SPEAKER_1: Today's bonus episode of StarTalk Radio is presented exclusively by Audible.
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SPEAKER_1: And Audible has the newest book from today's guest, Andy Weir.
SPEAKER_1: Listen to Artemis read by Rosario Dawson today.
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SPEAKER_2: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_2: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_2: This is StarTalk.
SPEAKER_2: Today, in this bonus episode, you'll hear my extended interview with author Andy Weir.
SPEAKER_2: Let's get right to it.
SPEAKER_2: So Andy, you couldn't leave it alone.
SPEAKER_3: I just couldn't.
SPEAKER_2: You just had to keep doing this.
SPEAKER_3: Just had to, it's a sickness.
SPEAKER_2: Putting a dude on Mars was not enough.
SPEAKER_3: Insufficient.
SPEAKER_3: I'm putting a city on the moon.
SPEAKER_2: Having a movie about the book was not enough.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, no, I mean, it was a good start.
SPEAKER_2: You just had to keep going.
SPEAKER_3: Got it, that's my whole job.
SPEAKER_2: Well, that original book was sort of battle tested because it was written in parcels, if I remember correctly.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: And the internet would react and you'd react back.
SPEAKER_2: But this one, not so much.
SPEAKER_3: No, this was a traditional contract with Random House.
SPEAKER_3: And so I didn't get to post it a chapter at a time like I did for The Martian because when a-
SPEAKER_2: So you don't have everyone's buy-in in advance.
SPEAKER_3: I don't, I don't, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: When a publisher gives you a big pile of money to write a book, they don't like it when you post it for free.
SPEAKER_3: So they prefer that you don't do that.
SPEAKER_3: So yeah, it was on my own this time.
SPEAKER_2: Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_2: So did anyone tell you like there's no air on the moon?
SPEAKER_2: Did they tell you this in advance?
SPEAKER_2: It's a really hostile place?
SPEAKER_2: Did that?
SPEAKER_2: More hostile than Mars?
SPEAKER_3: No, it didn't come up.
SPEAKER_2: No one told you.
SPEAKER_3: I should probably, I need to make some edits.
SPEAKER_3: Maybe it's too late.
SPEAKER_3: The book comes out tomorrow as of the time that we're taping this.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, of course, I'm a space dork.
SPEAKER_3: Not that I have to tell you that.
SPEAKER_2: People wear space dork titles with pride in this office.
SPEAKER_3: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_2: This is a space dork safe space.
SPEAKER_3: A space dork, a safe space dork space.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, and so, of course, the moon's always been as fascinating to me as Mars.
SPEAKER_2: So, this required an entire other layer of thinking to make existence on the moon real.
SPEAKER_3: Well, yeah, I mean, so, this time it wasn't just like a flags and footprints mission like The Martian was.
SPEAKER_3: I wanted to make a story about humanity's first non-Earth city.
SPEAKER_3: And so, the first thing I had to figure out was why would anybody build a city somewhere other than Earth?
SPEAKER_3: I needed an economic reason for that to happen.
SPEAKER_2: So, let's start there.
SPEAKER_2: Why?
SPEAKER_3: Tourism.
SPEAKER_2: Tourism, very good.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: But it's, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I would save, I did my own personal math on this.
SPEAKER_2: I would save five years, maybe ten years of vacation money to spend on one vacation on the moon.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, is that, that's your threshold?
SPEAKER_2: That's my sort of equation there.
SPEAKER_3: Well, I did a...
SPEAKER_2: If you can't get it that cheap, just forget it.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, well, okay then.
SPEAKER_3: Well, I did my own math on what I think the commercial space industry might get to in terms of efficiency.
SPEAKER_2: By when?
SPEAKER_3: Well, Artemis takes place in the 2080s.
SPEAKER_2: 2080s, okay.
SPEAKER_2: That's like almost in reach.
SPEAKER_3: Almost in reach.
SPEAKER_3: Probably I won't see it.
SPEAKER_2: But people alive today will.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, yeah, some people.
SPEAKER_2: And you might see it if we do a little genetic thing.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, you know, CRISPR, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Well, here's the aging gene.
SPEAKER_2: Swap that out.
SPEAKER_3: Wow, don't know why we didn't do that earlier.
SPEAKER_3: No, it's based on the presumption that the commercial space industry would become as efficient in terms of fuel to overhead ratio as a commercial airline industry.
SPEAKER_3: And I wrote a whole article on that, which is actually coming out in Business Insider.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, and I wrote this whole kind of very amateurish economic analysis, but I'm not getting investors.
SPEAKER_3: I'm just writing fiction.
SPEAKER_3: So it just has to make enough sense for that.
SPEAKER_2: What is the cost to send a person to the moon in your 2080 future?
SPEAKER_3: Well, if you want to go to the moon for two weeks, which includes a week travel time there and a week travel time back.
SPEAKER_2: A week?
SPEAKER_3: Yep.
SPEAKER_2: It's three days.
SPEAKER_3: Well, if you go the Apollo route and if you use a lunar cycler.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_2: So this will save energy.
SPEAKER_3: A lot.
SPEAKER_3: Oh.
SPEAKER_3: So your lunar cycler is much faster.
SPEAKER_2: Apollo is just, let's go straight there.
SPEAKER_3: Let's go straight there.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: But the lunar cycler, I used the Uphoff Crouch cycler that those guys defined, I want to say in the 80s.
SPEAKER_2: Those guys?
SPEAKER_3: Uphoff and Crouch.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: These were just syllables spilling out of your mouth.
SPEAKER_3: These aren't just random noises.
SPEAKER_2: These are the names of two people.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: They're the names of two people.
SPEAKER_3: Unfortunately, I've forgotten their first names so I can't give them fully the credit that they deserve but it's a paper I found that describes a lunar cycler.
SPEAKER_3: Anyway, grand total, you would spend about $70,000 in 2015 dollars to be able to go to the moon.
SPEAKER_2: So you could easily, if you wanted to, create a lottery that you can send people all the time.
SPEAKER_3: Sure.
SPEAKER_3: Or I think a lot of people would get a second mortgage on their home to be able to spend two weeks on the moon.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Everyone's home is worth more than $70,000 now so you could easily pull that out of the value of your house.
