Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Kim Stanley Robinson: The High Sierra: A Love Story (#325)

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Watch the video of this episode here. In this live in-studio episode of The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE, host Brian Keating sat down with renowned science fiction author, Kim Stanley Robinson, to discuss his fist major non-fiction work, The High Sierra: A Love Story. Equal parts memoir, guidebook, geology tutorial, and historiography, in High Sierra, Robinson describes the geological forces that shaped the Sierras and the history of its exploration, going back to the indigenous peoples who made it home and whose traces can still be found today in the knapping fields of obsidian chips. He celebrates the people whose ideas and actions protected the High Sierra for future generations. He describes uniquely beautiful hikes and the trails to be avoided. Robinson’s own life-altering events, defining relationships, and unforgettable adventures form the narrative’s spine. And he illuminates the human communion with the wild and with the sublime, including the personal growth that only seems to come from time spent outdoors. Stan reveals his writing process (he treats it as a job and doesn’t “wait” for inspiration). Keating and Robinson also discuss Robinson's book, "Galileo's Dream" exploring one of Professor Keating’s heroes and the lessons Stan learned from researching the great scientist. Robinson emphasizes the importance of melding science and art, arguing that the split between them is due to a lack of understanding and a unified approach is essential to the progress of humanity. He defends John Muir against accusations of racism, and mistreatment of Native Americans, pointing out Muir's desire to preserve the Sierras, his recognition of Native American stewardship and his admonitions to get outside. Host Keating even gets feedback on his science fiction novel pitch. Kim Stanley Robinson is a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed 2312, Shaman, New York 2140, and The Ministry for the Future. He traveled in Antarctica twice, courtesy of the US National Science Foundation. In 2008, he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. He lives in Davis, California. Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're in the humanities, the world is running under your feet. Your life is created by the STEM, science, technology, engineering, and either math or medicine. And then on the scientist's side, you know, they could feel, oh my gosh, you know, the peoples think that we're nerds or that we're dry people or that we only see things as numbers as if it isn't beautiful when you've got an equation that works. I mean, people don't understand us. And so it's a lack of understanding on each side. But since I've been a science fiction writer, my whole life I've been trying to say,

science is actually quite modest in that it doesn't want to tell people what to do or what things mean. So scientists doing their science well will be quite, they won't claim more for science than it is attempting to be. Right. It's just to explain things. And once, if you clarify that to people in the humanities, they get out. this notion that, oh, scientists have taken over the world and when actually they haven't, they just have provided an amazingly powerful tools.

Welcome, everyone. Here, for your summer listening pleasure, is our episode of Into the Impossible with celebrated science fiction author and UC San Diego alumni Kim Stanley Robinson. Stan has reached the highest peaks of science fiction writing, winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Locust Awards. He's also become an outspoken advocate for environmental preservation and climate change science. And with his recent novels, 2312, New York 2140, and The Ministry for the Future, he's become one of the foremost authors in the newly named subgenre Clifai or climate fiction. Stan visited our studio to discuss his first major nonfiction work, his new book High Sierra, a love story. It's a weave of memoir, guidebook,

geology, tutorial, and historiography. Stan talks to Brian about his motivations for writing the book and his own high-CR adventures. Your host, Brian Keating, also had a chance to talk about one of his favorite subjects, Galileo. They discussed Stan's imaginative of 2009 science fiction work Galileo's dream, and some lessons from the great maestro that Kim Stanley Robinson himself took to heart. Please keep into the impossible in your feeds by subscribing and following. To see the video version of this lively interview, jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR. Brian Keating, and subscribe there too.

Please let us know what you think of the show in the form of a review like this one from Audible. From Brooklyn Bookworm. Brian's podcast and YouTube channel are great fun for the layman to be introduced to fascinating insights, exhilarating theories, and mind-expanding ideas. Brian has a knack for metaphor to help explain highly complicated concepts into much easier, to digest ideas. And now, let us help you plan your summer outdoor adventure with Kim Stanley Robinson, discussing his new book, High Sierra, A Love Story on Into the Impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome everybody to what promises to be an out-of-this-world adventure

with a hometown hero, a favorite son of UC. CSD and California in general, but really of Earth and Mars fame. And that's Kim Stanley Robinson, Stan, as we know him here, renowned science fiction author, but also nonfiction author. And today we're talking about two of his books that I've had an incredible impact on me and just my thought process, including my hero, Galileo Galilei, who was really the last time we were together for an official event of any kind, was in 2012, I think it was, maybe it was 2014.

And it was commemorating the 400th anniversary of Galileo, or the 400th anniversary of the telescope, I believe it was. We'll put some B.Role and we'll show that here. So you and I and Mario Biajoli, who's a professor, now he's at UCLA. He was at Davis at the time where you spent a lot of time. And we did a birthday party for Galileo, and in the back of my mind, it was in February, which Galileo's birthday is the day after Valentine's Day, February 15th. And I knew that a month later we'd be announcing to the great fanfare that we had discovered waves of gravity percolating through the universe, courtesy of a refracting telescope, just like the one that Galileo utilized to peer into the heavens.

But I couldn't make that known. So I was keeping a deep secret while we were speaking. But we did a wonderful event together, and you're back on campus to do more events. You've been so prolific. We're going to talk about Galileo's dream, which really is probably my favorite science fiction book, fantasy, fan fiction. I don't know how you think of it, but that's the way I think about it. 20 hours of goodness that I've listened to multiple times. And we're also going to be talking about something that's also near and dear to my heart,

which is the subject of your latest book, which is about the Sierra Nevada, Mountain Range, which is not far from here. And I didn't realize how much time you spent there, including time when you're spending time here. So, first of all, Stan, welcome to UCSD. Welcome back. Welcome home. We love having you here, and you're so gracious with your time to spend some time with us. We have questions from the audience.

