Hello and welcome to the Nauticast podcast, the podcast that usually goes through a song of ice and fire one chapter a week, but not here.

I'm your host, Emmett, better known as Poor Quentin. My co-host, Jeff, better known as Brendan Beefish, is taking a couple months off the podcast for work.

Soon as he's back, which we expect to be late July, early August,

we'll be resuming the regular weekly podcast with a storm of swords.

Until then, I'll be putting out weekly episodes with rotating guest hosts on a variety of topics,

as well as audio and text posts of my own.

And I'm very happy to welcome my guests for this episode, Dr. Cavita Mudan-Fin.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you for having me. So we're going to be talking a little bit about historical narrators and

the unreliability therein. But before we get into that, I just wanted to ask you something. I've been

asking a lot of my guests on the podcast lately. And how did you get into a Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones?

Oh my God. For this, we have to go back to the Dark Ages. I have been, I've been obsessed with the Wars of the Roses since I was 13 years old. I happened to find a fantastic historical novel by the late great Sharon K. Penman.

And after a couple of years when I was in college, I happened to run into someone at a party

who told me about this book trilogy that was, quote, The Wars of the Roses except with dragons.

That sold me just very, very quickly.

I went out and I bought a Game of Thrones.

Took me about two tries to get in,

but as soon as I got to the end of Brand 2,

I was completely hooked.

Of course.

This was 2002,

so I read a Game of Thrones,

...