[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] science fiction is so much about creating new worlds and making them believable and pulling the reader in and Andy Weir is a master of that in his new book Artemis it set on the moon and the
basic setting is lunar tourism so what are the economics Andy of how we can make Lunar tourism work well um actually I'm glad you asked because I I put a huge amount of effort into that before I even started writing the book one thing for me that's always bugged me about like stories that take place in an off-world Colony or or the economics of it you know if a story is like oh the purpose of this lunar colony is mining
I'm like well why don't you have robots doing the mining for you like why why risk humans people mind if humans die they're not that upset when robots die so I decided tourism is kind of the answer to why what is the economics behind it and the the main conceit in emis is that the price to low earth orbit has been driven down by competition in the space industry uh to the point that middle class people can afford to go into space and I actually
wrote a whole paper on that which is on Business Insider right now where uh where I kind of justify that by drawing parallels with the airline industry so this is the year 2080 so I'm a potential tourist talk me into what's the killer experience on the moon if it's low gravity sex I can have that in space if I want to look back on the earth I can go into low orbit on the moon it's hard for me to go outside for long or without
considerable danger what's the killer app up there well the main thing is tourism because uh Artemis is right next to the Apollo 11 Landing site so it's a it's a it's a site of historical significance that people like to go to
also just around in uh one sixth gravity is fun and I wasn't making a sex joke there I mean like bouncing around and having fun sure now in your story there's a Cantonese meal served at at one point in the narrative a lot of the
people are eating this alga G which is cheap and not very tasty but you can get Cantonese food how is it that you thought about how much that food would cost and in 2080 what does a good Cantonese meal on the moon cost well it would depend on what a good Cantonese meal weighs I worked out with with my economic stuff I I worked out the the price of of transporting Mass to the moon and it works out to be in $ 2015 it
works out to be about $160 $25 to the kilogram and so to that end uh in Artemis the the kind of deao monetary unit is called slugs which is means soft landed grams it's not a cryptocurrency though it's not a cryptocurrency it's actually a in a way store credit the the Kenya space corpor coration which you'll probably ask me about later the Kenya space Corporation ships things to and from Artemis and they own Artemis itself
and you can buy store credit and so 1,000 slugs will get you one kilogram transported from Earth to the moon so if you want to transport uh some nice cantes food the price will be like whatever the cost of the actual Cantonese food is plus its mass in grams in slugs and why is Artemis run by the Kenyon space Corporation well well Kenya in my fictional setting Kenya had two things to offer the global uh space industry uh number one they're on the
equator launching from the equator uh takes less Fuel and costs less money that's why our launch complex is like in Southern Florida because we want to get as close to the equator as possible because you're taking advantage of the Earth's rotation to get a free about 500 meters per second for reference you need 7,800 m/s to maintain low earth orbit so you're getting about one part in 15 or one part in 16 for free just by
launching from the equator so that's a big economic benefit that saves you a lot of fuel second off Kenya is on the eastern coast of Africa which means you always launch to the east to take advantage of Earth's rotation and so that means that the launches go out over the water so any failures would fall harmlessly into the ocean instead of landing on potentially populated areas like if you put your launch complex in
Ghana or something you'd be launching over Mainland Africa Ghana would be a terrible idea right who would do it in Ghana well that was another candidate I thought of because it's also on the equator and then uh the other thing they had that they realized they could do is they could offer policy so the Minister of Economics for Kenya came up with this plan to draw the space industry into Kenya and and she basically made sure that Kenya had the
most unbelievably business friendly laws for the space industry special rules cuz one of the main things that gets in the way of private space uh exploration right now isn't technology anymore it's policy sure and like travel of all kinds try commuting into Washington DC it's a policy problem right well it's not so much policy on that that's a you know insufficient infrastructure problem but um no like the outer space treaty and
our adherence to it and other nations adherence to it to these details of a treaty that's really really out of date now causes a lot of problems and so um what in my fictional version Kenya says like we're going to interpret the treaty a little differently so that yeah we're not going to let people militarize space and we're not going to let people claim territory outside of Earth all the all the main bullet points of the treaty
we're going to preserve but we're not going to require a specific type of FM transmitter to be aboard every probe so that we can monitor them you know all this stuff like like the US so uh by doing that they drew in this multi-billion dollar commercial space industry into Kenya and tax them very little but still tax them so Kenya benefits the space Community benefits given our unwillingness to lose individual human lives these days which
is a theme in your earlier novel The Maran and we're less willing to do a kind of experimental process will space travel and especially re-entry ever be safe enough that middle class say Americans even in 2080 are going to put
their lives on the line going to the moon and would you do it um I would not do it but I don't even like to fly so I'm the wrong person to ask I have a phobia of flying I have to take meds just to be able to get on a plane so me
personally no however I don't see any reason why space travel couldn't become as safe as commercial air travel if you describe commercial air travel to someone from the 1800s they would say are you kidding there's no way that could possibly be safe you're going to go several hundred miles an hour and you're going to be 30,000 ft up in the air and you're telling me that's safe but it is and so I don't see why space
travel wouldn't follow suit with enough research in your story you raised the possibility that this moon base might in fact be a kind of economic bubble because the increase in population is slowing down population might even be