We have questions from me and so forth. But first of all, I wanted to ask you, what drove you, you know, predominantly are known as science fiction writer of the highest magnitude, Hugo, Nebula, all the awards he could win, right? What drove you to write a nonfiction book about the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range? Well, I've wanted to for decades, but I am a science fiction novelist, and I had novels to write, contracts to fulfill. So it kind of just sat there in the back of my mind,

and it was also something to think about when I was hiking, because hiking is an all-day thing. The hours passed, you've got time to think. It is a double consciousness maybe. I mean, it's a space that demands your attention and gets your attention. It's a beautiful space to walk in, the high Sierra. But also there's time, especially on trail, to ponder, you know, how would you write this down in sentences, which is something that always...

comes to me. And I got to say, before I forget, thank you so much for mentioning Galileo's dream. It's one of my favorite of my own novels. I love it because I love Galileo, and that was an opportunity. And since then, I've been on a role, partly contractual, partly life situation, partly a wonderful editor, Tim Holman, who platformed me. And that's now seven novels back. And it's I think it's a little lost in the shuffle of my career compared to my other novels since. And the people who like Galileo or think of it as a historical novel, well, it's got some pretty weird chapters. It does. The people who think of it as a science fiction novel, there's an awful lot of detail about Galileo's people.

Quantum entanglement. Yeah. And his life in Florence and Pisa and in Rome. So if you're a science fiction fan, it's too historical. If you're a historical fan, it's too science fictional. So maybe that's one explanation for it or just who you never know. But I'm very happy that you'd like that book because I like it a lot too because he, here's what he taught me. I was feeling low.

I was feeling thrashed. I had finished a novel, a trilogy set in Washington, D.C. And it had kicked my ass. And I was thinking maybe I'm done. And then I started working on Galileo. I moved and started writing outdoors. That was important. But more important was Galileo.

I realized that guy. he went through a lot of hard stuff. Physical ailments, including going blind, the Pope putting him under house arrest and almost burning him at the stake. His daughter dying young when he was still alive. These are, that's as difficult as life gets in terms of throwing hard things at you. And all he did was work more. He just worked harder. And his famous book, The Diologo, is, um, uh, uh, uh, his famous book, The Diologo is, um, uh,

Justly famous, but the one he wrote at the end of his life, the discoursey, yeah, is amazing, simply amazing. And so, you know, everything that he ever thought for 40 years put into one book. And at that point, I felt a little embarrassed for myself, or a little ashamed of myself, thinking, you know, you think you have it hard. So just start working. And I started working, and I realized he had the secret that actually my low point was basically probably from spending too much time indoors. and getting bored with sitting at a laptop indoors. When I moved outdoors, I was enjoying writing again. I had the good editor.

So Galileo taught me some really important lessons. And people don't really realize. So I had the honor to, because of the University of California Press, owns the rights to the definitive translation by Stillman Drake of the Dialago. I had the honor of performing and creating the very first audiobook ever by Galileo, which is the Dialago, read by my friend Carlo Rovelli, and another friend, Italian friend, Lucio Pichorillo. So we play it in actual performance.

So we acted out in this audiobook. Which one were you? So I was, I am... Totally you were Simplicia. No, no, no. My friend, Carlo is, of course, Alviati. Yeah. I am Sagredo, and then there's Simplicio, the Pope's character, infutally.

But the thing that kind of does remind me of Galileo when I read your writing is there's a poetry. There are sections of Galileo's dream where you describe there's not a sport. I don't think you can spoil a book that's 12 years old or whatever. No, no, no. Talk of your very last page could be discussed. So, but which I won't. But there are passages where you describe Galileo visiting the moons of Jupiter. And you describe the rich ochres, the tans, the purples.

And it's a page, but it's rapturous. And I listen to the audio. I love hearing your voice. And the narrator of that book is a wonderful narrator. I wish I could have gotten him for some of my books instead of me. But when you have this eye, it reminds me of Galileo. There are passages in the dialogo, which are the deepest poetry. He speaks at sometimes, and he's, of course, speaking with some false humility because he had a healthy ego, as I want to get into, as a great scientist, a great writer.

I think you need a little bit of a swagger to do good, to do greatness, and balance that with humility. But he said in the final passage, he said, I have not meant to travel roads never trodden, but merely to open a portal to vistas such that other travelers much more perspicacious than me will be able to unveil secrets which I can own. dimly grass, but he has just this beautiful way of writing evocative. He talks about the sun with all those planets revolving independent upon. Of course, that's what he was trying to prove, which he didn't successfully do in that book. But he says, still finds time to ripen a bunch of grapes on the vine. It's just amazing. And I think about your writing in this new book, about the high sierras, you have this real poetic sense of attention to detail, which I'm wondering, is that born of a scientific curiosity, not unlike Gallowayos?

Where does that come from, the attention to detail that you're known for? Well, I wonder, certainly most of the scientists I've known, they're fascinated by what they're studying. So it's not just a job. It's a form of devotional practice. In other words, the pain of attention is that kind of worship of reality. And Galileo was very much in that mode. The world was kind of a miracle to him filled with mysteries, and some of his theories were wrong.

I mean, the tides vexed him. Without gravity, without calculus, he was constantly at the edge of his own understanding and super curious. So he's paying attention and throwing theories out there. And he was a beautiful stylist. I'm told by Mario, since I don't read Italian, but that, you know, along with Machiavelli and Dante, they sort of turned the Florence, the Florentine dialect into classical Italian, high Italian, because of their powers as writers. That just became the norm for written Italian when there were so many dialects at the time. Well, it makes sense to me reading him in English. He's vivid. He cuts to the chase. There was a tradition in his time. of debates after dinner, you know, because it was a patronage system and you were entertaining the Duke or the...

Medici's or the... ...the Medici's or the... ...or the elected, well, whatever they were, the Senate, yeah, in Venice. So two people would go out and have a debate and, God, you would have lost to Galileo. Exactly. He did have a healthy ego because he knew he was smarter than almost anybody alive in his time. And I had such pleasure throwing him into a weird situation. you know, like the year 3,000.

Poisoning, right. Yeah, well, but going into the year 3000, if you threw that at Galileo, he would be doing his best to comprehend it. And one of my future characters and says to him, you know, well, you know, of course you can't know everything that there is to know.

And he's like, why not? I know everything there is to know in my time. How is the year 3000 any different? And a thoroughgoing pleasure to contemplate. And Mario Biagioli kept telling me, do not romanticize this guy. He was a real son of a bitch. He was a, he was a schemer and a grasper. There was no such thing as intellectual property rights. He had

to fight and scheme. I mean, he, he had, he wasn't unscrupulous by any means. He had scruples and values, but he had to be tough. Yeah. Mario points out he concealed how the telescope was perfected by him, not invented. It was a form of, you know, property and a trademark investment for his own safety. As you point out, he had all these people to bet it on them, right? Yeah, that's right. And when he had that first book about the Moon published, he put the actual statistics last in a kind of a supplement

so that he couldn't be ripped off before the rest of the book came out. It was a smart man in a difficult time. And it's nice to think, I mean, I'm not a scientist. I am an English major and a novelist. So what are novels about? These are long, complicated stories. It might not even be a major quality of my novelizing that I like being in the Sierras and attending to that world. I was just reminded of this an hour ago.

