Scales Of Success Podcast

#16 - Mars Myths, Money, and Hard Truths with Zach Weinersmith

• Marcus Arredondo

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Is Mars our next home—or just a sci-fi fantasy? In today’s episode, host Marcus Arredondo chats with Zach Weinersmith, co-author of A City on Mars, who breaks down the real challenges of space colonization, from floating toilets to international law. He also shares his journey as a creator, navigating social media shifts, monetizing art, and balancing humor with deep research. If you think space travel is just around the corner, this episode might change your mind.

Zach Weinersmith is a celebrated cartoonist, author, and science communicator best known for his webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), which combines sharp humor with deep intellectual themes. He has co-authored bestselling books like Soonish and A City on Mars alongside his wife, Kelly Weinersmith, blending rigorous research with wit. His latest children’s book, Bea Wolf, reimagines Beowulf with a fresh, comedic twist. With a passion for making complex ideas accessible, Zach’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Forbes. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and two children.

Link up with Zach Weinersmith:
Website: https://www.smbc-comics.com/
X: https://x.com/zachweiner?lang=en
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smbccomics/?hl=en

Books by Zach Weinersmith:


Episode highlights:
(2:35) The evolution of social media for creators
(7:08) Building a loyal audience and evolving over time
(14:06) Monetizing art in a changing landscape
(16:44) Zach’s writing and drawing routine
(26:01) Challenges and humor in space colonization
(32:16) Researching and writing A City on Mars with Kelly
(40:55) Assessing the feasibility of space settlement
(46:26) Impact of satellite pollution on Earth
(50:46) Parenting philosophies and nature Vs. Nurture
(56:37) What’s next for Zach Weinersmith?
(57:49) Outro

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Note: The transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors.

Zach Weinersmith: 0:00

in space, you don't have a tragedy of the commons, you have a commons. Space is a commons, but it's not a tragedy of the commons because everyone has skin in the game. If Elon Musk causes out-of-control cascading destruction of satellites, he's going to lose hundreds of billions of dollars, same with space agencies that have these satellites up. If the US suddenly loses its GPS system, that's disastrous.

Marcus Arredondo: 0:22

Today's guest is New York Times bestselling author Zach Wienersmith, the brilliant mind behind the acclaimed webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast, cereal and award-winning books A City on Mars and Be a Wolf. Zach shares his insights on thriving as an artist in a constantly shifting social media landscape and explains the nuances of how he monetizes his work through the power of his fan base. We also delve into the making of A City on Mars, a deeply researched and laugh-out-loud funny exploration of the challenges and misconceptions surrounding space colonization, from the technical hurdles to the profound human risks. Zach opens up about balancing humor with intellectual depth, collaborating with his frequent co-author and wife, kelly, and his take on whether children are shaped more by nature or nurture. Let's start the show, zach.

Marcus Arredondo: 1:12

I'm so excited to talk to you. Thanks for being on, thanks, thanks for having me Welcome. So I want to dive into sort of the meatier questions. Before I do, though, your questions, before I do, though I just to frame this for everybody. I don't have enough time in our allotted uh block here to list all your accolades, but uh, I believe a recent winner of the royal society of triveti science book prize, hugo award, uh, nominated for outstanding short form comic, single panel comic.

Marcus Arredondo: 1:44

Uh goes on your nonfiction which we'll talk about, your most recent being A City on Mars, but I've also written Soonish Open Borders. I should note City on Mars is with your wife, kelly, and some fiction, including a graphic novel for Bay Wolf, augie and the Green Knight. Green Knight, augie and the Green Knight. I've got some comments on Trial of the Clone, augie and the Green Knight, green Knight, augie and the Green Knight. I've got some comments on Trial of the Clone. The list goes on and on. You're an extraordinarily accomplished man and I want to dive in because you are at the intersection of art and science and art and commerce and you incorporate, I'd say, I think it's fair to say, esoteric subject matter, extremely, hopefully, subject matter.

Zach Weinersmith: 2:22

Extremely hopefully.

Marcus Arredondo: 2:27

I want to ask how you're responding to some of the changes in social media relative to the algorithms and monetizing the relationship you have with your audience.

Zach Weinersmith: 2:32

Yeah, yeah, let's do that. So let me give you a little story. I was just recently at a wedding and it just happened that one of the people getting married was friends with a bunch of cartoonists kind of a builder of the community and there was a cartoonist tape. When you get married, you try to see the people who won't fight with each other, and so all the cartoonists got sat together and everybody was talking about the same thing, which is like the sort of catastrophe that's happening in slow motion, that accelerated COVID, which is that if you go back, you know clearly, if you go back 20 years, everybody goes to a website. Right, you have a list of websites. You go to them, and one of the consequences of that is, if you were selling something or being an entertainer or whatever it was, is that if you sold ads, most of the revenue went to you. If you wanted to sell merchandise, people who went to your website would actually see this thing where you said buy my t-shirt please, and now that's all gone. And if you talk to someone under the age of like 30, mostly they go to about five websites. Those websites are Facebook, instagram, tiktok and maybe Reddit and YouTube and one or two others, and the idea of even websites in the traditional sense is just sort of going away.

Zach Weinersmith: 3:49

One of the astonishing things I still think about this I used to be able to, maybe 15 years ago. If you were a cartoonist, you would post a little thing below your blog saying, hey guys, go look at this thing, and most people would go to it. Now it's basically zero, and the sort of ultimate goal of all social media is to denude all content of the source of its creation and anything else you might like to tag onto it. So that's the cynical view. The flip of that is just I think it's true for everyone it's probably especially true for entertainers is you never get to pick where people are watching, right, you just get to do stuff. There's a cartoonist named Jim Benton who said it. Well, he said something like you know, if you were a juggler on the street and then a mall opens up and no one's coming to your street, you don't get to insist that they ought to come back where you're juggling, and so you know you can spend a minute swearing and spitting, but then you have to decide what you're going to do, and so what's happening now is everyone's trying to figure out where they can make peace with the new system. But it is genuinely tough, and so what you're seeing in my world is a lot of people are just either leaving the business or just accepting that they're going to make less money, or trying to find some categories of premium services they can offer.

Zach Weinersmith: 5:03

Didn't used to do, or, you know, as a friend of mine put it playing by influencer rules, which means actually really focusing on this sort of weird parasociality paradigm that that has been really built out on like instagram and other places. Um, as for myself, my approach has been I've been diversifying into, like working with traditional publishing, where at least you have a kind of powerhouse behind you and there's just an audience of maybe more patient people than your average TikTok user. But even that's tough because and this is the last I know I'm rambling here but that's tough because you used to be able to, even on Facebook five years ago, you used to be able to say guys, I have a book out, you have agreed to follow me. You probably would like to know about the book, and Facebook might actually transmit that information. Now it will not, unless you pay literally thousands of dollars, which makes it, you know a wash financially, so it's a tough time.

