Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Andy Weir Explains the Real Science of Project Hail Mary

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 In this episode of The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast, Brian Keating sits down with Andy Weir, the bestselling author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, to explore the real science behind one of the most ambitious science fiction stories ever written. With the upcoming film adaptation of Project Hail Mary generating excitement among fans, we dig into the physics, astrophysics, and speculative biology that make the story so compelling. Could the mysterious energy source known as astrophage actually exist? What does real astrophysics say about interstellar travel, relativistic journeys, and humanity’s chances of reaching nearby star systems? Andy Weir explains how he builds scientifically grounded worlds while still telling gripping stories, and Brian breaks down which elements of the novel are plausible according to modern physics. The conversation also explores the process of writing hard science fiction, how scientific accuracy shapes storytelling, and why readers and scientists alike have embraced Project Hail Mary as one of the most scientifically informed sci-fi novels of the last decade. Along the way, Brian and Andy discuss the challenges of adapting such a technically rich story into a major Hollywood film and what audiences might expect when the movie arrives. If you enjoy deep conversations about physics, astronomy, science fiction, and the boundary between imagination and reality, this episode will give you a fascinating look at how real science inspires great storytelling. - Key Takeaways: 00:00 Andy Weir Discusses 'Project Hail Mary' 10:44 "Balancing Science and Creativity" 16:03 "Global Unity Against Common Threats" 18:56 Amateurs Driving Innovation 25:35 Fermi Paradox: Light Speed Limit 29:30 "Building a Shared Language" 35:32 "5,000 Words Weekly Writing System" 46:58 UCSD Physics Experience Reflection 51:23 "Colleges Should Be Trade Schools" 57:08 Billion-Year Human Legacy Capsule - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #andyweir #projecthailmary #themartian #sciencefiction #hardsciencefiction #scifibooks #spacescience Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. From the brilliant mind that brought you the Martian. In the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option. I'm going to have to science the shit out of this. And the smash follow-up hit Artemis. What comes a spectacular new work of fiction can only be described as his best work ever. Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation and survival to rival the Martian in Artemis.

A gripping tale of survival facing humanity, our galaxy. gripped in the throes of battle with an invisible interstellar enemy ravaging our sun our earth hangs in the balance and only one man awakening from a coma

in the midst of interstellar space is charged with a suicide mission save earth save humanity sacrifice himself and do it all and his own wits. A propulsive adventures, a yarn spun the way only Weir can do. Once again proving Andy Weir is a singular talent. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Today's very special guest, it's Andy Weir joining us from a location, I assume, up North in California, Andy? Yeah, that's right. And hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm in Saratoga, California, which is kind of near San Jose. It's in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's a pleasure to welcome you back. We met a couple times when you were back. I can't say it's your alma mater, right? There must be some word for when you didn't graduate, but, you know, I think you, you've got okay, even though you didn't graduate. I do want to talk about your relationship to UCSD and stuff like that, later. But I want to introduce you, Andy Weir, author of many, many wonderful works of art and science fiction, including Artemis, including The Martian, the Egg. And this book, Project Hail

Mary, which I'll have my producer hold up on the screen. I listened to it. I read it in a digital advanced copy form. And it's a book about a teacher who turns into an astronaut and then wakes up on a spaceship with amnesia and realizes up to him to save the world from an algae that's eating the sun. Now, Andy, I don't want to give away a spoiler, but it's almost impossible not to, so I'm just going to say, if you don't want the spoiler, just plug your ears for one second, but Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's time you knew. And Leah is the sister of Luke. I'm so sorry to give it away, but it's, It's actually, you know, I love this book.

I think it's your best book. I know you're probably, you know, tired of hearing it, but, but you write. I'm tired of hearing that. But the thing that really I love about this book, I've listened to all, you know, all three of your most famous books, the Martian, Artemis, and this book. I think the spoiler grace period is at least a year. So people, you know, they haven't listened to the, to the, Red Artemis, or the Martian, too bad for you guys.

because we might spoil those books really thoroughly. But I love listening to the books. So the last, before this one, I listened to this one. This is phenomenal. And actually, I think this one, you almost have to listen to it. So even if you buy it, please buy the audio copy too. Yes, buy both kinds. I appreciate that.

And the hard copy. And the hard copy. And then also just mail me some cash. VEMO 2. Andy Weir. Exactly. So what was the process like of the audiobook this time. I'll just say that there's

an incredible amount of audio engineering. And I want to talk to you about that, about communication, because that plays a huge role in this book. Not only the science, but also linguistics plays a huge role in it. I've had a Stephen Wolfram, who played a big role in Arrival,

and the linguistics behind that. How hard and challenging was it to record the audiobook this time? You didn't read it, but you were deeply involved in it. Yeah, I was involved in audible. They went through a whole bunch of clever stuff, figure it out. It's narrated by the incredibly talented Ray Porter, who is, of course, just awesome, top-tier audiobook narrator there. And yeah, they came up with, you know,

after going back and forth and trying out a few things, they came up with what I think is a pretty good way of dealing with that challenge that the story presents in the audio retelling. And I think they did a great job in how they approached it. I'm trying not to get too Spoilory. I mean, I know that we're, I mean, you're probably going to warn your listeners. Oh, okay, here there be spoilers. But there's kind of, I would say, two layers of spoiler in this book. There's the normal spoilers that, okay, well, you're going to learn about this stuff in the first couple of chapters anyway. And then there's like an, you know, epic spoiler that happens about 120 pages into the book that you probably don't want to have ruined for you. Yeah, exactly. The main character, of course, in this book is a, teacher. And the first place I want to start off, after moving from the, from the very multi-talented narration of the audiobook, which narrates not only, you know, there are female characters, male characters. Of course, your previous book, Artemis was narrated by Rosario Dawson, which is just delightful. I've had a run of really good narrators. Like, I've had,

R.C. Bray was the original Martian narrator. And then it got re-recorded with Will Whitten. as the narrator. And that was just because the rights to the to the Bray recording expired. And so Audible needed to make a new recording. Then, of course, Rosario Dawson narrated Artemis. And then, you know, Ray reporter for this. So it's awesome. I'm going to ask for better narrators.