turning negative and this danger of a kind of colony collapse I hope this isn't a spoiler do you thus also think that countries on the Earth today with declining populations are possibly also bubbles no countries on the Earth today
are very different than emis Artemis has at least well you learn more about its economy uh later on in the book but emis is a delicate economy because it's a single Source income so it's like a resort Town um where so there's not much income from mining say there's no there's actually pretty much zero income when you think of it as a as a like a trade deficit point of view they don't export the aluminum that they create
they use the aluminum to build more Artemis they're they're not tra if you think of Artemis as a single economic entity the only money that enters the system is tourism tourism money but there is another Avenue by which money enters the system which is immigration when people move to emis they bring their life savings with with them so that also brings money into the system but then when artemis' population starts
to Plateau then they find out that they may have accidentally made a Ponzi scheme and in your economic model how expensive is water on the moon well water would uh water weighs a kilogram per liter right so if you wanted to just
straight up ship water to the Moon that would cost you a th slugs a liter however you wouldn't just ship water to the Moon you'd ship hydrogen in tanks and react it with the oxygen which is in plentiful Supply it's a byproduct of
smelting aluminum so you would actually uh only have to bring up one nth of that mass in hydrogen so in other words for 1,000 slugs you could get 9 lers of water but it actually gets a little more complicated than that or actually a lot cheaper than that because water isn't consumed you know when you drink water it doesn't disappear from the universe correct as much water as you bring in comes out through your breath uh a lot
more than you expect actually comes out through your breath and then through urine and feces and sweat and everything else really what you're paying for when you want water in emis is water purification even on Earth it can be
efficient to drink your recycled urine right so surely on the moon that's likely to be the case what do you think of Elon Musk and other private space efforts I think private uh space and commercial space Industries like that
are the way forward I think that's how we will reach a point where we end up with a booming space industry and I think that's how the price to low earth orbit will eventually be driven down far enough that middle- class people can afford it and once we reach that magic point then there'll be a huge space boom it'll be it'll become a multi-trillion dollar industry like the commercial airline industry here's a question from
a reader quote I would love to hear his thoughts on NASA's office of planetary protection the guys who try to keep our organisms from infecting other planets sterilizing everything that we send to other worlds it's very expensive and it might be important or it might not what's your take I am not a fan and I've I've been you know I've mentioned this a few times in the past um my main concern is this okay so you just run run through
a little flowchart in your mind start off by saying is there anything that's on Earth any any organism on Earth that can survive an eight-month Journey Through the vacuum of space and the radiation of space and all the other all the other rigors of being just out in space that can survive the trip from Earth to Mars okay maybe some tardigrades could it's possible maybe some bacteria inside of something could okay but if you're to that is no then
there's no need for planetary protection if your answer is yes then the next question is is there any life native to earth that could find anything to eat on Mars that there's any anything it would it be able to survive and reproduce on Mars I don't think it would so if if the answer to that is no then there's no need for planetary protection if it's yes then ask yourself this would that life that you accidentally introduced to
Mars oh oh sorry right at the top of this flowchart ask do you think there's Life on Mars if the answer is no there's no need for planetary protection if the answer is yes then move into this these other steps now so since we're assuming there's Life on Mars move ahead to would the Earth life somehow be more Adept at surviving on Mars than naturally evolved Mars life to the point that it would displace it and ruin the Mars ecosphere
uh seems very unlikely to me so I would say no but if your answer to that is yes then ask yourself if the Soviets properly sterilized their probes if you think the answer is if you think the answer is yes well okay I think the answer is no in which case it's already infected but let's say it did then the final thing I would say is this Mars is a planet it's big you're not going to ruin the entire ecosphere if it has one
by accidentally infecting one area and so to give people the what I try to say to give people a notion of what I mean mean by this if you're going to have surgery in New York City you do not need every gas station in Bangladesh to be
sterilized do you believe in the panspermia hypothesis and if you do does this imply we should actually subsidize sending non-sterilized life forms to Mars because there's always some chance that you would create some kind of
long-term panspermia scenario on other planet I mean well I I my understanding of the panspermia hypothesis is that there was a single Genesis of life but that may have infected multiple planets doesn't have to be a single but there's a smaller number of origin points than final number of planets the basic conceit is that life was able to through some natural processes or accident of Fate get from one planet to another take
root and then also go there I don't believe that that has happened and I also don't believe we have any sort of responsibility to deliberately and infect other planets with life if if it is a value to us to go to Mars then we should go to Mars and if it's a value to us to devise a crop that would grow in Mars's native environment then sure go ahead but I don't think we have some strange Manifest Destiny moral imperative to infect the solar system
also I'll just tell you that yes I'm a science fiction writer and yes I'd love for us to discover Life on Mars but I really don't think there's any because on Earth it's very difficult for you to find any part of Earth that isn't teeming with life if you just grab a liter of air or ocean water or snow from Antarctica or sand from the Sahara Desert if you grab any of that and look at it it'll be absolutely riddled with