SPEAKER_3: Possibly, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Or there could be financing.
SPEAKER_2: Not everyone's.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know.
SPEAKER_3: But it's not.
SPEAKER_2: Most people who own homes, their homes are worth more than $70,000.
SPEAKER_3: But it's not like going to France.
SPEAKER_3: It's considerably more expensive, you know, something like that.
SPEAKER_3: And these are all in 2015 dollars, by the way, because that's when I did all the economic stuff.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, so that's the money part, all right?
SPEAKER_2: And how about the food part?
SPEAKER_2: How did you solve that?
SPEAKER_2: Well, first, let me say in advance, I was at one of your launches at Comic Con New York, and they had this green powder that was offered me.
SPEAKER_2: They said, Oh, this is what Andy invented for his book.
SPEAKER_2: I said, Isn't his book fiction?
SPEAKER_2: They said, Yeah, but this is real.
SPEAKER_2: Isn't his book fiction?
SPEAKER_2: So it was some kind of powdered algae.
SPEAKER_2: Just to show you how much I love you and how much I trust you, I ate it.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I saw that.
SPEAKER_3: I saw the video.
SPEAKER_2: It was real.
SPEAKER_2: I said, All right, Andy, he doesn't want me dead.
SPEAKER_3: I don't think yet.
SPEAKER_3: The name of the algae is Chlorella.
SPEAKER_3: Not to be confused with cholera, you don't want to eat cholera.
SPEAKER_2: Chlorella, that sounds like a hair color.
SPEAKER_2: Clarell hair color.
SPEAKER_2: Chlorella.
SPEAKER_3: It sounds like a brand.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: It's Chlorella and the reason they made it.
SPEAKER_2: Was it actively alive when I ate it?
SPEAKER_3: No, it was way dead by the time you ate it.
SPEAKER_2: Way dead, not just dead.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, it was a powder, it was dead.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, no, it lives in the ocean.
SPEAKER_3: It lives completely surrounded by water.
SPEAKER_3: And the way you guys ate it is actually, I watched you and LeVar Burton eating it.
SPEAKER_3: That was awesome.
SPEAKER_2: Both of us were on location for this event.
SPEAKER_3: You were both like, oh, well, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: The way people in Artemis eat it is they add a little bit of water, so it's more like an oatmeal.
SPEAKER_2: Your people didn't tell me this.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, they did not.
SPEAKER_2: I looked at it and I said, who eats powder?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Surely, there's some water you would have to add to this.
SPEAKER_2: Well, this is how they did it on the moon.
SPEAKER_2: So I said, let me play along.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: Well, also, they add flavorant.
SPEAKER_3: The idea is that, so, chlorella, algae, algae in general, of course, it reproduces with doubling times.
SPEAKER_3: So you can, in a fairly small volume, grow a lot of calories of food, as long as you've got the energy.
SPEAKER_3: And the energy is not a problem.
SPEAKER_3: Artemis has reactors, you're good.
SPEAKER_2: But wouldn't all life have doubling times?
SPEAKER_3: That's true.
SPEAKER_2: If you have an open ecosystem for it, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: But the doubling time of wheat is a little slower than you'd like.
SPEAKER_3: And it takes a lot of surface area and volume to grow.
SPEAKER_3: So that's what kind of the poor people eat.
SPEAKER_3: That plus-
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, the algae.
SPEAKER_3: That plus flavorants, like artificial flavors that you import from Earth, which are fairly cheap because it doesn't weigh a lot to bring a thing of extract up.
SPEAKER_2: It's like vanilla extract at home.
SPEAKER_2: It's in your cabinet for years.
SPEAKER_3: You need like three drops to make a batch of cookies.
SPEAKER_3: But then if you're a little wealthier or if you're poor but want to go out for a good meal, then you eat food that's been imported from Earth.
SPEAKER_3: And that's good old-fashioned food, although of course it's not going to be fresh.
SPEAKER_2: This reminds me of the early days when international transportation was expensive because we're old enough to remember a time when if you had something imported, you would tell people that.
SPEAKER_3: This is my imported.
SPEAKER_2: Yes, this is imported cheese.
SPEAKER_2: This is imported wine.
SPEAKER_3: This is rich, real Corinthian leather.
SPEAKER_2: Corinthian.
SPEAKER_2: So it was imported.
SPEAKER_2: That was a mark of exclusivity.
SPEAKER_2: Now so much goods and services goods are transported across the ocean.
SPEAKER_2: It's not a point of pride anymore.
SPEAKER_2: It just is.
SPEAKER_3: It just is.
SPEAKER_3: And in terms of expense, it's, I mean...
SPEAKER_2: In fact, I remember in grocery stores, there'd be the imported section.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, yes.
SPEAKER_2: Right, this is where you get imported goods.
SPEAKER_2: You go there for that.
SPEAKER_3: For the goods.
SPEAKER_3: Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Now it's like, what is it?
SPEAKER_3: I forget what it is.
SPEAKER_3: It's like something like they'll go lobster fishing in the ocean, like off the East Coast.
SPEAKER_3: They'll go lobster fishing.
SPEAKER_3: They'll send the lobsters to China for processing, and then they'll have them sent back, because that's cheaper than doing the processing here.
SPEAKER_3: It's insane how cheap it is to ship things around.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, just the economics of it determines the pathways.
SPEAKER_3: Not so much on the moon.
SPEAKER_2: Of consumption.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, so it's either algae, which you can grow just by sunlight.
SPEAKER_3: Right, well, they don't use sunlight.
SPEAKER_3: They use artificial light.
SPEAKER_3: Everything is like super, they have these algae vats that they...
SPEAKER_2: But where are they getting energy?
SPEAKER_3: From nuclear reactors, ultimately.
SPEAKER_3: The whole city is powered by two nuclear reactors.
SPEAKER_2: So this is helium-3.
SPEAKER_3: No, not fusion reactors.
SPEAKER_2: Helium-3 is in the moon.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, well, gold is in the ocean.
SPEAKER_3: Go get it.
SPEAKER_2: This is 2080.
SPEAKER_2: Go figure it out.
SPEAKER_3: Go figure it out.
SPEAKER_2: So there, snap.