I walked down to Black's Beach and back. Well, I spent a lot of my youth as an undergraduate at UCSD down there at that beach. And it sort of forces you to pay attention, especially being in the water and swimming and making sure you don't drown. Right. You talk about almost succumbing to the tide, the currents here. Yeah, yeah. I have three near-drying events in my childhood and youth, one at Corona del Mar, one at Newport Beach, and one right down on the over the shores, which is a very simple. Platt said here. Yes. Most of the time. I blew it. It was a stupid mistake when I was young and overconfident. And I must say, the waves break much further offshore down here than they do in Orange County. So it was a simple perceptual error. I said, oh, the waves aren't very big. And when I got out there, they were.

And I got thrashed. The water was cold. Whatever, I love it. And so, of course, the interesting thing is, can you put this into sentences where other people can kind of imagine it? So I can almost grasp, you know, writing nonfiction books as I've done now twice. But the fictional world, it's a mystery to me. It seems like such a different skill set. It's like one's a jujitsu master and one's like a chef.

But I know there must be commonalities between the processes, but I wonder, can you talk us through your, what is your daily, you're in it, you have a contract, you're working on a new book. It's a fictional book. Yeah. Does your daily routine, does it differ from nonfiction to fiction? A, and what is it in any case, what is your daily, what is your operating routine? There are a lot of young men who listen to young women to that listen to the podcast. What is your routine to achieve, you know, to get into a flow, what do you do? Well, it's been, I've only written one nonfiction book, except for my, um, P. PhD thesis, which wasn't a real, well, it was, but in any case, it's always been fiction. And my routine is very simple. I treat it like work. I don't wait for inspiration to strike. You can't do that with novels. So I get up at breakfast, the family would go off to school and to work. I would be there.

I would sit down. I would write from after breakfast to lunch, and then maybe write again in the afternoon. First draft, maybe not. If I was revising, I would write as long as I was awake. And many a day, I would actually, after breakfast, go out to the garden. This is very Galileo. He did this too. And I would pull weeds and garden for about an hour, get my hands dirty, think things over, like, what am I going to write today?

And kind of ponder what the scene needed in some very general sense, because it never comes sharp until you're writing the sentences themselves. And then the scene actually happens by some strange moment where I don't want to be misting. about it, but I'm not fully there self making decisions. It's more like, ah, yes, that it must have been this way because that's the only, that's a combination of the most interesting and the most believable at the same time. So let's write that down and see what it looks like. So, first draft, and then I go off and I usually would go for a run or go swim or work out or go play Frisbee golf, do something athletic, because sitting on my butt is not really my thing, despite my job. And then revision, as I would say, I can revise as long as I'm awake. And also,

but for the afternoon's research, doing science fiction, especially as an English major, I'd write a scene, and then I'd say to myself, if this scene was going to be really good, I would have to know more. I'd have to know X, Y, and Z. But it was specific to the scene. So my research was reiterative and supportive and was expressed in between the first draft and the subsequent drafts. So write a scene, try it out, realize what you would need to know to make it better, find that stuff out, try it again, and fit in the new information. And a lot of times the research that I did subsequent to the first draft would change

the story itself considerably because in the research I would learn more that actually told me you can't even do that or that's wrong. It's better to do it right because it would be more interesting. So it's been a re-edited process. Well, I was taking care of my kids because they're grown up now, but when they were young and I was Mr. Mom, I would work Monday through Friday, and Saturdays and Sundays I would fool around with the family and do chores. Once they grew up enough, I just started working seven days a week, and I got into streaks. Like one time I worked 220 days in a row. And it's a streak sort of like Cal Ripkin, where occasionally I would be going to bed and realize I hadn't written that day and I'd write one paragraph to keep the streak live.

Right. But it's good for writers to keep a streak where every day you don't get to decide. You're going to write that day. You don't know what you're going to write, but you're going to write something. And that way you have seven-fifths more work done in every week than if you take the weekends off. Yeah, I think Stephen Pressfield in the War of Art says something like, I only write when I'm inspired, but fortunately, inspiration strikes every morning at 9 a.m. Sometimes it doesn't. Meaning that he has to put his butt in a chair.

Yeah, exactly. You can flog it a little, and certainly until your butts in a chair, you're not going to be inspired. In the COVID period, and since Ministry for the Future is done, and also since the High Sierra was done, I have been doing these little poems, like Chinese landscape poems or Chinese widows, Buddhist dailies. They're very small poems. They're more like diary and trees maimed into a poem. There, I actually wait for inspiration. Something happens and I think, oh, that would make a good little poem.

Hold on to that thought. So it's completely different than novels. I can't resistance. I did teach a class. The first ever combination class taught in partnership between literature, English, literature, and physics, with our mutual friend Ray Armantrout and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Oh, man. So she is hopefully listening, and Ray, I love you, and miss you.

But we used to debate, and I always put up on the first day of class. I put up this following quote by Dirac, which I'll try to resuscitate the famous physicist. his novel laureate came up with the concept of antimatter and his construction of the relativistic theory of quantum mechanics leading to what's called the positron. And he was talking about, and he was rumored to be very parsimonious with his language. In fact, his brother-in-law said something, Paul never uses two words when none will do. So he said the following. He said, in physics, we tried to express the richness of the physical universe in the fewest possible terms, or the small, you know, most economical amount of language, but in poetry, it's the opposite.

And Feynman, of course, had these ridicules of the poets' process. He said, why is it that, you know, if I speak about Jupiter as being made of methane and hydrocarbons and so forth, that I'm somehow less well regarded than, you know, Walt Whitman waxing rhapsodically about the loss of the night's guide to numbers, why is there this, you know, kind of hostility between the physical sciences, perhaps, or the hard sciences and maybe the humanity. Choice Hotels gets you more of what you value. Comfort in. It's calling your name.