The main character is an astronaut Grace, who becomes an underemptuble. unwitting and a hero in the story as an astronaut, as you'll find out. And he has amnesia. I don't think that's too much of a spoiler. That comes in very early in the book. That's like right away. That's right. I don't want to spoil page one, but there you go. I feel like that one's okay. I feel like, you know, there's this canard that those who, you know, who can do do, and those who can't do teach. And here I am a college professor at your Do you ever have a teacher, you know, and what you did and that taught you what you do?

Or do you feel like you're pretty much self-made and a lot of what you become successful have? Well, I mean, I guess I'm self-taught on most of the science stuff just because it's something that's always been interesting to me. But I certainly had teachers, especially in high school, that were really influential and kind of fostering my interest of that. So I'll make a special shout out to Mr. Fong from Livermore High School, His name is Nelson Fong and Mrs. Cox and Mr. Nicola, who was actually my history teacher,

but he just made it really interesting. Yeah, I think the depth of scholasticism here in the book, you know, I was actually just teaching my cosmology, upper division cosmology class, and I was telling them, you know, again, I have struggle, you know, coming up with the name for what you are and how you relate to this fine university besides epic donor. and I want to thank you for the Weir airport. We needed that. Yes, the Weir airport, yeah.

Spaceport, sorry, it's space port. Oh, sure. We'll take that, yeah. But it was really ripped from a lot of modern headlines. And we're talking about things today in my cosmology class that you can measure the distance to an object using many different ways. You can measure it using a ruler. You can measure it using the angular diameter that it's uptends.

And you can measure it using the luminance that it emits, if it's emitting, luminance and the inverse square law. And of course, all these, you know, our tools are using cosmology. But I think what I love about your books, including the Martian, which I made, you know, required reading for my students, my graduate students when they go down to Chile in the Otacama Desert at 17,000 feet, which makes a tiny appearance in this book, by the way. Yeah, yeah, the Otacama Observatory. Yeah. That's right. That's right. And I want to invite you, by the way, I want to invite you to the Simon's Observatory at 17,200 feet in the Otacama Desert.

Probably not doing that, but okay. It seems a little bit middle of nowhere-ish for my tastes. Well, it's one of the places NASA does go to simulate the Martian environment. But anyway, the resourcefulness of the characters. And I know that you're a tinkerer, you reputed to have, still have all of your digits, even though you have a circular saw that you use to make different objects in your home workshop. I think there's some kind of 3D printer maybe behind you. I don't know.

That's a laser cutter, but yeah. Okay, so still, that's even more impressive if you have all your eyeballs. Yeah, you have your eyes balls and your fingers. I have a rule in my lab. I have a sign that says, don't look into the laser with your remaining. Meant eye, yeah. So was this always natural to you? Were you exposed to not to lasers, but were you exposed to like curiosity, tinkering spirit,

building clocks, building stuff? Were you exposed to that by these mentors that you just gave shoutouts to or did it come naturally to you? That came naturally to me. I've just always had an interest in that sort of, you know, I really like mechanical systems, which is funny because I don't really write about them. But yeah, yeah, just the way things work has always been really fascinating to me. And so thinking about the book, you know, I heard an interview with my friend, Matt Kaplan,

who's a member of the Planetary Society, the Planetary Radio. He's actually coming to interview me next week here at UCSD. He's a friend. And he was saying, you know, that it's what's remarkable about you is that you have this confidence, you have this thorough, you know, research ability, which would make a great graduate student or, you know, research scientist. But you also are not afraid to just say, you know, F it, I'm just going to make stuff up and have neutrinos store, you know, energy. How do you balance the like the hard science where you'll get the exact? Because I look these things up, Andy, you know, I look up that the wavelength, and I actually have these memorized, you know,

What wavelength lines of the infrared does CO2 absorb at? This is pertinent to the book. That's not a spoiler, right? There's two of them. You talk about it was in the Petrova line, which it doesn't exist. But anyway, but then the intrino story, how do you balance that as a hard science fiction author? How do you balance the realism with the, like, just sometimes I'm going to say F it and just make it up? Well, I mean, usually I have to make something up.

Usually I have to do something, but I want it to be as inobtrusive as possible. I want it to be, I don't want to, you know, just give a ship a warp drive or anything like that. I want to minimize the violations to physics that I have to do. In the case of Project Almery, it's like you have to go all the way down to the quantum level, literally, before you find where I was hand-waving. And actually, you can use neutrinos to store mass. The problem is you can't store neutrinos. And so that's the part that I made up.

You could use neutrinos. Neutrinos really are their own antiparticle. If you do manage to get two neutrinos to whack into each other, then they would create two photons in this infrared band of wavelength. Right, yeah. Of course, you know, neutrinos were proposed. They were almost in the 1930s, Wolfgang Powell, we proposed them. And then for a string of years, there were Nobel Prizes whenever these new particles would be awarded. And then famous Isidore Rabbi said, I proposed that a Nobel Prize goes to the man who does not discover a new particle.

article this year. Yeah. Yeah. There's too many of them. So when we're looking at, yeah, so there has to be some level of plausibility, but is there ever, you know, something that we're thinking in the back of your mind, you know, like, I might be going too far or do you feel like you've earned enough credibility with just your sheer, dogged, you know, research ability that it doesn't matter, basically? Well, I mean, I hope I haven't gone too far.

But yeah, I always try to keep it pretty minimal in terms of invasiveness, you know, to physics. So I never really think I've gone too far because I kind of, if anything, I spend too much time and effort going further down the rabbit hole than I need to, where I could have just hand waved much earlier and nobody would have objected, you know. You know, this book, as I said in the very beginning, the only minimal kind of intro to it that I can, you know, basically there's some form of life that, you know, is afflicting the sun and it's causing massive destruction. Now, this not only taps into our global pandemic that we're experiencing, it has resonance, no pun intended, with global warming, et cetera. Were all these things, you know, kind of going through your mind? I mean, when did you start this project?

Was it pre-COVID-19 on the horizon? How was it with regard to the pandemic? And certainly global warming has been around for a long time, right? Right. So I finished the entire book. before COVID-19 struck. So any correlation between the book and the pandemic is pure coincidence. So, you know, there are some things that seem to be parallels,

but I'd finish the whole thing before the pandemic. So there's nothing like that intentional. As for global warming or climate change, I never have any sort of meaning or message or moral in my stories. In this case, it's not climate change. It's not like man-made climate change. it's not CO2 emissions. It's literally an alien algae growing on the surface of the sun

that is now absorbing enough of the sun's luminance that Earth itself is in danger because it just is not getting enough energy from the sun. And if anything, there's even just a weird thing in the book that the global warming is now what they want to have happen. Because the Earth is not getting enough energy, so we want to retain the energy. that we are getting, make it stay a little longer.

