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- [00:00]
A
This is humans.
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B
Humans, Humans, humans, humans, humans.
- [00:08]
A
I'm Hank Green. Humans are strange in a very specific way. We are not the fastest or the strongest, but we are very, very good at figuring things out. Not every time, but remarkably consistently so consistently that I think we can all agree this trait has led to a pretty weird set of outcomes, which include you listening to this podcast. Andy Weir writes stories about this ability. All the little moments when something stops being impossible and starts being solvable. Because it's never all at once, right? It's one thing after another, step by step by step. A person looks at a problem that should kill them or all of us and says, okay, what would have to be true for us to not die right now? Andy's books, project, Hail Mary, Artemis, the Martian, the. They're compelling because figuring out how to not die, not through brute force, but through a succession of little moments of insight and the application of our tools is a pretty big part of the human story. And something I find very interesting about Andy is that he didn't just write stories like this. He kind of lived that process as he built his career. For years he was writing and publishing his work online, letting people point out what he got wrong, what they liked, what didn't work, fixing it, iterating and trying again the same way his characters do. Also, something I find very interesting that I've been thinking about a lot. His stories carry an assumption that reality has a structure, that problems are understandable, that the answers are out there, and that if we pay attention, if we test things out, if we are willing to be wrong, we can get close enough to the truth that we can actually do something with it. And in a time when it seems like a lot of the world's problems are pretty unsolvable, I think a lot of people are happy to hear that message. The world is big and messy and. And it's contradictory and it's overwhelming. But problems are not unsolvable. They feel unsolvable when you first look at them. That's why they're still problems. If they felt solvable, they wouldn't be problems anymore. But getting to solve, along with Mark Watney or Ryland Grace, is a joy because it is very human and it makes us feel the agency that we actually do have. So I want to talk to Andy about that. I want to talk to him about science fiction, about optimism, about trying to understand reality. Andy Weir was Welcome to humans. First question, what is science fiction?
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B
For me, science fiction is not a genre. It's a setting for me saying science Fiction is kind of like saying, Chicago, you could have a love story in Chicago. You could have a drama in Chicago, you could have an action movie in Chicago. You could have whatever you want.
- [02:42]
A
Yeah. I love the big silly debates that we get into as citizens of the world and the Internet where we have to yell at each other about what science fiction really is. That's a good sort of solution to the problem, to be like, look, everybody, if it feels like sci fi, it is sci fi. I've been working on a little. Can I hit you with a theory of science fiction?
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B
I'm sorry, no.
- [03:06]
A
It's going to be like this the whole time, everybody. Sci fi is not when the rules of the universe are the rules of our universe, really, but when we are asked as readers to believe that the rules of the universe in the book or in the piece of media are the rules of our universe.
- [03:25]
B
Interesting. I don't 100% agree with you because I think that definition is fairly broad. You know, a story like Twilight or, you know, contemporary fantasy stories like that.
- [03:35]
A
Yeah. I guess you are being asked to believe that there are kind of vampires in this world, but I don't think you are. Like, I read Twilight, and I don't think that Stephenie Meyer wants me to believe that this world that I inhabit right now has vampires in it.
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B
That's true, but I don't think Gene Roddenberry specifically wanted you to believe that this world has Romulans. Right.
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A
No, but like the rules of the Star Trek universe, the warp drive. I believe that the warp drive is something that could exist in my universe. I'm being asked to believe.
- [04:03]
B
Yeah, Yeah, I guess that's as good a taxonomy as any. I can. I can get behind it. I want to take a quick aside. There's a short of you talking about how you advised me on Project Hail Mary. Right. The thing that you corrected me on when you read a prerelease of PHM was the math related to a pendulum. It didn't quite work out. And then they sent it to me and said, oh, he says the math is wrong here. And I checked. And I'm like, well, he's right. You know, the math is wrong. But we're already. It's already off to the printers. Like, oh, was it? Yeah, it was already in the hands of the printers. And I'm like, well, I assume it's like, way too late. And my editor was like, well, it's a quick change. It doesn't change.
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A
It doesn't change the lines.
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B
It doesn't change. The lines. If you cause one word to line
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wrap, then you couldn't do it.
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B
Then you couldn't do it. Because they don't just deal with the pagination line wrap. They also have to deal with rivers. Do you know about rivers in books?
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A
No. No.
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B
If you open up a book to a random page, if they didn't go out of their way to prevent it, there is a chance that the words would line up such that the spaces would kind of line up and make a negative space image that catches your eye.
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A
Yeah, yeah, I've seen that. They avoid those.
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B
Yeah, they avoid those because they don't want you distracted. They have software to do it, but slightly nudge things around to keep those R from happening. And so just one line wrap would
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A
break the whole rest of the book.
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B
They'd have to reanalyze every page of the rest of the book for. But anyway, this was something that they could change. And so my editor was like, well, it's in the hands of the printing facility, but I'll find out if they've done the run yet. And they were, like, loading it. So this was quite literally a stop the presses.
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A
Because I remember reading the book and being like, it got fixed.
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B
Yeah. But I wanted you to know that it was the very last change ever made to it. Because they're, like, loading the papers into the machine and they're like, hold on, we're gonna make this one little change in the file. Just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Then do the print run. So you can also lay claim to being like, the very last edit.
- [06:00]
A
I've always felt a little bit weird talking about that in public because, of course, I was reading the book. Not as a consultant or anything. I was reading it because I was gonna interview for the release. And so I got an early copy. I've always felt a little bit like I shouldn't, but then it's very cool for me, in part because your work is about people solving real problems in the real world. And at least when it comes to the physics, you are working hard.
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B
Yeah, I am.
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A
To have that be a character in the story and to get it right. And, like, part of the fun of it is you getting it right. And also people checking you and you're in this weird dialogue with the world. And so when I noticed this, I was like, oh, God, I gotta save Andy.
- [06:45]
B
I appreciate it, but there are other mistakes in the book. So, of course, you know, I was already doomed. I invite this on myself. Like, I go out there and say, hey, I Made this as scientifically accurate as possible. And so I'm basically saying, yes, nerds, you may email me with inaccuracies and errors that I made.
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A
There's something very fun about that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Now I want to ask you about some short story stuff.
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B
Okay.
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A
This is a very in the weeds Andy Weir question. So before you ever wrote a novel, you were writing short stories online. You were sharing them. Small audience, growing audience, one person at a time. And a lot of your short stories are just setups for plot twists, which I love. They could be 5 minutes to read kind of thing. Like almost a joke.
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B
I tend to go for short shorts. Yeah.
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A
So Anti Hypoxia is a short story that feels extremely Andy Weir. It's a real delight. It's such, like, an economy of storytelling. The story is basically, there is a scientist. He's developed this remarkable tool for helping people survive things that would normally kill them, basically by making it so that you never run out of oxygen in your body. And the twist, and I apologize for ruining this for everybody, but the twist at the end is that he is so fed up with the way that the structures of bureaucracy works that he just gets this new medical technique out into the world with a virus that he infects everyone with because he can't wait for the fda because so many people will die if we go through the proper channels. And then accidentally, it turns out that the because he didn't test it, it has negative consequences elsewhere in the body. And he accidentally creates exactly the thing that zombies are. So, like people who have no brains and cannot think, but also die very slowly.