Save on the stain. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Book direct at storeshirtails.com. Do you perceive that? Well, I know what he's talking about. And yes, it exists as a thing. And somewhat in the minds on both sides. I mean, it's the CP Snow too cold.

culture's division. And I've got to say, Ray Armantrout is an example of a true poet in that she has a gift. And this is a hard thing to describe, and I think it has to do with a sense of rhythm. Because as a prose writer, I try to be as precise as a poet, as expressive as a poet. But thoughts in rhythm, syllables that between the weak syllables and the strong syllables, and also the in-stops of switching to the next line at an unexpressing. expected moment that nevertheless makes bold or prominent one thought or another or just gives you a little internal surprise. Whatever a poet is doing, she has a gift for it.

And I don't have that gift, but I can understand, I can know it when I see it as a reader. And as for the two cultures split, what are you going to do? I'm an English major from UCSD. And Patrick Leden used to start his non-Euclidean geometry classes, which I took from him and loved him with quotes from James Joyce. He ran the Joyce workshop here for a while, a seminar on Joyce. And when he did chalkboards, you know, the non-Euclidean sphere with the... Hyperboics for you. And the line, yeah, the lines at infinity.

And so he would draw these perfect circles on the chalkboard. He was making works of art and quoting Joyce and teaching us non-Euclidean geometry. which is pretty strange stuff and interesting in many ways. And he made it quite clear in ways that I now look back on with some surprise. The split isn't necessary. And I wonder if it's a little bit of insecurity on both sides in that if you're in the humanities, the world is running under your feet. Your life is created by science technology, by the

STEM, science, technology, engineering, and either math or medicine. And then on the scientists side, they could be, they could feel, oh my gosh, you know, the people think that we're nerds or that we're dry people or that we only see things as numbers as if it isn't beautiful when you've got an equation that works. I mean, people don't understand this. And so it's a lack of understanding on each side. But since I've been a science fiction writer, my whole life, I've been trying to say they are shared enterprises or they're both equally valuable, even though they are quite different. I've been trying to explain to the humanities, science is actually quite modest in that it doesn't want to tell people what to do or what things mean.

It's how things work, how we might manipulate them, explanations of processes, but not philosophy in the sense of meaning and not, ethics and not politics. So scientists doing their science well will be quite, they won't claim more for science than it is attempting to do it, which is to explain things. And once, if you clarify that to people in the humanities, they get over this notion that, oh, scientists have taken over the world and when actually they haven't, they just have provided an amazingly powerful tools.

So, you know, you can go on forever on this. science and art split. But when you're a science fiction writer, it's like, oh, come on, you know, let's get over that and talk more about what we can do together to illuminate things and go forward. Yeah, it's like the scientist Robert Wilson, I think, was one of the original NSF directors or something in government in the 50s and 60s. And some congressman asked, oh, what, Mr. Wilson, what will this new fangled particle accelerator do, you know, for the defense of the country? And he said, well, Well, it'll make it worth defending. But I always invert that and say, well, it's really, you know, the humanities that need protection, but there also should be the highest form of expression.

As you described, Professor Leden, we have lectures named after, to this day. Yeah. You know, I think of what is the purpose of a scholar, you know, what good do we do? And it's like there's a tremendous amount of high bar that in my mind what it means to be a scholar. But to have this diversity of curiosity means you shouldn't just do physics. And you should that's why the course was called by the way. I didn't tell you this. The course was called poetry for physicists.

Oh, yeah. Instead of physics for poets, right? So I'd always wanted to do that. And one day I got an email, you know, you get these emails, I'm sure, you know, or, you know, stand, I'd love to take you out to coffee or, you know, pick your brain. Like, I can get my own coffee. Thanks very much. And she's writing to me.

I'd love to take you out to coffee. And, you know, I'm in camp. Oh, by the way, I won the Pulitzer Prize last year. But I'll be undelet, you know, like, oh, let me take this. It's just not a normal person who asks you out for a cup of coffee. And she had this incredibly discursive curiosity about cosmology and entanglement. She wrote a poem, which won one of the best poems, American poems of 2012, and it's inspired by me and you can hear it on Audible and elsewhere. Just a quick pause to ask you for a small favor while my thumb is occupied with old Albert on it.

Yours is presumably freed up to leave a thumbs up on this video. It really helps me a lot with a good old-fashioned YouTube algorithm. Thanks a lot. Now back to the video. But when we think about a novel, the thing that's always surprised me, nonfiction, you kind of know the story. I mean, yes, you come in and media rays. You don't exactly know perhaps what happened before the Big Bang in my case or something like that. But I know the story I'm trying to tell.

But with a novel, especially like it's trilogy or multi-series, multi-part series, do you have to know, like someone who's obviously I'm deeply closet and I want to write a novel someday? Tell me, Stan, like what do I need? What's the prerequisite? How do you know when you have enough? Like, what do you know, what do you need to go on to start? Obviously, you can start at any time. What do you, what's your theoretical minimum? The idea itself. Including the resolution like the- Well, very often, yes, the resolution or where I'm headed. Well, the idea itself. Let's see if we can terraform Mars in 200 years. That has its resolution. At the end, you say yes. You don't say no. No is likelyer now. But, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, What if you're like we're not going to make it to the stars that this is a false dream that humanity's going to the stars because of biological constraints and physics biological. So then how would you how would you show that in a novel? Well, let's do the most likely thing, a multi-generational starship and then we'll show the problems that are unsolvable given the distances involved. And then we'll put them in a perilous state. And actually I didn't quite know my answer to that one, which is my novel,

Aurora. Ministry for the Future, what's the best case scenario for the next 30 years that you could still believe in after I described it to you? So these are ideas. Some of them are a little crazier. Galileo, when he's looking through his telescope and he sees the moons of Jupiter, what if he found himself there, like by some kind of matter transfer or quantum entanglement and he's standing on the moons of Jupiter? Well, that's a pretty crazy notion. It's not dissimilar to a voyage to art tourists by David Lindsay, a novel from the 20s quite bizarre. So I'm not saying it's a particularly original idea, but once it came to me, I kept pondering and itching at it, and I have to say that's a strange idea.

I could go through all of them. What was it like for the people who painted the Chauvet caves 32,000 years ago, living in the Ice Age in the middle of Europe? What was that like? Well, now that's a tough speculation and an interesting thing to try. And what if sea level was 50 feet higher and you were living in Manhattan? So these are simply the ideas. And then I would pursue from there. Have you gotten more or less optimistic, pessimistic about humanity's future on Mars or interplanetary desires as Elon has kind of proposed?

Well, interplanetary, I'm gung-ho for the solar system. I think this now, NASA slogan, space science is an Earth science, I totally believe it. And I think a robust space program is very good for us for the health of this planet, the biosphere health. I love NASA and I love the space program. I love SpaceX. Not so sure about Elon himself these days just because of his politics, which I don't like now.

