Roman Mars

speaker

157 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Roman Mars’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · The Global Story - The soft power superpower, with Roman Mars · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

People think in stories, and we have this ability to export our story, and a lot of people have bought it. matched

I mean, throughout the 20th century, matched

We just figured out something in the United States that we didn't have to put, you know, governors and colonies and put down insurrections and armies that we could use our global manufacturing power in particular to control the earth in these ways that were way more effective. matched

It's not free of coercion. matched

It's not free of power, but it is so effective. matched

Well, it is really pervasive. matched

And one of the things that we did was we have a kind of manufacturing might. matched

that is a consequence of planning, but also just the luck of history. matched

Like World War II destroyed a lot of the manufacturing power of a lot of the world. matched

We were mostly free of having that on our shores. matched

And so our factories could keep running and people needed us. matched

And we became the sort of quartermaster for the world in terms of providing all of the different bits and pieces of, you know, Jeeps and tanks and things like that. matched

And through that, we ended up enforcing our will of the sort of global standards of things. matched

And one of the stories that we do on A History of the United States in 100 Objects is about the 60-degree angle screw, which is the angle of threading on a screw, which was the U.S. matched

standard that was developed. matched

And it was not the global standard. matched

But we told everyone in the world, essentially, like, if you want our Jeeps, you have to adopt our standard. matched

And therefore, it really just changed the nature of our relationship with the world. matched

That's what we excel in. matched

I want to take these mundane objects and make you care about them and think about the world differently because of it. matched

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