YouSaid · the spoken record

Mary Roach

lines on the record: 94
first: 2017-10-18
most recent: 2017-10-18
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

“Well, when I travel, I'm often traveling in the context of research, which is my favorite way to travel because it's a way in. So anytime you can find a way into a country or a culture or a home just beyond the sightseeing, I think it always makes the trip so much more interesting. And there are various ways to do that. You can volunteer. You can go to places where you know someone. Anywhere where you have a personal connection that takes you beyond the surface.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone out there, people are going to go, whoa, if that's the most mind-blowing thing, that means everything else is less mind blowing. I'm going to cross her off my to do read list.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only method I have is to self-police. I think especially with written humor, if you're reading it over 20 times going, I think it's funny, right? I think that's funny. Yeah, that's funny. If I read it again, it'll be funny to get rid of it. It's probably not funny. My editor helps with that too. That's the only.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought about robots as a topic, but I feel that my complete and utter ignorance in the world of coding and artificial intelligence, I don't think I could get up to speed to the point where I could do that topic justice.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As it turned out, he thought I was NCIS. What's that? Naval Criminal Investigation Service. So he was very, you know, I came up when I approached him. Yeah, he said, I'm done. I'm leaving. He started to get up to leave and I had to go into this sort of song and dance. Like, well, I'm writing a book, actually. This sounds like a really trivial topic, but I want to talk to you about diarrhea. He actually cut me off and he said, it's not silly. You're welcome to sit down. And it was a really interesting conversation. But that was, I was really nervous. It was kind of dumb, but I was nervous.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the PR guy said, and to steal our women. So they're very imposing. They're like the guys with the beards and they don't mix a lot and they keep to themselves. And basically my only chance was to accost one of them in the dining facility, this big, huge dining facility. And so the public affairs guys like Mary, there's your guy over there, very imposing guy, like shaved head beard eating by himself. And I remember crossing the dining facility feeling like a fifth grader at the dance just going, I don't want to do this. I mean, as it turned out, I mean, it was a very awkward overture to make to go up to a stranger and somehow explain why you want to ask him about diarrhea. And also, he doesn't know why I've chosen him. And as it turned out”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a little apprehensive. Oh, you know what? Okay, I scratched that. Here's where I was nervous. I was very nervous grunt. I had a chapter that had to do with diarrhea specifically in special operations teams. And these are the, because these are the guys they're eating in little villages in Yemen or Somalia. They're out eating off the economy, as they say, and the food isn't necessarily refrigerated, the water may not be treated. They get really bad food poisoning all the time. And if you get food poisoning and you've got, say, a mission to go like into Osama bin Laden's compound and you've got to go, you just go in your pants. So I wanted to talk to, I was in, I went to Djibouti, which is way over in North Africa, and specifically to talk to someone in the special operations. I didn't know they had their own compound, which was off limits to me. They only came out at dinner.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes And my dad was a real eccentric character. He was sixty-five when I was born and he was the kind of guy. My favorite animal was an elephant, so he painted a life-size elephant on the basement floor. I mean, he was definitely a bit of a rebel. And I guess maybe it comes from him.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On that quickly, the brain would probably be okay, and she probably would live. So I don't know. I have to read a lot into these very specific moments or when I used to play with my dinosaurs in the cat litter box. So there weren't some elements.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A kid and all the way through high school, I was pretty shy and boring. High school just did my homework, got good grades, watched a ton of TV. Then I got to Wesleyan, realized I'm not going to go to graduate school. I don't care what my grades are and I'm just going to have fun. And then I began traveling. And then so I kind of like I had a very, it kind of went like this, kind of a, you know, just But as a kid, no one as a kid, I don't I don't remember myself although there's certain things I remember I had a friend named Mary Hewitt who gave me a Barbie doll and I didn't collect I didn't like dolls particularly and what I would do is I would pull the head off and I'd say you have five seconds to put the head back on or she dies and that's kind of accurate if you could put the head back”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right, yeah, I don't, I can't I'm more flummocked and confused by this situation than I can ever been about anything. I don't get it. How did this happen? How come it's, what is what? Yeah.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny that why are they stigmatized? Yeah, I mean, it's funny we have shame and, I mean, the idea of anybody seeing you. Having sex is, of course, unless you know you're in Dr. Dang's office, you're into that, that's kind of like a really awkward and weird, but having written, having had the Dr. Dang experience and having written gulp, the chewing chapter of Gulp. So I didn't answer the question. It's an iPad question. Or somebody here.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are well educated in these parts of the body and they have patience and cases, these are the people that should write those books, not me. I'm the rectum gal. So, yeah, I'd love to have that folder. I really would.