microbial life but on Mars we've found literally nothing so I find it extremely hard to believe because life is very good at getting everywhere and if it's had like 4 and a half billion years like like Earth has had to evolve and adapt then why isn't it just everywhere on Mars but let's say it's 2080 your books have continue to do very well your grandchildren are billionaires and they they've read your books maybe they've
talked to you and they think H I'm going to send out some self-replicating fun noyman probes powered by solar energy and they're going to try to seed the rest of of the Galaxy with life most people who try this will fail but philanthropy is a somewhat unusual and diverse Endeavor and in equilibrium don't societies that survive to the point where they can put beings on the moon on Mars end up with self-replicating fyman machines and thus
some version of panspermia is actually likely I think the best self-replicating machines are ourselves I mean we're we're really a lot better at it than any machines that we'll have by 2080 I mean I understand what you're saying with a fun just send bacteria right it's yeah you can chuckberry songs and bacteria yeah right it'll be a lot easier it would be a lot easier to uh genetically engineer a bacteria that could survive
on Mars than to create a VY device that could reproduce itself on Mars I mean why don't take take advantage of all this stuff that of the first two billion years or so of evolution that worked all this out for you now let me ask you some questions about governance in space I've read some of your favorite works are by Robert heinan moon is a Harsh Mistress R Mars of course by Kim Stanley Robinson azimov caves of Steel and it's a
consistent theme in these stories in fact the stories you love they involve an element of rebellion they do if we had a colony on the moon how long do you think it would be before that Colony would seek independence from Earth rule
well first off it wouldn't be Earth rule be it would be ruled by some specific country sure or company or country uh seeking you can't really seek independence from a company well it could be the East India Company right
the Kenyan space Corporation have some features of East India they're much nicer than the East India Company was yeah well the the Kenya space Corporation in my book is just they have a very simple business model they build Artemis and then rent out Lots they don't try to control its economy or its people or anything they're literally just landlords and absentee landlords at that you can't declare independence from
a company because by definition the company owns all the assets if you say I'm independent from the company what you're doing is resigning what but it happens right yeah but if you're talking about some sort of Revolution or something like that well I guess the first step is you'd have to be pretty sure that you are self-sufficient independent you have to be like Earth independent um which uh in the case of Artemis it's not but you have some
allies so what's now the United States declares independence from what was then Britain and the French help us uh other people who are upset at Britain help the American colonies to become independent so as long as you have some outside allies wouldn't you expect within say 50 years time a lunar Colony a Mars colony would try to seek Independence so those rents could be captured by domestic interests possibly I mean uh ultimately
U I believe that all major events in history are economic and I mean Independence was really about who gets to collect taxes right so if the people who live in in a city are content with the economic status that they have they're not going to Rebel people don't people despite what you see I would challenge you to show me any situation where people revolted over purely ideology without any economic but think about the American colonies so the
British were taxing us maybe 5% GDP and the American colonies preferred that those taxes went to the American colonial government yes absolutely but it wasn't that much money in a sense that to me is what's surprising well uh at that time taxes globally were not that much money yeah but when you read these books by hinin azimov Kim Stanley Robertson they always end up being political Thrillers and that's not what I'm going for I'm I'm showing the
frontier town and the kind of Cooperative aspects of human nature I'm not I uh it for some reason every book about colonizing space ultimately seems to lead to a revolution because that's exciting right you're it's Star Wars you know you've got you've got a rebellion you say yeah we throw off the Yol and it has historical parallels and it's all awesome like that but I don't necessarily think that's going to be the
case partially because as long as we keep following the rules of the outer space treaty which I believe we will there's no such thing as Sovereign territory outside of Earth so emis is functionally speaking an offshore platform on Earth do you think we should experiment more with sea steing set up sea colonies underground colonies absolutely have them be politically autonomous if they want you would have to change maritime law to be able to do
that right now under maritime law you can SE dead I mean you can you you can do it right now you can go out into the international waters and build something you have to flag to some country though right a cruise ship yeah you well yeah you have to you you could flag to like serame or something like that you could fly a flag of convenience but one way or another you are subject to the laws of the country that you're fing the flag of
just as Artemis is subject to the laws of Kenya now one theme in your story The Martian is this difference between an individual life and a statistical life and I think on the very last page of the Martian you mentioned that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to save this one life and it's clear that in the actual real world we would do something similar but if you consult economic studies well what is a life supposed to
be worth an anonymous life that often comes in at about 8 to 10 million what is your view okay for that single life of course we'll spend the hundreds of millions everyone's watching on TV but what are the limits of spending that kind of money to save individual lives where do you draw the line how do you think about that philosophically I I guess it would come down to how like if you were going to spend that money to
save other lives instead how many could you save right right so it's like well you can spend $50 million to save this one person or you can save these 80 people by giving them much needed surgeries or something like that smoke
detectors but you'll never know which people you never really know but that that that's when that's when the devil's in the details in in your in your Fitness Formula where you're like okay you know how many people how many human
