YouSaid · the spoken record

Andy Weir

lines on the record: 84
first: 2017-12-20
most recent: 2017-12-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 Artemis. I would like Artemis to be a general setting for lots of different stories. Not necessarily direct serials. Like the next book that I have in mind, jazz is not the main character. completely different protagonist.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, 20th Century Fox has bought the film right and they've attached the directing duo of Phil Lord 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 green lighted. So at this point, it's just very early days and just cross your fingers.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. The scenario you're describing is a hypothetical is true in the book. Artemis has very little crime, and the crimes that are happening are fairly minor in the grand scheme of things. There aren't like unsolved murders in Artemis. And when there is a major crime, it's always an outsider who's done it. Because just as you say, everybody knows each other.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rule of law is iffy in Artemis, and that's clear through the whole novel. It's difficult for them to enforce law. And this was actually kind of a central theme. It's they're like, oh crap, we really, we are on the verge of basically being owned by this syndicate”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to, I mean, I needed an organized crime syndicate for the story, and I wanted to just, I was like, okay, I don't want to go with like, you know, La Cosa Nostra 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 a large economy or kind of the best places to get good, solid crime syndicates, you know. We have awesome big old mafias here in the US and Japan or Russia. You don't get a lot of organized crime in small economies. So I picked Brazil because it's like a country that you don't often hear about. I'm sure, and I'm certain they have lots of organized crime there, just like every other major country, but it's not a stereotypical organized crime source in fiction.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 writing a story about a kind of lovable rogue might work. So that's when I moved into what is now Artemis, 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 I'd tried to change her into being something I'm more familiar with, like a guy or whatever.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I originally conceived, well, so I designed the whole city and all the science and economics behind it before I came up with any characters or story. And 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 for this first rev of the story. I needed like kind of a smuggler type, a shady person, but not a bad person. And so 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. 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, characters and plot elements that I liked from the first rev and put it together. And the second one, Jazz was a little more prevalent, but still very much a secondary character. She wasn't the”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you pick two points, I'm guessing one of us would have to walk probably about a quarter of the way around the planet 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, it would take you 2x to get all the way around the planet because my initial plan was you'd walk half speed. I'm guessing it would be a quarter of that. So one half x to get to your great circle and then a quarter x. To find you along your great circle, on average, I'm guessing, so one half plus a quarter, so three quarter x, so three quarters of the time that it would take to circumnavigate the planet.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So no? No. I think the best thing to do would be for both of us to pick an arbitrary great circle to walk. Around the planet and leave markings along the way, denoting what direction you're walking. So 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 what is a comfortable speed for me. And you would do the same thing. Now, somewhere are two, in fact, in two points, our great circles will intersect. And when one of us reaches the other ones, then they start following the markers at full speed and then you'd get the guy, right?”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to find each other. We know we're trying to find each other. Well, we should both, but we can we have a, are we both rational actors? Where's rational?”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I hadn't run out of money yet. I mean, it was my intention to get a computer science degree. But then I ran out of money before finishing college and I had to enter the workforce. And at that time, it was 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 entry-level programmer. 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 chose the money.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I didn't realize existed, 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 liked reading Niven growing up. And he would actually kind of do all the math. I mean, he was a little iffy on lightspeed 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. There's no physics violations or anything in ring world except for the fast ring light travel that you take to get there. And so I really enjoyed that as a kid. And so 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 they could read it.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Books are made into movies 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 smart ass 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 smart ass 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 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, unfortunately, is just, I stumbled into a formula that worked. And I also stumbled into a niche.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 fait accompli, I didn't have to, I wasn't locked into the earlier chapters.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since the Martian was a serial, I was much more locked into each chapter after it was written. So I'd write a chapter, post it 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 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 inviolate, 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 Artemis, I had cases where it was a much more complicated plot with a whole lot more moving parts. And so I needed to frequently go back and just make substantial changes to earlier chapters while I'm working on chapter seven and I realize crap, I need to completely rewrite chapter three now.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It all sounds like Andy Weir. I do end up with, well, the affect that the characters would be putting in, like if they're mad and the other one's like, no, calm down. I'll do a little bit of voice acting. But yeah, you would really think that I was crazy if you just watched me write for a while.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make sure the conversation flows and makes sense, I kind of need to hear it audibly. I need to hear it with my ears, not just see it with my eyes in order to make sure that the sentence is full. It's just kind of how I think.