SPEAKER_3: Snap, snap, snap.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, just one snap.
SPEAKER_3: Not a Z-snap.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, no, I didn't want to invent any brand new technology for the story.
SPEAKER_3: Everything is based on existing technology.
SPEAKER_3: And so the reactors they have are good old-fashioned fission reactors.
SPEAKER_3: Where are you getting your uranium?
SPEAKER_3: You get that from Earth.
SPEAKER_3: But once again, not that heavy.
SPEAKER_2: For what it does.
SPEAKER_2: Uranium is actually very heavy.
SPEAKER_3: Well, yes, it's quite dense.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: With all those 92 protons going on.
SPEAKER_3: But it's for...
SPEAKER_2: Uranium, by the way, named after the planet Uranus.
SPEAKER_3: It is.
SPEAKER_3: But what's neptunium named after?
SPEAKER_3: Hmm.
SPEAKER_2: And plutonium.
SPEAKER_3: Plutonium also a question.
SPEAKER_3: Plutonium isn't even named after a planet, right?
SPEAKER_2: That's right.
SPEAKER_2: It got on there on false pretense.
SPEAKER_2: Don't get me started.
SPEAKER_2: So, all right.
SPEAKER_2: So is it just vacant?
SPEAKER_2: Does anyone stay there permanently?
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: Well, Artemis is internal economy.
SPEAKER_2: Artemis is the name of the colony.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, the city.
SPEAKER_2: The city.
SPEAKER_2: Its population?
SPEAKER_3: Its population is about 2,000 people, not including tourists.
SPEAKER_3: And its main income is tourism.
SPEAKER_3: It's about 40 kilometers from the...
SPEAKER_2: And we know that's the thing.
SPEAKER_2: That's the thing.
SPEAKER_2: Because we have cities that do that today.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_2: Like Roswell, New Mexico.
SPEAKER_3: Well, that's one option.
SPEAKER_3: Or a Caribbean resort town is another example.
SPEAKER_3: And I based Artemis' economy kind of the internal workings after like resort towns in the Caribbean.
SPEAKER_3: So you've got the really nice affluent areas for the tourists and then the shall we say more austere conditions where the...
SPEAKER_2: The working class people who sustain the enterprise.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: And those are the people, those are like immigrants.
SPEAKER_3: It's similar to like America in the early 1800s where, hey, if you can get here, you're welcome to make a life here.
SPEAKER_3: If you can just, if you can get...
SPEAKER_2: So how does a poor person get to the moon if it takes $70,000?
SPEAKER_3: Well, that's if you're going to emigrate to the moon first.
SPEAKER_2: There's a worker immigrant program, I guess.
SPEAKER_3: No, there's no, there is not.
SPEAKER_2: Guest worker program.
SPEAKER_3: No, nothing like that.
SPEAKER_3: There's no policies even.
SPEAKER_3: It's just like, it's kind of self-regulated by whether or not people can get there.
SPEAKER_3: It's the same as an immigrant's tale, you know, back in the days of like the New World, which is where, okay, I'm a, you know, I'm a welder and I want to go work in Artemis.
SPEAKER_2: I want to do that.
SPEAKER_2: So your family saves up the money for you to go.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I'm selling my house.
SPEAKER_3: I'm selling my shop.
SPEAKER_2: And you land with $10 in your pocket.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_2: And then you make a living.
SPEAKER_3: And then I'm going to, yeah, and I'm going to start my shop here.
SPEAKER_3: One-way trip makes it a little cheaper, you know.
SPEAKER_2: So how are they breathing?
SPEAKER_3: Well, you know, your diaphragm goes down and it expands your rib cage.
SPEAKER_3: No, so the oxygen is actually, there are lots of ways of managing oxygen in an atmosphere, but the way things work out in Artemis is they have a thriving aluminum smelting industry because they're constantly growing and they're constantly making aluminum.
SPEAKER_3: And they refine the aluminum from a mineral called anorthite, which is the most common mineral found on the moon.
SPEAKER_3: About 85% of the rocks in the lunar highland are just anorthite.
SPEAKER_3: You can just scoop them right up off the ground because there's no pesky dirt in the way.
SPEAKER_3: You don't have to mine, you just go get it.
SPEAKER_3: And anorthite is made of aluminum, silicon, calcium and oxygen.
SPEAKER_3: It's an enormous amount of oxygen.
SPEAKER_3: It's like Al2 and blah blah blah, O8.
SPEAKER_2: So, oxygen is a waste product of extracting aluminum from this molecule.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_2: From this mineral.
SPEAKER_3: From this mineral.
SPEAKER_3: And the moon is awesome.
SPEAKER_3: It's made of disassembled moon bases.
SPEAKER_3: It's just some assembly required.
SPEAKER_3: Anorthite is aluminum to make your moon base and oxygen to fill it.
SPEAKER_2: Nice, and so now we got oxygen, okay, and so we have food imported or grown on location with energy from...
SPEAKER_3: Cage-free algae.
SPEAKER_2: Free range algae.
SPEAKER_3: Free range algae.
SPEAKER_2: And it's...
SPEAKER_3: I think that's just called, you know, algae.
SPEAKER_2: Algae.
SPEAKER_3: Algae.
SPEAKER_2: And so you've got food, imported or otherwise, you've got energy, you've got oxygen, okay.
SPEAKER_2: What is the governance?
SPEAKER_3: The governance is practically nil.
SPEAKER_3: So in terms of societies, it's very similar to a frontier town in the 1800s kind of thing in the US during the Westward expansion.
SPEAKER_3: There is like one lawman who works there.
SPEAKER_3: His name is Rudy.
SPEAKER_3: He's a former member of the RMCP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
SPEAKER_3: But now...
SPEAKER_2: Which makes him polite.
SPEAKER_3: He's not that polite.
SPEAKER_3: He's Canadian.
SPEAKER_3: He's got that inherent...
SPEAKER_2: You can't make a mean Canadian.
SPEAKER_3: He's got the inherent Canadian...
SPEAKER_2: No one will read the book if you have a mean Canadian.
SPEAKER_3: He has a no BS attitude, let's say that.
SPEAKER_3: But for the most part, it's just social norms or how the rules are enforced.