And so they're deliberately doing things to increase global warming. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Right. And when you look through the scientific method plays a huge role in the book. And many of the heroes in the book are scientists and even, you know, sort of the military industrial complex is playing a role because you have to mobilize, you know, kind of planetary resources to do that. to what level suspension of disbelief would come in there?

Do you feel like such a thing could be mobilized? Do you feel like we saw that in COVID-19 at all? Do you come out of COVID-19 thinking that the scenario to outline in Project Hair Mary is more plausible or less plausible after what we've seen in the last 16 months? I would say more plausible because it kind of validates my beliefs that we can pretty much come together pretty significantly as a species to like fight a common enemy.

And yeah, I mean, of course, you know, it's a little bit different because in Project Hail Mary, it's a global systemic issue. It's like everybody dies if we don't solve this, right? You can't, there's nothing any one country can do to protect just its citizens, right? And that's not the case with COVID. Each country can make its own rules and implement its own strategies for trying to, slow or stop the spread or, you know, whatever else. So it's a little different. But I do see an awful lot of cooperation just in the world in general.

Yeah, so I mean, obviously we weren't perfect about it. We, humanity, we weren't perfect about it. And there was some sloppiness there. But I don't know. I feel like we're turning a corner on COVID. The U.S. is now making so much vaccine that we're now starting to send it to other countries. So in this book, I find that there's either something hilarious, some juicy science nerd nugget on every page, even the table of contents. You know, it brought me to tears. That library donation. I was weeping, Andy. That was. And actually, the people's fantastic. The ISBN is just hilarious.

Yeah, that was, I played the lottery, that number that was. Oh, there we go. No, that. Tell me, I mean, it's not a spoiler, but you dedicated to John Paul, George, and Ringo. Why is that? I'm just a big Beatles fan, and there's a lot of, like, little Beatles references in the book, so I thought it was... Oh, yes, yes, there were Stoge's references as well. So that's delightful, but I love, personally, whenever I get a shout out, you know, it's like, and he's talking to me. He knows me, he understands me. He knows that I was an amateur astronomer, an amateur astronomer.

and amateur astronomers play a role in this book. And I think it's remarkable. I talked about this name drop alert, name drop alert. I talked to Neil deGrasse Tyson about a month ago. And he was saying astronomy is one of the few fields where amateurs play a significant role, where amateurs are actually doing useful science. They're doing variable star research. They're doing binary star research.

In your book, they're saving the universe. I find with you, amateur writers. You weren't a professional writer. You went from amateur or two. Do you see commonality between, are there other fields of amateur science or amateur engineering that seem to convey a certain type of skill set that's transferable to writing

or some other field? I mean, I think a lot of amateur software engineering can quickly turn into a profession and a lot of really good software comes out of people just doing it for the hell of it, not working for a company or anything. What else? is there that's really good.

In some of the newer things like 3D printing and stuff, professional companies are getting very good at it, but it was the amateurs with their little home kits that kind of worked the kinks out of the system, figure out how those things worked. That's cool. Yeah, so there's a lot of things where, you know, you can be a quote-unquote amateur

and really have an effect on the field. Also, anything related to art or entertainment, I would say, because you can just be, you know, good at this stuff. you could be like just a really good artist and you like make a good sculpture or a painting or something and you could start a trend in the art world and there you're an amateur who just changed to the field yeah and this uh youtube economy you know my i've become a creator and my uh you know my subscriber really appreciates it well uh hi hi brian's mom how you doing she's my toughest critic you know They say don't read the comments, and I don't.

Whenever she leaves a comment, I do not read it. Converse of this, you know, of the amateur community is now prominent, and it's kind of adjacent to your field and my field in some sense. And that's ufology. You know, there's tons of ufologists out there nowadays, and there's a big data dump coming in just about three weeks from the time of release of this. The Pentagon is going to release all this data. You must get harassed by, you know, tons and tons of media requests or what happens.

you asked about it. Do you think that there's almost the problem of too much data or garbage in, garbage out danger, or do you think it's good and healthy that so many amateur UFOologists are out there? Well, I mean, I don't believe that we've ever been visited by any aliens, so let's be clear. But, I mean, if people want, anything that people do and take seriously as a science expands human knowledge, even if it's just to say, like, yeah, I've confirmed that that thing wasn't a UFO, it was an airplane, or that thing wasn't a UFO, it was a reflection off the camera lens, and so on. So there's, you know, negative results are just as good as positive results in terms of advancing humankind. However, I do feel like UFOologists, like many kind of, I don't want to be

insulting, but pseudosciences, tend to not really follow the scientific method very well, and they tend to really start with a conclusion and then really try hard to work backwards to justify it. And so you'll almost always find some sort of leap of logic or some sort of gap in the proof that just, you know, you'd never get away with that in a scientific paper, right? Yeah, right. Yeah. And that's one of the contexts that, you know, I was hoping we turned to next. And you actually spoke recently. We saw each other recently. You spoke at the SETI Institute virtually and I'm one of their, you know, minor contributors. I haven't reached the weir level of The Weirr Airport at the City Institute, right.

The Jill Carter helipad. Yes. But I gave a talk there a couple of years back, and I said, you know, if one of my students handed in the Drake equation, I would fail her or him because it's never presented with error bars. You know, it's like, if you handed an equation or a plot, and it's funny because it's like, here's this equation and it's got 100% uncertainty. If you estimate something, it could be zero, it could be an infant, or 10,000 alien. And so it shouldn't be so surprising. But one thing I love about this book, you could easily make a version of the Drake equation where for each of the input values, you have to specify error ranges.

And then you can derive the error bars. Yeah. So I do that at my SETI Institute talk. Maybe I'll put a link here somewhere over there in the video. And I do that. And I say, here's an example. Because one of the solutions to the Fermi paradox is that, just as you and I go, to the zoo, I take my kids to the zoo, I don't let them bang on the gorilla cage and say,

like in other words, the aliens might not want to disturb us, right? So they might be here, but they don't disturb us. So we don't know that they're here because we don't, they're not observable because they cloak themselves for some reason. And so I did an estimation. I said, I'm from San Diego. You used to live here. We have the world famous San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park. And if you remember, we had this sculpture here on campus with this netting that's about 17 feet tall. and I always say that's the catch escape giraffes in the San Diego Zoo. Well, we always called it the koala catchers when I was there. I always give it as a quiz for the visiting string theorists that come here.