Marcus Arredondo: 5:57

So let's backtrack for a little bit for your SMBC Saturday morning breakfast cereal yes, I remember being in college. After SMBC Saturday morning breakfast cereal yes, I remember being in college. So, for the audience's benefit, zach is the younger brother of a friend of mine that I went to high school with. So Zach and I went to high school, but he's a little bit behind me, but I remember being in college and this was huge. It got circulated among my friend group and I was a follower of it and it was sort of incidental that I found out that you were the author. And so what happens to that following? I know it was a large following for many, many years. I think that started in 2005. Is that?

Zach Weinersmith: 6:34

something like that. Yeah, it's sort of fuzzy, but yes, up there on there.

Marcus Arredondo: 6:39

And so I know that there's a large I know you had probably an email list and a lot of very loyal followers. I mean just to sort of go back to the esoteric quality of maybe for the audience you can share a little bit what the comic is about and then talk to us about what the relationship with the audience was then and how it's transformed.

Zach Weinersmith: 6:56

Yeah, sure. So, oh gosh, how to describe it so like this is. You know, I was kind of in on the ground floor on people posting comics on the internet back when it was like a weird thing for losers and I don't know if I got lucky or what, but it might. Mine sort of broke out and so I did a lot of maybe stuff that was differentiating, a lot of like science or philosophy, humor, uh, math, but also just like like stupid jokes. It's kind of a blend. I think that's probably why it did well with college students it was probably as highbrow as it was lowbrow.

Marcus Arredondo: 7:23

That's how, yeah, that's probably why it did well with college students.

Zach Weinersmith: 7:24

It was probably as highbrow as it was lowbrow. That's how yeah, that's a good way to say it they're trying to do everything. Uh, you know, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a fan of people who do both. You know, voltaire was very good at telling a dirty joke and, uh, and doing deep philosophy. So, day, this is true, whatever you're doing, it's good to be differentiated, because I think that gives you more staying power. Uh, like, so I always.

Zach Weinersmith: 7:48

You know, one thing that happens in comics and this probably applies in different areas is now. Then you'll see someone and they're doing comics. Then one day they do that comic about how, like, cats are funny, or anxiety is very difficult, and they, they get like a bump and then six months later, that's all they're doing and it's like you could see the disaster coming because they're now doing stuff anyone could do and eventually their audience will assert discard them. So what else is doing it? So it's good to have a kind of like to be the only person doing something means people have to come to you. And, yes, I had a really nice following. I still do and that led to there was a really nice part of my career where, you know, on the old internet you could get a following. But it could never be that big because there just weren't that many people on the internet. It wasn't like ubiquitous and normal like it is now. But one of the downsides also was you couldn't make a lot of money. You know a lot of people. If they were making a living, it was. They were like handbagging their own t-shirts and mailing them and stuff, and now there's just great third-party services for everything and so you never push your own stuff, that kind of thing. The downside is there's enormous competition, but also the stuff I mentioned earlier about how it's become harder to reach your audience in the social media era. So there's a really nice in-between period where you can do both. You can really reach people. Ad revenue was still high. The bottom hadn't fallen out of that business. There was a monopoly by Google and Facebook or monopoly. It was a pretty good time.

Zach Weinersmith: 9:09

One of the weird things is I have a lot more ways to gauge audience size now, so to speak.

Zach Weinersmith: 9:14

I can look up numbers that are fairly detailed on Instagram or Facebook. I feel like I have less of a grip on audience size or less of a grip on what's meaningful. If you have a website and a million people come to it a day. That means you have a million very loyal people who are actually taking a positive action to go see you. So I could say like now certainly more people see my comics per day than ever, but part of that passive consumption on like instagram or like just just the variety of infinite scroll feeds and and so you know ultimately I mean kill it to reviews, I suppose but ultimately what your goal is to make a decent living so you could keep doing the fun stuff, and so it's like as if you suddenly have more people but they are less engaged directly with you, and so that feels to me like a big part of the conundrum that needs to be cracked for people like me, and I still don't know what the answer is.

Marcus Arredondo: 10:07

Do you feel like the algorithms, having changed since COVID, have influenced how people are viewing that?

Zach Weinersmith: 10:13

Oh, yes, I think it's been fairly disastrous for artists, and I say that in a nuanced way, which is, like some people are really good at social media. I think of, like Nathan Pyle, who's also a great artist, don't want to like say it's an either or he does, um strange universe. You know what would they like? Uh, aliens who, uh, talk about life. Um, they're extremely popular. But he's also very good at sort of like making viral content that produces sales, which is something I am bad at.

Zach Weinersmith: 10:39

And well, what's tough is, I think, for any career. You get into a career because there are things that appeal to you about it. Maybe that's the lifestyle you get to live, maybe that's the kind of legacy, whatever it is. And a lot of us got into the arts because we wanted to sit around making stuff all day. Well, I'm on the following 12 platforms and I manage them, and so, whatever you could say about the old internet that it was kind of sparse and the art was certainly not as good most of you just figured out how to do an HTML website and put stuff on. Now it's like a full-time job learning how to manage algorithms and separate from the fact that it just kind of sucks that you.

Zach Weinersmith: 11:22

You can make yourself really depressed by imagining your favorite author from the early 20th century. Now, how many people have a parasocial relationship where he says look at my bedhead and my dog and isn't coffee tasty? But also, if you imagine the absolute black hole of time that should have been spent just perfecting craft, that is now going into. Oh, instagram likes it a little better when I use six hashtags than five. To me it's sort of like aesthetically disastrous.

Zach Weinersmith: 11:55

I think we talked in email a little bit. I was saying it seems like the counter who a lot of people are making now is going for Substack, other sorts of direct newsletters, patreon, like basically completely disintermediated kind of ancient technology, because I think there's an extent which has become bad for the consumer too. Like you know, you pull up Instagram and you don't get what you signed up for. You get one or two things you signed up for and then you get infinite scroll that's designed to keep you engaged, which is, I think, like you do it, but you don't sort of feel gratified in the way you do if you get things you that appeal to you personally well, I wonder if that's a generational thing too, because I still have very much a website person.

Marcus Arredondo: 12:36

I'll go straight to the website. I have direct relationships with the people that I follow by way of exactly what you referenced subst, substack. I've started to explore that a little bit and, you know, in a lot of ways I feel like a lot. I, you know, just try an old man trying to learn new tricks and it's. You know, the world has passed me by, but I'm curious, you know, if you do, if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make it sound as an artist? You had to get it out there and I looked at SMBC when it was first coming out and I thought, oh, that's a great passion project. But I had no idea. And while it's surprising to hear you speak about this, it's not necessarily unexpected because the detail orientedness that you possess in everything you do, especially in that most recent work, a City on Mars, that I read no stone is left unturned.