SPEAKER_3: When you have a small society like that, it's a frontier, they don't have the resources to have like a large standing police force or a bunch of rules.
SPEAKER_3: As they grow, they would almost certainly develop that.
SPEAKER_2: So in the series, the book in the series Walking Dead, what has sustained it for so long is the thought the author and the producers have put into the interpersonal dynamics that unfold in the presence of this threat.
SPEAKER_3: Of this complete collapse of society.
SPEAKER_2: Complete collapse of society.
SPEAKER_2: Who's in charge of resources, who has distribution, who gets weird, who gets power hungry, who gets submissive, and so do you explore this, this human dynamic?
SPEAKER_3: Somewhat.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, basically, you're always going to have greed, right?
SPEAKER_3: You're always going to have people trying to work to their best advantage and taking advantage of whatever weaknesses there are in the system.
SPEAKER_2: Or of other people.
SPEAKER_3: Or of other people.
SPEAKER_3: And in Artemis, the case is that since it's so unregulated, something you might even call like a libertarian paradise, it comes with those disadvantages.
SPEAKER_3: In other words, there's...
SPEAKER_3: So our heroine is hired to do industrial espionage because who's going to stop you?
SPEAKER_3: And also organized crime likes to use Artemis as a means of laundering money because Artemis has its own currency called SLUGS, which stands for Soft-Landed Grams.
SPEAKER_2: Soft-Landed Grams.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: It's a reserve currency in a way.
SPEAKER_2: SLUG is a great word anyway.
SPEAKER_3: Thanks.
SPEAKER_3: And so one SLUG can be redeemed for one gram of cargo transported from Earth to Artemis.
SPEAKER_3: So if you want to get a kilogram over from Earth, that will cost exactly 1,000 SLUGS and so on.
SPEAKER_3: But they also end up using that as a currency.
SPEAKER_3: And because it's this really completely unregulated, largely untracked currency, organized crime loves to come in and use it to launder money.
SPEAKER_2: So if I build a ship, I basically have manufactured some of your currency.
SPEAKER_3: If you can transport goods.
SPEAKER_2: That's right.
SPEAKER_3: Well, yes and no.
SPEAKER_2: Actually, that's kind of fair because it increases the value of...
SPEAKER_2: You don't want to print money if what it represents has not increased in value.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Well, think of it as being more like if you go back to the days of the gold standard, if you pull some gold out of the ground, you have created money.
SPEAKER_3: Way back in the day.
SPEAKER_2: I still have a gold certificate.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, do you?
SPEAKER_2: Now it says Federal Reserve Note.
SPEAKER_2: In that slot it says silver certificate, gold certificate.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know if I can still cash it in.
SPEAKER_3: I think you can actually by law.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I can just go to Fort Knox and say, give me my...
SPEAKER_3: Well, but they'll give you, what is it?
SPEAKER_3: A $1 bill?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, it's a $1 bill.
SPEAKER_3: They'll give you $1 of today's money in gold.
SPEAKER_3: So, there you go.
SPEAKER_3: Here you go.
SPEAKER_2: It's like fleek.
SPEAKER_2: So, how fast is this going to become a movie?
SPEAKER_3: Well, I'd love it to become a movie right away.
SPEAKER_3: But as a writer, I mean, your only job on a film is to cash the check.
SPEAKER_3: And I've already done that.
SPEAKER_2: However, if your book is so popular, then there's public pressure on how much latitude the filmmakers can take from them, like in the Harry Potter series.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not JK.
SPEAKER_3: Rowling.
SPEAKER_2: You can't mess with the characters but so much.
SPEAKER_3: That's true.
SPEAKER_2: Otherwise, people will be all up in your business.
SPEAKER_3: They would be all up in the business.
SPEAKER_3: I think you've got to be a bit bigger than I am to have that kind of pull.
SPEAKER_2: To have that muscle.
SPEAKER_3: To have that muscle.
SPEAKER_3: I think you've got to be JK.
SPEAKER_3: Rowling or Stephen King.
SPEAKER_3: I'm quite a few steps below that.
SPEAKER_2: Well, Stephen King now co-writes the screenplays.
SPEAKER_2: So he's in it.
SPEAKER_3: He's in it.
SPEAKER_2: Did they keep you out of that room, the screenplay room?
SPEAKER_3: Well, they haven't even made the screenplay.
SPEAKER_2: Will they keep you out of the screenplay room?
SPEAKER_3: I don't know.
SPEAKER_2: Did they keep you out of the screenplay room for The Martian?
SPEAKER_3: No, actually.
SPEAKER_3: They consulted me a lot pretty much every day.
SPEAKER_3: Drew Goddard, who wrote the marvelous screenplay for The Martian, was calling me and asking me stuff, usually technical questions.
SPEAKER_2: Good, very good.
SPEAKER_2: So remind me who produced The Martian?
SPEAKER_3: That was 20th Century Fox.
SPEAKER_3: It was produced by Simon Kinberb Productions and Scott Free.
SPEAKER_3: It's always an alphabet soup of companies, but Fox, right?
SPEAKER_3: And they have now also bought, the same group has bought the rights to Artemis.
SPEAKER_3: And they have the directing duo of Chris Miller and Phil Lord lined up to direct.
SPEAKER_3: So the next step is they're going to get a...
SPEAKER_2: You couldn't keep...
SPEAKER_3: Couldn't keep Ridley?
SPEAKER_2: Couldn't keep Ridley.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, Ridley.
SPEAKER_2: We're on a first name basis with him now.
SPEAKER_3: That's a weird thing about Hollywood, as I'm sure you've noticed, is that everybody just calls everybody by their first name.
SPEAKER_3: And it just seems weird.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, Matt Damon is like, yeah, hi, Matt.
SPEAKER_3: You know, it's just like...
SPEAKER_2: Well, you need the Damon.
SPEAKER_2: There's no Matt without a Damon.
SPEAKER_2: You need the Matt Damon.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know.
SPEAKER_3: It's weird.
SPEAKER_3: But yeah.
SPEAKER_3: So we've got Warden Miller lined up to direct.
SPEAKER_3: And they are right now, I think, picking a screenplay writer to do the adaptation.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: And again, forgive me for not having read the book before this interview.