lives will I save by dumping $1 million into cancer research how many human lives does that save it could be zero it could be zero but that could be that last million that makes the the aha moment or if you amortise it over all the money that's ever been spent on cancer research and then versus all the lives that have ever been saved by cancer research that you you see it's all about the Fitness Formula so it's it's one of those questions that is
deceptively simplistic But ultimately gets really really complicated when you start drilling down into the details let me well let me ask you this uh let me ask you one yes um let's say we can cure cancer we can do it today uh actually no tell with cancer we can cure let's say the the the number one killer of human beings in the world and we almost can this will be a reality soon well okay but let's say Le let's say all all other
attempts fail at malaria we don't know what to do but then here's aliens from outer space come and they say like we'll tell you what we're going to we're going to give you the cure to malaria and we we'll we'll just eradicate the anopolis mosquito you'll never and and all malaria will be gone from your planet forever but we want all your redwoods all right we want every redwood tree on your planet we want it to become extinct
we hate Redwood part of our right they could ask for a lot more in fact they could ask for a lot more so it would be okay for us to render the Redwood the entire species extinct if we could save the millions and of people a year that malaria kills I'll toss in the Elms to wipe out yeah yeah yeah to i p pink eye yeah but then I say like all right aliens from OU space go like oh this one malaria patient is on the verge of death
none of your doctors can save him we'll save his life in exchange for destroying all the Redwoods on your planet no well now you've just somewhere between those two things is the value of human life versus the value of redwoods sure I think we should be more imp personal in terms of how we think about value of human lives but in individual cases we so often aren't let me ask you some questions about particular Technologies
but feel free to pass if you don't have an opinion especially as it relates to settling the moon or maybe Mars of course that's harder but 3D printing does it play a major role in how you think about this happening or not uh I think 3D printing is a a major technology in manufacturing in general like so it's not specific to the space industry it's like saying oh what how do you think refining steel affects industry it's like it affects everything
and so I think 3D printing is something that will have this omnipresent effect across all uh aspects of manufacturing including the space industry will a lunar settlement use blockchains as a substitute for some forms of centralized command and control uh you mean like like behind Bitcoin but you can use blockchains to register property titles to store decentralized information no not at all I don't I don't think that'll happen at all I I
also don't think that cryptocurrency is is a good idea why not because investing if if if you are investing in a current if the currency's inherent value is the potential for the currency to go up that's always going to fail as a currency every time in history that people have tried that it's failed like without without exception as a science fiction author how do you view the evolution of social media including
how it would relate to a lunar settlement Facebook on the moon I don't see why not harmful beneficial uh neither neither so neutral yeah i' be about to say I mean emis there's nothing magical about it it's it's a city that's on the moon but humans are still humans and they do what they do so whatever you they do in another small town that that's fairly isolated they do arimus one of your favorite noas is Robert
hein's tunnel in the sky and there's a new technology in that story where you enter a kind of tunnel and you can emerge at some other very distant place it's almost a bit like teleportation but they don't wipe out a copy of you you're
still you if we had this in the world what do you think is the most fundamental change it would bring if we had like basically teleportation something like teleportation but it does not obliterate the individual being
teleported in the sky something like that but where you and with precision like we could have like a we could just go I I want to go to LA right now yeah you don't fall into a volcano right you get to appear on the corner of s Monica that would have massive tumultuous effects because we there would no longer be any such thing as Borders or territory like if people can teleport let's say you've got a country how do
you defend that when the AR when your enemies can just teleport into the middle um ultimately you would end up very quickly with a global government how do you think through the equilibrium they are could you imagine nation states
become stronger they require all individuals be tagged in some way if you appear in a territory and you're not tagged the drones come they strike you down immediately is it possible you'd have less Mobility because you would
invest upfront in this tagging technology I I think the first thing uh once again for me it always comes down to the tech and the details however this tunnel system works the first thing that that countries would try to do is say like can I build a shield such that you can't make a tunnel into here yeah but say you can actually make the tunnel you may be vulnerable when you there's no way to stop the tunneling process though
you can shoot them when they get off the boat peral boat yeah no that's rough that that basically means there is no such thing as borders and no way of preventing people so if this is technology existed right now we'd have like suicide bombers just showing up in every American city so Global GDP Falls in your view uh in the short term for sure in the long term in the in the long term you end up with one Global government because one entity fi one
entity that's powerful enough to do it finally says like you know what screw this we're going to control everything so that this is no longer an issue even individual governments as you know they put Mobility restrictions often on citizens so if you're in China you live in the countryside you want to move to Shanghai you can't just appear there legally you may appear in a Black Market sort of way so I suspect also it would
be a kind of dystopia to have Highlands tunnel in the sky to be fair in tunnel in the sky they weren't anywhere near that precise it'll put you kind of somewhere on the planet and that may be better right it was really really uh oh and also a supernova happened somewhere in the galaxy and it completely screwed up the system and they couldn't retrieve the people who used it and so they were all stranded on that planet and why do
