is a possibility.
00:24:27.360Just because catastrophe has happened doesn't mean that's the end of the conversation.
00:24:31.240So kudos to them for doing that on Paramount's dime.
00:24:50.460The idea of the show being about rebuilding after catastrophe just feels very, not just optimistic, but also very Star Trek in that it's like, okay, let's look at what we're dealing with right now and find a way to talk about it that doesn't end in a pit of despair.
00:25:12.200Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or like any of like the grim, dark, gritty reboot, you know, science fiction that we've seen. I mean, some of which I really like. I believe that we need to have positive ideas about what the future could be and how we can relate to each other in that future. And so it's nice to hear that Star Trek is still committed to that.
00:25:33.280One of the things that Star Trek as a franchise has done really well is both being optimistic and at the same time being willing to be critical.
00:25:46.080It's simply about saying to us, we actually have to confront the problems, but if we decide we want to confront them, there is a possibility of succeeding on the other end.
00:25:54.740And I'm thinking about that juxtaposed with For All Mankind, right?
00:25:59.720Which is actually run by one of the same people who did Enterprise, the series.
00:28:47.220But I do think that that's like an interesting thing
00:28:49.420that we should be thinking about right now,
00:28:51.260which is like, there is this push to do these things in space, and there's no mainstream discourse about the labor issues that inevitably come up with this.
00:29:03.780Unfortunately, we still live in capitalism, and that means we need to talk about our partners and sponsors.
00:29:09.120But fortunately, our partners and sponsors are great.
00:29:11.940And if you want to support Dreaming Against the Machine directly, you can join us on Patreon,
00:29:16.380where $5 a month gives you the chance to ask questions of upcoming guests
00:29:20.740and a dedicated stream of cat pictures.
00:29:23.660We love our patrons, and we also love being a part of the Multitude Collective at MultitudeShows.com.
00:29:29.300Multitude is a podcast company made up of passionate people creating shows you can count on.
00:29:33.800Shows like American Medieval, a podcast about the Middle Ages, but with an American twist.
00:29:39.200Every week, Professor Matthew Gabriel is joined by an expert scholar
00:29:42.640to talk about either some bit of the medieval world itself
00:29:45.480or how Americans have, throughout our history, used the Middle Ages to say something about ourselves.
00:29:50.940If America has never been fully modern, it might be because we've always been a little bit medieval.
00:29:56.940Check out AmericanMedieval.com for more.
00:29:59.460New episodes are available every Wednesday.
00:31:25.560And I thought most of them were pretty bad because I think that the ethos of the VC startup culture and the C-suites of Silicon Valley has always been sort of very techno-libertarian and verging on fascist and sometimes outright fascist.
00:31:44.660But it is true that the rank-and-file workers at most of the big tech companies have reliably and still reliably vote against Trump and the Republicans.
00:31:56.580And I think that that makes this a ripe opportunity for labor organizations.
00:32:03.960It's interesting because I think there's a piece of this that's also about whether we actually have a shared reality.
00:32:09.840And I don't mean that in, like, the—it's all the simulation.
00:32:12.800I mean that how we're processing what is happening and what values matter and I think a lot of white-collar workers and I would count myself as a white-collar worker because I'm a professor, solidly middle class or in the case of some Silicon Valley workers, upper middle class, have this kind of fundamental belief that everybody's committed to democracy as an idea.
00:32:36.820and that you should make all of your choices based on the assumption that everybody in the
00:32:42.780conversation is committed to democracy as an idea. And I think part of the transition that
00:32:47.580people need to go through at this point is understanding that you are dealing with a boss
00:32:52.760who does not believe in democracy as a fundamental principle for organizing society. Not just like,
00:32:59.860oh, this company is not a chirocracy, right? Like companies have never been run like democracies
00:33:05.940except maybe workers collectives. But I think what these workers need to understand is that
00:33:11.120this is now bigger than what happens internally at the company, that this is about whether people
00:33:16.620get a say in the organization and the running of their society, and that they actually have a lot
00:33:21.540of power over this because so much of the anti-democratic work is happening through and
00:33:27.020with tech. So when they think about organizing and what is their purpose in organizing,
00:33:33.100they have to understand that they are going up against a boss that does not believe in democracy
00:33:38.580and they have to organize accordingly your strategy shifts if you understand that the
00:33:43.740person on the other side of the table fundamentally does not believe in your right to vote that's it
00:33:49.160you have to accept they don't believe in your right to vote that has to be where you organize
00:33:53.820from and that's one of the reasons that you need to organize is because we have to collectivize
00:33:59.060our power to say no actually the right to vote is important right yeah it feels embarrassing to have
00:34:07.540to make that case but i think we got to get over that though right yeah uh we're gonna win this
00:34:14.140thing uh what is it i'm gonna mangle this but the line from that um from that yates poem right you
00:34:20.700know the the the best are filled with doubt and the worst are filled with a terrible certainty
00:34:51.240They weren't just going out and organizing protests.