What is that thing here? But anyway, so I gave an example in my SETI Institute. I said, like, how many people are at the San Diego Zoo right now? And you can go through the math. And if you don't give an error bar, it could be zero or it could be 8,000. And it's actually close to about 8,000. But yeah, so I think you're right. if you can do something that expands human knowledge, that it reduces the Bayesian confidence interval, it tightens it up.

And that's a good, that's a service. And one thing I love about your book and all your books is that you think kind of like an alien. Like, in other words, you're going to come in. Thank you, fellow human. I know that you are speaking in just for I am a human like you. I love metabolizing protocol, mitochondrial, crept cycle violation. I love breathing oxygen. We, too, exchanged long protein strands to communicate.

So one thing I've thought about and has been in the astronomical community is where should we look? So one of my colleagues upstairs, Professor Shelley Wright, she studies optical setting. And one thing in the book that you make quite prominent use of is that these algae, you know, have a signature. and that perhaps other civilizations might also know about that signature. Do you think we've been going about SETI the wrong way? In other words, should we look for extraterrestrials using some kind of universal signature that we are aware of? I mean, or are we, you know, should we look as broadly as possible? I mean, well, I mean, I'm hardly qualified to comment on that.

And much smarter people than me have already worked all those questions through at SETI. But don't they kind of do that with a hydrogen line? Yeah, there's a 21 centimeter line, but of course, that's a radio line, and it's, you know, not as powerful, perhaps as an optical line or, you know, something like that. Or as the Petrova line, perhaps. Yes, well, yeah. But, yeah, by the way, just calling back to earlier in the discussion, my answer to the Fermi paradox is not the cloaking devices or anything like that. My answer is, I believe there is probably, you know, just looking at the Drake equation, there's probably intelligent life out there. But I also believe we will never be able to go faster than light, nor transmit information faster than light.

So I think that if it turns out that the nearest intelligent life form is 1,000 light years away, like if they're looking at us with a super advanced telescope right now, they're seeing like the way things were in the year, you know, 1021. And if we said high right now, it would take 2,000 years to get a response, you know. So I'm just, I just, that my answer to the Fermi paradox is the inviolability of the speed of light. Yeah. Yeah, that is certainly not only a good idea, as Einstein said, but the law. But the law, yeah. So, yeah, maybe while we're still on that topic of aliens, I know that's not really a focus of the book.

in a large scheme of things. Let me just say, have you thought about these, you know, kind of epic battles between, you know, the Stephen Hawkins and the Elon Musk's of the world in terms of like the great filter? And, you know, should we respond if we get a message, you know, tomorrow? Just because they won't know about us, you know, it doesn't mean that there isn't a beam of light coming towards us right now

with some information. Should we respond or, as Hawking said, you know, that would be like ringing the dinner bell saying, I'm ready for, I'm ready for you now. for dinner. I have no idea how to answer that because it's all just wild speculation. But I would think if, I mean, I would want to answer. So we talked a little bit about some of the connections in the book between, or rather in your past, between your upbringing, et cetera.

I think I read some of your father was a particle physicist. Is that right? Yeah. Well, I mean, And your mom is... My mom was an engineer. I say particle physicist generally because it's easier than explaining the truth, which is he was a linear accelerator physicist. So he worked with electrons a lot. But, I mean, he didn't do stuff with like, you know, neutrinos or muons or anything like that. But yeah, that's what he did.

And he's not dead, by the way. He's just retired. That's why I say past tense on he was. Yeah. I presume. What's that? Was that slack, I presume? up in the Bay Area? No, it wasn't at Slack. It was an ATA, which was a program run through

Lawrence Livmore. Oh, really? Oh, wow. Very interesting. Okay. So I'm going to talk about language. I've had on, as I said, Stephen Wolfe from and also Noam Chomsky. And both of those gentlemen, we talked a lot about alien communication and how one would communicate with an alien. Of course, in a rival, there's an alien species that comes to Earth. And, and, and, and, and, actually communicates directly through the spaceship with Amy Adams' character and the not wonderful novel by Ted Chang. And then of course, Noam Chomsky has thought a lot about communication, but always there's a gestural aspect to it. And in fact, as you probably know, Noam thinks that there is basically a component of language communication that is inherently kind of physiosomatic or something like that, that you basically need some way of communicating using your hands or some way.

What do you think about communication? How would you communicate with an alien species? If you just got a beam of Morse code, could you communicate with an alien species, what do you think? Or how would you crack that particular nut? Or how do you resolve such things? Well, any communication you have, you would have to send something that hopefully they would be able to identify as a key on what things mean. Right. And so I don't know exactly how you would go about doing that, but it would be difficult for sure.

And working out a common language requires pretty much near instant communication. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today.

Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. You and the other party, like, if you, you know, if you don't speak a word of, like, you know, Cantonese and you're talking to a Cantonese speaker who doesn't speak a word of English, if you're just, like, locked in a cell. together, you guys will, over the course of probably a day, have a little bit of a shared language. But you work that stuff out with communication. You point it yourself and say your name. You point at the floor and say floor and stuff like that. And so it has to go back and forth and back and forth. If there are two species communicating across a thousand-year Gulf, you're looking at hundreds of thousands of years before they even start getting a shared language going.

All right. That's a so-called Chinese room argument that says a digital computer in another, it's a version of a little different than the Chinese room. The Chinese room argument is just you can't tell the difference between if a computer understands something or is just regurgitating a preordained list of responses. This is like aliens actively attempting to understand and collaboratively create a language, but it would still take a. really long time if the conversation takes, you know, has to happen over the, over late years. I want to turn now to the craft of writing and that will take us to maybe some rapid fire and then we'll move into some other other domains if you have a, if you have the time and then we'll wrap up with my path. Yeah. Before we do that, I just need to hit the bathroom. I'll be right now. Yeah. Let me pause. Zoom that. Okay, great. Okay. So now we're going to get into the practice of writing. All right.

Okay. So, first of all, I'll do one rapid-fire question. True or false or yes or no, is the best way to sell your nth book to write your N-plus one-th book? I don't really understand that question. Let's say you wrote the Project Hail Mary and you want to make a really great success. I've heard that the best way to, you know, kind of get attention and get publishers and sell more books is to write your next book.