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would kill to have that folder. I would kill to have that folder, especially right now. I'm trying things on and rejecting them. They're not quite working. No, yeah, because most of science doesn't work for me. Most of science now is protein receptors and genomes and it's gone very, very tiny and invisible. I'm a body's on the slab kind of gal. And that's an anachronism. There's not a lot of science that has people kind of doing things that you can describe and talk to them about as it's happening, which is what I like to do, especially as relates to the human body. I've done all the bodily fluids. And there's certain parts of the body that belong to other people, the brain that will, you know, Oliver Sachs, David Eagleman.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, heck, there's a 22-page specification for button, so I'm surprised the brownies isn't more like 120 pages. Yes, there are very, very specific specifications. They're wordy. It sounds like more than it is because they're very specific. But yes.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had wanted to write a book that had to do with natural disasters and like the human elements of preparing for them and also how do you rescue, how do you take someone from rubble? There's all kinds of very specific medical things that happen when someone is crushed and avalanche, how do you find someone in Avalanche? And then there's things that happen after the before and after. And I spent some time on this thinking that I might do that. The being on the scene is very difficult because you don't know where it's going to happen and that determines which organization will be sending in teams. And you kind of have to set that up ahead of time. Otherwise, you're just in a press pool. So anyway, that was a challenge that I failed to master.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, sure, someone who died traumatically, I think it's very upsetting to see, first of all, the knowledge of what happened and you're imagining what must have happened and the violence of it and the suddenness of it. And often these people are people in car or motorcycle crashes. They're quite young. So it's a combination of those three things adds up to it being much more upsetting than to see someone who's lived a long life died of natural causes for sure.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, is it endangered? No, I don't want to eat an endangered. Okay, yes. No, I like to try new food. Especially an egg, a penguin egg would be interesting.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But one day I will write about the video toilet. And so the combination of the video toilet, the trip to Johnson Space Center for Discover, and the bedrest facility, I thought I'll build a book around that. Like there's got to be another 10 chapters that are interesting that have to do with the astronaut existence because it seemed to me that the things that happen to astronauts in training were sometimes more interesting than what happened in orbit, which could be quite mundane. So anyway, it's a hodgepodge, and I wish it came more frequently and promptly, this sense of what makes a good topic.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where they simulate zero gravity, and that's interesting. And in the back of my mind is this years and years and years ago I interviewed an astronaut about bone loss, but we went off on a topic that had to do with the toilet training that is given to astronauts and this video camera that you have to dock with basically. It's a closed circuit TV and you're watching your butt. And I remember thinking, I can't fit this into the Vogue story on osteoporosis.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that is always a difficult phase for me. Sometimes it's I read a sentence somewhere that sparked an idea. Bonk came from reading a sentence that described the, it said, the colposcopic films of Masters and Johnson. And I went, Coloscopic Films, does that mean cervix? It sounds like someone was filming a woman from the inside during sex. Is that what was happening? And yes, indeed, there was a penis camera contraption that they had built. This was a 50s. Wow. That was this moment where I thought sex research, that's just incredibly brave and awkward and interesting, and that'll be my next book. So that was, I wish it were always that much of a sudden flash. Sometimes it's packing for Mars was I've got, I've been to Johnson Space Center for a discovery and that was really interesting. And I know someone who works at the bedrest facility in Galveston.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm guessing maybe something that you, what color did it become? The saliva turned black. Ah, I don't know why the saliva would turn Hm You don't have any kind of mouth fungus or any. There is something called black tongue or something that you, I don't think that you have that though. I don't know. Now I really need to. That's you stump the jump. I don't know.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, he said, but I've arranged to show you some other reflexes. So he had this nurse there, this male nurse, and the reflex that he had arranged to show me is called the anal wink, which is essentially if you scratch next to the anus, it kind of winks. It goes like that. And so this poor guy had to drop his scrubs, and he's standing on the bed, so it's kind of eye level and eye describe all this in a scene. And then I further went on to talk about how I've had this flashback to my as a child on Easter, those little glass eggs that you look through the hole, right? The little opening, and there's a little scene of bunnies and chicks inside. And my editor just put a line through that whole thing and wrote, no. And initially, I thought, hey, I really like that scene, but anyway, I'm very grateful to her that she crossed that out.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. My editor, when my editor cuts something, I almost always grateful because it tends to be, I don't even know if I should even, it's rare that she will cut something. And my initial response will be, it's my favorite part, but fast forward when the book comes out. I'm quite relieved that she took it out. I don't think we have probably time for me to tell the story of... When I was working on bonk, there's a researcher in Egypt, Dr. Shafiq, who, one of the things he looks at is reflexes during sexual intercourse. And he said to me, I can demonstrate some of these for you if you come to the lab. And I thought, I don't know what that's going to look like, but sign me up. I went to Cairo and I'm like, oh, this is going to be a really epic afternoon. And I get there and he said, well, the volunteer has left.