00:34:53.080they were also reading about history together. And I think that there would be a lot of power
00:34:57.320right now in people going back and reading in detail about, for example, the Montgomery bus
00:35:01.760boycott, which actually basically up until the point when they won, it looked like they were
00:35:07.060about to fail. The movement was starting to fray. People were having a hard time. There were all of
00:35:11.540the internal disagreements about, like, can I afford to do this? This is a fiscal hardship on
00:35:16.100my family. It's a physical hardship, etc. Those fights all happened internally, and they were
00:35:21.240all having to organize through it. And I think about my grandmother who left Barbados on her
00:35:28.360birthday in the early 60s before Barbados was independent. So she had never had the right to
00:35:34.760vote over anything that had happened to her and came to the United States and had like a very
00:35:41.040miserable experience, came to the segregated country. She went to New York, so it wasn't the
00:35:45.700South, but there was all kinds of racism as there continues to be. And there is a kind of optimism
00:35:51.200that was involved in people making those moves. And so I would really encourage people, they often
00:35:56.060think, oh, you just want me to feel guilty when I'm saying go back and read this history, but I
00:36:00.120want you to go back and read about how people held themselves together and fought anyway,
00:36:05.240because they did have victories on the other end, and we need to have that energy. And so I think
00:36:10.560there's a lot that can be learned from the experiences of marginalized people of holding
00:36:14.760it together anyway. And that's one of the reasons people actually should go back and study the
00:36:19.860history of the civil rights movement is not because I think people should walk around feeling
00:36:23.520guilty about being white or whatever, but because there are lessons to be learned about how you keep0.98
00:36:29.420your shit together when you're terrified. Oh my God. I have so much to say about this1.00
00:36:34.020and we don't have a lot of time left, but I'm so I'm going to, I'm going to pick three things.
00:36:40.320The first is that I agree. And also this hits to me one of the things that I think is so infuriating about the tech oligarchs in particular and like the culture of Silicon Valley is they're aggressively uninterested in history. And I think that it is infuriating, but it's also sort of a weakness, right? You know, what happens to people who are ignorant of history?
00:37:07.720Yes. I almost interrupted you to say, but that's a weakness. Every villain has a weakness.
00:37:12.880Yes, exactly. And so, you know, their weakness is they can't read.
00:37:19.260And they really do think the Gen AI is saying smart shit to them.1.00
00:37:25.380Yep. Yep. Exactly. So there's that. I also, man, to bring it back to Star Trek,1.00
00:37:32.500I'm also thinking about you saying that, you know, in the movement when you were growing up,
00:37:36.580you would read you know people would read together and and the community building that happens when
00:37:42.840you read I mean when you read history together but also when you read anything together or books0.99
00:37:46.920called the edge of space time plug your shit this is this is what we're here for0.94
00:37:53.640uh you know just the the importance of engaging with art together just you know for the human0.99
00:38:05.280experience of the art, but also as a community-building experience, it's really important
00:38:10.580and also, strangely, or maybe not so strange, a running, very consistent theme in Star Trek.
00:43:38.680how do you feel about it? I mean, I guess, let me say in the season of Passover times,
00:43:45.800as two Jews talking about this, right, that I actually think it's important to contextualize0.69
00:43:50.760the history of the Vulcan live long and prosper salute, which is that Leonard Nimoy is the one
00:43:59.260who introduced that salute. Leonard Nimoy, like William Shatner and Walter Koenig, also a bunch
00:44:06.880of the cast were Jewish children of Eastern European immigrants to the United States and
00:44:13.200Canada. Leonard Nimoy as a child in Boston had seen in an Orthodox synagogue someone make a
00:44:20.400symbol like that with their hands. And it was meant to communicate, may God be with you,0.63
00:44:26.820may peace be with you. And so live long and prosper is like a very similar, it's like a
00:44:31.120secular version of that message. And so it is a Jewish symbol. And so I think it's very important
00:44:36.600And at least when thinking through my own reaction to it, and this was the part I didn't write about, is that Hegseth has been strongly identified with these white supremacist, anti-Semitic, Christian nationalist movements.