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B
Yeah. As I recall, he made a version of a special version of hemoglobin that could hold, like, way more oxygen, so your body had something like hours and hours or days of reserve oxygen so that even if your heart stops working, as long as they can get you to a hospital and fix whatever's wrong with you within a day or two, then you'll be fine. Your brain won't be damaged in that day. And he tested it on rats. He tested it on everything. But he'd never tested it on humans. And it turns out that it basically ruins higher brain function in humans because he tested it on animals. And so basically, it reduces humans to being like mindless animals. But then the only way to kill them is to shoot them in the head, basically. And he himself is immune to the virus because he spent so much time working with the virus. His body was already. Yes.
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A
And so now he's just walking around with a bunch of shotguns in a zombie apocalypse wasteland.
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B
I had fun with that one. I remember because he's this unbelievably arrogant asshole. Like, he still doesn't think he did anything wrong.
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A
He's like, look, I played the numbers.
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B
I think it starts with, I am the most brilliant scientist.
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A
Yeah. And frankly, if somebody could pull that off, they're pretty brilliant.
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B
Yeah. But he's like, he has no remorse. He doesn't consider himself responsible for any of this. He's just such an asshole. That's one of the fun things about writing short shorts. You could never wr. Write that as a book with that main character because the reader will despise.
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A
You'd have to have a bunch of, like, good guys.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Who were the actual protagonists?
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That guy would be the villain.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Yeah. It's weird. It's a fun thing. In short shorts, you can actively hate the main character.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Because you're going to get through it.
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B
Yeah.
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A
The thing about this is that it feels very illustrative of the way that you create story, which it feels. Feels a little bit like you sat down and you were like, okay, so for zombies to exist without magic, what would that have to look like? And then you stared at the wall for seven hours and you figured out this problem and then you solved all of the problems. And by the end of the story, it was like, okay, not only do we have like a super villain who's got his resistance from the virus, we've got all the necessary ingredients to have a zombie.
- [10:37]
B
Yep, you've got it. Exactly. I was like, how could we have a proper zombie apocalypse in a hard sci fi setting? That's my shtick, is I take a very common science fiction theme.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And then I do it my way. Like, guy stranded on Mars. Okay, well, there's the movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars from like 1958 or something. I didn't come up with that person being a smuggler living on the moon. There's probably like 5 million stories that are like that, or someone out to save the earth from an existential crisis of the sun and stuff like that. All these things have been done like a thousand times. I just like to do them with my own spin. So I was like, how do I make zombies happen?
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A
I've always had huge problems with zombies stories because they are asking me to believe impossible things.
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B
I can accept the biology. I can accept that MacGuffin of just. Okay, whatever it is. There's this contagious thing that turns people into zombies and their bodies end up being indestructible until you hit them in the head. Whatever.
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A
Yeah.
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But the United States army is pretty good at what they do.
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A
Got some pretty remarkable tools for just obliterating people. Yeah.
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B
If you take on team A is a bunch of shambling, mindless creatures. Team B is the United States military. Yeah, I'm pretty sure Team B will happen. So that's one thing where I was like, okay, a zombie outbreak would have to be everywhere all at once. It couldn't be a contagion.
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A
So the problem that you have with zombie apocalypse is not. I don't understand how a thing that doesn't have a beating heart can walk around.
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B
Right.
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A
The problem you have is I'm pretty sure humans would work together to fix this before it got too big of a problem. Which is very Andy Weir. Which leads me to a remarkable thing I got sent to me. A friend of mine sent me a tweet and it said that Andy Weir has a worldview that I call Hank Greenism.
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B
Hank Greenism. I like it. I'll take that.
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A
People are good, Science is good, Things will get better. We should all work together across barriers. And I'm like, yeah, if you want to call that Hank Greenism, then I'll sign up for that for sure.
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B
I'm a Hank Greenist.
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A
So we are both pretty pro human.
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B
What's the alternative?
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A
Well, let me tell you, there are some.
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B
Yeah.
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A
What do you think is good about humans?
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B
It goes all the way down to our fundamental evolution. Our species evolved as a pack. We have a pack instinct. We cooperate, and that is a core element of our being. What I think is cool is the things that are best about humanity are the things that are built into our brains at a fundamental level. Like traits that cause me to feel good about humanity are universal. Like there are no civilizations or cultures that do not have compassion, empathy, cooperation, collaboration. If you have a village, that means you already have all of those traits
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A
because everyone has them. We overlook them as a thing. Yes. I think there are other organism that also have them, but there are certainly organisms that don't.
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B
Yeah. Humans are not unique on our planet in terms of having that sort of pack instinct. Like wolves. Wolves will feed the weaker members of their pack.
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A
A lot of primates.
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B
Yeah, primates, of course, because that's where we got it from.
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A
I wonder about raccoons. I don't know.
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B
I don't think of raccoons in groups.
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A
They have like family groups. I don't think they have multi family groups. Thank goodness. Because that would be Terrifying a raccoon apocalypse.
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B
No trash can is safe.
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A
People will talk about how badly we are handling this responsibility and ability that we have as humans. And one of my frameworks is how do you think raccoons would do if they were this smart? How do you think they'd do? I feel like they'd make a lot of the same mistakes.
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B
I think you can't really get to our level of intelligence. Like human intelligence, I think, is predicated on human cooperation.
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A
I think that human intelligence is not stored in any individual.
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B
I mean, if you think about it, we just call it language and call it a day. But we have the ability where I can transfer a specific organization of a few million neurons in my brain over to yours.
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A
Really fast.
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B
Really fast.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're doing it right now. And also we're doing it to you.
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B
Yeah, we have data transfer technology that works not only point to point, but point one to many.
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A
Now it's one to millions.
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B
So you have to have cooperation. So the raccoons, basically, if you had raccoons that were as intelligent as humans,
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A
you think that they would probably be almost identically as good as us because they'd have to build the same systems.
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B
If you give them the intelligence but don't give them the cooperation instincts that we have and the packing instincts that we have, then you just have a bunch of really intelligent scavengers. So you'd have. This scavenger is pretty good at problem solving and stuff like that, but he doesn't tell the next raccoon how he figured out how to do this thing, and then he dies.
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A
You don't get the figuring out at scale that we have.
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B
And you don't get the specialization. You get the big advances in technology by first specializing.
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A
Yeah.
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B
If you go back to like Paleolithic era, our hunter gatherer tribes, everybody had to be able to do everything right. So everybody had to hunt. They probably separated based on males and females. But beyond that, like, all the men had to be able to hunt. All the men had to be able to fight other villages. But then it was later when they started to get like agriculture that you could have someone specialize in being like, yeah, I'm not a very good hunter, but I'm really good at making shoes. So how about I work on that and you guys work on that, and then while you're out hunting, you'll have really good shoes.
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A
That's going to be a game changer. Like that's going to help. You have no idea the extent to
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B
which yeah, you guys are not going to have foot injuries anymore, thanks to me. And then you guys just give me some of your food.
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A
Have you played the game Civilization?
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B
I have.