Marcus Arredondo: 13:25

How did you know how to monetize that? How did you start to explore that? Because that was you were always a doodler, right, I mean, to turn that into money is a new science.

Zach Weinersmith: 13:35

Yeah, totally. So it's changed over time. I mean one of the things about being I think it's probably true for any career, but especially in entertainment you really have to be willing to change everything every couple of years. There's always some disruption happening and then like, ideally well, you're holding on to values and where you've got a business. I mean, when I started, it was like MySpace, right, you had to have a MySpace and then what's tough is MySpace was obliterated. And there's actually been a very similar thing recently with Twitter, where a lot of people were able to Well, x I mean X now A lot of people were able to use Elon, just blocked you.

Zach Weinersmith: 14:16

Yeah well, yeah, so I blocked him. I had enough Elon, so I got there first. But no, I was talking to people who used to be able to like, look, if I wanted a few more patreon followers. I do like a twitter thread about obscure history and I pick up four people and they change down, so you have to pay money to to get breaking and and now it's not worth it and so. But it's like usually if you're outside this business, it's hard to imagine how devastating that is, because you spend years developing presence and then a new guy takes over and you just lose. And my space was like that too, you know long ago and that that sort of thing happens.

Zach Weinersmith: 14:50

Actually, facebook was very similar. It was like, at the very beginning it was super good, you had access to all these people. You say, go check out my stuff. And then they turned the screws and it was like, oh, now I have to pay you to get the thing that I thought I was going to get for free forever. But early on, I made a conscious decision, which was I did not. This is bad for your audience, but I did not want to run a business, because it's like you face a kind of fork in the road. If you're someone like me which is well, as you're making more money you can say, oh, I'm going to hire someone and then I will produce more merchandise, merchandise, and my money will go out. Then I'll need to hire a second person, and I know people like this. I remember talking to a friend of mine who said well, you know the good thing, I get to run a business.

Zach Weinersmith: 15:33

Now, when we get to make animations which I could have never done on my own, but 90% of my time now is spent doing that and 10% is spent doing the stuff I got into this for and he was sort of ambivalent about it and but I think there's a sort of spectrum.

Zach Weinersmith: 15:46

Like I I like running the business, in that I think there's a kind of happy medium because, like money is time right, so, like you know, I make enough, uh to this day off my work that I don't have to do stuff I I don't enjoy, like um, taking commissions for art, which is a big part of a lot of people's business, and I do have someone I've hired to assist me for like brain kit starters and social media and stuff I don't like doing, and so it is a little bit complicated. But my goal then became just make the best stuff to get the most audience. And if you're leaving a bunch of money on the table, that's okay, because the whole point is the lifestyle and having a good enough income that I could like have family and and a house.

Marcus Arredondo: 16:28

Sure, yeah, so we could keep going into social media into a wormhole, because I think there's a lot to unpack there. But I want to understand a little bit more about your writing process, because, uh, and drawing process. So how do you turn that from a passion to a product?

Zach Weinersmith: 16:44

yeah, so you know. So it's probably depressing. People have this idea, when they're not professionals at Barts, that it's kind of pure joy all the time, and it's just not. Nor should it be. There should be a level of sort of self-loathing, you know, because you need to be sufficiently critical of yourself and especially driven, and it's just. It's a pyramid-shaped business. Only a few of us get to make a living at it. So you're really fighting tooth and nail to get to that point and what I ended up doing I actually have like a life schedule every single day. So I have a kind of I've. Actually I experimented for a very long time different ways to schedule out how my days would go.

Marcus Arredondo: 17:21

I love this. This was a question of mine, by the way. I really want to get into this Totally. What is your day?

Zach Weinersmith: 17:34

So let me tell you how I got to it, because it was a startup development. So when I was a single guy, I actually kept a sort of Ben Franklin style this is what you're doing from seven to nine. This is what you're doing from nine to 10. And this is a great way to schedule. The only downside to keeping a schedule like that is if you get off because of something, if you're off schedule, then your whole day is messed up and you have to start reorienting, and so I experimented with different systems.

Zach Weinersmith: 17:55

I don't know if you have a family, but it gets much harder once you have kids. Yeah, so you're like, oh, I know a day from 9 to ten. Oh no, you're kids sick. And oh no, you know you, you have to. You forgot about this field trip and I have guys. I just forget about it. You know you're gonna be a stress case all the time. So what I do is um, I have a giant excel sheet. I actually tried using the various productivity apps and I just think to me it's like they all introduce extra work to an already busy existence yeah.

Zach Weinersmith: 18:24

Absolutely. Yeah, you know these ones. They're like these gamified ones where you did your exercise so you get the Sword of Destiny, and I was like this is nicely addicting, but it's like now I'm competing for points instead of just doing my work. So no, I keep an Excel sheet and the Excel sheet has almost everything I do from. You need to read this much of this type of thing to. You know, you need to finish this much drawing to like brush your stupid teeth and get some exercise. And you know, like I mean, you don't have stuff like spend time with your family. Presumably I'm doing that willingly, but it's really down to like anything that you would not do if you weren't forced to buy.

Zach Weinersmith: 19:03

The piece of paper is on the list, um and so. And the way I set it up is it's sort of like you have your choice of doing any of the tasks on the list any time, but there's some that like carry over to the next day and some don't. So as an example, like obviously you can't like skip brushing your teeth for seven days and then brush your teeth seven times. That's not gonna work, um, but there's a lot of tasks in life like that where it's better if you do a little each day. So for me, like writing, I can't, like you know. So if you write for a living everybody knows this there's like a brief period where you're good at it. So, like, some people write in the morning, some people write at night, but but nobody writes well for more than like three or four hours a day, and so you can't say, well, I'll skip today and do tomorrow.

Zach Weinersmith: 19:41

So there's some things that like do not roll over on my schedule. There's other stuff, like for me, illustrations are not quite like that. If I need to do a lot of illustrations, I can work ahead or get behind it and come back through. So I sort of designate categories where you're allowed to get ahead. There's other stuff, like exercise.

Zach Weinersmith: 19:57

So I have this very, very strict schedule, and it also includes like self-cultivation stuff. You need to be doing like a lot of reading or a lot of like whatever it is that makes you better. What you're doing, like what I usually say to young artists, or like how do I get a job in this is you need to be more interesting than other people, because otherwise why is your audience here? And so for me that involves just a lot of like being obscure stuff and you know exchanging letters with, like, uh, scholars I'm interested in that's, like you know, under the dorky stuff, but it could be like climbing mountains or like I don't know wrestling bears, I don't know, but something you know and so that's written into the schedule too, and actually it's most of what I do is spend a lot of time self-cultivating to make myself like someone who you might want to hear about.