But I think it's like Antarctica. And so you know the South Pole base. There's going to be one of those on Mars. And people at that point, they won't care. They won't give a damn. It'll be exactly like, oh my God, there's people at South Pole right now. How amazing. And 95 out of 100 people, you say that too.

You're like, well, so what? No, it's not interesting. Whereas we know it's interesting. And this comes from Oliver Morton, who's the environmental editor at The Economist and a good writer, nonfiction books. He says humans are interested in the place that we can't quite get to yet, but we hope that we could, maybe through technological achievements or through courage or through trying repeatedly and doing stupid things. So, okay, for a long time, it was the North Pole. Then we got there, and indeed Amundsen was on his way to the North Pole when he heard the news that someone got there,

and he just told his crew, sorry, we're going south. Flip a Ui. What a crazy thing that is in terms of logistics and everything else, but that's what he did. anyone. So then the South Pole, then Everest, and then after that, people are kind of at loose ends, and going to the moon was as shocking, but it was interesting. The moment we got to the moon, it wasn't interesting anymore. And so Oliver speculates, and I bet he's right, that when we get to Mars, it'll be a nine-days wonder, and everybody will freak out. The astronauts will come back home. It should not be a dead end destiny.

And you think it's in the Elon won't die on Mars, as he's reputed to want? I mean, as Martin He says he'll die on impact potentially. Yeah, not on impact. He might, but it would be like saying, I'm going to check into a motel six for the rest of my life. And maybe even a motel six underground for the rest of my life. How cool is that? And it's just not cool. You know, I mean, even the people who love the South Pole Station or McMurdo, they do not say, I'm never coming back.

I love this so much. I'm going to live there. The record is about 12 years, but with a three-month break in New Zealand. and traveling about the South Island. Oh, yeah, yeah. Those Anarchicans, they count their time down there by months. Oh, yeah. How long have you been in Antarctica?

54 months. And you're thinking, that's a little weird to count it that way. But they're taking advantage of the coming back. They're proud of how much time they spend in Antarctica. But they always come back to the world, as they call it. Yeah, from the ice to the world. And you've been there, and we were talking about this picture. Where did I put it up there?

Maybe it's in the frame. Maybe it's not. Yeah, it is. The dry valley. So you've been to Antarctica. I've spent only time really at the South Pole and at McMurdo Station, but I greatly prefer McMurdo because there's more people. There's soft serve ice cream on demand. And you can tell I like that. But how realistic is it? I can't call him a graduate of UCSD, but past attendee of UCSD, Andy Weir, has been a guest

in the podcast. Very wonderful. Obviously, it's a deep connection to the planet Mars, as do you. He never graduated, but he, he's a guest. He's still welcome to send his donations to UCSC. We will take them, Andy, as I told you last time. It was interesting. He's very vulnerable about his time, and he answered some of the questions about

kind of existential meaning that I'll get to at the very end of this conversation a little bit with you. If you continue to be as gracious as I know you are to answer them. But he talked about, really, the moon even is, it's not a dead end, but in his novel Artemis, after which NASA's new space program is named, No, I don't think it's named after it, but he claims the real only economic reason to go to the moon is for tourist purposes. Are you in the same camp when it comes to the moon? And what about with Mars exploration? I am in the same camp, and I met Andy a couple of times at science fiction events and enjoyed those meetings a lot.

The moon, I wrote a moon novel called Red Moon. It was the one right before ministry for the future. And I would say that it's, the moon is too small to be interesting and China is too big to be comprehensible. And putting the two together, I had a novel about Chinese taking over the South Pole of the moon, which I think could happen. But nevertheless, it was hard to find a heroic story or any economic reason to be there. But tourism, and my addition to tourism on the moon is, I think, original to me. and it comes out of Galileo. He noticed that the moon was shifting a little bit, libation or libration?

Libration. Libration. And he said it was like a man shaving, turning his head back and forth to see the sides for shaving. And so if you were, and even the poles will work with us, and the poles will have water. But along the two limbs that we see, if you put it to a hotel there, then the earth would rise and go down on a like two, basis. It would come over the horizon. It would be up in the low in the sky and then I'm going to go back down again. It's almost the only thing you'd see because everywhere else on the moon you're going to be seeing the stars fixed in position. People haven't really

thought too much. Even the Earth would be fixed in position and going through its daily cycle of shade and dark, which would be interesting. But to have it come up and down also. So yes, the moon, and the so-called economic reasons are simply, I'm going to say ridiculous. the helium three, it's quantities. Astronomy is more. And, well, astronomy, cool. It's practical, but it's not an economic driver. I mean, look at American astronomy.

It's an expense. You go to the other side or whatever you want to do. It's like the South Pole itself. So if people say we're going up there in order to make money, you've got to just laugh at them. And I think tourists, there probably shouldn't be people rich enough to be able to afford to go to the moon as a tourist. But on the other hand, if we get really these SpaceX reusable rockets

and if it becomes not grotesquely expensive, like the people have been going up into low Earth orbit for $20 million, I mean, that's probably a sign they've got too much money and should be taxed out of it. So tourism, that's not good either. Now, Mars is different because it's a planet, And once we set up a scientific base there and astronauts begin to go there, spend a season, come back in the following season, they'll have taken on a heavy dose of radiation, as you know. And they'll have had the time of their lives, and they'll come back.

But also, same at the moon. We don't know what that low gravity is going to do. I mean, we have suspicions. It's not good for you. Right. The microgravity is really bad for you. Maybe 37% would be okay. Maybe 16%.

Maybe. We don't know. it'll be experiments that astronauts will be willing to take because it'd be so cool. It's a thrill. Yeah, the thrill of it. Yeah, it might be one of our also illustrious alumna, Jessica Mayer, who's a graduate of Scripps Institution of Astronography. I'm kind of hoping that she'll be the first woman on the moon because I got to interview her twice once while she was in the ISS floating above my head. Wow.

Let's shift gears to things that Galileo noted about the similarity between the Earth and the Moon, and those are mountains. The Sierra, it's a love story. And you tell it and there are characters in it. I don't want to spoil some of the, some of the, but it is dedicated to a friend. Talk about Terry, talk about your friend who's not with us. What did you know, did you know, you knew him from your UCSD days? I knew him from sixth grade in Orange County. We were friends together, close friends from seventh grade on.