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A
It's like a turn based game where you move through the process of a civilization. And one of the conceits of the game is that in the beginning of the game, every turn is like 50 years. And by the end of the game, when you're in the modern time, every turn is a year and you're slowly decreasing the number of years per turn because more is happening as civilization progresses. But I've heard historians take issue with this that actually kind of at every point in our history, a lot has been happening. We're just not particularly good at remembering it. And also if you go super far back, it doesn't do a great job of preserving in the fossil record. We think that we had this very long period of time where stabby stone points were all the same. And so humanity must not have been progressing that much. But a lot of stuff may have been happening in textiles. It turns out that a huge amount of the technology of people was turning fibers into useful things.
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B
And also wood.
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A
Yeah, all wood.
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B
All the wood from 50,000 years ago is rotted away and gone. So they would have had primarily like wood structures. They say. All we found were these little stone tools.
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A
It's like everybody was living in caves and it's like, no, the caves are the things that stuck around.
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B
Yeah.
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A
This reminds me of a thing that I heard you say on another podcast, which is that I also think that the future is always better than the past.
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B
Yeah. Because to think otherwise, follow my logic here. I think it's pretty easy to say where we are now is better than pretty much anywhere in the past. If you're looking long term, if you're going like centuries or even 50.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Then where we are now is definitely better than anywhere in the past. If you believe that the future is going to suck, then that necessarily means that you must believe we are currently right now at the pinnacle of human accomplishment.
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A
Right. Which is we always think we're at the end of history. It's one of these things where, like, if you look at where the stock market is, you're like, well, here's the top.
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B
You know,
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A
it must be going down from here.
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B
Yeah. That's why I say, would you rather be in 2026 or 1926?
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A
This is very hard to get into our heads because of course we are all obsessed with the problems of our moment and we should be. We didn't get where we are by not being worried.
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B
We shouldn't ignore the problems. It's just the doom and gloom, the
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A
hopelessness, which also does not help solve the problem.
- [18:27]
B
Exactly. Identifying that we have problems, working on those problems, that's important and that needs to be done. Yeah, but looking at the problems and throwing up your hands and saying, well, it's over is A not productive and B, not true. It's easy to get morose when you watch the news or read the news or whatever because the news by definition talks about things that are abnormal. Like when people are cooperative and collaborative and help each other, it generally doesn't make the news. And so my hypothetical is imagine someone slips while crossing the street and breaks their leg. Seven total strangers crowd around, help them to a street corner, call an ambulance, maybe get them some water, try to make them comfortable. That's not going to make the news. You're not going to read about that in your feed.
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A
And sometimes people say, like, why don't we start the organization that covers good news?
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B
Many have tried.
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A
That's not what we want.
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B
Many have tried that. There have been good news networks. It's just people just don't.
- [19:25]
A
We want to look at the things that are easy to pay attention to and that's threats. I think that we would not have gotten where we are if we were not so threat sensitive.
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B
Yes.
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A
And I'm glad that we're threat sensitive right now. We're looking at the problems and trying to fix them.
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B
But.
- [19:39]
A
But there's also the sort of scale of the information. I don't know if we are more anti human now than we were in the past. This is not something that I've done any research on. But like, I feel like we are certainly exposed to more bad news than we ever have been.
- [19:54]
B
I think that's true and I think that we are in a transitional state learning how to digest that much information.
- [20:00]
A
Yeah.
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B
So if you go back in time to before radio, all the news came to you from newspapers. If you lived in San Francisco, you probably wouldn't end up reading about a fire that killed 12 people in like Montana.
- [20:15]
A
Certainly not in India.
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B
Definitely not in India. And then the radio came around and people started getting national news rapidly and that was an adjustment. And then television came around and that was an adjustment. The concept of having this much information at your fingertips so fast is less than a generation old. And we are learning to adapt to getting this deluge of information and it's being filtered through algorithms which are focused on gaining my attention not in helping my mood.
- [20:43]
A
Yeah, I think about this. People won't have heard this, but I think about this through the lens of like, if there's more and more information and there are more and more people competing to keep your attention and to have you pay attention to them instead of the person next to them. We've had cycles like this before. This is how yellow journalism works.
- [21:02]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [21:03]
A
We could basically give away the papers because we can do the advertisements. We've invented this new system for funding the news. All that's important is circulation, how many people will look at the paper. And then you have these papers competing to create the most salient possible attention grabbing headlines which are going to be about like moral corruption, they're going to be about foreign invasion, they're going to be about threats, threats, threats. The most dangerous things you could imagine.
- [21:28]
B
And with the deluge of suppliers, there is no real way to keep up with them. Fact checking wise. There's nobody to police them. And we live in a society where you don't police speech.
- [21:37]
A
And we didn't have any internal protections against it because it was like, well, the newspapers are where the true information is.
- [21:43]
B
Right.
- [21:44]
A
Because previously they had been. But there was this new business model.
- [21:47]
B
I liken it to being kind of like this happens in pretty much every society. Once a civilization starts to get wealthy, they start to get fat. Like it happened to Americans, it's happening to the Chinese now.
- [21:59]
A
Yeah. Because it turns out the biggest problem people tend to have is not having enough food. And then when you have enough food it's like, oh, well, now I have a new problem.
- [22:07]
B
Then we have the yellow journalism, but for food, it's like the food that tastes better.
- [22:11]
A
This is exactly the metaphor I use.
- [22:14]
B
Yeah. The chocolate bar is more fun to eat than the broccoli. And so you keep eating the chocolate bar and then you're fat.
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A
And then eventually you say to yourself, I'm enjoying this chocolate bar, but I am not enjoying my time in the bathroom.
- [22:27]
B
I'm not enjoying being winded crossing the street.
- [22:29]
A
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
It's making me sick.
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A
I think we're at the edge of that point with this stuff where we're realizing that we're eating junk food all of the time because everybody's just competing to make the most salient possible information without us having credibility as a prerequisite to paying attention to someone.
- [22:46]
B
It's funny the kind of dopamine economy, right. It's like when people invented opium. Nobody set out to invent an addictive drug. No. Yeah, they just noticed that it was fun to do this and then they just kept distilling down the experience until here we go to the maximum amount ultimately of dopamine that you get for the minimum amount of effort. And then we're going to sell that and now we're getting that in the Internet. And it's just like the concept of doom scrolling. I think we've all been just stuck there where you're just like next. Oh yeah, next. And then it takes mental effort to stop.
- [23:19]
A
So you tend to think that technology is good. I don't feel like this current incarnation of mass media has had positive impacts so far. I do feel like in the long term this is my frame that we will just like how when like the printing press first happened, it was very disruptive to society. A lot of people were like, we shouldn't have done this, we gotta control this. But now nobody looks at books and are like, ah, books are scary and bad. We shouldn't have done books. People are now pro book. I think that someday that's how we'll feel. It will just be like we'll look back and say, oh wow, that was a really disruptive time when the Internet first happened. But nobody's anti Internet. Nobody thinks that it was like a bad thing to have happen.
- [23:58]
B
It's just like there were people who were upset about radio, but like radio
- [24:02]
A
did a lot of harm.
- [24:02]
B
Yeah. And that's the thing. It's just when a new technology reaches the masses, it takes the masses a little while to adapt to it.
- [24:09]
A
Do you think that's just what we have to do?
- [24:11]
B
Yeah, it's on the individual. It'll take a generation or two. You know, I have a four year old son. By the time he's grown up, he will just have, I think an instinctive ability to sort the wheat from the chaff on the information that's coming at him. Yeah.
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A
Systems will build around people's norms.