SPEAKER_3: That's why my questions are so blank.
SPEAKER_3: No, no.
SPEAKER_2: But I'm deeply intrigued.
SPEAKER_3: That's not, that's not, that's very hurtful, you know.
SPEAKER_2: No, no.
SPEAKER_2: You have the wrong attitude.
SPEAKER_2: It is, I'm the only honest person to tell you that in all of your interviews.
SPEAKER_3: Literally no one else.
SPEAKER_3: I read your book, I loved it.
SPEAKER_3: So tell me about it.
SPEAKER_3: It takes place on the, where, the moon?
SPEAKER_2: So a day lasts a month on the moon.
SPEAKER_2: So how does that work in the bio cycles of people?
SPEAKER_3: Well, Artemis doesn't get any natural light under the inside, except for one little part of it called Aldrin Park actually.
SPEAKER_2: Wait, so you're underground?
SPEAKER_3: No, they're in spheres, which they call bubbles, that are, well, one of them is 100 meters across and all the others are 200 meters across in diameter.
SPEAKER_3: They're spheres and they're half underground, half above ground.
SPEAKER_2: This is a geometrically literate audience.
SPEAKER_2: So when you say it's a sphere 100 meters across, you don't have to say then in diameter.
SPEAKER_3: Well, I just wanted to, I need to draw the distinction between radius and diameter.
SPEAKER_3: You know, I just, I don't want to be making, I don't want to be making a false impression.
SPEAKER_2: So these are hab domes, basically.
SPEAKER_3: Well, they're spheres.
SPEAKER_3: They're not domes.
SPEAKER_3: You know, a dome is a hemisphere.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, your literate audience would know this.
SPEAKER_3: Literate audience?
SPEAKER_3: Auderence.
SPEAKER_2: So tell me about the one sixth gravity.
SPEAKER_3: I'm more of a writer, not a speaker.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Tell me about the one sixth gravity.
SPEAKER_3: To finish up on the previous question, they're made of aluminum.
SPEAKER_3: The hulls are six centimeters of aluminum, followed by a full meter of crushed lunar rock, followed by another six centimeters of aluminum.
SPEAKER_2: So this protects you from radiation?
SPEAKER_3: Radiation.
SPEAKER_3: So there's no sunlight getting to you.
SPEAKER_3: Everything's artificial and it's based on Kenya time, is what they do for their scheduling and time of day.
SPEAKER_2: Kenya.
SPEAKER_3: Kenya as in Africa.
SPEAKER_3: Kenya as in Africa, yes.
SPEAKER_3: Kenya is where the Kenya Space Corporation, which actually owns Artemis, is based.
SPEAKER_3: And that's where they do all their launches from.
SPEAKER_2: Remind me of the Earth latitude of Kenya?
SPEAKER_3: Latitude?
SPEAKER_3: Zero.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, so very nice.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: Nice pickings there.
SPEAKER_3: Kenya had two things to offer the global space community.
SPEAKER_3: My fictional Kenya had two things to offer.
SPEAKER_3: Number one, the equator.
SPEAKER_2: The real Kenya would do that if it's actually on the equator.
SPEAKER_2: Wouldn't have to be fictional for that.
SPEAKER_3: Wouldn't have to be fictional.
SPEAKER_3: But the other thing they did is they set all of their policies to be as friendly as possible for space travel.
SPEAKER_3: They said, we'll give you a launch license.
SPEAKER_3: You don't have to follow these stupid rules that the other countries make you follow.
SPEAKER_3: We'll make special tax breaks for you.
SPEAKER_3: You can go ahead and bust unions.
SPEAKER_3: We don't care.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, this is not kindergarten.
SPEAKER_3: It's like they did everything they could to draw.
SPEAKER_2: So they earned the privilege.
SPEAKER_3: They successfully drew in the global space.
SPEAKER_2: Investment.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, not just investment, but actual companies relocate there.
SPEAKER_3: They may be still be owned by Belgium consortiums or whatever else, but it's centered in Kenya.
SPEAKER_2: So being on the equator, you get the benefit of the high-speed movement of the equator in Earth's rotation going into orbit, Earth orbit.
SPEAKER_2: So these missions to the moon first go into Earth orbit and then they leave?
SPEAKER_3: Well, you have to first go into LEO and then you'll have to transfer low Earth orbit.
SPEAKER_2: LEO.
SPEAKER_3: I thought we agreed that this audience...
SPEAKER_2: I've never heard anyone say LEO before.
SPEAKER_3: LEO?
SPEAKER_3: Really?
SPEAKER_2: LEO.
SPEAKER_2: LEO, GEO, MEO.
SPEAKER_3: LEO, GEO, MEO.
SPEAKER_3: MEO.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, the middle Earth orbit.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_2: Middle Earth orbit.
SPEAKER_3: So you're like orbiting Sauron.
SPEAKER_2: Right, right, exactly.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, good.
SPEAKER_3: So you go into LEO and then you will take a transfer.
SPEAKER_3: You need to catch up with the lunar cycler.
SPEAKER_2: There you go.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, because lunar cyclers are, the cycler just goes back and forth.
SPEAKER_3: It's actually way more complicated.
SPEAKER_3: But ultimately it comes near Earth and near the Moon at regular intervals.
SPEAKER_3: And you do have to accelerate the people to catch up with the cycler.
SPEAKER_3: But you at least, you don't need to accelerate the cycler anymore.
SPEAKER_3: So you can have this big comfortable basically space hotel that only ever needed to be put in that orbit once.
SPEAKER_3: And then so you have a nice luxurious cruise.
SPEAKER_2: And once you catch up with it, you're just on a moving vessel.
SPEAKER_3: Yep.
SPEAKER_3: And then you also need to be, you also need to then be decelerated or accelerated, depends on your frame of reference, to be able to go then land on the Moon when the time comes.
SPEAKER_2: So tell me about the one sixth gravity, how's that working for people?
SPEAKER_3: It works great.
SPEAKER_3: One sixth gravity, Artemis is all set up for that.
SPEAKER_3: First off, it makes construction a lot simpler because you don't need nearly as much load bearing.
SPEAKER_3: You don't need as much load bearing on the individual floors within the bubbles.
SPEAKER_3: The people who live there are very good at moving around in one sixth G.