Yeah, I've never heard that theory before. I would disagree with it. Okay. Next question, semi-rapid fire, is do you always write a book now with kind of the idea of a movie production coming down, the pike? No. I think that now my style of writing tends to be kind of cinematic because I see it in my head like that but I'm not deliberately trying to make it movie friendly and that's because my job is to write a book if I want to write and this is why I tell other writers who are asking for advice if you want to write a movie write a movie write a screenplay no problem but if if what you really want in the end here is a movie then write a movie if you're going to write a book write a book. Don't sacrifice good plot ideas or good narrative techniques because you think it wouldn't translate well into a film. And what about Artemis? What's the status of the movie Artemis?

Artemis is the screenwriter, Geneva Robertson-Vorett, is working on the screenplay. She's already made a few revs and sent them to the directors. We have the directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller attached. And that's kind of the status of where it is right now. And we have some artists working on, you know, what the inside of Artemis could look like and, you know, some of the storyboarding, that sort of thing. And I understand that Ryan Gosling is attached in some way to Project Hail Mary's movie adaptation. Yeah, that's right. For Project Hail Mary, MGM bought the film rights, and Ryan Gosling is attached to play the lead, Ryan Gosling, Rylund Grace. Oh, yes, that's right.

So the lead character's name is Rylan Grace, not to be confused with Ryan Gosling, who is going to play him. Also, like Artemis, this is also set to be direct by Phil Lord and Chris Miller. We have Drew Goddard working on the screenplay. He's the guy who did the screenplay adaptation of the Martian, so obviously his skills speak for themselves.

And MGM is really seems pretty excited about it. So I feel like it's got a good chance being green lighted, we'll see. You never really know with Hollywood. And is that pretty hands-off? Like, would you be in, would you go down? Would you be involved in it? Or would you just be working on? Well, I mean, I am involved in

Project Hail Mary. I'm actually a producer on the film. So, yeah, but the reason I'm a producer is so that I could have some of the front-end gross just money-wise. And so

my main objective is to stay out of the way of the real producers. But the end result is I am involved in a lot of these decisions. I'll offer my opinions, but I try not to make ways or get in anybody's way. Right, right. Next up I have, let's see. Okay, do you write every day? Do you have like a writing target, thousand words a day? Do you have any kind of writing schedule, daily habits, rituals?

When I'm working on a first draft, I try to make a thousand words per weekday. Or more accurately, I try to make 5,000 words a week with minimum levels. So the system I came up with is like, by the end of Monday, I need to have 1,000 words written. By the end of Tuesday, I need to have 2,000 words written for the week, Wednesday, 3,000 and so on, all the way up to 5,000 for Friday. That system, I kind of worked out over time. That way, if it's like a Monday and I'm plugging along and I blow through a thousand words, I'm not, encouraged to stop, right? I'll just keep going and say,

now I'm working off Tuesday's debt, you know? So that's the system I came up with. Although right at this moment, I'm just kind of freeform messing around working on the research for my next book. So I'm not writing yet. Do you have any other rituals, meditation, exercise, sport, biathlon, hunting, big game, big game hunting?

No, not quite so much. No, no big game hunting. hunting. No rituals. Just plugging along. Just doing the work, huh? I'm an much more boring guy than people suspect. Yeah, no, that's, that's, well, it comes across, but it's a good thing, I think. It's better than you're, like, living like Hemingway and then, you know, meeting an untimely end. Okay, best part and worst part about being a writer, professional writer. Well, the best part, of course, is that you're your own boss, you get to, you know, and also, It's one of the few creative jobs where you're basically a dictator.

I mean, aside from your editor, you know, giving you notes and stuff, you are the sole arbiter of what does and doesn't go into the story. If you're in film, well, there's a whole bunch of people who get input. There's the, you know, the screenwriter, the director, the performers often have things to say, the studio and so on. But when you're a writer of a novel, it's just you. So that's kind of cool. The downside is, is you have to motivate yourself. There's no one breathing down your neck. I mean, sometimes if you have a contract, then your editor might give you a call.

But for the most part, the bad part of being self-directed is you have to also be self-motivated, and that can be difficult. And I also miss having a team of people that I work with because I came from software originally. And I miss like going to work. I miss, well, of course, everybody does right now. But even before the pandemic, I missed going to work. I missed being part of a team. I missed that environment, that camaraderie that comes with it. I really enjoyed my job as a software engineer.

And the last engineering job I had before I left, I liked it. I really enjoyed it. And I hung on there much longer than I needed to just because I liked the work. I liked my coworkers. So I missed that. I think one of the most surprising things in the book is how prominent and important the role of Microsoft Excel is in this. It's true. And that made me...

Go ahead. Yeah. Ryland ends up using Excel a lot to keep track of a bunch of data. It's just realistic. Yeah. It made me think of one of the dirtiest secrets in the publishing business, I assume for you, too, is that much of publishing is accomplished by emailing Microsoft Word documents across the country with track changes. Is that true of all?

True of all. Absolutely. Absolutely. No doubt about it. There's got to be a better way. Come on, Andy. We've got to figure out a better way. I'm not sure there is a better way, though, because, like, it's a really efficient way.

Track changes is track changes in the comments and the notes and stuff like that. That's a really good way of doing editing passes with multiple people involved. So I've got no complaints with it. Yeah, it's just the whole file. Yeah, maybe they could be, there could be, yeah, there could be maybe a more. secure way to pass the document around. Yeah, and then real-time updating or collaboration or something like that. I don't know.

I mean, you could do that with Google Docs if you really wanted. Yeah, I just don't. I don't need to see each individual letters show up, you know, at the moment my editor is writing a message on the thing. It's okay. And also, it's best if I don't see anything until he's done and reread them and sent it along. There's a lot of mid-air collisions you could have where he writes a comment and then decides, no, I don't want to say that. But I've already seen the comment. Now I'm working on it,

you know. I guess in the nonfiction world, you know, where you're like writing a chapter that standalone, you want to like compile, you know, and just separately write chapters and then compile the whole thing. I don't want to email, you know, 80,000 words every time I change a word in a chapter. But that's a small thing. What about you narrating an audio book? Any inkling to do that ever? No, I don't think so. I'm a, you know, I don't consider myself a particularly good voice actor. And also the narrators that we've been getting from my books are just fantastic. I mean, so why would I ever want to displace any of them?