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would you go there? 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 because I can now. It would be neat. I'm like, oh, so this is the secret deep innermost chamber of the Pentagon, huh? Neat. With no agenda other than just to see it.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, no, I don't have that kind of access, right? And other things is like, you know, anytime I want to travel, I just go right up into some unoccupied first class seat in a plane. It's like I might. And also 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that'd be awesome. I'd just go into major sporting events. I just walk in, go watch the Super Bowl from the sidelines and go to the World Series. That'd be lots of stuff. But you can go to these now”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which of those two would have any of your time? That is a really random question. I guess a mermaid would have a slightly easier time because more people understand the concept of a mermaid than a merman. People understand, well, there must kind of be a male of the species. But everybody knows what mermaids are.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a tough call. I don't know if you firmly believe. If everybody on earth firmly believed in the egg, I think the argument would quickly become who are the older souls.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 afterlife philosophy can either be turned into we should be nice to each other or we should kill everyone.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a big morass. It's just this big, brand new ethical mess that is going to be a politics. It's basically going to be politics. This is not a technology issue. This is humans making rules about what humans do with technology.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm sure. Once we have self-driving cars, there's going to be all sorts of laws about, oh, there's a new law that says in this situation a self-driving car must do this thing, just as we have traffic laws now.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The selfish cars would be outlawed, is what I'm saying. Policy. This would be a policy issue, not a consumer choice issue.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We still all go selfish? That would, well, first off, yes. But second off, that would certainly be against the law. So it would not be something you would broadcast. Mercedes.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, and 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've uploaded this patch that makes my car pick me.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, this is a real 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 want to buy a car that under certain rare circumstances 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you got to bear on Asimov's laws. I've got to say yes because I was a computer programmer for 25 years. I'm actually pretty good at this stuff. And one thing that those 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 constitutes allowing a human to come to harm. And a lot of Asimov stories explore that. 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”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From birth. Maybe, I don't know, but I feel like I've got 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 are mad that you invented the plow, but it turned out to be good.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, interests in fiction and 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. Correct. And dystopic. Yeah. A dystopian future with a semi-fascist government and plucky young upstarts fighting against it. And 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 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, like Stephen Moffat writes Sherlock is sort of like a not socialist, a sociopath with a heart of gold.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure about that. I mean, by 600 AD, the Romans had stopped pillaging all of Europe, right? And so now nation states had solidified and it was much more peaceful era.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd go straight to the 400 years in the future because imagine you ask some guy in 1617. 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 Hundred 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I love it. 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 out 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Star Trek invented the idea of an evil parallel dimension. That's another trek? Yeah. The idea of like your evil counterpart has a goatee. That came from Mirror because evil spock had a goatee. That's right. That's where that came from.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also underrated, it's the first fictional adventure story ever. He invented that. And he invented, 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of underrated because people have pretty much forgotten all his contributions to fiction. So I've got to give that an underrated.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have not seen it yet 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, well, economics is just another science. If you start to think of money as like a physics property and there's going to be conservation of 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 start to look at it like a physics problem, a lot of stuff starts to make sense”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't go to the city. You can 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, 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the long term, you end up with one global government because 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vulnerable when you appear. Though you can Yeah, no, that's rough. 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the first thing, once again, for me, it always comes down to the tech and the details. However this tunnel system works, the first thing 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.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the corner of Santa Monica. That would have massive tumultuous effects because 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 your enemies can just teleport into the middle? Ultimately, you would end up very quickly with a global government.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yeah. Heineland something like something like that, but with precision, like we could have just go, I want to go to LA right now.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either. So neutral? Yeah, I mean, Artemis, there's nothing magical about it. It's a city that's on the moon. But humans are still humans, and they do what they do. So whatever they do in another small town that's fairly isolated, they do an Artemis.”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Without exception”
2017-12-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source