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

And it was becoming clear that very few of our parts were working. matched

No bullet worked in a gun across the ocean. matched

And so what you... matched

What we had to do is we had to have these series of meetings with the British government that was like, we need to figure this out because the inefficiency of having things fixed in the field was costing people lives. matched

Daniel Emerwar, who I talked to, you know, describes these series of meetings where the British Empire, very unused to taking orders from anybody, and especially not these upstart Americans. matched

They got used to it eventually. matched

And, you know, they begin to go, well, we'll hear you out. matched

And there's a meeting about that. matched

And then there's another set of meetings which is like, OK, we're just capitulating completely because the because the UK had a had a 55 degree screw angle. matched

And the insidious thing about a screw is that. matched

You cannot look at it and say, that's 55 degrees versus this is 60 degrees. matched

You have to, like, you only figure that out when you put it in and it doesn't quite work. matched

Once you get the British Empire and all the sort of associated territories and the U.S. matched

on one standard, then everyone else falls in line. matched

From there, it just locks in and we were just in the lead of that. matched

But we were in the lead of that because we had people like Herbert Hoover deciding that stuff for us, you know, like a generation earlier. matched

And then, you know, one of the things about having that type of power and our ascendancy in the 20th century is like, matched

not only do we get to impose our standards on others, we get to decide to not take part of standards that we don't like, which is like the metric system, which for some reason, I don't know why, but we've just, it doesn't feel good in our gut. matched

I don't even know why. matched

The metric system doesn't feel good in American guts. matched

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