I mean, these are top-tier narrators. So I hope that trend continues. Yeah. Okay. Next, best and worst writing advice you've ever received. Well, the best writing advice, well, I mean, at the risk of sounding douchy, I think the best writing advice is a piece that I came up with, which is don't tell your friends and family your story idea. Well, you can tell them the basic idea, but don't tell them the details of the story because it satisfies your need for an audience and saps your will to actually write it. So that's a good piece of advice.

Let's see, bad writing advice. Yeah, I don't know. I'm having a hard time thinking of any bad writing advice. I do know some people who are like, oh, I like to write the fun scenes first and then back fill in with the connective tissue kind of scenes. And I think that's a terrible idea because you'll write all the fun scenes and then you have nothing but miserable work ahead of you. And so you won't do it. So you'll never finish. That's what I always tell my students. Whenever they like solve something, I go, congratulations. Now you've earn your ticket to an even harder problem.

Exactly. Do you feel like you've achieved what Neil deGrasse Tyson and I, we discussed as, like, niche fame? Like he, in COVID time, says he can't even go on the subway with a mask on. You know, like he's too famous. Are you just famous enough? Do you feel like you get recognized your trademark chappo glasses? No, I mean, I don't get recognized that much.

That's a cool thing about being a writer. you're famous when you want to be. Yeah, if I'm at a convention or something like that, I'll get spotted all the time, you know. But if I'm just out in the wild, I mean, maybe once a month someone will recognize me. That's about it. And that's, you know, pre-COVID back when, you know, you go to the grocery store or a restaurant or whatever. It'll be rare, but it'll happen. Okay.

Do you like or hate getting feedback on bugs, like a – do you give a bug bounty when someone – of your readers, say one of my undergraduates finds an error in your book? I like it. I like that my readers are engaged enough to be looking at it at that level. And, you know, I bring it upon myself because I tell everyone, hey, I write scientifically actor at science fiction. And they're like, really? Let's see about that. And so I certainly can't whine if they do hit me with some truth, you know. All right. Well, I got some truth for you, Andy. You ready? Yeah, yeah. I know a few. I know a few that I missed up. All right. Well, you messed up the countries that use the imperial system.

United States, there's not two. There's the United States. There's Liberia. Oh, I didn't know Liberia. There's, uh, no. You do, you do have, I think you say Liberia, but it's Liberia. And then there's Myanmar and Burma. Okay.

Now I'm joking. My Anmar and Burma are the same thing. There's one more typo that. So my undergraduate, Ben, found that one. But I found one that. The Earth, you talk about magnetic fields in a planet when you're talking about a certain planet that shall not be named. But you talk about planets need a liquid core, a molten core, like the Earth. But the Earth has a solid core.

Oh, we have the molten mantle. Yes. So there's the only two words in the whole book. Well, there's more. There was an alert reader on Twitter sent me that at one point he powers a little white LED with like a white. with a watch battery. But a watch battery doesn't have enough voltage to power a white LED, or so I was told.

Hmm. I have to think about that. The red ones can be lower, but the white ones, I guess, need more. High voltage? Huh. Yeah, or something like that. I mean, obviously, I don't know what I'm talking about here. I'm just going off of what the guy told me, hang on a second.

I can find that. If only there was kind of a worldwide web we could look at it. Yeah, but who's going to. do that. No, well, I was actually looking for 3.6 volts. Yellow is 2.1 volts. Have you ever rearranged your furniture and discovered the carpet underneath looks brand new while the rest of it looks

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sales in series would do it. So I guess a watch battery has like a little bit over a volt, like one and a half volts. Yeah, it has, yeah, it has watch battery. It depends on the watch itself. Of course, I could have the Apple watch or CR 32 as 3 volts. Yeah, anyway, tell them to stuff it. No, what are you talking about this?

I'm joking. I'm joking, Andy. I know, I know you're joking, but I'm like these are exactly, I, I open myself. by being meticulously accurate everywhere else and claiming that I'm accurate. That's right. I bring this kind of this scrutiny. You are thinking in public and you are doing what a good scholar should do, which is to be intellectually honest,

which is why I knew I could bring up those two faux paws, those fall paws. Okay, we're coming to the end here, Andy, I promise. And the last thing, okay, so we talked about teaching. We talked about before I get into, okay, so would you ever want to be a professor? Would you ever want to teach writing? No, I wouldn't want to teach writing, no, but I might want to teach a science field. I really like, I don't know, there's something I really enjoy explaining science to other people. And so I, but I'm not deeply, despite what it appears to be when you're reading my books, I'm not, I'm not really qualified to be like a, you know, upper division professor.

but I could probably teach like lower division physics. Like 1A, 2A, that sort of stuff. I could teach those. And those are the names of our physics classes here at UCSD, which brings me to my last major set of questions. So I want to ask you about that. I don't think we've ever really communicated about this, if it's not too painful as I.

I had a reader, I had a reader, I mean, I had a viewer, a subscriber in addition to my mom. And he went to UCSD and I'm not using his name. I didn't say if I could or couldn't, so I'm just not going to. But he said he didn't have a great experience. And he said he wanted to come on my show anonymously to talk about why I didn't have a good experience. He was a physics major. And he said, you know, why don't you ever have on somebody like me?

And I said, well, you know what? I'm going to have on someone who dropped out of UCST. I'm going to ask him the following question. And I'm going to ask you, Andy, what could we have done differently? You know, is there something that we could have done? We have vast resources. I don't care. We're a public universe.

We're building 40-story dormitory with Ocean. view and every, we have resources. Just because we're a public university, I'm a public servant. I believe it's my responsibility to the taxpayers to teach and educate California's students. What could we have done better for a student like you? I think it's not me, it's you. I think basically I was at a point in my life where I just wasn't really to put it, really willing to put out the effort. I had like a lot of semi-smart people, I breezed through high school without really, really. having to do any work at all. Like, it was so easy for me. And then you get to college,

and it's like it's real work. And I never learned good study habits. I never learned any of that stuff. And so it was just really hard for me. Now, ostensibly, the reason I left was because I ran out of money. And that's true. I did. I ran out of money. I couldn't afford to go there anymore. But I mean, if I had been working diligently toward a goal and I'd been getting good grades and was feeling like I was making progress, then I probably would have found a way to make it happen, student loans or something else. So I guess for me, I just didn't feel like super directed. I didn't feel like I just wasn't in a mindset to really put the effort into college. Also, remember, I was in computer science.