you like tunnel in the sky so much why is that an interesting story for you oh it's a survival story it's a people versus nature I I I love that sort of stuff as you may have noticed sure so something that strikes me about your work I find very special to you there there's an economic model behind everything and an engineering model behind everything a model of Science and the economic in the engineering models are integrated and there's a lot of
science fiction authors that do one or the other but you're the guy who integrates them both and you never say this UPF front but that to me is one thing so striking about your two novels oh well thank you um yeah well economics is just another science if you start to think of money as like a a a physics property and there's going to be conservation of money and money actually acts sort of like a particle with gravity so wealth
accumulates and it has a tendency to keep going where I mean if you if you start to look at it like a physics problem a lot of stuff starts to make sense now in all of these interviews there's a segment in the middle it's
called overrated versus underrated all right so I toss out a name an idea you're free to pass you're not required to offend anyone but you tell me if you think it's overrated or underrated all right the movie Blade Runner director's
cut correctly rated and how do you rate it I I love it Blade Runner 2049 the new one I have not seen it yet okay because my girlfriend has made it clear that I will be severely punished if I watch it without her and we haven't had time with my book tour to go somewhere together Edgar Rice Burrows kind of underrated because people have pretty much forgotten all his contributions to fiction so I've got to I've got to give
that an underrated okay Robinson cruso the novel also underrated it's the first like fictional adventure story story ever he invented that and invented the well and of course the Martian is a I mean there's a whole category of books called Robinson Aid and the Martian is one of them so the Martian's influenced by Daniel defo yeah yeah it's a great Book Adventure one myv I mean in a way so is every Adventure
novel it was one of the first like you know just fictional adventure stories and it's still gripping it's still good yeah Star Trek the Original Series uh underrated it's my favorite of all of them what's your favorite episode oo uh balance of Terror I think the one is that DC Fontana script I don't know who wrote it yeah I think the DC Fontana ones are the best generally I liked balance of Terror and of course I loved Mirror Mirror yeah
that's Star Trek invented the idea of an evil parallel Dimension that's another is that original Star Trek yeah the idea of like your evil counterpart has a goatee that came from Mirror Mirror because evil Spock had a goatee that's where that came from and the optimistic Vision in the original Star Trek do you find that persuasive yeah I love I love it I I mean I have a very optimistic view of the future it's my belief that
every century is better than the last and if you don't believe me let's say I pointed a gun at you and pointed you at my time machine and said you have to go back in time some exact number of centuries but you get to pick you're
going to choose one century you're not going to want to go back further than that you're going to want to go as far forward in time as you are allowed to go I don't want to go back but if you give me the choice to live born in 1962 as I
was or to go 400 years into the future I think I would stick with the status quo just simply because of your comfort level I know I'm surviving to a particular age with more to come and maybe history is cyclical I'd go straight to the 400 years in the future because can imagine you asked some guy in uh 1617 you know you want to go 400 years in the future or stay here right so that guy now he has a life expectancy of
maybe 50 if he's lucky and he's probably going to die in the 100 Years War I mean you're way better off going 400 years in the future I mean find me any spot in history where you're better off 400 years earlier well these are Dark Ages you'd rather be around the time of Jesus Christ than say in the year 600 AD for instance in Western Europe I'm not sure about that I mean by 600 AD the Romans had stopped like pillaging all of Europe
right and so now like nation states had solidified and it was much more peaceful era overrated or underrated disco music underrated disco will never die my friend and what in disco music do you Advocate all of it all of it your favorite oh boy uh Donna Summer maybe that would be my pick Donna Summer that's great yeah yeah I I am a fan of disco I admit it what's the main way in which Mor arity differs from Sherlock
Holmes he's a little bit older and he does not let pesky things like a code of ethics or honor get in his way how ethical is Holmes in your view because it seems in most of these stor he violates the rule of law he runs around
with the pistol very often he doesn't catch the criminal in some stories but that's rare he often just figures out a mystery is at odds with the police Sherlock Holmes today would we consider him a terrorist a freedom fighter a
superhero we'd consider him a police procedural detective I mean it's been so ripped off by so many people basically the way most contemporary writers like to write new Sherlock Holmes stories like you know uh like Stephen Moffett writes Sherlock is is sort of like a social uh not socialist a sociopath with a heart of gold it's basically here's another question from a reader quote Peter teal remarks often how modern science fiction
depicts science and technological progress often is dangerous or bad like in the movie The Terminator Hunger Games this is a departure from writers like azimov hinin and Clark who are mostly very prot technology pro-science optimistic Vision what's responsible for this cultural shift I don't know interests in fiction and what what people are buying goes up and down and changes over time I think lately young adult science fiction has all been
basically the same story told about 20 different times corre dystopic yeah a dystopian future with a semi- fascist government and Plucky young upstarts fighting against it and that's a that's an interesting story but I think it's
kind of been done to death just like zombies were a little overdone a few years ago as well there is sort of a technophobia out there and I don't buy into it I I feel like technology generally makes things better it's also
why I don't really like the show Black Mirror because it's pretty much all about how technology is awful and will ruin the universe and control it's all about control technology but you being controlled not you controlling the natural world but what is it you think in your individual biography that accounts for your greater loyalty to what is now the Fairly old Asam of hland Clark tradition when the other writers