Marcus Arredondo: 20:47

So I'm assuming there's certain things that are just a must-haves that you alluded to writing right. So what do you typically? I mean, I know at this point in your career you've got projects. You're probably working on right, but prior to that, before you had projects, how did you find the subject matter that you thought had juice?

Zach Weinersmith: 21:08

That is kind of like the quintessential skill, and it's very hard to develop. The right word for it is taste, and it's very hard to have taste. Right word for it is taste, um and, and it's very hard to have taste about your own work. It's, it's, made, the hardest thing because it's like you know, it's very easy to feel what you want other people to feel. And I, I, I yell about this a lot.

Zach Weinersmith: 21:24

It's true outside the arts too. It's like if you're giving a speech, you may feel very strongly about the subject, but you only transmit it to your listeners if you get the words right, sort of induce the same mental state that you had, and the sort of irony and paradox of it is that requires crap. So in order to get that honest feeling over, you have to sort of be sneaky. You have to say like, okay, I need to, but you're giving a funeral speech and you want everybody to be crying. It's no good to just say I profoundly liked this person and they were very mean. You can't dip into cliches but then you lose. You have to come up with some way to get them to feel that strong feeling. You're feeling and so so you, you, you know this is like the study of a lifetime in terms of like writing. That usually the good way to do that eye farming in addition to just having read a lot. So you have a kind, you have a lot of colors in your palette. It's very hard to actively be creative. It's much better to come up with many ideas and then the real talent is to detect where the action is.

Zach Weinersmith: 22:26

We used to do a show, covid, which was a science comedy show where we had amateur speakers. We would teach to do something like science sketch comedy. I was always shocked by how kids couldn't tell which of their ideas were the good ones. They would come up with brilliant ideas and obviously unusable ones. They both couldn't tell the difference. And to me the difference is seeing. This idea is very rich in that it will permit you all sorts of additional ideas, and this other one made me funny, but it's not going to give you anything. And funny, I do that with your own ideas. I think you can just only do it by practicing. And then the worst of it is having people tell you they don't like stuff. Listen to your audience.

Marcus Arredondo: 23:04

Well, that's actually something I wanted to explore, because I think about stand-up or a band, where you get immediate feedback, right. That's probably the closest connection between an artist and its audience. And then, on the other end of the spectrum, we might put film and traditional books, where you work on something for months, there's months of post-production and editing and then it finally comes out, and that might be nine months, 12 months later, and then there's a press tour and then you start to get sort of feedback from that experience. Your process was somewhere in the middle right when you're putting it out. It's not instantaneous but it is relatively immediate. That has to result in a lot of reps and a lot of information that you're gathering from what's working and what's not working, to the point where it's like the competence consciousness pyramid of it becomes intuitive at some point where you've internalized that, I'm assuming.

Zach Weinersmith: 24:06

I guess that I'm framing that as a question, hopefully so I actually I've come to think a really valuable thing for for an entertaining career is to have some point early on where you've hard-hitted a lot of rapid feedback work. So if you're a stand-up, that's great. Like literally, are they laughing or not, that's great. Well, I understand. Like for the Beatles, they spent a lot of time doing like small, crappy club shows for years, right, and so I feel like I benefited. Like I started in short form. I still do it, it's still a good like muscle exercise, but more and more of my career is already to run long form and so, like the city on Mars took four years and then after that it was like another year waiting for it to come out.

Zach Weinersmith: 24:43

You know it's like a non-trivial portion of my entire career was about this book, but I feel like I you know, a lot of the sense of what's going to fly with a reader comes from that kind of like constant feedback. Um, and then the really hard thing and the important thing is like you have to accept feedback but also not be destroyed by it, and also understand when it's bad feedback, like not everything your audience says is useful, right. Sometimes they're stupid and off base. By the way, that's true, compliments too. Uh right, you know, like I I I was just um helping some friends who'd written a pop side book and I was like I think they really liked, because I was the first person that was like I hate this chapter, but like if you just send stuff to your friends, they'll be like this is so good and you're so great and I love you and it's going to ruin you because you'll believe them, you know, yeah.

Marcus Arredondo: 25:28

Well, let's switch to the print. I think a lot of people see short form production, and you know whether that's in his writing or in art. I mean, writing is art, but in drawing that you're just coming up with that. But I think there has to be some long form in it in order to distill it down into those words. So, one, is that true? And two, what's that process been like to transition to putting the longer form material out?

Zach Weinersmith: 25:59

It's been enormously stressful, which is appropriate, I mean. I always say, like if you're not, like you know, worried, everyone's going to find out you're a fraud tomorrow then you're not trying hard enough. You know, I really do think I try to convince my daughter of this when she's struggling with something like. Like struggle is proof that you were trying something, you know. You were never worried, never fused, never afraid that you're not, you're not, you're obviously not attempting it.

Zach Weinersmith: 26:24

So you know, you talked about how, like, you get instant feedback on comics. You know, with something like, um, like I said, a city on mars was was four years, was a huge time. We did get paid for it. So it's not like it would have been If nobody liked the book. At least we got paid. But it is this weird thing where you spend all this time it's a 450-page book and you just pluck it in front of people and then you wait and then there comes a week where almost all these reviews start coming out and it's extremely nerve-wracking and actually I can't even read reviews. I don't even like reading good books. I just avoid them. Kelly, my wife reads them and tells me because she just doesn't mind reading them, but it's like it's too much for me.

Zach Weinersmith: 27:02

And it is because it's like look, if I put out a comic and it sucks, I don't really like it or it's confusing or bad, tomorrow I can sweep it behind the curtain and put something else out. If you don't like my book, where I like put my soul into it for years, you know that's hard, that's hard to accept, but it's so much worse. I assume people do like memoir, like imagine you, you write your whole life, you know, and you put it down and stuff picks it up, it's like whatever. So so it's, it's. For me it's a much more anxious line of work.

Zach Weinersmith: 27:30

I also, you know, my other thing I do you mentioned briefly as I do fiction now, like kids and that's. You know. At least with a pop science book I can hide behind being right At least I was right Whereas in a kids book it's purely. Kids are the most honest people in the world. They either love or hate you. They don't care if you're famous. They don't care if your mom likes you. They don't care if you did something literarily interesting. They pick it up and they put it down and and, and I'm actually as, as like, like literally right before we got on, I'm working on, like, the endless revisions of a kids book I'm working on and it's like I've never been so anxious about stuff well, maybe I was wrong about stand-up or uh bands, it really is children, right?

Marcus Arredondo: 28:13

I mean, that is as instant as it gets.

Zach Weinersmith: 28:15

Well, I want to talk about the writing process, working with an editor going through that.