And at the time, the tech boom was just beginning. And so there was also an economic thing. I was like, I could either go deeply into debt to continue this and get a college degree, or I can immediately right now start making a decent salary because no one in the tech industry seems to care if you have a degree. Also, so I don't think there's anything UCSD could have done differently. Although one thing, you know, at the time I was there, I'm sure things are different. It's been a million years.

but at the time I was there, the CS department was like woefully behind the times in terms of what it taught. We move it on up to Cobol. Okay, that's right. Glad to hear it. Yeah. No, when I was- And Excel. We teach Excel exclusively.

Excellent. Excellent. No, but when I was there in a world that was all basically C++ and Java, at UCSD, they didn't have any classes for C++, no classes for Java. they had one class for C, straight C, and it was an elective. And mainly they taught Pascal, very proud of having invented Pascal, so they kept teaching it way too long. And so those are some factors. Also, I also think that in general in this country, people are a little too obsessed with college degrees or acquiring them. they're not as needed for employment as people seem to think.

And it's so expensive to get one. It's just like, don't go horribly into debt that it's going to take you half your life to pay off just to get an art history degree so you can become the regional manager of sales at some company. You can go straight into the sales job, you know. And there are tons and tons of professions out there that where you don't go to college, you go to a trade school. And these are not like, these are critical parts of society. I mean, we need mechanics, we need locksmiths, we need plumbers, we need all these things. And you don't go to college for those. So you don't, I don't know, there's some sort of notion that college makes you properly educated and somehow better than those who don't have college degrees.

And I don't like that. And I guess finally I would say, and this is nothing directed at UCSD, this is all colleges. for me, higher education should be, I am investing in my future. I'm paying an institution money so that they will teach me the skills I need to go out and be able to demand a higher salary in the job market. Like, I'm going to learn how to do something. Most people don't know how to do so that I can get paid a good salary for doing it, right? But colleges are still stuck in, frankly, this, you know, 18th century gentleman mode

of not really being focused on increasing your skills as a potential worker, but on giving you this comprehensive education. And I'm like, I can understand that happening in high school, where you get like a big broad education because they're trying to bring you up to speed with what we consider a minimum amount of knowledge for an adult in our country. But for college, I'm paying you to teach me stuff. So I don't want you, if I'm paying you to teach me how to program computers,

I don't want you to say I don't get a degree in tell you. I write a report about Beowulf, you know? So I just, and I know a lot of people disagree with me on this, but I don't buy into the comprehensive education thing. I honestly think all colleges should work functionally like trade schools. If I go to a college student computer programming, that's all I want to hear about when I'm there. Nothing else. Very good. Yeah, I agree. And I think colleges are maybe shooting themselves in the foot because, you know, eventually it's going to dawn on people that just to, you know, Harvard doesn't teach, you know, so there's not some special brand of physics that

Harvard's learned that, you know, I haven't learned yet, you know, like there's a fifth Maxwell's equation that hasn't made its way to the West Coast yet. No, we all know the same things. We all teach from the same textbooks. And that means it's very vulnerable to disruption via, you know, technology like into artificial intelligence. Like, who would you rather learn electromagnetism from Brian Keating or from James Clark Maxwell? And I think as we get more and more like that. The colleges have to differentiate themselves by the perks. And that's why we have Ocean View dorms here. And we have the, Andy, we're notatorium. We have, you know, that's the only way we can differentiate ourselves. And you're absolutely right. It should have elements of this, but, you know,

it's a tough nut to crack. But I think if colleges don't wise up to this, you know, kind of serving a customer rather than just like what this ideal system is, as you call it, the 18th century British gentleman, which is kind of the modality. It's been stuck in, you know, maybe even longer. I mean, I looked up the first college ever was like in Bologna in 8th and 180. And it's basically some old dude standing up on a stage scratching a piece of rock on another piece of rock. And, you know, I have a whiteboard now and a marker. And that's it. That's the only good. Oxford was founded in the in the thousands or 1100s. Yeah, that's right. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire. Yeah, that's right. And almost nothing is

change. There's just, you know, different, different disciplines. Well, I mean, they don't do sacrifices anymore. Oh, you mean Oxford. Okay. Yeah, they still do sacrifice. They still do. If you go to the pitch, you'll get Sir Roger Penrose, frequent guest on the show. All right, last question just before we go to the final thrilling three, if you could adapt any science fiction novel into a movie other than your own, Andrew, what would it be and why? This is from my friend Jacob Cune. I think I would go for probably Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. First off, it's a really good book.

It's in the robots genre, you know, the three laws of robotics and stuff like that. And it's the first book in a series. So it'd be cool if they made that movie and then it was successful and then they made more. Awesome. Okay, Andy, we are now in the final section, the so-called Thrilling Three, where I ask the thrilling three patented questions, which I'm patented just a minute ago. please do subscribe and like and comment on this and go to my website briancaidam.com you'll get notes and resources and get a chance to maybe even win and copy of project hail mary this wonderful

new book by today's guest ucSD attendee uh miss that's a good one right ucccc attendee uccd mega donor okay okay i've never donated a cent to you guys i don't know what i know i think the big donor relations is going to come and get me okay this first one has to do with your near future when you reach the so-called biblical age of 120 years old, what ethical wisdom do you want to put? Not your material wealth, not your earthly possessions, but what material wisdom or values do you want to articulate to give to future generations as an inheritance for the future? I don't know. It's like, I guess I would, mostly just pass along like not everyone in the society can relax and kick back.

Like you have to pull your own weight, I guess. You have to do your share of society's work, I guess. You have to, I guess it's an old thing, but give more than you get, I guess. Fun fact, in the Bible, there's a commandment to take a day off every week. But people forget that the other part of that commandment is you have to work six days a week. It says you must work six days a week, which some of my kids don't recommend. No, I'm just kidding. Number two involves an up-and-coming science fiction writer by the name of Arthur C. Clark.

