Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Andy Weir: Project Hail Mary (#147)

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Andy Weir built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian, allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time. He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. Thanks to our sponsors! https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible http://betterhelp.com/impossible About Project Hail Mary A lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this incredible new science-based thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Martian. Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission–and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that’s been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it’s up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance. Part scientific mystery, part dazzling interstellar journey, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian–while taking us to places it never dreamed of going. Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 Chapters 00:10:43 Did building things come naturally to you as reflected in the ingenuity of your characters? 12:00:00 How do you balance realism and scientific fact with a fictional narrative? 00:16:08 Could you really mobilize resources at a planetary scale? 00:19:00 Do you think it's realistic to turn an amateur avocation into a career? 00:20:48 Is there too much UFOlogy? What's your stance on SETI and UFOs? 00:25:24 Do you think we've been going about SETI the wrong way? 00:28:52 Do you think we really could communicate with an alien civilization? 00:31:46 Rapid-fire questions! 00:46:45 Would you ever want to teach? 00:48:00 What could UCSD have done better during your tenure here? 00:55:00 What science fiction novel would you make into a movie if you could? 00:55:35 Final Thrilling Three Questions: Ethical will, billion-year monument, advice to your younger self. 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 👪Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize 🎙️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Comes a spectacular new work of fiction. A gripping adventure story, every bit the rival of the Martian, awaits you in Project Hail Mary. Rylan Grace is the sole survivor on a...

desperate last chance mission, and if he fails, humanity, and the Earth itself will perish. On a spaceship hurtling through space and time, it's up to him to solve an impossible scientific mystery and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. A space virus is attacking our sun. And with the nearest human being light years away, he's got to do it all alone. Or does he? An irresistible, interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir can deliver.

Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival that rivals the Martian in every way while taking us to places it never dreamed of going. Join me on this adventure with UCSD's own Andy Weir. In this, thrilling,

episode of Into the Impossible with me, Brian Keating. 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've done 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, egg and this book, Project Hail Mary, which I'll have my producer hold up on the screen. I listen to it. I read it in 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, you know, 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 actually, you know, I love this book. I think it's your best book. I know you're probably, you're tired of hearing it, but, but you write. I'm not tired of hearing that. but the thing that that really i love about this book i've listened to all you know all three of your books the martian artemus and this book um i think the spoiler grace period is at least a year so people you know um they haven't listened to the to the red artemus or the martian too bad for you guys but um because we might we might spoil those books really thoroughly but i love listening to

the book so the last uh 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 because yes buy both kinds I appreciate that and the hard copy hard copy and then also just mail me some cash VEMO too and be weird 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 on 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 all. 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 spoilery.

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 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 Wheaton, 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, a reporter for this. It's awesome. I can ask for better narrators. The main character, who is an astronaut, Grace, who becomes an 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 dorm work. Did you ever have a teacher, you know, in 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 at?

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 to 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 spaceport. 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 up tens. 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 Atacama 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're 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 eye 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. The main 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, does 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 or, 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 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 eff it and just 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, I want to minimize the violations to physics that I have to do. In the case of Project Hail Mary, 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, this year.

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 finished 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. 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. 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 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?

I mean, do you come out of COVID-19 thinking that the scenario outlined 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 best, people's. The ISBN is just hilarious. Yeah, that was, I played the lottery, that number that was.

There we go. Now, 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 Stooges 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 assortment. 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 to, 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 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 YouTube economy, you know, I've become a creator. And my, you know, my subscriber really appreciates it. Well, hi, hi, Brian's mom. How you doing? She's my toughest critic. They say don't read the comments, and I don't.

Whenever she leaves a comment, I do not read it. Converse 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 UFOology. There's tons of UFOologists 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 tons and tons of, you know, tons of, media requests or what have you or asked about it.

Do you think that there's like 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 ufologists 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 just. 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 Weir Airport at the Citi 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 another.

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, as you used to live here, we have the world famous San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park. And if you remember, we had the 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? 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. And one of those ways... Thank you, fellow human. I know that you are speaking in jest for I am a human like you. I love metabolizing.

Protocol, mitochondrial crept cycle violation. I love breathing oxygen. We too exchange 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 seti. And one thing in the book that you make quite prominent use of is that these algae 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, like should we look for extraterrestrials using some way?