Marcus Arredondo: 28:20

But before we do and it's going to be through the lens of City on Mars, but I'll butcher this, so you'll have to correct me. But City on Mars is the exploration, with humor and an overwhelming amount of data and fact, about the ramifications and challenges of inner space living. Uh, for lack of a better word, and I'm gonna take a deep breath um, for the audience, I want to just share the breadth of what you guys explore in this book. No pun, because I'm starting it off with that, but breathing space, sex and reproduction, rearing of children, rocketry, comparing moon to Mars and other locations, pros and cons of atmosphere, soil, lack thereof, gravity sustenance, bathroom tendencies, including floating feces, self-pleasure in space, currency exchange, space law, international diplomacy, lack of space to live in complications with territory and cohabitation, spoms, which you're going to have to define for a number of us, and the extraordinary challenges in building encapsulated living quarters.

Marcus Arredondo: 29:25

And, of course, last but not least, astronauts are liars. That is only a summary of my favorite takeaways in what I've read. I'm wondering if you might just break down what you think I missed, but I do want to explore the editing process, the research process and, maybe most interesting, working with your wife on yet another book.

Zach Weinersmith: 29:48

So a SPOAM is an actual word that was proposed. But so there's this long-standing dispute whether we should say space settlement or space colon colony, because colony obviously has a kind of stink of it of the era of colonialism, although settlement has the stink of settler colonialism. So people have tried to come up with better words. Spoke a shirt for space how. Nobody uses it. We found it in the old book, but yeah it's about space settlement.

Marcus Arredondo: 30:09

I see Asimov right.

Zach Weinersmith: 30:10

I believe that's right. Asimov, right, I believe that's right. I think it was Asimov, you're right. Yeah, so Asimov, very prolific, not always the best prose writer, maybe that's controversial. Yeah, you got through a lot of what we know, I guess. I would also add we do a lot on international law, though it's stuck after the SpaceX so that you're already reading by the time you get to the International Governance which we think it's. But I'm yeah. So, as I mentioned was an extremely involved research project, like, like I said, it took four years. The entire time was about researching towards the end.

Zach Weinersmith: 30:45

We're also writing, of course, but you know our, our strategy as researchers is essentially, like you know, there are a lot of books about space element and often they either rely on expert interviews or kind of a pop understanding of a topic, and our policy is always try to rate primary literature. We do talk to experts, but only after we have a grounding in the field. Very dangerous to talk to experts when you don't have a beat. You know what I mean. So, like without naming names, there are definitely cases where, if we only talk to an expert, we come away with actually untrue information, because often the field has changed and the emeritus professors have not gotten an update on it. Or sometimes a field is just kind of data poor and people make stuff up and it gets relied on. We have examples of this in the book. Stuff up and and it gets relied on uh, we have examples of this in the book, and so like. As again for me, uh, we wanted to do a chapter which was very difficult research on the international law, how states come into existence. Modern world just changed her and there's a book on that. There's a classic book on it by crawford. It's like 1400 pages long and it's the most great thing that anyone has ever written, and we read it page by page, because the alternative was to call someone up and get the gist of it. So when you say it's very detailed, that's essentially why, when we talk about Martian resources, it's because we got the textbook and preceding documents going into it.

Zach Weinersmith: 32:09

We did talk to experts, but mostly to check us Make sure we weren't telling any whoppers. They did cash a few, which is very valuable. So, down the process and this will get it to working with my wife on a research project. So the first thing is, unfortunately, no drama. There's actually no. I take that back. There's real drama about whether to use Microsoft Word or Google Docs. That was close to a fistfight but yeah, yeah, we worked.

Zach Weinersmith: 32:32

But we worked reasonably well together on our last book together, called Soonish, which I would say required about 1, 20th as much research as a much easier project, much less ambitious, still good, available to find books everywhere, but much easier. And so for that book we just kind of you know, you take this chapter, I'll take this chapter, and then at the end we'll kind of polish together. For this book the load of work was so enormous we had to do division of labor. In econ. It's like division of labor spark vision and the more complex society gets, the more you have to do it. And so at some point we actually divided up the tasks by talent and inclination and so the actual process by the end was fairly streamlined.

Zach Weinersmith: 33:10

Was we both read, but we read in different ways. So I read much more quickly than Kelly, but she reads with much more fidelity. So meaning a lot of my job was like there are something like 80 to 100 astronaut memoirs, like personal estimates of having been at space, and I was just writing through them. I was buying any I could. Some of them are like self-published. Some of them came out in like 1982. And I was tracking everything. I good and they're very quick read because they're just a guy talking or whatever, but they're great sources of stories nobody's heard and stuff like tactile stuff, sense stuff, what did it smell like, what did the food taste like? And so I was grinding through that at top speed. Meanwhile Kelly was more off to the one who was like I'm going to read the like.

Zach Weinersmith: 33:59

Nasa has a 150-page technical document on the effects of space Technical reading. She, by the way, is a research scientist by trade, so it's also good to have that. So I was sort of like scanning the horizons and she was doing the drill down, which is extremely valuable. And so we would both take our notes from these subjects, put them in giant documents by topic so we have literally thousands of pages of notes. Put them in giant documents by topic. So we have literally thousands of pages of notes. She would take the relevant notes for a subject like, say, space psychology, then convert it all. So space psychology we literally have like 400 pages of notes. Very diffused topics, very hard to research. She converted that into what we called the dossier, which was something like a 30 page read down with like an inkling of structure.

Zach Weinersmith: 34:36

And then my job, as the entertainer, was to then convert that to a 3,000-word summary. That was ideally entertaining and hit the high points while keeping in the research.

Zach Weinersmith: 34:47

And at that point it was like fighting, not fighting, but like we'd argue with each other, essentially like go for a walk, it's aging. Are we making the strongest argument? Are we actually right here? Do we know this thing? We're saying, uh, and then eventually, the very last step actually, um, writing wise, was the, the jokes, like it's written in a humorous way. I think people think we just sat down and did that, but actually that was the, that was like a veneer, was like okay, well, actually you know some of the stuff is my job.

Zach Weinersmith: 35:13

Yeah, I get you for the technical stuff. Or even like like, look like that we, I think, to understand space, you have to go through like a lot of international law, which is often quite boring, so we try to bury our. We ran obscure books and we would find stories, so like we felt like we had to briefly go through antarctic law, which is not enthralling, uh. But we found this great story about like the time nazis like tried to set up a country in Antarctica and at one point it's documented that they isle of the penguin. And I was like this penguin is going to get us through this horrible international law and that's why you have to research, probably because you find these gems you know that have just been lost. And then once we have that, then we then you go back out to experts and you say am I totally off base? Have I misunderstood your research when I quoted it? And then it goes to the editor and then all I've never had a bad editor. I'm sure they exist, I've always had, and I hope I don't sound like I'm just trying to cover my ass here, but I've always looked at it very luckily. I've heard harder stories elsewhere, but I have not.