- [24:27]
B
Well, yes. So we live in a society of free speech, so it'll be incumbent on the individual to police their own input. Yeah.
- [24:34]
A
It would be easier if there were like alternatives that I felt good about, but I just don't feel like a lot of them exist yet. But I think that people need to want it first because right now what I see is people mostly don't like, want their decisions taken away from them. And to have their algorithm defined specifically for them to want is a strange thing. There's this extraordinarily dystopian term in Silicon Valley called revealed preference.
- [24:58]
B
Okay.
- [24:59]
A
So, for example, people will say that they want their feed to be a chronological feed of the people they follow, right?
- [25:04]
B
But it's not true.
- [25:05]
A
But then when you give them a chronological feed of the people they follow or an algorithmic feed of a bunch of, like, the most salient tweets, they will go for the algorithmic feed of the most salient tweets, and that's their revealed preference. And I'm like, that's not what that is. That's not the same thing as a preference. I don't know what I want. And what I want to want are different things.
- [25:27]
B
Yeah, I was aware of that concept. I didn't know that name. Every human being, there is a disconnect between what you really want and what you think you want. And that's just normal.
- [25:36]
A
I don't think it's dystopian to have the difference. I think it's dystopian for them to label it as my revealed preference when I should be the one who decides what my revealed preference is. You cannot reveal my preference.
- [25:48]
B
Well, I don't know. I think that is fair to say. You can say you're going to go to the gym every day, but if your revealed preference is that you go to the gym like three times after you get your membership and never again, that's a revelation.
- [26:00]
A
So how about these basically two YouTubes, right? There's long form YouTube and then there's shorts, which is like the TikTok version of YouTube. There's a button where you can click and say, don't show me these shorts on my homepage. I know I'll watch them, but I don't want to see them because I'd rather not. I'd rather watch longs. I like the long form experience. I get more out of it. I know that I'm happier after a session of watching those than watching shorts, and I'm aware of this. But if you show them to me, something's gonna catch my eye and I'm gonna start watching them. So stop showing them to me. And then YouTube will stop showing them to you for a while and then they'll start again. And then you watch them and they're like, well, I guess the revealed preference is that he wanted to watch them, but I don't. I still don't want to watch them, but they will still show them to me because they know that it will increase the amount of time I spend on the site.
- [26:43]
B
Yeah, I guess it's kind of like saying, like, I don't want to See a bunch of bloody, dismembered human bodies.
- [26:49]
A
Yeah. I don't want to see car crashes,
- [26:51]
B
but, like, if I'm driving by and there's a bunch of bloody, dismembered human bodies due to a bus crash or something, I'm going to look at it. But that doesn't mean that's an experience that I want. Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying.
- [27:04]
A
You say that by the time your 4 year old is headed out into the world to be a human, maybe we'll have figured out this current media revolution, but we've also got another one right on the shoulder of this one, which is artificial intelligence, generative AI, large language models, chatbots. All of these things are happening. You know, I've been thinking about this a lot. I've been trying to figure out how I feel about this. I have a theory that people in science fiction aren't writing about this yet because we don't know what it's gonna be. It's very hard to write about AI now suddenly, like, it was a lot easier in 2017 than it is now, because now we're like, okay, everything I write a year from because takes a while for a book to come out, takes a while to finish a book. By the time it comes out, I'm worried it's gonna look really wrong.
- [27:49]
B
Y the reason I'm not writing about AI right now is because I'm actually worried about the opposite. I think that the market is going to be very quickly saturated with books about AI I think that lots of people are spinning up their own AI books right now. And I don't want to be one of 74 AI centered stories. And I also don't like chasing the current thing. I like to come up with my own stuff. But in terms of AI, if you're talking about how to feel about AI well, I'm going to have to apply my obnoxious optimism to it.
- [28:19]
A
That's not the story most people are hearing.
- [28:21]
B
Yeah. Which is that AI is a tool. It isn't good or bad for society. All that matters is what people do with it. If you give me a hammer, I can build a house or I can murder someone.
- [28:32]
A
Yeah.
- [28:32]
B
There's nothing inherently good or bad about a hammer. It has to do with what you do with it. Now here's where we get to my Pollyanna attitude is, remember, I believe that most human beings are inherently good by most societal definitions of good. Meaning we want to cooperate, we want to collaborate, we want to help each other. If I see an Opportunity to help millions of people. I'm absolutely going to do it.
- [28:55]
A
A worry I have is that it's pretty complex to use a hammer to build a house, but it's really easy to use a hammer to hit somebody in the head. And I think that it will take a while for us to figure out the constructive uses for it, but it'll take us less time to figure out the destructive uses for it. So it's simply that this tool is just a tool, but we won't know the good and bad parts for a while. And so it's just going to be hard. Just like this media transition has been
- [29:20]
B
difficult, maybe, but hammer's been around for a long time. I don't know exactly when the transition happened for people to invent hammers, but at some point in the Paleolithic era, someone attached a rock to a stick and said, I could drive stakes into the ground with this to help make a hut.
- [29:34]
A
Yeah.
- [29:34]
B
And I can also bash that guy's head in.
- [29:37]
A
But mostly they build huts.
- [29:38]
B
Well, Hannah Fry said AI can do some superhuman things, but so can a forklift.
- [29:45]
A
I, of course, have no ability to feel confident in anything I say about AI, but I do keep running up against the reality that there are some really huge limitations right now that this could free up. It turns out there was a massive worldwide shortage of software. There is. There just is not enough software in the world. We need more of it. If that's much easier to make, that's going to be actually a very good thing for society. And also there's a lot that it can't do. Like, if you make software with AI, you're perfectly aware that there are things, especially when it comes to like. Like actually identifying what problems need to be solved and figuring out the most effective, pleasant ways for them to be solved, is actually quite, quite human and feels almost separate from the kind of intelligence that the AIs have so far, for sure. Yeah. Of course, whatever it is that we
- [30:40]
B
are doing can be analyzed and done better, I think, eventually by AI. And that might be a sad fact, but it's kind of like saying whatever it is you're doing with your physical body, we could make a machine to do that better.
- [30:53]
A
Code is very easy because it's checkable. You can see whether the code actually compiles.
- [30:58]
B
Right.
- [30:58]
A
There's a bunch of tools that we
- [31:00]
B
have even easier things like chess and go, which is just like a very small set of physical laws that you have to follow.
- [31:06]
A
Yeah. And then there's very hard things like the Sort of analog way a human body works in terms of, like, medicine that turns out to be really messy.
- [31:15]
B
What I'm most excited about with AI is how they're using it for protein folding, which is very cool. It's not just cool, it's revolutionary. I think within a generation, call it 20 years or so, we're going to have AI basically solving medical problems that we deemed impossible to solve. So not only can you give it an RNA sequence, and it'll figure out the shape it makes, which is a huge hurdle that now AIs are able to do that. They have already got it where they say, I want this shape. Give me the protein sequence. They'll do it. And so they're doing it backwards, which would be amazing, because then later on, they say, okay, bad news, Hank. You got cancer. Good news. We have devised a protein that will attack your cancer cells, but not your healthy ones. And it's just yours. It's specifically for you. But that's okay.