In sixth grade, he was in a different class and was just a formidable opponent on the sports fields because they played class against class. And then in seventh grade, we became good buddies, and we were ever since up to a certain point. And I want to say parenthetically that Galais was so cool in that being the geometrician that he was, that when he saw there were mountains on the moon, he made a pretty damn good calculation of how tall they were and had the moon-sized also. Impressive as hell that meant. But my friend Terry was also impressive. He was a chemistry major here at UC San Diego. We roomed together our senior year up in Del Mar, and he went up to the Sierra's with another UCSD friend, Daryl Bonin, and came back down and said to me and Joe Holds, who I just talked to day before yesterday on his birthday. He's out in Hawaii. Joe and Terry and I went up to the Sierra's together under Terry's encouragement. He said, look, we've got to go up there. It's great. Let's go to Desolation. It's such a fantastic name. It must be the best place up there.

and for years, for decades, this was a pattern. Go to the Sierra's with Terry, learn. He was a creative guy. He wanted to make gear lighter. He didn't trust the commercial companies. He thought their products were mostly crap, and he was often right. He was way ahead of the curve on ultralight backpacking. And these through hikers that go from Mexico to Canada in a single season, he was one of those,

and it was all his own gear. And the industries, the cottage industries, that have come up to serve that community where they're not just concerned with ounces, but with grams. I mean, they want a backpack that weighs five pounds plus some food. Yeah, one extra bristle on a toothbrush. Yeah, they're getting out. Yeah, yeah.

And he was like that, just out of a personal drive. And he liked to hike, I'm going to say he liked to hike 15 and 20 miles a day. That's what made him feel good in the series. And I'm talking about on trail. And I'm the one that kept insisting, let's get off trail. Let's go see places where nobody else goes. Because he would have been content to trump trails. And indeed, when this through hiking came into being, he was fond of it.

He did it twice. But then he came down with ALS and Lou Gehry's disease. Like with Stephen Hawking's hand, but he's like many people who catch that disease. They're dead within a year. I don't know if there are different varieties of it. I don't know why some people can persist for decades. Decades and other people, they measure your hand strength and they can tell you how many months you have left. And when they found, diagnosed him, he had about six months left.

This was back in, I don't know, 2018 or 2019. So, and I, you know, before that, what I've been reading about ALS is that it can have mood and cognitive effects before the physical effects show up. whether that's true or not, somehow he got distrustful of almost everybody in his life. So this was a sad thing to see, and it impacted the last decade of his life pretty heavily, and it wasn't a happy time for him. But it's important to remember that for decades before that, he was a kind of, I thought of him as a kind of a thorough figure. For sure, a mountain guru. He wanted to go up there.

he was having fun up there. And one time I saw a walrus at a zoo where you know them on land and they're just clumping around. And then if you see them underwater... Like penguins. They're graceful. They are uncontroll.

Like Michael Phelps. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, Terry in the Sierras was in his element. And down in civilization, he was not in his element. He wasn't comfortable. It's just the way it was with him.

I see the high Sierra is sort of a different incarnation of Abby's desert solitaire in some ways and there's a phrase that's never left me from that book which I want to get your reaction to which is that you know you can't live on the ocean you can't live on the mountains

you'll fall off or something like that but you can live in the desert and you can kind of persist there and it's a stable environment how do you react to that do you agree with Abby or not no it's such a desert rat There's a beautiful book by, what is his name?

It's called The Desert by a guy who had a fever around 1902 and cured it. Doctors told him to go out and live in the desert. Oh, interesting. It's fever. It's like Heisenberg's hay fever. Yeah, his name will come to me. But there's only a few books called The Desert. And Abby was like that.

These desert rats, they love it out there. And maybe they're a bit nocturnal. Maybe they're a bit don't like it to be cold, although you can be cold in the desert as you know. But it isn't sustainable. You would have to be one of an indigenous person that really knew that landscape. And then if you were an indigenous person and you knew that landscape, you wouldn't, you'd go to the Owens Valley. You'd go into the rivers. You'd be on the cottonwood rivers in the desert. You wouldn't be out there where it was completely desolated and without water because you need to live and have both food and drink. Now the high Sierra, it's somewhat similar

and somewhat not. There are summer encampments up there that the native Californians went up to every summer. To Boos Pass is one that I write about because I saw it myself. And the reason we know that that was a summer encampment for hundreds of years is there are obsidian flakes everywhere in that meadow. I mean thousands of obsidian flakes. And so you can't get there other than these are not never endemic. They were brought by humans. They were chipped off of blocks. And the, The chips came from Obsidian Dome, so they only carried them of, I don't know, maybe 20 miles, 30 miles. Well, Obsidian Dome is up near Mama, so maybe 40 miles. But in any case, they're up in Tbus Pass, and all over the Sierra, obsidian flakes.

So, some are encamp, but in the winter you're not going to be up there. You go down to the valleys below. And so it is livable. And unless you get on the vertical faces like climbers do, it's not particularly dangerous. But I must say, I've often thought about this, food up there. They were probably killing deer with snares or with arrows. And they were probably pulling meadow onions. And also they had such a good supply of acorns and pine nuts

and carry up a backpack full of pine nuts ready to eat or acorns that had already been leached. Grounded and rained. Yeah, exactly. So it was pretty robust, but not the actual local food supplies. Once you get up above about, say 8,000 feet, is relatively minimum. So a main character in the book is John Muir, and I'm proud to say I am a member of Muir College.

We have this college system here at UCSD, as you know, and other may not know, but John Muir is one of them. He has a complicated legacy. You and I talked about this at Washington, D.C. when we were there. I should also mention that you're gracious enough to participate in events for the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, of which I'm honored to be the associate director of, along with Eric Vierry, Patrick Coleman, stupid wolkow and others uh but you have um you and i just chat in the car uh on your way uh are both mutual way to the amtrak station after mitchie kaku and others won the uh and you spoke as well at the uh clark foundation awards that was fun a couple years ago yep um and that was a great time

but you and i talked about muir and sort of some of the complicated aspects of his of his life and and his career i love the portrayal and i love the quotes that you use you do talk about it in the book famous one of course i found by going out, I was really going in. What does Muir mean to you? And what do you say to those who say his legacy has been tarnished and compromised in some sense? Yeah. Hadaday presents in the red corner, the undisputed, undefeated weed whacker guys.

Champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere. And in the blue corner, the challenger, extra strength, Hannity. Eye drops and work all day to prevent the release of histamines that cause itchy, Allergy Eyes. And the winner by knockout is Padiday. Padiday. Bring it on. Well, I conceive of myself as his defense attorney because that is a, that is a calumny. He has been mischaracterized.

And this was a kind of a clickbait gotcha moment, a canceled culture moment of 2020. the executive director of the Sierra Club Cravenly gave into it and supported it. She found it or almost, he didn't find, you mentioned in the book. Yeah, well, he certainly was involved, but there were men, mostly men in San Francisco who came to him and said, well, you'll help us start a Sierra Club,

and he said, hell yeah. And the leader in 2020, yes. Yeah, so this is a moment that has passed. I was extremely angry in 2020, because the people who were accusing him of racism, they had not read him. And I've read him. And I mean in full, even to the point of going to his archives at University of Pacific in Stockton, California, and reading all the unpublished stuff.

I needed to be sure. Like, to prove a negative is difficult, as you know. And this is one of the scientists, big problem. So if I say, no, he was not a racist, well, how do you prove a negative? And one way to try is to read everything. And I have to say, there's a dozen sentences of him. him of his, that are obnoxious, that are a little ignorant on his part and a little judgy. He was Presbyterian, his dad whipped him through his youth and childhood. He was kind of PTSD.

He didn't like seeing people sitting around during the daytime, and he didn't like people with dirty clothing. Both of those things he found shocking and sinful. Not that he stayed a Christian, but he had these attitudes beaten into him. But aside from about a dozen sentences, his admiration for Native Californians and Native Americans in general was strong, and he never had much of anything to say about the recently freed slaves of the South. When he was a kid, he hiked all the way down to Florida and saw the Shattered South, and he made relatively objective, sometimes admiring comments, sometimes critical comments, sometimes ignorant comments about the black people he met in the South.

But once he got to California, he had very little contact with them at all. So if you hunt for these sentences, the new executive director of the Sierra Club, Ben Jellis, whose previous job was at the NAACP. Ben Jellis said once recently, you know, Mirr, sometimes he sounds like a guy writing in the 19th century. And I think that's so well put. There are some sentences that are 19th century sentences that we wouldn't say now. Right. fell into the 20th century, unfortunately, but right.

They got plucked out of the record, oh, with a bad man. But I want to finish the point by saying, what did Muir actually do? Because Audubon had slaves. And even Krober, Ursula Lleguen's father, he had his name taken off of buildings in Berkeley because he had Ishi's brain sent to the Smithsonian. And because he told the federal government that some of the native kids. Californians around the San Francisco Bay did not constitute tribes, and that kept them from getting federal listings.

And so their lives were impacted by Krober's opinions. Muir never did any of that. And the main accusation against Muir as to doing stuff was that he encouraged the national park system to kick Native Americans off their land in order to make a pure wilderness. That never happened. That absolutely did not happen. He died before the National Park Service was established, but also. So he never said that to anybody, not to Teddy Roosevelt, not to anybody.

He, I mean, when he said everybody should go up to the mountains and get their glad tidings, he was thinking of his white middle class audience that were in the cities. But he was certainly never said they should get these Native Californians out of here to make a better wilderness area. That is simply a lie. And now that I've read all of him and seen the context, he actually said once, these Native Californians, they live so well in the landscape. party they made them yeah yeah he did and he said also it's clear that they burn this valley floor in order to clear it for to make parkland out of it so this people who accused him of not even knowing

the ecological fire management practices they're wrong about that to me right so to i mean i don't want to go on too long about this but mirror a heroic figure um the world's most famous environmentalist and um he still is worth valuing because the sierras are the way they are because he was such a good writer too Like Galileo, he could capture the beauty and the sacredness of the outdoor world. Right. He's eminently quotable as well. Yeah. So I want to ask a couple of final questions.

I'm going to wrap up with my existential. You just call it the thrilling three. Now I call it the final four. We'll see how many we can get to. I know you've got a huge event coming up and not too long from now. First, though, I want to pitch an idea to you. My nascent entry into science fiction. So Kim Prather is a national category.

member, professor, atmospheric chemistry. She's closely associated with the idea of atmospheric rivers, which you talk about in your book is Pineapple Express, is what it used to be branded. Now it's kind of revisited. But one of her theories, and sorry Kim, if you're listening, another Kim, famous KM, ACSD, associated. Last night. So one of her theories is that microbes may control the generation and diminution of the atmospheric river phenomena when there's a drought that they do nucleate and they do cause this upwelling and so forth that do enter into the atmosphere providing nucleation sites for precipitation to fall, which then cures the drought, right?

So here's my pitch to you. You're the book agent, right? Okay. Can we turn this into a science fiction novel, or the microbes are taking over the planet, maybe add in some Paul Davies, a little shadow biosphere, because they're not from Earth, perhaps, but they want to maintain the Earth so that we can get to planet Borchon and then save it. Anyway, what do you think? Yay or nay?

Do the Caligula, do the thumbs up. Holy moly, go for it. All right. Go for it. You heard it here first. Yes. You need to figure out the plot. And here's what I say, a plot is something goes wrong.

That's really the quick definition of a plot. And you don't want to read a novel that doesn't have a plot. That's, I've had my butt whipped for trying that. And it doesn't work. So what I love about this is I'm right now reading the, correspondence between James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. And it's a funny and interesting dialogue between the two of them as they work out this homeostasis or this cybernetic feedback loops. And she's the biologist and he's the cyberneticist and all around space cadet, super scientist.

Leubleck was really good, although erratic and strange, an independent scholar. But they didn't want to make it Mother Earth. They didn't want a personification. They wanted a name for a It's actually somewhat hard to describe what guy is with some kind of supra organism that is self-raigna. Well see all that yeah It's all personify there, right? Yeah, but homoestatic is a good way to put it into just cybernetic terms and but with living elements in it that want to live and are encouraged by leaving. So what I love about this idea is I just think Lovelock and Margulis would love it. Interesting.

Yeah. All right. Well, it gets at least a provisional stamp of approval. All right, Stan, we've reached the sort of end where we transition into questions of existential import. And all of these in some way or another are tangentially or directly related to quotes of the great Arthur C. Clark. Did you meet Arthur?

By phone only. Okay. But he had a deep influence on you and passed an upcoming guest, Peter Diamandis, who also sends regards. Oh, yeah. He's a great friend of the Clark Center as well. So Clark would say many things. My favorite that I love to drop on my faculty colleagues at a faculty meeting is for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert.