SPEAKER_3: Tourists are generally not as good.
SPEAKER_3: I believe you've seen the videos from the Apollo missions where they're kind of stumbling around.
SPEAKER_3: Of course, tourists in Artemis aren't wearing bulky spacesuits, so they have that going for them.
SPEAKER_3: Stairs can be about half a meter high because it's that easy to go up a riser.
SPEAKER_2: So, this sounds like an ideal place to invent new sports.
SPEAKER_3: Could be, could be.
SPEAKER_3: Space is limited.
SPEAKER_3: Space is never limited.
SPEAKER_3: Space is not limited.
SPEAKER_2: Space on your freaking colony is limited.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, that's true.
SPEAKER_3: My colony.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: Space inside of Artemis' habitable volume is limited.
SPEAKER_3: However, there is one of the bubbles.
SPEAKER_3: The bubbles are named after the Apollo astronauts.
SPEAKER_3: An Aldrin bubble has the top four floors of it are just called Aldrin Park.
SPEAKER_3: It's all glass on top instead of the other kind of hole that I was describing.
SPEAKER_3: That's all locally sourced glass because one of the other things that anorthite gives you is silicon.
SPEAKER_3: It gives you a bunch of silicon and a bunch of oxygen.
SPEAKER_3: Mix those together, you get glass.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: They have that.
SPEAKER_3: There's a big park there.
SPEAKER_3: Theoretically, you could play some games there.
SPEAKER_3: Frisbee is a challenge.
SPEAKER_2: Why?
SPEAKER_3: Well, you got two things that are kind of working against you.
SPEAKER_3: Well, working for or against.
SPEAKER_3: First off, one, six gravity.
SPEAKER_3: It's not going to go exactly the way you expect.
SPEAKER_2: That would be true for pretty much anything.
SPEAKER_3: Pretty much anything.
SPEAKER_3: But second off, the air is only 21% of Earth's atmospheric pressure.
SPEAKER_2: Why?
SPEAKER_3: Because it's a pure oxygen environment.
SPEAKER_2: So you need just the right amount of oxygen.
SPEAKER_3: Just the right amount of oxygen.
SPEAKER_3: Because why over design?
SPEAKER_3: Why go out of your way to make it so much harder on the pressure vessels?
SPEAKER_2: So this makes...
SPEAKER_2: So I guess you've done the math on this.
SPEAKER_2: If it is one-fifth air pressure here, even if it's 100% oxygen, things should not be more flammable.
SPEAKER_3: They're the exact same amount of flammable.
SPEAKER_2: Because the same density of oxygen.
SPEAKER_3: Same partial pressure of oxygen at Earth's sea level.
SPEAKER_3: So humans would be perfectly comfortable breathing and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_3: However, it does cause a few other little problems.
SPEAKER_2: Like?
SPEAKER_3: Like water boils at 61 degrees Celsius.
SPEAKER_3: Which means coffee tastes like crap.
SPEAKER_3: Because it can't properly brew or steep.
SPEAKER_2: So you need to boil coffee in a pressure cooker.
SPEAKER_3: You could make it in a pressure cooker or you could go cold brew.
SPEAKER_2: That's a thing.
SPEAKER_2: People pay top dollar for that on Earth.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, but Earth people are really stupid.
SPEAKER_3: You know this.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, so this is a science fiction movie that takes place in the future in space.
SPEAKER_2: All right, and the only thing that every science fiction movie ever produced in the history of the universe has in common with one another, with each other, is that people go into space, and then something goes wrong.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: That's the plot of every single science fiction movie.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, fair enough.
SPEAKER_2: In space.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Something goes wrong.
SPEAKER_3: Something goes wrong.
SPEAKER_2: So what goes wrong?
SPEAKER_3: Well, this is more of a problem having to do with people in that the heist that our hero Jazz gets hired to do doesn't go right, and she angers some pretty powerful and very dangerous people that she was not aware were associated with the company that she was sabotaging.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, so this is a...
SPEAKER_3: It's a crime novel.
SPEAKER_2: Crime?
SPEAKER_3: It is, it absolutely is.
SPEAKER_3: It's a heist story.
SPEAKER_2: A heist crime novel that happens to be on the moon.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_2: I gotcha, gotcha.
SPEAKER_2: So what's the coolest thing to look for in the book?
SPEAKER_2: No, I mean, ask that differently.
SPEAKER_2: What's the most inventive thing you came up with for this book?
SPEAKER_3: Most inventive?
SPEAKER_2: Because in The Martian, you know, poop potatoes, that was good.
SPEAKER_3: Potatoes?
SPEAKER_2: That was good, that was a good one.
SPEAKER_2: Coming up with that.
SPEAKER_3: We're gonna get that one.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, yeah, that was good.
SPEAKER_3: That's not getting cut.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, so, boy, well, there is a twist it toward the end of the book, which you would know if you'd read it, you know, where some...
SPEAKER_2: I'm sorry, the universe is like a big place and I, you know, can't read everything at all times.
SPEAKER_3: You know, broadly speaking, Neil, you spend your whole life in a very, very small part of that universe, right?
SPEAKER_2: That's true.
SPEAKER_3: I mean...
SPEAKER_2: But the rest of the universe calls to me.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, does it?
SPEAKER_2: And you're a cog in that turning universe.
SPEAKER_3: Hey, if you take a cog out of any machine, the machine stops working.
SPEAKER_3: I'm just saying.
SPEAKER_2: No, no, you can break some cogs.
SPEAKER_3: You can break some cogs.
SPEAKER_3: You have redundant cogs.
SPEAKER_3: That's good, that's good.
SPEAKER_3: No, there is a thing at the end that I don't want to give too much away on because of spoilers, but there's some, shall we say, unexpected chemistry that happens at the end that causes a real problem.
SPEAKER_3: And I'm kind of proud for having come up with that.
SPEAKER_3: I'll tell you about it after we're done taping.
SPEAKER_3: Or maybe I won't, maybe you should read.
SPEAKER_2: It.
SPEAKER_2: So, is there dairy or farm animals or this sort of thing?
SPEAKER_3: Oh no, there's nothing like that.
SPEAKER_2: So it's a complete plant-based life?