Zach Weinersmith: 36:15

And so in our case I said I don't know, maybe people don't know this, but when you read or write a book you agree to an approximate word count. So they'll say your contract will literally say this should be about 100,000 words. I think that's hard, but it ended up around 100. Our very first draft was about 140 or 130. And you turn that and you're like maybe she'll say it's so good, don't take out of work, don't worry about it. She was like no, you can't do this. There's way too much stuff stuck in the back of this book that's not relevant enough. And so we rejiggered the entire book and we completely changed the organization in that last year. I do think it's like the reason the book is now like doing well at winning prizes, and all that is because of that you know, fairly brutal set of notes we got and our willingness to adapt to it.

Marcus Arredondo: 37:03

Well, you're in a fortunate position to be able to get that contract before you write the book, right? I mean, did you pitch this idea? And also, let me, just before we do something to that, that is a direct byproduct of the following you have. Right, I mean, you wouldn't have been able to get access to this? And were they critical? Did they help? Or was it just your following that assisted in getting audiences with some of these astronauts, some of these professionals, these physicists that you might otherwise look? Hey look, I do a comic. More often than not, people are not going to be picking up the phone and saying, zach, who? I want to tell you exactly what I'm thinking. How did you get access to that?

Zach Weinersmith: 37:39

yeah, so that we actually had a kind of one-two punch on that. So, uh, we're looking. Some people you know, so I do a lot of science jokes so I I didn't know a lot of science to reach out to direct. But, um, not everybody knows me. However, my wife uh is a professor, uh, fellow of rice, and so when you say fellow of Rice University, so you're not from Texas. Already Texas does Rice A lot of people outside of Texas but it's extremely highly ranked. It's like the MIT of Texas and so if you say to a professor my affiliation is Rice University, that opens the door. And so we actually are often led with Kelly, you know people happen to recognize the name. That was a bonus, but you know, that was actually quite useful using those credentials. So we actually kind of used both of our networks that way to open those doors.

Marcus Arredondo: 38:27

You're right, yeah, you would have to follow a lot.

Zach Weinersmith: 38:29

I mean, we wouldn't have the book deal. Like, as you said, it's lucky not just to have like a book deal in advance or writing it. The real benefit was we were able to ask for three to do research. So if you ever wondered why, like a lot of pop size is kind of shallow and repeats like stories you're pretty sure you saw on Wikipedia or YouTube page, that's because they have like a year to write it while doing something else. We were able to ask and then an extension, but we came in a little slow.

Zach Weinersmith: 38:55

Most fields don't have that luxury. It's also, by the way, often why you see an author's first pop-up offering be really good and the second one will feel quite shallow. It's because a publisher will say get us to do one right away. And we're just lucky because we have reviewers that are required to make this extra project. We can say no, which is an extreme luxury. But it's also it's kind of like one of those things where it's like an unfair advantage because you know, as you said, a lot, a lot more than successful is the depth of research which you I don't think we'll find in any other book, maybe maybe one or two, but not many I was just gonna say it's certainly not as comprehensive and it's uh for science, non-fiction.

Marcus Arredondo: 39:31

It is as uh informative as it is funny, which you might be the standalone in that category.

Zach Weinersmith: 39:38

I don't know that Mary Roach is as good as we are and Bill Bryson is, but I do think we I will say we did our best and there's a few jokes I'm very proud of.

Marcus Arredondo: 39:48

What's it like? Punching it up with the jokes, I mean because that's not an easy thing. People think it's easy to be funny and it's harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry you know, yeah, oh, absolutely.

Zach Weinersmith: 39:58

Um, I would say, yeah, it's funny. I think I mentioned earlier we had a certain division of labor. My wife and I soon. For me, this is like like my work is that I really enjoy editing. Like I like if you gave me, uh, you know, a 10 000 word thing and said, make this better, I, I, I could sit around doing that for six hours and it would help me to do it myself.

Zach Weinersmith: 40:19

My wife is very like when she writes a scientific paper, she wants to build it direct by break, like I've completed the first sentence, I'm moving on to the second sentence and there's no need to change anything. I'm very like I want to. She at some point would take a chapter out of my hand. She's like the chapter is done, you're not allowed to completely change it again. I think when this gets down to, by the way, we did have a kind of you know we had a very good relationship. I think it helps that you're married and with kids, you're fairly stuck. You have to resolve your problems, but, like you know, it's nice. It was actually.

Zach Weinersmith: 40:54

The really cool things about our partnership on this book was like you know, we were both very much like look this book, we want it to be the best it's going to be, and so sometimes what would happen is we'd say like the next job is a Kelly job, which by which I mean it's going for each sentence and verifying that the source material is an accurate representation of the. Putting it in citation that's a Kelly job. She's the research scientist. Putting it in citation that's a Kelly job, she's the research scientist.

Zach Weinersmith: 41:17

And so often that would be like Zach, your job is to watch the kids only, I mean, they go to school or whatever, but all kid duties now fall upon you like a late year into an office, and I feel like it's the kind of thing where, if it was just her book and not mine, it would be easy to be like well, this isn't very fair, but it was Beth's, ours, so I'm like all I got to do is watch kids at the playground. You're doing the hard work, and we had that one Later. She had to watch the kids and I was doing the final humor pass or whatever, and so we were able to keep this very supportive relationship. And, most crucially, I think now and then there would be something where one of us would write something and the other would be like sorry, this kind of sucks and nobody wants to hear that. But because we're very oriented around the final product, it's kind of easy to swallow, or relatively, or at least it had to be swallowed.

Marcus Arredondo: 42:00

Let's say it that way, it seems like. I mean, I think all partnerships are better served when there's a higher purpose, and in the form of marriage, it's oftentimes children, but certainly when working on a product like a book, that becomes the priority right, so you get to serve that. So I'm wondering and this is a tall order, so you can throw it out, this question but what takeaways do you think? And I'll preface this by saying the idea of space travel, while I don't want to be the beta test is exciting and I thought, wow, we seem to be getting closer After getting through the parts of the book that I have. I haven't finished it yet. I know the hookers think that.

Marcus Arredondo: 42:38

I know, I know. By any stretch of the imagination, in fact, I wonder if my son who's two will see it himself. But what takeaways do you think? What do people who are super excited about this and think it's very near term, what do you think they miss and what do you think that they should be considering as they contemplate the potential quote-unquote benefits of this opportunity?

Zach Weinersmith: 43:06

I, I would say the big. You know, obviously this is a whole book, but but the big picture stuff is like a. It's definitely harder than advertised. Uh, so just you.