00:44:50.920And here he is taking up what, to me, is this Jewish thing and what Leonard Nimoy brought from Jewish culture and putting it into service of this jingoistic, anti-Semitic, white Christian nationalist story about what the future of the planet and space and space travel is going to be.
00:45:17.060and it is so typical i guess if like you can't find your own culture can you that's all i will
00:45:24.960say about that you can't even find your own culture it's like very typical in a sense but
00:45:29.680it's also so cynical which is like star trek was 100 about putting everybody on the bridge and
00:45:37.440saying when we go to space we will go to space as a unified species representing planet earth0.98
00:45:44.040Not a small number of assholes who have exploited the law and people and the planet and mine the shit out of everything so that the planet is literally turning into a dumpster fire, then going and exploiting it on behalf of this one flag.0.98
00:46:06.080That's literally the opposite of Star Trek.1.00
00:46:12.000And also, like, one of the first things I thought of when I saw Hegseth doing the Vulcan hand salute was I thought, okay, buddy, what about that other Vulcan phrase, infinite diversity and infinite combinations?
00:46:24.300Because, you know, that's what, to me, what a good future looks like is a place where everyone can live together with infinite diversity and infinite combinations.
00:46:34.680Those guys don't even believe in diversity of shoe size.
00:46:37.820like they're all wearing like the same wrong size floor shines like i don't like you can't
00:46:46.540even have different size feet according to them why are they in charge of anything like if that's
00:46:52.600not an expression of don't trust them with anything they can't even wear correctly fitting
00:46:59.820shoes or tell the dude they work for that these shoes don't fit oh god no i'm i'm right
00:47:07.780there with you and so we got to find we got to find a way to at least get to a world where
00:47:16.060where people can have different shoe sizes yes i just infinite diversity and infinite foot
00:47:23.700combination okay so like like real real talk here for a sec uh i have like weird clown shaped feet
00:47:30.880like enormous weird feet and and actually flourish i makes a lot of shoes and a lot of
00:47:36.820different like widths and sizes and so yeah like no no shame you know to them but like jesus0.82
00:47:44.120fucking christ yeah um but like the media literacy on display here is just shockingly low and i mean0.53
00:47:53.740i you know i've talked about this you've talked about this these guys just misunderstand science0.99
00:47:58.840fiction over and over again. And the choice of Star Trek in particular is so telling to me because
00:48:07.620it's like, okay, of all of the sci-fi franchises, you picked the one that is most stridently and
00:48:14.280openly and obviously opposed to everything that you stand for. I do think it's easier for them
00:48:20.400to say Star Trek and not Star Wars because the Star Wars thing just invites the Empire comparison
00:48:25.560like right there right like you don't want to say that you're the rebels right like
00:48:33.460yep no no especially because you know uh uh george lucas said that the rebels were inspired by the
00:48:39.860viet kong right well i have so much more that i could say about that i'm sure that you do too we
00:48:47.220clearly need to talk more both on and offline chanda it has been such a pleasure having you
00:48:53.220on today. And congratulations on the book. Thank you. The book is out, The Edge of Space Time,
00:48:58.820Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. It has a lot of Star Trek in it. And if you're
00:49:04.400not a Star Trek fan, that's okay. I explain everything. Thank you so much, Adam, for having
00:49:08.540me on. This has been a lot of fun. Absolutely. This has been a joy, and I'm really looking
00:49:12.160forward to reading the book. Talk soon. Thank you again to this week's guest,
00:49:17.140Chanda Prescott-Weinstein. Coming up next week, Kim Stanley Robinson.
00:49:22.640To submit questions for future guests and to suggest other guests, and to see more pictures
00:49:29.160of Babka, join the conversation on Patreon. You can also find us on YouTube, on Instagram
00:49:35.000at datmpod, on the web, and on Blue Sky at dreamingagainstthemachine.com, or just find
00:49:41.740us wherever you get your podcasts. Dreaming Against the Machine is a proud member of
00:49:46.760Multitude Productions. Our executive producer is Nick Carissimi. Our associate producer is Rosie
00:49:52.400Thomas. Our theme music is by Jared Emerson Johnson. Our show logo is by Nick James. And
00:49:59.320our fearless leader is Babka, the greatest cat in the observable universe. I'm Adam Becker,