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in person and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Old Wolfgang would roll in his grave. What's a podcast? So it's like the radio? Also with the radio. Oh, so with the radio. What's good?

Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of The Newest Olympian.

My name is Mike Schumer.

I am the titular newest Olympian.

I never read the Percy Jackson books as a kid, but I'm doing it now as a quest to determine

if this is the YA series we should have been reading all along. I am not alone in this quest, though.

I am joined by a very special guest, and I'm joined in person. This is the first completely

in-person podcast recording that I've done since January of 2020, it's the best man in my wedding,

Johnny Frolikstein. Johnny, how's it going? It's going great. I didn't realize that I was the first

in-person since pre-pandemic. That's wild to me. I think the only time in person besides this was

I did a meddling adults episode with my parents, but this is the only time I've had someone in

the studio with me recording an episode of something. Well, and saying it was with your parents is sort of like saying, oh yeah, I've cooked for people before and it says you've cooked for your parents. So that doesn't even count either. Look, it was a real episode of meddling adults that went out on the feet and everything. But we are here to discuss two chapters of the Lightning Thief. We're discussing chapters 12 and

13. The reason being that you called dibs on 13 and you are not telling me why, you're just

telling me that it is a silly reason that I'm going to laugh at you for. For context right now,

I've only read chapter 12, but then we're going to stop recording, read, and then record for

chapter 13. So it's as fresh as possible. Yeah, it's a very silly reason that I want Chapter 13. But yeah, so I was certainly a bigger Harry Potter fan growing up than I was, a Percy Jackson fan. I read four of the books. And then when I was, like, oh, I'm never going to read children's books again. I just read the plot summary for the fifth one. So that's my knowledge of the series, but joining you and getting into it and now rereading it along with you, my eyes are being opened to the, all of the great things in this series, because it is so much fun and so much more fun than that other one, in my opinion. I'm having a blast with this. I know it's early going, but I also am enjoying

Percy Jackson more than I was enjoying early Harry Potter. And it could be just because I'm in a different place. I know this is my full-time job now. The books, I think, are a little more my style. I might be just in a happier place in my life, or maybe I'm used to YA novels now. But I feel like I am enjoying this more.

I'm certainly less frustrated with Percy,

...