- [32:03]
A
I know too much about how cancer treatment works now. There's all this, like, stuff that's really hard about it that gets easier, if you can be more precise. There are things that are different about cancer cells. You know, they are evolving to serve their own needs rather than the needs of the body, and that actually changes the way that they look. And sometimes the immune system can identify those differences and attack the cancer cells, and then you won't have cancer anymore. And that's dope. Oftentimes, one of the traits they evolve Is being able to hide from immune cells really effectively. And so there are ways where you can sort of, like, label them to be like, hey, immune cells. I'm a cancer cell. Come get me. And, like, we're participating in that process through medicine. But you have to have targets for these things. You have to have a thing that is different about the cancer cell that is only different about the cancer cell and not prevalent in other populations of cells in the body. So you don't want to kill them. You want to just kill the cancer cell. So it has to be unique to the cancer cell. It has to be throughout the entire cancer cell population. So not just like, well, this tumor has a lot of that marker, but these tumors over here don't, because the cancer is evolving off in different directions, and it has to be accessible. It has to be accessible to the drug. If it's, like, tucked away and hidden inside of the cancer cell, Then it's hard to get it in there. If it's in a part of the body that's hard to get drugs to, like, the brain, then that's another problem. And so you have all these constraints, but if you have more tools and I was just talking to a cancer biologist about this this week. Suddenly you can find a way to maybe tuck inside of this protein in a way that changes the function of the protein. And suddenly the cancer cell isn't really cancer anymore. Like, you just keep dosing people with this medicine and the cancer cell can't grow on its own. And it's so messed up that they're like bad at other parts of life. It's extraordinarily promising. And being able to not just see the way a protein folds, but the way another molecule would interact with that and how that would change the fold of the protein all at once. And I just did for the. This is an all audio podcast. But the hand gestures I just used were so good.
- [34:02]
B
They were magnificent. I appreciate it. I was seeing the proteins. Your right hand was always the cancer cell and your left hand was always the treatment coming in. It's really good.
- [34:11]
A
Thanks. But anyway, I think that you are right that this will be a big part of biomedicine. I also think that the biggest and most disruptive things are never weapons, they're never medicines, they're always communications. And so I do worry about how we're going to use these things.
- [34:29]
B
My own industries, the entertainment industry, I think the entire concept of collective entertainment is going to go away.
- [34:38]
A
Oh, I don't.
- [34:39]
B
Oh, okay. Well, let's talk about it. Yeah. So I write a book and like millions of people read it and that's awesome for me. And they like it too, and they talk to each other about it and stuff like that. Or we make a movie and millions of people watch it and they talk to each other about it and stuff like that. But imagine if your computer knew you really, really well and had fantastic AI capabilities and it could write a book that you will enjoy.
- [35:03]
A
Very specific to me.
- [35:05]
B
Or it can make a movie that you will enjoy. And so you'd be like, yeah, I liked Avengers. That was cool. But this, I mean, even if I show it to my best friend, they'll say like, well, I think that's crap. And you done. Yeah.
- [35:17]
A
Compared to the stuff that's made specifically for me, this isn't good at all.
- [35:20]
B
Yeah. And so I think that the idea of large collective entertainment, like cinema and books that get released for the masses, I think they're going to become more niche. I think it's going to be like plays like live Performances and stuff like that. It's never going to go away.
- [35:36]
A
Right. But it won't be a big part of culture anymore.
- [35:38]
B
It's just my guess.
- [35:39]
A
I have a couple of reasons why I think we might head off in different directions. Number one, we are already in this world where, like, we all have our own Instagram feeds. Like, people who scroll reels, they scroll different reels than I scroll. We already kind of have that little world and I don't know that it's that great. And we may be rebelling it a little bit. Like, everybody went to see Project Hail Mary. Not everybody, but a lot of people were like, let's go to the theater and enjoy this together and have a thing that we can appreciate together that's not like a tiny fragment of culture, but actually a well constructed, well thought out. A bunch of human decisions went into making something that was really exceptional that we could all enjoy together. And then there's the part where I care about all of the choices that went in. I care that it turned out to be that version of Project Hail Mary rather than the million billion other versions of Project Hail Mary that it could have been. I care that they chose to do that weird LED practical effects shot when he was out on the exterior of the ship. I care that Rocky is a puppet and not entirely cg. Like, I care about all that stuff. I care that, like, the puppeteer didn't even know that his voice was going to be the one that ended up being in the movie because everybody liked him so much that they were like, I can't imagine it any other way. I care about all of that and it makes me appreciate the movie so much more than if it were just one non human making this thing specifically for me. And I also care that I get to care about that with other people.
- [37:14]
B
That's cool. I do think you're more of a. I don't know, kind of like a wine snob when it comes to that.
- [37:20]
A
A deep appreciator.
- [37:21]
B
No shade intended. But I don't know why. But I really like chess sets. And I'm awful at chess, by the way. I'm terrible. But I really like chess sets. I just like the worksmanship. There's 32 individual pieces plus the board, plus some form of storage. I don't collect them or anything, but
- [37:37]
A
I just like looking at them.
- [37:38]
B
So kind of like how you're talking about, like, for me, I get. Get interested in all the little details of a chess set.
- [37:44]
A
Yeah.
- [37:45]
B
But most people are perfectly content to buy a $3 plastic mold injected chess set because they just want to play chess.
- [37:55]
A
Yeah, right. And in the same way most people are kind of fine with their Instagram feed as like the nightly entertainment. Yeah, I think that you're right. I think that the cinema is finding that this is the case. But I think that we do like a story that's bigger than the story and part of that story is that that Andy Weir did this thing. Now at the same time, I think that there are some things that are dysfunctional and in some ways a story can be dysfunctional, like just distract me, just tell me a nice little thing. And in that way, I think that if a story kind of fits into that like world of churned out mass media a little bit content farmy already. Like we're all aware that this guy who writes 10 books a year doesn't actually write 10 books a year. He sort of like plots out six books a year and he has another guy who consults with him who plots out the other four and then some somebody else writes them. We get that. And so maybe in that world there's a market for this new kind of media. But I think that we'll also still want a book where we're like, boy, I'm glad Andy Weir wrote this one.
- [38:54]
B
Well, thanks.
- [38:55]
A
An interesting thing that you said during all of that was that the industry that I am in, the entertainment industry, that's really cool because I think of you as being in the publishing industry.
- [39:04]
B
I think the entertainment industry is a superset. I consider the entertainment industry to be like a pretty broad umbrella that covers anything that's entertainment.
- [39:12]
A
But there is like a thing about your work that feels a little bit aware. It feels like you're trying to make stuff that's gonna be popular. Yeah. You wanna tell a story that's gonna. I don't know if this is the case with Project Hail Mary, but it felt to me like, okay, I saw the way that the Martian was turned into a movie. Now I get to imagine as I'm writing this the way that this might be turned into a movie and that it may have benefited from that. That.
- [39:36]
B
Well, I try not to do that because my job was to write books. It's somebody else's problem to adapt it into a film. The reason PHM works so well as a movie is because Drew Goddard did a really good job adapting it. Well, it's because of a million things, but part of it is because adapting it. Bear in mind, like the whole book is first person present tense. I can just tell, don't show whenever I want. You're inside Grace's head the whole time. That's very difficult to adapt and to screen. Screen. It's just Drew is really, really good at that. I like to use the tools at my disposal. I love first person narration. It makes things so much easier. But yeah, and this is what I advise other writers too, is like, if you want to make a movie, write a screenplay. You can make a movie. No one's stopping you if you want to write a book. There's so many tools at your disposal when writing narrative fiction that you don't have the convenience of when you're making a movie. You've written books, you understand. You have so much more space to tell your story. And in a movie, it's just claustrophobic.