coming up they're mixed attitudes but you're one of the most optimistic most Pro science this integration of economics and Engineering what is it in you that is produce that I don't know maybe I'm just an optimist just an optimist maybe I don't know but I I feel like I I feel like I've got you know you know about 50 centuries of human history to back up my point of view that we just generally make things better I mean if
you go back to the year 1000 I mean I'm sure there are people who were mad that you invented the plow but it turned out to be good now Isaac azimov as you know he came up with his three laws of robotics no harm obey self preses a in a
strictly hierarchical order those date from the 1940s it's now a long time ago we've seen a lot more from technology and in fact in robotics do you think that you Andy we today in 2017 could improve on asimov's Three Laws you mean
like if I was going to write rob you get to write some number of laws to govern robots to govern robots you don't get three million but you can have more than three improve on asimov's laws I've got to say yes because I was a computer programmer for 25 years so I'm actually pretty good at this stuff okay and one thing that Three Laws kind of hid and it's okay because science fiction is science fiction but it requires the
robot to have to make moral and ethical decisions and make you know what what constitutes allowing a human to come to harm and and a lot of azamov stories explore that but in order for a robot to have those ethical dilemmas and considerations there's a lot of programming that has to be done under the hood and do you have a nomination for how you would improve on the Three Laws just one bit you would need a very very detailed description of what
constitutes harming a human what constitutes allowing a human to come to harm what constitutes obeying a human and what constitutes self-preservation how good do you think the ethical programs embodied in autonomous vehicles will be and this is coming pretty soon right well yeah this is this is a real uh question that we have to ask there's nothing like you know your car is not going to conspire against you it's just
a program that it's running right now the question is do I do you want to buy a car that under certain rare circumstan es would choose to sacrifice you for some reason like it concludes that it's like oh that's a bus due to events Beyond anybody's control I'm about to crash I can either hit that bus and my passenger will be okay or I can go off that cliff and everyone on the bus will be okay and my passenger will be dead if
you're driving the car no one blames you for trying to preserve your own life no one holds you at fault for choosing your own life over anything else in a snap decision right but if it's something that can be coldly calculated in advance and your car is making the decision then people start saying no no no cars should do this that the other thing and I'd be like I'm not sure I want a car that doesn't prioritize me then you start to
get into the ethics of people hacking their cars so that they're like no no no I I I I've I've uploaded this patch that makes my car pick me so you go on Match.com and part of the profile request is to enter and certified fashion what kind of program you've chosen for your car car right could be actually equilibrium look like we still all go selfish that that would well first off yes but second off that would certainly be against the law so the
these would C it would not be something you would broadcast Mercedes sells altruistic cars and they're all pink the selfish cars are black you would the selfish cars would be outlawed is what I'm saying policy this would be a policy issue not a consumer Choice issue and you think it will be a policy issue yeah I'm sure once we have once you have uh self-driving cars there's going to be all sorts of laws about like oh there's
a new law that says like in this situation A self-driving car must do this thing just as just as we have traffic laws now I believe they just passed regulations in Germany forbidding self-driving cars from assigning higher values to younger lives than older lives okay are you for that or against it it's a big morass um it's just this big brand new ethical mess that is going to be a politics it's basically it's going to be
politics this is not a technology issue this is humans making rules about what humans do with technology let me ask you a few questions about some of your very early fiction which you originally wrote online you have a story called The Egg one of your most famous works if the world was such where all the other people we dealt with we felt were in some way reincarnations of ourselves how much nicer do you think we would be to
them or over time might it be not that much at all well there's two schools of thought on that I've gotten a lot of feedback on the egg one thing is you'd be like whoa this guy I'm talking to that's me I'm going to experience this
from his point of view or maybe I already have I should be nice we should all be nice we should all cooperate another school of thought is that people would be like oh that tribe of people over there they're less enlightened than
our tribe they're all earlier versions of the one soul and we're later versions we know what's best and that's why it's okay for us to kill them because they're just earlier versions of us so killing them is no different than like changing your mind and becoming more enlightened so any like afterlife philosophy can either be turned into we should be nice to each other or we should kill everyone and what's your prediction for which is
the equilibrium that's a tough call I don't know if everybody firmly believe if everybody on Earth firmly believed in the egg I think the argument would quickly become who are the older Souls we're thinking about questions of cultural assimilation would a discovered mermaid or merman have an easier time blending into the rest of society and being accepted and you're' written on this too of course you're talking about
you want me to choose between mermaid or merman which would have an easier time which of those two into modern American society that is a really random question uh I guess a mermaid would have a slightly easier time because more people understand the concept of a mermaid than a merma people understand well there must kind of be a male of the species but everybody knows what mermaids are and you think more men would be willing
to date a mermaid than women would be willing to date a merman well I'd have to ask about the biology of the mermaid of course that would be a factor I'm sure if you had the power to go anywhere without being tossed out again a premise from one of your stories where would you actually choose to go oh oh that'd be awesome I'd just go uh into like major sporting events I just walk in go like watch the Super Bowl from the sidelines