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 city. But don't they kind of do that with a hydrogen line? I mean. 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. Oh, yeah. But yeah, oh, and 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, you know, 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 Hawking's and the, and the Elon

musks of the world in terms of like the great filter and, you know, should we, 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. This episode is brought to you by Netflix.

Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best have you wait in the world, Frances Ngano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center, Time, 6 p.m. Pacific Time. 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, 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 if his, 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 Livermore. Oh, really? Oh, wow. Oh, very interesting. Okay. So I want 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 arrival, there's an alien species that comes to Earth 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. 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. Like 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. Right. That's a so-called Chinese room argument that says a digital computer in another. It's a version of a... A little different than the Chinese... 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 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 domains 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. Sure, 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's book i don't really understand that question let's say you wrote you wrote the project

hail mary and you want to make a really great success to you where i've heard that the best way to 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, and 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. 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 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? 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. Ryland Grace. Oh, yes, that's right. So the lead character's name is Ryland 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 of being greenlighted. 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? 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. All for 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 a thousand 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 recent. search 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? Not, no, not quite so much. No, no big game hunting. No rituals, just, just plugging along. Just doing the work, huh? I'm a much more boring guy than people suspect. Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's, well, it comes across, but it's a good thing, I think.

Better than you're 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 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 you know 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 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 book.

It's true. And the main... Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. Rylan ends up using Excel a lot to keep track of a bunch of data. 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 or false? 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 bit. I'm not sure there's a better way, though, because it's a really efficient way.

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 do that with google documents if you really wanted. Yeah, it's not like that. 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. Right. 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, where you're like writing a chapter that standalone, you want to compile, you know, and just separately write chapters and then compile the whole thing. I don't want to email 80,000 words every time I change a word in a chapter. But that's a small thing. What about you narrating an audiobook? 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 for 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. 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 backfill in with the intermediate.

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 earned 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? Yeah. Like, he's too famous. Are you just famous enough?

Do you feel like you get recognized your trademark chappot, glasses, and the... 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, one 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 messed 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, 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 mountain mantle. Yes.

So there's the only two months in the whole book. Well, there's more. There's an alert reader on Twitter sent me that at one point he powers a little white LED with like a watch battery. Yeah. 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 this. Only there was a 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. Watch battery. I'm sure my memory. audience is going to love it is he says hi i just finished hail marian promise a nice five-star review 40 years of science teaching and only one quibble you can't light a white LED with one watch

battery uh it needs 3.6 volts minimum so three series three cells in series would do it so i guess a watch battery has like a little bit over a vote like one and a half volts yeah it has yeah it has watch battery it depends on the watch itself of course a Apple, a kid on the Apple Watch, or CR 2032 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 open myself by being meticulously accurate everywhere else and claiming that I'm accurate. That's right. I bring this kind of, uh, 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, 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, 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 one A, two A, that sort of stuff. I could, I could teach those. And those are the names of our physics classes here at UCSD, which brings me to my last, you know, 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. 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. He 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 everything in there. We have resources. Just because we're a public university, I'm a public servant. I believe it's my responsibility to taxpayers to teach and educate California's students. What could we have done better for a student like you? I think it was 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 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 really 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 making, you know, getting good grades and was feeling like I was making progress, and 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 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. Like, we move on up to Cobol. We're 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, 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, 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, I don't like that. And I guess finally I would say, and this is not, 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, you know, 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 until. 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, 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 and... Well, I mean, they don't do sacrifices anymore. Oh, you mean Oxford. Okay. Yeah, they still do sacrifices. 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 briancaim.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 mehre that's a good one right ucccd attendee ucd mega donor okay okay i've never donated a cent to you guys i don't know i think Better relations is going to come and get me. Okay.

The 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. 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. 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 are not particularly, to make your monolith and have it last as a billion year time capsule, 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. 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'd 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 I 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. 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 with depression. 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... 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, 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 this Roman blue pills. I'm taking these blue pills. I'm just kidding. I'm not doing those. But I can say, 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 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, 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, Wushful Drinking is what it's called. And she's hilarious. The book is funny as hell. But also 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, but she died about two weeks before a convention we were both going to be at. Oh, that's brutal.

Yeah. Yeah, 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, right now is Mental Health Awareness Month. I didn't know that. This is a huge service that you do.

And, you know, I've always loved, it's hard to believe that, you know, 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. 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. 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. 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. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating.

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