- [40:36]
A
Yeah. You can't be inside of somebody's head in a movie. You can only see it from an angle. You can only see it from outside.
- [40:42]
B
Yeah. People have tried voiceover narrations and stuff like that. It's unsatisfying to watch. Yeah.
- [40:48]
A
So I think that Drew Goddard said that only 5% of a book makes it into a movie.
- [40:53]
B
That's probably about accurate. His approach is that he just says, like, what is the core of this story? What are the most important elements? And he said, like, well, in phm, it's the relationship between and Grace and Rocky. We'll work outward from there and then prioritize all this over that.
- [41:08]
A
I want to talk a little bit more about sci fi and where we're at in sci fi right now. I've heard you talk about how there isn't enough hope in sci fi these days or pro human sentiment. And I agree with this. But then I did a very rough analysis of Hugo nominees, like every Hugo nominee throughout every decade. This is like the big Sci Fi Fantasy award for novels. And it seems from my rough analysis that right now is actually pretty pro human. So you've got like John Scalzi doing it. You've got you. You've got Becky Chambers, there's Mary Robinette Kowal's stuff, Reika Aoki's. There's a lot. And so this is a limited data set. Of course. This is like the ones that are being nominated by the people who vote for Hugo's. But I was surprised to find that the nominees, like, right now, and there's a lot of like cozy sci fi that isn't the same as, like expansionist. Like humans are amazing, but it is like pro human in that, like we are, you know, it's just like, people being people, helping each other, doing stuff. Like, way more than the cyberpunk era, but even more than, like, the 1950s. I feel like the books that are being nominated now are pretty pro human. So I think there's, like, a demand for this stuff. And I think that, like, you're tapping into something that people want. And I don't know if this is like a post Covid sensibility where it's just, good Lord, we need to believe in ourselves or what, but. Do you think I'm wrong? Should I look at the data a different way? Because I feel it in my heart that there's so much dystopian stuff. Stuff. But then when I looked, I don't
- [42:31]
B
know, I didn't do any sort of actual analysis. Right. I can tell you that it is my emotional feel that there's not a lot of humanity is cool sci fi out there. So my least favorite genre is Dystopia. Yeah, that is my least favorite genre. That's like the assumption that the default state of humanity is chaos and subjugation and stuff like that. And that's just. Just not what our history has shown. I mean, humans strive for stability. We always try to find a way to make today be a lot like yesterday. This idea that humanity's default state is chaos and victimization and we have to work hard to have a civilization, I disagree with that fundamental assumption.
- [43:17]
A
I think that we have to work hard for it. I think that it comes out of worry and work.
- [43:21]
B
I mean, we do work hard for it, but I think we are inclined to work hard for it.
- [43:25]
A
I agree with that.
- [43:26]
B
Most people are like, okay, yeah, it's gonna be hard work to build a fence around our little town here, but if we don't, the bears will get in.
- [43:34]
A
What does seem true is that in young adult sci fi, it's been the fifth season and it's been the Hunger Games, and it's just been a lot of that.
- [43:42]
B
I honestly think it's because it is a very easy way to unambiguously and very quickly set up protagonists and antagonists. It's the same plot every time. Right. It's a fascist government and then teenagers who are part of some sort of suppressed underclass fighting against it. And that takes, like, half a page to set up. You don't have to do a lot of exposition. Yeah.
- [44:08]
A
And it also feels good to a teenager to be like, oh, so you're telling me the adults are bad, the teenagers are the heroes? That makes sense.
- [44:15]
B
And it taps into our collective shared historical Knowledge of like Nazi Germany.
- [44:20]
A
Certainly there have been fascists.
- [44:22]
B
Yeah. And we all know like it is in pseudo recent history of like fascism in the real world of full on Nazis. Right. That was less than 100 years ago. And so it's already understood that's bad. You don't need to convince the reader that the bad guys are bad. You don't need to convince the reader that the good guys are good. It's kind of a shortcut. I get it. It's like why there was a proflance of zombie stuff for a while. Because that's another really convenient shortcut cut. Because it gives you a post apocalyptic story with built in enemies in danger and the one explains the other. Like there was a zombie apocalypse.
- [44:59]
A
So there's zombies.
- [45:00]
B
So there's zombies.
- [45:00]
A
Right. And it's the apocalypse. Yeah.
- [45:01]
B
And that's the apocalypse. That's actually very elegant because you get to have that excitement of a post apocalyptic world and you get to have kind of non living threats.
- [45:11]
A
Right. You don't have to feel bad.
- [45:12]
B
You don't have to feel bad about killing them, but if they get to you, you'll die. It's a very well put together setting. It's just so many people have used it. It seems trite now.
- [45:20]
A
It can seem a little bit like if you don't like dystopias, then I guess you like utopias. But that's not the thing here actually.
- [45:28]
B
Yeah. Because I want an interesting story. I don't want a story about a guy who's all of his needs are met and he has a great day. I would love to live that life,
- [45:35]
A
but I don't want to read about it.
- [45:36]
B
So for me, the opposite of dystopia is not utopia in fiction. The opposite of dystopia is post apocalypse.
- [45:43]
A
Okay. Yeah.
- [45:44]
B
Dystopia is always like a fascist government or people completely in control of everything and some people rebelling against that control. Whereas post apocalypse is anarchy. No one's in control, Everybody's fighting for
- [45:57]
A
survival, the society has collapsed and now we do that thing.
- [46:00]
B
I love me some post apocalypse stuff.
- [46:02]
A
And post apocalypse can be like pro human even. It's a setting rather than, you know, it could be a post apocalyptic romance. Maybe isn't often, but could be.
- [46:12]
B
There was a post apocalyptic romance. There was that zombie one where a zombie falls in love with a human. It's kind of Romeo and Juliet. I think his name is R. Yeah. You could have post apocalyptic romance or post apocalyptic comedy. There've been plenty of those. Oh for sure.
- [46:24]
A
So I didn't do, like, an analysis of whether books were dystopian or utopian. I focused on whether humans were good. I do find myself having a harder and harder time with stories in which, I mean, part of this is that the protagonists oftentimes aren't very like it. There's just some, like, thing about people that is broken now. There are times when I've heard this story told where we're not really to blame. It is part of our evolutionary biology. Octavia Butler does this in xenogenesis, where the story is really that you can't have this level of intelligence with this level of hierarchy without bad outcomes. And so other species have done it other ways. You have intelligence without that same hierarchical system or other social structures. But we are innately both very intelligent and hierarchical, and that's part of how our cooperation works. So that's incompatible long term. I don't know that's the case. But I don't mind that as a frame because there's a subtlety to it, a complexity to it that isn't just humans are bad. It is like we have an element of our nature that is difficult to overcome. At the same time, I do see us overcome it.
- [47:34]
B
We spend our whole lives learning how to. To overcome our instincts as men. We have to learn not to punch people when we're mad. Yeah.
- [47:41]
A
No, I didn't really realize this until I had a young boy in my life. I was like, is there something wrong? Why is he punchy? And it's like, no, that's.
