Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs.

Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable

themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there.

Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scaleups, online,

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.

I don't know if you guys do this in maths class over there. Thank you. I appreciate that very much.

I didn't want you to be confused. What's good?

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

My name is Mike Schubert.

I'm the titular Newst Olympian.

I'm a 32-year-old man who never read the Percy Jackson books as a kid.

I read them as an adult because I was determining if it was a book series that society has been sleeping on. I said yes. Now I'm seeing if society has also been sleeping on the Heroes of Olympus books, which would be uncomfortable. Those books are very long. But we are here for another episode to continue our coverage. And I am not on this journey alone. I'm joined by a very special guest, someone who has been a long time coming on this podcast and I'm very excited to have them on. You might know them from the work that we've done together on 20 to Midday or her incredible voiceover work in wonderful podcasts such as wooden overcoats or the new sensation sweeping the internet nations, tiny angry witch. It's Bethair. Beth, how's it going? Mike, hi. I'm really good. Thank you. I'm so excited

to be here at last. I'm really looking forward to it. I am so stoked as well. I wanted to have you on it ever since I did the Teno show in London when I didn't even know that you were reading the books and then you were in attendance and it was a lovely fun time and we had a good time at the show and good time hanging afterwards and then hanging out the next day and i'm glad that we can

finally make this happen. The schedules have aligned, the stars have aligned and you're here to break down the son of Neptune. I'm so stoked. What do you tell everyone your history with the Percy Jackson books and then also the Heroes of Olympus books before we get into these two chapters? Yeah, absolutely. So I never read the Percy Jackson books as a kid. I imagine that. I know, right? I was really into fantasy. I read a lot of Tolkien books, a lot of Lord of Rings type stuff, and Philip Pullman books. But I completely missed these, I think partly going to university at the wrong time. But they were on my radar. I was really aware of them. And then

through meeting you, I was like, brilliant. I have an excuse to actually read these for the first time. So I started reading the first series last year or maybe the year before. Not sure anymore, but it feels a bit like last year, maybe it was the year before. And I had such a great time listening to TNO. Then I thought, oh, so am I going to commit to reading these books the rest of time so I can keep up the podcast. And I absolutely am. I'm very happy about that. I'm having a great time doing that. Amazing. Yeah, I think we did this fun thing when we started working together on 22 midnight, the D&D stream that we do, that you started listening to T&O and I started listening to Winneovercoast and I was like, oh my gosh, this is great.

So I'm very excited to cover these.

There's some chunky chapters. So I think we should just get right into these two Percy chapters. Fourcent. Chapter 13 is called Percy, and we will, of course, retitle it by the end for a new fun name. but where we last left our heroes, Frank Zhang just got claimed by Mars as his son,

which is wild and dramatic and does not make Percy happy. Are you not happy about that? I thought it was very cool. I feel like Frank is not happy about it. Correct. I think that's super sweet. No,

it's really fun. It's really fun. I did not see it coming. Did you see it coming? I did see it coming. It was funny because it started as just like a process of elimination type guess of just like, well, he needs to have a God as a dad. And there's only a certain few that can work, and there's only a certain few that we actually haven't really seen a child of. So I kind of saw it coming, but not necessarily in that way.

And I'm very excited about how it's going to develop.

That's very exciting.

...