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Talk about, yeah, because Jason's always thinking about the Roman Empire.

Uh-huh, ah, of course.

Gosh, again, prophetic.

Prophetic.

Yeah. Of course. Gosh, again. Prophian. My name is Mike Schuber. I'm the titular Newst Olympian. I am a 32-year-old man who never read the Percy Jackson books as a kid. I read them as an adult because I was on a quest to determine if it was a book series that society had been sleeping on. I said yes. And now I'm seeing if that's the case for the Heroes of Olympus series. And I am on this quest joined by a special guest because I'm never on this quest alone. I am joined by someone who you've heard on this podcast. And you may have heard on their podcast as they are the co-host of seaweed brain. It's Erica Ito. Erica, how's it going?

Hi, Mike. I'm so happy to be here. It's been a hot second since I've been on the newest Olympian. And it's been a long, many second since I've read the Lost Hero. So this was fun to revisit these chapters. Fantastic. Yeah. Let's get right into it. What's your history with the Heroes of Olympus Books? Did you read them exactly as they came out? What's the story?

Oh, yeah. I was in my era when the Heroes of Olympus books are coming out. I have all of them hardcover, you know, original, gorgeous jacket sleeves designed by John Rocco. They're my faves. This is the series that, like Carter famously, like, deeply spoiled the end of this for me because we were, like,

reading them. I want to say it was like our freshman year of high school. And Carter, like,

ran into the library, you know, and I was like, oh my God, this thing happened. And I was like, why would you do that? Yeah. Yeah. Why would you do that to me? But this was like definitely my peak of my childhood fandom, I would say, because I was reading along in real time. All of the things that

were happening in the cliffhangers I was actively participating in. And I remember opening up the lost

hero as a kid and being like, who the F is Jason. I had that moment and I was like, this isn't it.

And I remember sitting in my grandma's house having like family dinner and explaining to my whole family like

you don't get it percy isn't here anymore this is a paradigm shift i don't know how to adequately

express to you that every my world is changing i famously don't love the lost hero i think it's probably

my least favorite book out of like all 10 of the first two series wow Wow. Wow. Okay. But that's not because it's bad. That's just because I think the other books are so excellent. Yeah. It's clear where this one is lacking in certain points for me. We can get into that with the characters. But yeah, we got Piper, Jason, Leo, Festus. Yeah, Festus. Yes. I don't know the full seven. We're on spoiler monitoring situation. I am on high alert. But yeah, so I know those folks. Yeah, we'll see how our old pal Festus is doing when we get into these chapters. We also, when Carter and I got to the point of covering the Heroes of Olympus, we were like, oh, neither of us really liked the lost hero at all. And there was no Persebeth in it, right? So that being the mission of our podcast at the time, especially, we were like, what are we going to do with this? So we just did, we only did three episodes for the entire book. We just did one focusing on like character and theme for each episode. So this was really,

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