- [47:48]
B
That's just the default.
- [47:49]
A
No one ever punched anybody in front of him. And yet he figured it out.
- [47:52]
B
Yeah. I have a four year old boy and he's very punchy.
- [47:55]
A
And this is not limited to boys. Girls will also punch.
- [47:58]
B
Yeah. And so we spend our whole lives, like, overriding our natural impulses. That sure is a nice cupcake you've got there, Hank. And you turned your head away. It's like, I want the cupcake, but I'm not gonna take the cupcake. Whereas your dog will take the cupcake. Yeah. Yeah.
- [48:13]
A
And you don't blame the dog for it. This is the thing about the mistakes that humans make is that they're actually like, we can blame us for it. If trees were causing climate change, everybody be like, oh, we gotta do something about the trees. But nobody be blaming the trees.
- [48:27]
B
Right.
- [48:27]
A
But humans are causing climate change and we know better. Like, we know that we're doing it. We know that we could stop. We're not sacrificing the Things we need to sacrifice to stop.
- [48:36]
B
Right.
- [48:37]
A
I get that is a different moral case, but I also think that it's better to have a species that can be aware that it is causing a problem than a species that just causes a mass extinction by virtue of existing. Of existing. And then there's nothing you could do about it because no one's there to have a thought. So at least we get to have a thought about it and have a chance at 50. Fixing it. Yeah.
- [48:58]
B
Or ameliorating it.
- [48:59]
A
Yeah. Fixing is past.
- [49:01]
B
Yeah. Fixing it is tall order at this point. But things like, okay, we're melting the ice caps, let's start making some polar bear preserves. Reserves.
- [49:09]
A
Reserves, not preserves.
- [49:11]
B
Polar bear preserves would be a type of jelly that would not taste good. Polar bear freezers might be better.
- [49:19]
A
I think both might work. I'm not 100% sure. Two authors in a room trying to figure out out the multiple definition of preserve.
- [49:26]
B
Yes, but let's say reserve.
- [49:29]
A
Definitely reserve.
- [49:30]
B
I generally don't like to talk about politics, so I won't. But I do feel like our efforts in environmentalism would be better spent on amelioration than in kind of a pipe dream of reversal. Unless we had a single global government to enforce things, I just don't see us being able to reverse climate change. I think we need to work on addressing the symptoms, basically. That may be sort of a bleak
- [49:56]
A
view, but yeah, you have to do both. A nice thing about the way that the world works is that if one country, you know, invests a tremendous amount in subsidizing the sort of technology of solar power, then every country benefits from that. But maybe the country that subsidized it benefits the most. And so there actually is like a reason why it is good to take action. The reality to me feels like reversing, but like we're going to burn less, we're going to be releasing less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the future than we are right now. Will we get to net zero in my lifetime? I don't think so.
- [50:33]
B
No. I'm going to challenge that because I think we're always working on new energy technologies. Once it becomes cheaper and more effective to use clean energy, then that'll be a tipping point and it will very rapidly take over.
- [50:48]
A
It could be pretty fast. I think that there will be parts of it that are slow. And of course, carbon emissions isn't just energy, unfortunately. It's also steel production and concrete, and there's all of these things that are a little bit harder to crack.
- [51:00]
B
But most of it is energy.
- [51:01]
A
Most of it is energy. You know, electricity plus transport. But then a lot of it is also like land use. A lot of it is. We have to figure out how to have the, the carbon stay in the soil.
- [51:11]
B
But I'm saying if you got rid of energy and transportation and that's pretty doable. Yeah. In your lifespan, that's doable.
- [51:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so.
- [51:22]
B
I think so.
- [51:23]
A
I'm glad you think so.
- [51:26]
B
I believe that you believe it.
- [51:29]
A
Here's what I think. My, like, big frame for hard problems is that 250 years ago, when America was founded, we didn't know why we had to breathe. We didn't know what the air was. We didn't even realize it was stuff. There were a couple of people who had figured out that it was stuff. But we knew that if we held our breath for a minute or two, we would die. And we didn't know why.
- [51:57]
B
And we also knew that breathing water would very quickly put an end to.
- [52:00]
A
You can't do that. That doesn't work.
- [52:02]
B
Can't do. That, does not work.
- [52:03]
A
We knew that in certain situations, people would be in coal mines and then they would just stop working. And we had no idea why that would happen. And now we can create a molecule that binds to a protein in a cancer cell that changes the shape of the protein so that the cancer cell no longer functions well as the cell and will die. That's like a wild level of different levels of power and knowledge.
- [52:26]
B
It has been 250 years.
- [52:29]
A
Yes. What I will say is, as far as the rest of my life, I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the next 40 years, but I have no grip on the next 250 years. What I will say to we will never reverse climate change is in 250 years, I feel like if we're around to do it, we will have.
- [52:45]
B
Okay, yeah, I guess I shouldn't state it as. And I don't think I did. I'm not saying, okay, we will never be able to reverse climate change. What I'm saying is, right this moment, our efforts would be better spent ameliorating climate change than trying to use the tools that we currently have at our disposal to reverse it, because there will be better tools. We do not have the good tools.
- [53:07]
A
Yeah, but I don't think that we'll get the tools unless we're working the problem.
- [53:10]
B
I want us to work on the tools rather than saying, hey, we need to shut down our entire infrastructure for the sake of the climate. It's like, no, we've got quality of life that we come to accept as useful. Not everyone can bicycle to work.
- [53:25]
A
Yeah. The systems are set up the way that they are. If we turned off all of the power plants, lots of people would starve unnecessarily.
- [53:32]
B
I like that caveat unnecessarily. It is necessary for some people to starve, but I'm concerned about the unnecessary starvations.
- [53:43]
A
It would do a lot of damage without, I feel, a necessary benefit. Without a comparative benefit, some of you may die. But that, that's a price I'm willing to pay. I, Hank Green, am willing to pay. Oh, man. I want to ask you one last question before I ask you my last question, which is I am a public person and I am very public kind of all of the time. I've been doing this for 20 years now and I've been out there at various levels and I've.
- [54:10]
B
Well, we all watched you fight cancer. Yeah.
- [54:12]
A
That's a weird thing.
- [54:12]
B
Talk about public to have done in public.
- [54:14]
A
Yeah. And I have an idea of my level of like how much people are listening to me at any given moment. Like my level of status in society, how carefully I must move around. I feel like you have a different version of this where like every five or ten years suddenly people care what Andy Weir is saying again. And that I feel like that must be harder to navigate and I know that what I navigate is quite hard. Do you feel like that's harder to navigate?
- [54:41]
B
A little bit. Yeah, definitely. Because it's inconsistent. So I get to be my usual snarky smart ass self most of the time. But then suddenly somebody sneaks up and puts a megaphone in front of me for a week and then runs away. And so it's like when I have a book come out or when something like that comes into my movies and stuff like that. Yeah.
- [54:58]
A
Is there a way to sort of have there be a version of you that takes the hits and have it be different than the version of you that has to take care of your four year old?
- [55:09]
B
Well, yeah, I mean I have my kind of, for lack of a better term, public Persona. Even when I'm talking to you, if I know a bunch of people are going to listen, there's subjects I don't talk about. I don't talk about anything controversial. I generally don't talk about politics. I try to steer clear of things that people have strong and diverse opinions on.
- [55:27]
A
Sure.