and go to the World Series that'd be lots of stuff I would of you can go to these now right this is yeah well no not I don't have that kind of access right and other things is like you know anytime I want to travel I just just go right up into some unoccupied first class seat in in a plane it's like I might and um and also I I would almost certainly use it for evil at various times I'm like I need some money I'm going to walk into that
bank is there any place you would go that you cannot currently go right now like right now you more or less can't go to North Korea right would you go there uh no I'm not that interested in that there's probably a bunch of places I would go simply because other people aren't allowed to go like I just wander around Buckingham Palace just cuz cuz I can now you know it would be neat I'm like oh so this is the uh so this is the
secret deep innermost chamber of the Pentagon huh neat you know with No Agenda other than just to see it let me ask you a few questions about you again you always have the freedom to pass but in one of your interviews you say that you often read dialogue out loud to yourself I do why do you do that what function does it serve uh to make sure the conversation flows Mak sense um I I kind of need to hear it audibly I I need
to hear it with my ears not just see it with my eyes in order to make sure that the senten is FL it's just kind of how I think and you put on different voices for different characters or it all sounds like Andy Weir I do end up with
the well the affect that the characters would be putting in like if they're mad and the other one's like no calm down you know I'll I'll do a little bit of voice acting but yeah you you would really think that I was crazy if you
just watched me write for a while now the Martian was was written online first and in a way in serial form like the great 19th century novelist a bit at a time and you would spoon it out to readers and get feedback and Artemis it seems to me wasn't the methods of writing how do you feel it's shaped the final output in each case how would you compare those two since the Martian Was a Serial I was much more locked into
each chapter after it was written so I'd write a chapter posted online now I didn't consider those chapters to be set in stone and I would go back and make minor Corrections and changes and I I told the readers that in advance I'm
like hey you know if I need to go back a few chapters and change something I'm going to do that but still I had a strong impetus to kind of like consider anything that's been released as done and inv violate right and also it gave
me a really strong desire to have each chapter end with kind of a cliffhanger in Artemis I didn't feel the need to do that and that was actually good because in emis I had cases where it's a much more complicated plot with a whole lot more moving parts and so I I needed to frequently go back and just make substantial changes to earlier chapters while you know I'm working on chapter 7 and I realize oh crap I need to completely rewrite
chapter 3 now because I came up with this much cooler thing to happen and so I need to start setting up for it back here and that was good because by having the entire book be presented as a fat a comple I didn't have to like I wasn't locked into the earlier chapters and what method will you use for your next book The the same as Artemis I I'm I I I like the traditional publishing route one of the things to me that's striking
about your work is just how good you are at synthesizing what you learn and then improving on it in a continuous sort of way it's a kind of engineering approach but applied to writing and the knowledge you need behind writing if I ask you the question I ask many of our guests the andu year production function you started from not being a professional writer you wrote online you were paid zero yes now you're famous you Reed huge
sums of money your books are made into movies how would you describe the Andy we production function so that we have insight into your comparative advantage that helped you become successful H I don't know I'm sure luck played a large part of it I think I happened upon a combination of things that worked well together without doing the proper experimentation to find it in advance so I said like okay I'm going to make a a
smartass main character and I'm going to make a scientifically accurate story well it turns out those two dovetailed together very very well because being a funny smartass enabled me to dump enormous amounts of exposition on the
reader that ordinarily would have been painful to slog through and so I didn't realize how well those two things were going to go together and I also didn't realize how much people would end up rooting for this this poor guy who
stranded on Mars I was doing it as sort of a self-insertion what would I do if I were on Mars and other people read it as like the world must help him and so I mean some of it unfort is just I stumbled into a formula that worked and I also stumbled into a niche that I didn't realize existed uh which is the so-called hard sci-fi the scientifically accurate science fiction I like reading that and you go back a bit you get to
like I I liked reading nien growing up and um he he would actually kind of do all the math I mean he was a little iffy on on light speed travel and he really didn't like to have it in his books but you do something like the Ring World all of that works it all like there's there's no physics violations or anything in ring world except for the faster and white travel that you take to get there and so I really enjoyed that
as a kid and so that's that's kind of what I wrote as an adult and nobody else is really doing that and I kind of wish they would on the one hand it's nice to have that Niche to myself and all the readers who are interested in that are just mine but on the other hand I wish there was another writer doing that so I could read it your college experience you dropped out I believe in your fourth year yeah why didn't you drop out sooner
because I hadn't run out of money yet I mean it was my intention to get a computer science degree right uh but then I ran out of money before finishing college and I had to enter the workforce and at that time it was uh the mid 90s and the tech bubble was still inflating and there was such a huge demand for engineers I could make pretty good money as an entrylevel programmer um so my choice was either get paid what for me at the time was a
pretty good salary or go deeply into debt to continue College I I chose the money let's say economics economics it's all about economics what if there are two Immortal people let's say it's the two of us placed on opposite sides of the earth an earthlike planet and we can wander freely with no constraints but just foot speed how long does it take us to find each other can we collude in advance no we cannot okay but we know