Oh, is he? Just getting started, is he? You might have somewhat of a career. You might hear of them someday. Anyway, you might remember 2001 a space odyssey. There are these monoliths, these menacing vehicles or capsules or whatever that are built by some unseen extraterrestrial species, which are eventually discovered by our solar system by human beings. And the response to the characters to these messages or warnings kind of encourages humankind to progress. First, they're seen on the savannah in Africa, then on the moon and floating around. In other words, I want to ask you, Andy, if you had an opportunity to make your monolith and have it last as a billion-year time capsule, not just... Not just, what would you put on it or in it to kind of maybe triumphally declare what

humankind had learned in our existence? Probably a bunch of dick jokes. Not far jokes? You know, that was the oldest joke ever. Okay, there we go. There we go. Yeah. No, I don't know.

I mean, to people a billion years from now, they're not going to be able to learn anything from me. So I think a value of a monolith from our era would be in learning about our own culture and our own history and what we were doing back in this ancient time. So I guess I try to impart information about history, our history up to the present. And that would be done exclusively in an Excel document. Right. Lastly, now we're going backwards in time. And as you know, this Arthur C. Clark personality had many laws, one of which was for every expert. There's an equal and opposite expert. any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And that's how we open the show every week on the show. I'm going to open with his actual voice. It's pretty cool. We got him to read it from beyond the grave. No, we found it somewhere here at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. But his third law states the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the origin of the name of my podcast. I want to ask you, Andy, what mysterious aspect of life might have perplexed you as a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old,

but now makes sense because you had the courage to go into the impossible? In other words, what life advice would you give to your 20-year-old self? Well, I was a real screw-up at 20. So, I mean, I would probably have reams and reams and reams of things to say to my 20-year-old self. But I guess the number one thing I would tell my 20-year-old self is you have a problem. problem with anxiety and depression, you need to get help for it. Your life is going to suck until you get that help, and then your life's going to get a lot better. So go do that now. So I guess just identifying that I had that problem was, I wish I'd been able to identify and

act on it earlier. How did you do that, actually, Andy? How did you achieve that betterment of yourself? Well, you know, my main problem is anxiety. I mean, I had real problems. depression when I was in my 20s. But as I got older, the depression just kind of became anxiety instead. And, you know, throughout the 90s and stuff, if you wanted to get help for anxiety, it was generally like you'd be told, oh, here do some breathing exercises or something like that, which is kind of like bringing a bucket of water to a forest fire. It's just, you know, useless.

Or just suck it up, you baby, you know, kind of advice. But then it's actually when the Martian came out and it got popular, and I was horribly afraid to fly. I'm still am, but whatever. I had a huge fear of flying, and I was saying no to, you know, people would invite me to one place or another, and I said, no, no, no. But then NASA invited me to Johnson Space Center for a week of VIP tours. And I'm like, I have got to do this, right?

I cannot, I can't, I need, I want to do this. And so I said, like, all right, maybe I can get some pills that'll knock me out, you know, to be on a plane. So I started talking to a doctor, a psychiatrist, about that. And she said, okay, we can work on that, but also, you know, let's work on the, you know, persistent, generalized anxiety that you definitely have, you know. And so she ultimately gave me pills that let me fly. and she's like, that's great. But I also want to deal with the long-term anxiety. So I guess what happened was I went to a doctor for one thing,

and she said, I'll take care of that thing. But also you have this other problem, and let's work on that. And so she did, and she gives me, now I have, like, long-term anti-anxiety meds that I take, and they help a lot. They've really improved the quality of my life. It's not like this magic thing. It's just things are now manageable, you know? and I do therapy every week, which is if you broke your leg, you wouldn't be surprised that you have to do physical therapy as part of your recovery.

That's exactly right. I just started doing therapy as part of the podcast. I have a sponsor now who does therapy, and I was like, ah, I'm much. I don't need to do therapy. But I was like, I don't sponsor something unless I actually try it. So that's why I'm doing these Roman blue pills. I'm taking these blue pills. I'm just kidding.

I'm not doing those. But I decide I'm going to do this online therapy. And I have resistance to it because I can solve my own problem. but I've been doing online therapy through this. I'm not going to mention it because this isn't an ad. But I said to myself, you know, I go to a trainer on occasions. I mean, you can't tell from the massive physical specimen you see before you. But, you know, we have trainers for, we have coaches.

We have, you know, all sorts of things. Why not do that, as you say, if you hurt your leg, you'd go to a freaking doctor. And this is just like a coach. So I think you're incredibly, you know, courageous, but I think it's in your self-interest to do it, right? It's my one little, I don't know, you know, for some reason, I guess you get a soap box handed to you as soon as you're famous. But this is my quote-unquote cause is to, I guess, to try to desigmatize anxiety and depression. And just, just if you tell somebody, oh, man, I broke my leg, people are like, oh, that sucks, man.

Sorry to hear that. But if you tell people you're, like, suffering from chronic depression or anxiety, there's a little bit of a stigma still to it. and so I you know if I can do anything to destigmatize it then that's good and you know by just kind of saying like hey everybody I've got this problem one of the most comforting things for me ever was read reading Carrie Fisher's autobiography what is it something drinks drinking wishful drinking is what it's called and she's hilarious or the book is funny as hell but also it's It's just, it made me feel good to see, you know, Carrie Fisher's problems with, like, bipolar disorder. And it showed me, oh, hey, you can be kind of a little bit broken on the inside and still be incredibly successful and beloved by everyone. You know, that's Carrie Fisher, right? Yeah.

And a sad uplog to that is I came within two weeks of meeting her. And I wanted to tell her that. I wanted to tell her how much her book affected me. and but she died um about two weeks before a convention we were both going to be at. Oh, that's brutal. Yeah. Oh, that's awful. Yeah, I almost got to meet Herman Woke, who lives not far from here.

And I always wanted to be, I'll meet him. He died like a couple weeks before I got to meet him. But it's interesting that you mention all this, Andy, because May, our month right now is mental health awareness month. I didn't know that. I think this is a huge service that you do. And, you know, I've always loved. It's hard to believe that you could have even more appreciation and respect than I already did.

But, Andy, I want to thank you so much for sharing your time and being a friend of the Arthur C. Clark Center here in UC San Diego. You're always welcome here. Your money's always welcome. No, I'm just kidding. Of course. I'm just kidding, Andy. Your Bitcoin, your blockchain. I thought that's what we're going to say is on your monolith.

Doge coin. Yeah. Doge coin. Yeah, we do. Anyway, Andy, thank you so much for coming on the show. I wish you all the best of success and abundance and serenity too. Take time for yourself. And I hope we can get together again.

I always love being in your presence. Someday after the apocalypse. Best of luck, Eddie. Take care. All right. Thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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