SPEAKER_2: Plant-based diet?
SPEAKER_3: Well, I mean, if you're talking about locally made stuff, then yeah, anything that's imported from Earth, well, it would have to be something that can be frozen or freeze-dried or something like that.
SPEAKER_3: It's a 7-day trip.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, it's a 7-day trip.
SPEAKER_3: So like fresh meat would be challenging, right?
SPEAKER_3: But like frozen meat, frozen chicken, you know, eggs can last 7 days, sure.
SPEAKER_2: Fruits and vegetables?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, you can get those.
SPEAKER_3: And some people would grow them themselves in very small quantities, but not at a scale for everyone to eat.
SPEAKER_3: It would be a luxury item.
SPEAKER_3: And you can forget about like fruit tree fruit, at least not local stuff.
SPEAKER_2: Now, for me, the allure of going to the moon would be frolicking on the landscape.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, well, you get to do that.
SPEAKER_3: As part of the excursion.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_3: So you can go for these excursions.
SPEAKER_3: They're EVA masters.
SPEAKER_3: Basically, going out onto the surface of the moon is...
SPEAKER_2: Let's be clear, EVA is NASA's multisyllable...
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: That's spacewalks, basically.
SPEAKER_2: Extravehicular activity.
SPEAKER_3: Moonwalks.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, moonwalks.
SPEAKER_3: Not the Michael Jackson kind.
SPEAKER_3: And you can do this in a similar way that you can go diving when you're on vacation in a nice ocean place.
SPEAKER_3: You have an EVA master who is out there kind of keeping track of you and maybe eight other people.
SPEAKER_3: But he or she will be wearing like the big complicated suit with articulated finger, everything kind of like you imagine an Apollo suit, but a little more advanced.
SPEAKER_3: You will be in what they call a hamster ball.
SPEAKER_3: It's basically just a big clear inflatable airtight ball that's strong enough that if you roll it over a rock, it won't pop or anything.
SPEAKER_3: And you're inside and you wear a backpack that they call a scurry pack.
SPEAKER_3: And it regulates all the air on the inside.
SPEAKER_3: And you're limited to about two hours on any given EVA because I did the math on this, that's about as much heat rejection that you can handle by having a big block of ice in a backpack.
SPEAKER_3: So basically...
SPEAKER_2: So you ran the thermodynamics on this?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Very nice.
SPEAKER_2: Thank you.
SPEAKER_2: We should remind ourselves of your academic pedigree.
SPEAKER_3: I have no degree.
SPEAKER_3: That's my academic pedigree.
SPEAKER_3: You are Dr.
SPEAKER_3: Tyson.
SPEAKER_3: I am high school graduate, Andy.
SPEAKER_2: Then let us not call it academic, but let's call it academic passions.
SPEAKER_2: Yes, that would include science and engineering.
SPEAKER_3: Oh yeah, big time.
SPEAKER_3: I love that stuff.
SPEAKER_2: There you go.
SPEAKER_3: But I am what you call a gentleman scientist, not an educated one.
SPEAKER_2: So I have told people that the highest compliment I have ever gotten from anyone at any time was from you.
SPEAKER_2: When you said that you were writing The Martian, laying down some science to track, and you imagined I was looking over your shoulder.
SPEAKER_3: Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_3: What if Neil deGrasse Tyson reads this?
SPEAKER_2: On the brink of tweeting about some mess up in your book.
SPEAKER_2: You didn't want that.
SPEAKER_3: I didn't want that.
SPEAKER_2: You didn't want that.
SPEAKER_2: So, is that, am I still there?
SPEAKER_3: Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Am I still there on your shoulder?
SPEAKER_3: You're still there on my shoulder.
SPEAKER_3: In fact, Artemis is even more scientifically accurate than The Martian.
SPEAKER_3: The Martian projected forward some technologies like ion propulsion and I completely ignored the effects of radiation.
SPEAKER_3: I just made this magical HAB material that would stop radiation.
SPEAKER_3: I offered no explanation.
SPEAKER_3: In Artemis, I didn't even do that.
SPEAKER_3: I said, all right, Artemis has the whole thickness to protect people from radiation.
SPEAKER_3: When you go out on an EVA, I calculated.
SPEAKER_3: Let's say you're a tourist and you go out on an EVA in one of those hamster balls.
SPEAKER_3: You don't have a bunch of protection from a traditional EVA suit.
SPEAKER_3: How much radiation do you get?
SPEAKER_3: Turns out over a two-hour EVA during the lunar daytime, you would get about the same amount of radiation as getting a set of dental x-rays.
SPEAKER_3: So that's fine.
SPEAKER_2: That's the measure.
SPEAKER_3: I checked.
SPEAKER_3: And the reason I checked is because I knew you'd check.
SPEAKER_2: But you know, I get misunderstood in many of my...
SPEAKER_2: I'm there to just enhance people's appreciation of the book or of the movie.
SPEAKER_2: And I get characterized as a buzzkill.
SPEAKER_2: But I'm really just keeping everybody...
SPEAKER_3: Keeping them honest.
SPEAKER_3: Just keeping it to the soul.
SPEAKER_3: See, I guess I'm in some...
SPEAKER_3: I don't know if I'm in a minority or whatever.
SPEAKER_3: I'm in the opposite camp.
SPEAKER_3: I love...
SPEAKER_3: I love that.
SPEAKER_3: I love what other people apparently consider a buzzkill.
SPEAKER_3: I'm like, yeah, you tell them, Neil, because it drives me crazy.
SPEAKER_3: What really bugs me in the story isn't so much physics and accuracies.
SPEAKER_3: I can accept a warp drive.
SPEAKER_3: I got no problem with that.
SPEAKER_3: For suspension disbelief, no problem.
SPEAKER_3: What bothers me is inconsistencies.
SPEAKER_3: So if you can go faster than light...
SPEAKER_3: I remember there was one episode of Star Trek where they're in the Classic Trek.
SPEAKER_3: They're in the Enterprise.
SPEAKER_3: It can go warp.
SPEAKER_3: I forget what Classic Trek Enterprise could go, warp nine, something like that.
SPEAKER_3: But then at one point they were like, okay, we need to get from Mercury to Earth.