we're trying to find each other we know we're trying to find each other well we should both but we can we can we have a are we both rational actors and we we're as rational as you and I are take that as so no no uh I think the best thing to do would be for both of us to pick an arbitrary great circle to walk okay around the planet and leave uh leave markings along the way not denoting what direction you're walking right so I I
would arbitrarily pick a direction to go and I would just go that Direction with the intention of circumnavigating the entire globe and I would walk at maybe half my half what is a comfortable speed for me and you would do the same thing now somewhere our two great in fact in two points our great circles will intersect right and when one of us reaches the other ones then they start following the markers at full speed and then you get
the guy right and what's your best guess as to how long that would take if you pick two points uh I'm I'm guessing one of us would have to walk probably about a quarter of the way around the planet before the other one before we found the other one's great circle and then you'd have to walk again so if in terms of circumnavigation times you would be uh it would take you 2x to get all the way around the planet because my initial
plan was you'd walk half speed okay so I'm guessing uh it be a quarter of that so 1/2x to get to your great circle and then a quarter X to find you along your great circle on average I'm guessing so 1/2 plus a qu so 3/4 x so 3/4 of the time that it would take to circumnavigate the planet okay great answer that's my guess the lead character in emis I believe she's 26 years old her name is Chaz she's a woman and she's from Saudi Arabia why that
choice when I originally conceived uh well so I designed the whole city and all the science and economics behind it before I came up with any characters or or story right and so I so I had the city in place and I'm like now I'm going to make characters in a story so I camp with a story and I needed uh for this first rev of the story I needed like kind of a a Smuggler type a shady person but not a bad person and so I this is
how Jazz got created I was like well it's a very international town I'm going to pick a country kind of at random that I haven't used yet Saudi Arabia okay and I'll make her a woman done and she was only going to be in like two or three scenes but that story ultimately for unrelated reasons didn't work out it wasn't very good uh I didn't like the plot I didn't like the characters so I set that aside and I came up with a new
story taking elements I liked from the first chunk character and plot elements that I liked from the first rev and put it together in the second one Jazz was a little more prevalent but still very much a secondary character she wasn't the main character the lead character at all and then that story didn't work but I was like this character jazz is pretty interesting and the idea of like writing a story about a kind of lovable Rogue
might work so that's when I moved into what is now artem what Artemis became which is a story all about jazz and by that time she was so cemented in my mind as being like a Saudi woman that my imagination would have rebelled if ID
tried to change her into being something I'm more familiar with like a guy or whatever and some of the bad guys they're a Brazilian crime syndicate right oasia where did you get that idea from I wanted to I mean I needed an
organized crime syndicate for the story and I wanted to just I I was like okay I don't want to go with like you know laosan ostra or the Russian mob or anything I wanted to invent something new and so I said like well I want big fairly significant country with with a large economy uh or the kind of the best places to get good solid crime syndicates you know we have we have awesome like big old mafias here in like
the US and Japan or Russia you you don't you don't get a lot of like organized crime in uh small economies so I picked Brazil because it's it's like a country that you don't often hear about and I'm sure and I I'm I'm certain they have lots of organized crime there just like every every other major country but it's it's not a stereotypical organized crime Source in fiction and if there's a a Brazilian crime syndicate killing people
trying to kill people on Artemis does that mean it's poorly governed by the Kenyon space Corporation in your model the rule of law is iffy and emis and that's clear through the whole novel it's it's difficult for them to enforce
law and this was actually kind of a central theme is they're like oh crap we really we are on the verge of basically being owned by this Syndicate but if you think about the country of Iceland Iceland is extremely safe you know in
Iceland if you kill someone you can't escape right it's an island not many roads not many people people know each other not the only reason why crime in Iceland is low but a big reason why is an emis more like Iceland that there's so little anonymity so few possibilities for escape that the crime rate is either zero or it's crimes the Kenyan space Corporation wants to have happening right the scenario you're describing as
a hypothetical is is true in the book emis has very little crime and the crimes that are happening are fairly minor in the grand scheme of things there aren't there aren't like unsolved murders in Artemis and when there when there is a major crime it's always an outsider who's done it because just as you say everybody knows each other will there be a movie of Artemis well uh 20th Century Fox has bought the film rights
and they've attached the uh directing uh Duo of Phil or and Chris Miller to the project and those two are now in the process of choosing a screenplay writer to write the adaptation but a whole bunch of stuff needs to go right
for a movie to get greenlighted so at this point it's just very early days and just you know cross your fingers and to close could you just give us some sense of your vision for the future of your own career what you would like to write
what else you would like to accomplish how you think about the path that you're on love the path that I'm on I want to keep writing books I have more ideas for books than I have remaining lifespan to write them so I'm set on that front and in the short term I would like to write more books that take place in emis I'd like emis to be a general setting for lots of different stories not not not necessarily direct serials like the next
book that I have in mind jazz is not the main character it's a completely different protagonist Andy Weir thank you very much it's been a pleasure thank you for having [Music] me thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show