- [55:27]
B
Because I'm not a politician. I'm not here to affect policy and I'm not any sort of pundit. I'm not interested in changing people's minds on any topics. I just want to entertain. And I really don't want people to think about political ideology when they're reading my books.
- [55:42]
A
I do sometimes, you know, in Project Hail Mary, there's like, as long as it's your own, I think about your political ideology when I'm reading your work.
- [55:50]
B
I don't want people to do that. I don't want people to be looking through the pages at the author. I want you to be immersed in the story. So I don't want you to be thinking about, oh, what is Andy Weir trying to tell me here? Yeah, I just want you to enjoy the story.
- [56:02]
A
And when it is person solving problem, that is how it feels. But, you know, back on Earth, there's people making these terrible, horrible, ruthless decisions when we've put someone in charge of. And she knows that she's going to be hated forever for all of the terrible decisions that she must make.
- [56:20]
B
And she's comfortable with that and is comfortable with that.
- [56:23]
A
But more than that, like, a thing I am thinking is that you have a perspective, you have a worldview, you have a view of humans that's positive. We can solve problems. I get what you're saying that, like, the goal is entertainment. The goal is to, like, bring people through a story and to tell it in a way where, like, like, especially the sort of, like, controversies of the day don't appear on the page in a way where you're thinking, okay, am I being convinced of how I should be thinking about the controversies of the day? Like, yes, for sure. You're not doing that. And you're trying to tell a story that is entertaining. And so, like, you strike down the middle of the road there. And also, like, there is a politics. And I'm sorry, now I'm. But there's a politics to saving one man. You know, isn't that an interesting thing? And such a human thing that we would do that.
- [57:11]
B
That does come up in the Martian where they say, like, is it worth us spending this much money for one person's life?
- [57:18]
A
So there is an element there of, are we technocrats or are we humans? And that feels like a really politically salient thing right now in the same way as, like, is it better to build two useful, ugly government buildings or one beautiful, useful government building? And, like, that's a tricky choice. I know where I land on that. But when it comes to, like, there is a man that we put on Mars or there are these miners who are trapped in a cave. Like, the salient story is the one that matters. And so there's a little bit of telling that story where we are humans in a world of inhuman decisions and how do we confront that?
- [58:03]
B
Yeah.
- [58:03]
A
And I think that you're right about how we confront that.
- [58:05]
B
Oh, thank you. So in the end, there's no way for me to write something without aspects of my own personality sneaking in. Right, of course.
- [58:11]
A
Yeah.
- [58:12]
B
So that's gonna happen. I just don't like. As a reader, I don't like being preached to. So as a writer, I don't preach
- [58:19]
A
or I try not to.
- [58:20]
B
There's no pleasing everyone. Right. There are some people who will read into it. Like, I've heard some really wild takes on some of my stuff that I'm
- [58:28]
A
like, okay, can I hit you with one?
- [58:30]
B
Oh, sure.
- [58:32]
A
Somebody was like, andy Weir says there's no symbolism in his novels, but the book is called the Hail Mary and his main character is named Grace. And so this is a Christian theological message. And I'm like, no, I've talked to Andy about this.
- [58:45]
B
It's a pun.
- [58:45]
A
In fact, it's just a pun.
- [58:48]
B
The Hail Mary refers to the football play.
- [58:51]
A
Yes. And then the joke is, the Hail Mary is full of grace.
- [58:54]
B
Yes. Yep.
- [58:56]
A
Just a nerd being a nerd. It is not a Christian theological call out.
- [59:02]
B
It is not. That's true.
- [59:03]
A
Yeah. But books belong to their readers.
- [59:05]
B
Yeah, they do. You take from it what you want. I just don't want people to infer messaging that they don't like and then dislike the book.
- [59:12]
A
Right. That's hard. That is part of creating and sharing those creations is there's no world in which you get to do that and not be interpreted.
- [59:18]
B
And that's fine with me. But I myself, I'm a picky little shit. If I'm reading or watching any form of entertainment, a book, a movie, TV show, or something like that, if I feel like I'm being preached at, I'm going to be really aggravated at it. Even if it's something I completely agree with because it takes me out of the story. It's like, oh, okay, I see the ax that this writer has to grind. So now I know all the things that are going to happen in the story because the universe will conspire to validate that political view. It makes the story more predictable and less interesting.
- [59:49]
A
Yes. But I think that there's ways to do it. So of course, Star Trek has always been like, okay, we're going to take a little bit of an that we're dealing with in sci fi in general. This is like a thing that sci fi is good at. Let's take a thing that is part of our world, let's take it out of our world and see what it looks like from that perspective. And I like that. But I understand what you're saying here, which is that if the resolution, the satisfaction is driven by the perspective of the writers, then like, I don't know, are we just creating a just so story to say I'm right? See, I told you I was right. I took it out of the context and it turns out that I was right. But you're like, you didn't really take it out of the context of the context. But I think you can do it well too. You can do it in such a way where you can ask questions that wouldn't be comfortable to ask if it were our world. And Star Trek does this very well, where you have these stories where you can say, what if another species acted like this? How would we feel about that? And you can do it in a way that doesn't feel as. And I think preachy is a pretty good word for it.
- [60:51]
B
Yeah. I don't know, it just drives you away. And like I said, even if. If it completely validates my viewpoint.
- [60:57]
A
Yeah.
- [60:57]
B
You know, it's like nowadays if I am watching or reading anything and there is any corporation of any kind mentioned in the story, I'm like, well, that's going to be the bad guy. I can tell you the rest of this story. That's going to be the bad guy. I want to write a book where it turns out the corporation's a good guy and the plucky heroes are just completely wrong and the corporation has been saving the world. This.
- [61:18]
A
Yeah, really going to love that one. It's going to be really resonant with people's lived experience.
- [61:25]
B
That'd be great. It's like the corporation is founded by people who just like, really care.
- [61:31]
A
We can do this in a way that I think is really resonant, that people quite enjoy with people, where it turns out that people are good. And I think that can be a bit of a surprise and also really hopeful. And I think that is a lot of what your work does where it's like, oh, you're telling me that the opposite of don't look up is possible? Where like, we all looked up and it was like kind of a long shot, but we figured it out and along the way we discovered the power of friendship.
- [61:55]
B
Yeah. I have never liked satire that's my least favorite.
- [61:59]
A
I think that there's great satire, but there's something that's very hard to put your finger on. You push down and it moves. But there's something to this. But I also think that we have to be careful not to carve out the times when it's good, when people are doing really intelligent analysis from a perspective and it gets you out of it so that you can ask a question that otherwise we couldn't ask. All right. All right. Andy Weir, thank you so much for spending some time with us. I have one final question for you. What is something that you have learned from your work that you wish everyone on Earth knew?
- [62:28]
B
I guess this may seem obvious, but I just wish everyone on Earth knew that almost everyone else on Earth is pretty good and they would help you if they could, even if they don't know who you are.
- [62:41]
A
Yeah, if we could all hear each other's stories, man, yeah, our heads would explode. But, well, yeah, Thanks to all the humans who helped make this episode. Morgan Levy is the show's supervising producer, and Greg Rippon is our engineer. Peyton Mitchell manages our social media. Andrew Huang composed the music, and James Barnard designed the artwork. You can and should follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's do it one more time. Humans.