SPEAKER_3: And it took them a while.
SPEAKER_3: And I'm like, wait a minute.
SPEAKER_3: Mercury is like seven light minutes from Earth and you're going many, many times the speed of light.
SPEAKER_3: It's not going to take you a while.
SPEAKER_2: So yeah, that one that slipped by.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, that slipped by.
SPEAKER_2: There was the other episode where they wanted to magnify the sound of people's heartbeats to find out where the alien was in the spacecraft.
SPEAKER_2: And was it Spock or Kirk?
SPEAKER_2: This device magnifies the sound by one to the twelfth power.
SPEAKER_3: One to the twelfth power.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Excellent.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, one times one times one times one.
SPEAKER_3: One times one.
SPEAKER_3: All the way 12 times.
SPEAKER_2: Then I thought, okay, they just misread it.
SPEAKER_2: And then there's a similar error in another episode where it was like one to the ninth power.
SPEAKER_2: So somebody just didn't remember that.
SPEAKER_3: Just doesn't get that.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Well, I remember in a book, now that's not fair bagging on Star Trek books because there's so many, but I remember one of the Star Trek books, Kirk says, Scotty, I want every ohm of power to the shield.
SPEAKER_2: Ohm of power.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: So to which I imagine Scotty saying, well, he wants maximum resistance.
SPEAKER_3: So I guess I'll just turn them off.
SPEAKER_2: Let me get astronomical on you.
SPEAKER_2: See if you thought about it.
SPEAKER_2: Moon, of course, looks the way it does because it doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it from meteoroids.
SPEAKER_2: How do you protect yourself from meteoroids, especially during meteor showers?
SPEAKER_2: Did you think about that?
SPEAKER_3: I did.
SPEAKER_3: And the odds of any object hitting something the size of Artemis are literally astronomically low.
SPEAKER_2: Good.
SPEAKER_3: And it would have to be going, and even if it did, if you're talking about a micrometeorite or something like that, even if it did, it would have to be going very, very fast, like maybe 50 kilometers a second kind of thing to make it all the way through both holes and the sand.
SPEAKER_2: Good answer.
SPEAKER_2: A couple more.
SPEAKER_2: Are there occasions where people get to see total solar eclipses down on Earth?
SPEAKER_3: You see the moon's shadow.
SPEAKER_3: Literally every time there's a total solar eclipse, we'll be during a full Earth, and so you'd be seeing that.
SPEAKER_3: Unfortunately, a solar eclipse from space is lame.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, it's fuzzy.
SPEAKER_3: It's just like this little kind of blurry blob.
SPEAKER_2: Fuzzy, dark thing.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, it's not as exciting.
SPEAKER_2: But you talk about it in the book.
SPEAKER_3: I don't.
SPEAKER_2: That's what I'm...
SPEAKER_3: Oh, it doesn't come up in the book.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, that's what I'm getting at.
SPEAKER_3: Sorry.
SPEAKER_2: I'm getting astronomical on it.
SPEAKER_3: No eclipses in the book.
SPEAKER_2: No eclipses in the book.
SPEAKER_3: You said you're getting astronomical, not literary.
SPEAKER_2: So full Earth on the moon is 60 times brighter than full moon on Earth.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, nice, huh?
SPEAKER_2: So did you have any evening Earthlight walks?
SPEAKER_3: The Earthlight mattered for some of the EVAs they took, but once again, it only matters when you're outside because inside you get a light.
SPEAKER_2: 60 times brighter.
SPEAKER_3: 60 times.
SPEAKER_3: That I didn't know.
SPEAKER_2: See, there's astronomical stuff.
SPEAKER_3: That's astronomical.
SPEAKER_3: Well, my favorite thing is that Earth is in a fixed position in the sky.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: Well, there's lunar vibration, so it wobbles, but it's there.
SPEAKER_3: And so one of my characters is a devout Muslim, and so he made like a ramp with a prayer rug on it so that he could pray to Mecca because since Earth is in a fixed position, that direction is always correct.
SPEAKER_2: He never has to change his direction.
SPEAKER_3: He doesn't have to change direction.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Very good.
SPEAKER_3: Very good.
SPEAKER_2: So, dude.
SPEAKER_3: Dude.
SPEAKER_2: Congratulations.
SPEAKER_3: Thank you.
SPEAKER_2: And so you're on tour now for the book, and there's an audible version of it.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: Narrated by?
SPEAKER_3: The lovely and talented Rosario Dawson, whom you met.
SPEAKER_2: Oh yeah, just to hear her, because in the exhibit that I attended, that audible exhibit at the setup where you got to hear some of the-
SPEAKER_3: The lunar museum.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, the lunar museum at Comic Con, New York Comic Con, I got to hear some of the passages read by her.
SPEAKER_2: It's great.
SPEAKER_3: She's really fantastic.
SPEAKER_2: Oh man.
SPEAKER_2: Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Couldn't ask for a better narrator.
SPEAKER_2: Very good.
SPEAKER_2: So cool.
SPEAKER_2: And nowadays, since everyone is stuck in traffic, audible versions of books matter.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, they do.
SPEAKER_2: In my latest book, I decided I would narrate that because it was short enough.
SPEAKER_3: Well, you've also got, I mean, and I'm not kissing up here, you've got a great voice.
SPEAKER_2: I don't hear my voice.
SPEAKER_2: I don't even think about it.
SPEAKER_3: You've got a really good voice.
SPEAKER_2: But here's how I thought about it, because it's not a long book.
SPEAKER_2: So when I said, well, how many days stuck in LA traffic would get through this book?
SPEAKER_2: I figured two days.
SPEAKER_2: So that should be the metric, the new measure of how long a book is.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, commute days.
SPEAKER_2: Commute days.
SPEAKER_2: So, Andy, congratulations.
SPEAKER_2: Thanks for coming through town.
SPEAKER_3: Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_2: And you're based where again?
SPEAKER_3: I am based in California near San Jose.
SPEAKER_2: San Jose, okay.
SPEAKER_2: Well, thanks for coming to New York, your first time.
SPEAKER_3: My first time?
SPEAKER_3: My first visit to New York City.
SPEAKER_2: Welcome to the universe.
SPEAKER_2: Dude, we'll see you again.