I love to drop that on my department chair from time to time. But he also said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. And if you are subscriber to my mailing list, I call it the magic mailing list because we go through different aspects of what Clark and memories and sort of imaginative concepts. But I want to reimagine that question and say, what aspect of humanity is most magical to you? What, what invention? What would you put on an obelisk, on a monolith, you know, that could be a time capsule, a sentinel for less for billions of years to give us the swagger that we might deserve to say we were here? What would you put on such a talisman or, you know, future shard of our existence? What should humanity be most proud of in your conception?

Oh, most proud of, oh, my God. I don't know. I mean, anesthetics, heart surgery, medicine in general. I think science came out of an urge to reduce our suffering and make us more comfortable in the world. Less hungry, less hurt. And how to do that. Child and error, a lot of early scientists were women, the herb woman, as in my novel shaman. So I I would say medicine right off the bat because now we're living, like I'm living extended lifetime as in my Mars novels. I just hit 71, but it's only medicine that I got past about 65. I've had my life saved twice by medicine, so I'm particularly sensitive to how lucky we are to have the scientific project with that as its high point. Now, I would also say, you talk about Paul Davies, a wonderful writer and thinker. My God. He's the only person that ever has been able to explain some of the details of quantum mechanics in a way that I followed him. And that's mostly metaphorical in writing ability, not mathematical, in terms of his ability to explain to a layperson. He's fabulous and a good guy.

And he writes about mysticism a lot. And so this is also pure to Tilhard de Chardin. You got the lithosphere, the atmosphere, you got the biosphere, and then the Neuosphere, which, which was Des Chardin's word for the mental, maybe the thoughts of Gaia. The Anthrosphere, right? Yeah, exactly. And it is a human, the Neosphere is created by human thinking. So even the Internet as a technological manifestation of the Neosphere, or I said once in my Mars

books that first Mars has a Neosphere and then it got an atmosphere and a biosphere, because we thought of it first and then did it. Then we instantiated it. Yeah. Here it's the reverse. on earth. So that's what I would say. Medicine for sure. Okay. Another quote from Sir Arthur. When an elderly, a distinguished scientist, says something is possible, he is most certainly right. When he says something is impossible, he is very likely wrong. As you stand, what have you changed

your mind on? What, if anything, have you been wrong about? What would you like a mulligan about, if anything whatsoever? I'm not calling you elderly, by the way. Yeah, no, I would, like to take all mentions of blockchain out of ministry for the future. I think it was pressing. I think blockchain is bad coding and will be a phenomenon of just this decade and there will be better coding systems later. But that's a trivial thing. That's a good question.

I don't know. I was at UCSD 50 years ago. as an undergrad, I was several things converged in my brain at once and made me who I am. And ever since then, I've been kind of bowling along like a bowling ball, enjoying life and seeing the world. I can't think of things that have caused me to change anything major in my thinking since then. But now, this is probably an admission of my thinking has been too fixed. Not that flexible. I'm a creature of a habit.

And so my habits have been fixed for a long time. Well, as Yogi Beres said, if it ain't broke? Yeah. Well, I should never, I should not have spent so many years indoors. That's an accident, especially as a Californians, you can spend 50 to 100% more time than you do outdoors just by deciding to. And I didn't make that decision until, you know, about 2006 or so. But do you mind having more skin? You know, you've got remarkably smooth.

I've got a bunch of skin cancers chopped out of me. Even still. Oh, wow. Oh, hell, yeah. All right. Last question, Stan, and then I'll let you on your way. And that's the following statement by Sir Arthur, that the only way of determining the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. That's how we get the name in this podcast after all.

I want to ask you, what advice to 21-year-old Stan here at UCSD? What advice would you give to yourself to give yourself the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? Advice to your former self? Well, can I say as an English major and a word person that this is not a good use of language, that if you say impossible, you mean impossible. And so, and Clark was bad at this too, but he just came from physics. There's not going to be faster than light traveled by human beings. I'd just say that. It's impossible. And you can come back in 500 years and we'll test that out and I'll still be right.

This is one thing that physics is very good at, you know. Although, you know, we do have dark matter. It's not like we understand everything. Things are quite mysterious right now. But some things, I think, are impossible. So, and also this whole notion, say that, okay, humanity, like, is destined for the stars. and if we don't make it to the stars, we must have been idiots as a species. We must have failed.

But if you set yourself an impossible goal and then you fail, then you've just, the goal was stupid. Or it could be like, you know, so it says, oh, I'm superior to you, Stan, because I have a nicer phone than you. You know who's the most powerful people on Earth? They don't even have phones. Someone else has a phone from them, right? Yeah, yeah. So it's a false dichotomy. It is indeed.

And the use of language, we have all these words that are getting squished out of their natural, element and being overused and pressured to the point where they blow up like a balloon that you've stopped. So that, you know, the word artificial intelligence, what if the name, what if you just said extremely rapid computation or freedom, would if you change that to God knows what? Or people say, oh, he's very unique. And you've got to understand that unique cannot take adjectives. So you get into English major hairsprying about words. I would say if you...

But in terms of yourself, if going back, you're teleported through their quantum mechanical wormholes. Going back, stands here. What do you say to him? Don't worry too much about making mistakes. The mistakes will lead to later developments that are so cool that this play of title of Shakespeare's, all's well that ends well.

If it ends well, then the crap along the way was necessary. So don't fret. about mistakes. I often did that. Those mistakes actually led me into the life I'm in. And I think maybe, you know, it's got to be a time of anxiety, climate anxiety, anxiety about jobs and careers in a world in flux and a gig economy and everything's changing. And people who are 20 years old a day, their 50 years coming for them is going to be wild. Be easy to be anxious. Well, you just got to ride the wave. And, and, you just got to ride the wave. And, and, you know, you know, all's well that ends well.

Very well, from one great wordsmith to another. Stan, thank you so much for being so gracious with your time, your effort, your support of the Clark Center, and everything you do for UCSD and San Diego and the world at large for the Ceras, which I know you love. Thank you for writing this love letter to them and your many works along the way. Thank you so much. Well, thank you, Brian. It's a real pleasure. You know me.

I love UCSD. I love Muir College. I love the Clark Center. I loved Clark. And so we are right on the same vibe with all this stuff. Fantastic. Yeah. Thank you all.

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