Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 205 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Manu Sadia.

He's a long-time Star Trek fan who studied history of science and economic history in Paris

and Chicago, and we'll be speaking with him today about his new book

Trek economics about the economics of the Star Trek universe. The book has been featured in

the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

And now here's our interview with Manu Sadia.

All right, so we're here with Manu Sadia.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Dave.

OK, so first of all, just tell us about how you got interested in Star Trek.

Oh, it goes way back as a little kid.

I grew up in France and we didn't have Star Trek on TV and I didn't have TV anyways.

But so when I was like five my I really wanted to go see Star Wars because that's when it came out and my parents were like no no no

But then you know three years later they let me go see

Star Trek the motion picture and so that's how I started my life with Star Trek, when I was 8.

And my parents were very happy because there was no war like in Star Wars so

They thought it was educational on some level and that getting me, you know

Reading a lot of science fiction as a result because that's really the only

thing I could do to prolong the experience and to you know continue to live in the future

a little bit as a kid so that got me started on reading Asimov and Heinlein and all the sort of classics of science fiction. I was a very nardy kid. I realized. And of course it didn't get better because you know I was a nerdy

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