Zach Weinersmith: 43:14

There's this idea of what, that the rockets are getting big now, and that's true, and a lot of that's down to SpaceX and Elon Musk. But that leaves open a lot of other problems that are still to be discussed and we have just very limited data on all sorts of biological factors by study. So one, feasibility is harder than expected. Two, and I cannot overstate this, there is nothing of value in space other than data transmission. Right, and I say that way for a very long time. I'm talking about space-based solar, space-based manufacturing, asteroid mining, most crazily of all, moon mining. Moon has nothing worth getting. Even if it's gold sitting on the surface, it's so expensive it will remain. So I know there's plenty of listeners yelling at me about how I'm wrong.

Zach Weinersmith: 43:54

I've gone and read some articles. Please read the book. It's just, it's pie in the sky. Companies start this, they get VC money, they go bankrupt, like as they call it. So the financial emphasis is not there. It's not like you know.

Zach Weinersmith: 44:07

People will say, well, it'll be like aviation or computing. And you're like aviation, you know, had clear, immediate benefit. Satellites work this way. Satellites have developed a lot because data transmission and remote sensing are extremely valuable. Navigation, so low feasibility, no kind of ratchet for the space settlement stuff. And then there's an argument that some of it's not even desirable to do it, especially in the shark territory. There's risk to the whole planet of putting, as has been proposed, million ton optics in low Earth orbit. I hope for obvious reasons. That's quite dangerous.

Zach Weinersmith: 44:39

So I would say, if you ask me what people have missed, I think, unfortunately, a lot of the reporting on this and the books on this are pretty shallow and they're mostly written by advocates for doing it. They're often written by people who are running VCs or trying to hire young, talented engineers. I don't mean they're like brifters or liars, but it's like when your ability to run your company depends on convincing people of something, you tend to believe it. And lastly, I guess I would say Kelly and I are just kind of like jerks and so we just like when you have a nice uplifting statement where we're like well, let's see if there's evidence for it. And often, unfortunately, some people really deeply believe there's not good evidence. And let me end by saying someone who disagreed with me deeply and was being completely rational. I think what they would say is Zach, you don't appreciate that.

Zach Weinersmith: 45:28

Humans have a lot of ingenuity and we're going to work this out faster than expected. As you naysayers always say, we will not. We get to mars. We're going to be able to start like countries. There's going to be entrepreneurialism. Uh, there's going to be. You know, there's a lot of bureaucracy on earth, a lot of people like you saying that we, we should like not do all this awesome stuff, and we're going to do it and you're going to be left in the dustbin of history and and I think they would believe something like that, and all I would say is like I don't even necessarily agree. I just think the timescales, I don't think it's going to be 20 years.

Marcus Arredondo: 46:02

Well, what you learned about international law? Do you have any insight and this is a little bit off topic, but I think it's related is sort of you know satellite pollution, because we're starting to encounter some of that now as it relates to just you know, the satellite orbiting our planet. I mean, I think those have increased thousands of percent in the last handful of years.

Zach Weinersmith: 46:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I haven't looked at the numbers lately, so if I'm wildly off base someone can correct me. But I think Starlink alone, which is SpaceX's internet service provider, has something on the order of 5,000 satellites. For context, before they started launching, I think something like 9,000 satellites had ever been launched, going back to Sputnik in 1907. The environment has deeply changed. When you refer to pollution of orbits, there's really two senses in which that's used. One is light pollution, meaning if you're doing various types, certain types of astronomy, like you imagine, you're doing a long exposure of a star. But now there's way more satellites coming up. If you look at all the planned satellites, it's going to go from something like 10,000 objects now to maybe 50,000 objects. That's going to get in the way, certainly, of visual and visible spectrum astronomy.

Zach Weinersmith: 47:15

I have nuanced feelings on that. I sympathize with the astronomy community being pissed about it. I think there's a debate over how bad it is. On the other hand, the flip side is like imagine a world where in 10 years everybody in Africa can get high-speed internet. If you're into developmental economics, that's pretty damn good. It's hard to say humanity would be better served by better telescope data than by allowing a fisherman in a poor African village to get market data. So I have sort of complex feelings about this. I don't think anybody would be too happy with me.

Zach Weinersmith: 47:45

The other concern is that, like well, you put so much junk in space, eventually there's going to be an increase in collisions and a bunch of stuff is going to get destroyed. And there's even an idea called the Kessler syndrome which means space gets so ruined with objects that we can't even watch anymore. I think that's a legit concern is going to get destroyed and there's even an idea called the Kessler syndrome which means space gets so ruined with objects that we can't even watch anymore. I think that's a legit concern, but usually overstated. So people are maybe familiar with the tragedy of the commons, which you know. Commons meaning in this case like a pasture where you put animals and there's a situation in which a particular person grazing their herd gets more money out than the destruction they're doing to the grazing. So there's always an incentive to keep grazing. I don't think it's destroyed because it wasn't priced properly. They'll be using it In space.

Zach Weinersmith: 48:25

You don't have a tragedy of the commons, you have a commons. Space is a commons. But it's not a tragedy of the commons, because everyone has skin in the game. If Elon Musk causes out-of-control, cascading destruction of satellites, he's going to lose hundreds of billions of dollars. Same with space agencies that have these satellites up. If the US suddenly loses its GPS system, that's disastrous. Everyone's really priced in. You can imagine a mania detonating nuclear weapons in space and that's a real threat. But I can. It can be overstated by analogizing it to like landfills on earth. So, like everything in her book, it's nuanced and and weird and complicated well, it also becomes a subject of international vulnerability, right?

Zach Weinersmith: 49:07

I mean, this becomes international warfare's subject it is, but it's very mutually assured destruction. So one thing, sure, uh. So it's like it's very easy to destroy a satellite if you're an advanced nation. Every big player today India, russia, the US, china, everyone has demonstrated what's called a capability, that is just say, to knock out a satellite. They've only done it on their own satellite, as a sort of saber rattling. Look what we can do.

Zach Weinersmith: 49:31

But normal satellites, if you field a satellite, it's not like it's armor-plated, right, like why would it be? And so, like I said, if some maniac wants to knock out a lot of Earth's satellites, they can. But I think the big thing to realize is space is just not like Earth. You can't target right. So if you blow up a nuclear weapon in some orbit, radiation and bits of stuff go everywhere in that orbit at high speed. So anything that is in that shell is in danger. That might include yourself, right. And then if it flings other stuff into other shells, it's a disaster. So it has to be someone who's really trying to end the world or doing something very bad. Anyway, it's not a good place to take.

Marcus Arredondo: 50:10

I'm going to switch gears and start to bring this in for a landing. I'm going to ask you a dad question. So, just because I know you and Marty, you two are extraordinarily achieved men, very accomplished, incredibly bright, very interested and, I think, resultingly very interesting people, what was it in the water? Was that nature or nurture? And how do you replicate that within your own children? Oh gosh, that's a tough one.

Zach Weinersmith: 50:40

um, so clearly you allude to discipline right, I mean scheduling your days, I think, is a pretty critical component to moving the ball forward yes, although I don't think my my parents taught me I have great parents, so best friends in the world, but um, discipline. So they were very you do what you care about and we'll support you. That was was essentially my parents' attitude, and they pushed the kind of stuff parents do like do your day at home, work maybe, learn an instrument, but I think they were unusually un-pushy. I think there was a sense that you ought to be ambitious, but not you ought to be a doctor or an engineer or whatever. And as a result, there are six of us, six siblings, and everybody's doing something very different. And I think that was probably part of it, but I don't know.

Zach Weinersmith: 51:23

I'm always scared with this stuff because, as you know, as a parent, every kid is different. You don't have a lot of choice over what. So, like I do have a sort of everybody's got a philosophy of parenting, but I think you ought to never get credit or blame within reason. Like you know, maybe if you're like a monstrous bear, you should get blamed, but like I really feel that having a kid is kind of like having a roommate you have a lot of responsibility over. Like this is someone you're meeting, not creating, and you know, because there's science on this.

Zach Weinersmith: 51:50

Like, people can be angry at me about this, but look, a lot of personality is baked in the moment the baby comes out, either from genetics or from conditions in utero. It's just it, and so you can look this up. There's a way scientists say this, which is heritability increases over time, which means if you look at what's called a GWAS, an estimated genetic score of something like IQ, it's moderately correlated. When they're in your household, it's going to get closer to what you would expect when they get older, which means they're going to become more like themselves. I'm going to go on a whole thing.

Marcus Arredondo: 52:22

I don't stop so, but if you believe that Super fascinating for the record. So you've got a little bit of runway here.

Zach Weinersmith: 52:27

So essentially, you know, if you accept that then your your goal is to kind of just be there for the kid and make sure you're not messing them up. Like if you really want a profound effect on your kid, you can like start them, but otherwise a lot of it's baked in and so to my mind you should worry a little less than you probably do. But so you know to think for me. So, like with my daughter, who's 10 now, she's very mathematically gifted in a way. I was not, and so I do nudge her along. But a big part of that for me is developing a sense of self-worth. So, as you gathered, I'm a kind of data nerd, so there's reasonably good data Parents obsess over. Well, I don't want to make it to X because they'll stop loving it intrinsic, they'll stop loving it.

Zach Weinersmith: 53:17

The pretty good data that gets called intrinsic motivation is actually loading on pure esteem and a sense of excellence in oneself, meaning if you're really good at basketball and a pretty girl says, gosh, you're good at basketball, you start doing more basketball and you might say I'm intrinsically motivated by basketball. But we're all social aims, we're all motivated by what around us you're doing. So I want it for my daughter and so far this seems to be marking we'll see check in with me six months from now to have a sense of herself as someone who's smart. There's this reasonably good data that girls around age 13 decide smart is, um, anti-feminine. I like like. Like boys won't like me if I'm too smart, and so I wanted to sort of get ahead of that and just say sorry, you're smart and you know it too bad. But that's about all I do. I push a little on stuff that I think will serve later sets of self.

Zach Weinersmith: 54:06

And other than that, I sure, with my little guy who's eight.

Zach Weinersmith: 54:12

So my other kid is special needs. He's autistic, he's nonverbal, he'll probably need care his whole life and so I just part of why I'm very comfortable saying parents don't deserve credit or blame is I have someone in this case where it's very clear that he came a certain way and that my job is to just do my best for him and I don't get to brag later about either of my kids. I don't get to take credit if they do poorly and about either of my kids I don't get to take credit if they do poorly. And that's been very liberating to feel that way. I think the data does back me up, but I also think it's like a good way to live. It's a good way to like not yell at your kid because they're not doing violent or whatever, because it really doesn't have a lot of bearing on long-term outcomes, especially if you're like talking like Oxford or whatever, talking about whether at 30, they're healthy, wealthy and happy the things all parents hopefully care about A lot of. It doesn't matter that.

Marcus Arredondo: 54:59

But I think you know at some point emulation plays a role right. I mean seeing you and Kelly behave in a certain way informs how they might consider practical applications within their day-to-day life.

Zach Weinersmith: 55:13

I hope at least you know, you know a kid I might, you can see like I, I like like that you could have a weird life. Uh, you could do like like. So both kelly and I are doing kind of off-beat career paths but to be honest, I'm even skeptical of that. I've just said I'm deeply skeptical that parents matter as much as we think we do. I I think it's it's it's it's it's. It's such a like it's already stressful enough to be a parent. But I think parents think everything they do for a kid is kind of a metaphor for what they'll be like when they're 25. And that's just so, it's just.

Zach Weinersmith: 55:51

I think that's like there's a certain sense of which, according to some of these theories, my mom did everything wrong. She really shielded us in a way, a lot like like my kid, she's very open about this. She's like you know, I didn't want you guys to learn anything bad ever happened anywhere. And you, you would think that would mean we all lived in chills in our adult lives. We don't. We all go to stuff, and I think just part of what's going on is it's it just doesn't matter that you can't make your kids be what you want. I mean you can bribe with them into you know mercilessly. I think we all know some kid was forced to be an engineer and it's like kind of miserable in the middle of it. But like you know, within reason you just don't have a lot of control and it's very freeing to accept that.

Marcus Arredondo: 56:28

Well, look, I really appreciate you being on. This was awesome. I'd love to have you back. You care to tease the audience and what you've got coming up next, sure.

Zach Weinersmith: 56:39

I'm in a weird career point where I have opportunities, which is a very bad thing to have, and so I can't say too much, but I'm Well. I wrote a kid's book that was weirdly popular, called Beowulf. It's based on Beowulf the mafia of librarians really pushed it and it's done quite well. So I'm working on a sequel which has just been absolutely brutal, so we did talk about which is writing poetry, which is my other universe now. And then I'm working on a more series, like it's comedy book, but which I can't say too much about. But that's the brutal thing I was editing this morning. That's just absolutely killing me. But I guess I expect a book a year for a very long time. And then we're working on a graphic novel project with computer science that will come out someday. So we'll see.

Marcus Arredondo: 57:27

That's super exciting. Be sure to include those in the show notes and if people want to get a hold of you, follow you. What's the best way to track that?

Zach Weinersmith: 57:38

That's hard to know these days, but I guess just go to sbc-comicscom.

Marcus Arredondo: 57:41

uh, and I'm on the usual social media and I'm the only person other than my wife, named wiener spitz, but I get.

Zach Weinersmith: 57:47

Uh, I've really used to perfect um any closing thoughts.

Marcus Arredondo: 57:51

Oh god, uh, no, I'm out of thoughts. I've used them all. Thank you, zach, it was awesome seeing you appreciate it nice seeing you too.