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frequently, I'm interviewing someone for whom that's their day to day. And the problem is getting them to shut down. Because they're so excited that someone wants to hear about their work and their spouse doesn't want to hear about it. That's disgusting. Well, I know because they're just tired of it. Or because it's disgusting. But no, just to be direct. I mean, I think you convey a sense of awkwardness and shame and tension, then that will be reflected back. I think you just have to say if you're in the operating room and then the surgeon is using the laser incision thing and it smells like cooked meat and you just have to say, do you kind of find, does that smell, do you like that smell? Like, just say it. I don't know. Just say it. I think just, yeah, say it.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have, yeah, you know, but it was interesting. Thank you very much for saying that. There's a magazine called Muse, which the Smithsonian, I don't know if, I think Muse is still around. It's a science magazine for middle schoolers. And that magazine ran an excerpt from Stiff. And I remember saying to them, do you need me to make the word smaller and the writing more simple? And she said, no, we're good. I don't know if I may be already writing for that age group and internally am that age group. But I know I have thought about it. My publisher is W. W. Norton and they don't have that segment of the market. So I have to go to a different publisher and that was not welcome. But anyway, I do think about it and I think it would be fun. I think I would enjoy it. Because, as I said, I kind of relate to that”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“with the Alameda County Medical Examiner, and I've been to a couple of autopsies where I had to leave the room gagging. So it can be done. Mary Roche, you can make her gag. Thank you.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm with you actually of all the things in that quite, I mean, from here to here, there's a lot of disgusting terrain. But saliva was absolutely the toughest one. And even, as you remember from the book, the saliva researcher herself, we collected this stimulated saliva, which is just water, really. It's clean and pure. This woman who bows down to saliva, she wouldn't even drink her own saliva. So you're not alone. Yeah, unstimulated saliva is pretty tough for me. But what's even tougher weirdly is the thing in the plant world that resembles unstimulated saliva, and that is if you don't cook okra properly, that mucilogenous strand that I call okra snot, I just put down my spoon. I'm done. That's pretty tough. Also, friends.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the release, but it wasn't my first book. I think just it was kind of a surprising book that people talked about. I think word of mouth is so important with books, with book sales and finding something that is both interesting to you and that will be interesting and surprising to readers.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't try to be me. Don't try to be anyone. Because the reason I'm successful is that I didn't show this weird kind of funny book about dead people, which sounds like a bad, bad idea as a book, really. I'm going to write a funny kind of funny book about things that are done with dead bodies. I mean, any sensible person would have said that sounds ill-advised. So not only did I not ask anyone going into it, I didn't show it to anyone until I turned it into my editor. And I shown it to people, I think they would have said, yeah, this whole humor dead person, I don't know, I'm uncomfortable with it. I think it's inappropriate. I would have gone your right and I would have stripped a lot of it out. I would have backed off. I would have made it more center of the road, I think. And I think it's a mistake. You want a book that people are going to talk about. And I think the reason that that book succeeded, I mean, my publisher did a lovely job.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bringing an excretion and bringing forth of multi syllabic words that are in a very important order that I'm getting wrong all the time”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would answer the phones when the press would call and sometimes the press would call with a question like this happened. Someone called and said, I heard a rumor that the cheetah was sucked dry by fleas, and the proper response for a public relations professional is to say No, that's deny if it's not true or to do damage control, somehow spin it in a way. I don't know how you spin the Cheetah is sucked dry by fleas. But I didn't. My response was, wow, how many fleas? How much blood in a flea in a cheetah? How many bites? Is this even possible? Wow. You know, and I got into this conversation. I was having a great time talking to the reporter about my boss was horrified to learn that this is what I was doing.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bill Bryson's writing, not a specific book of his, although in a sunburnt country is a wonderful mix of just everything that you would want to know about Australia. And this book came out as I was on my way to Australia for the first time. I found it in the bookstore. That's just a perfect moment as a reader. Here's my favorite writer, and he's written a book about this place that I'm going. But anyway, the way that Bill Bryson is able to mix information, sometimes complex, not always, but information and a tone that's engaging and funny, sometimes writers, including myself, you can get lazy and when you're going into explanation mode, you drop your charming, funny, witty self and you just, because you just got to explain it in a way that's clear. But the tone needs to flow, it needs to be even. It needs to be that, what's that osmosis?”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Masturbation is a potential treatment for intractable hiccups. And then running off to the Xerox machine, or these days taking a picture. So just 99%, I suppose, of what I come across. I'm jettisoning. isn't making the cut. And that whole process helps me just figure out what it is that this book is about. I don't know for the first few months really, even six months. I don't really know what this book should contain, what fits and what doesn't fit. And then it's not very good advice to give anybody. Just to feel comfortable with randomness and chaos, because I think that is the healthy first stages of a book. Well, for me anyway.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am essentially a massive filtration system. So when I begin a project, I don't know where I'm going. I don't know what will be in the book. I know that my job is to just cherry-pick the most interesting, surprising, funny, bizarre. Material within this quite broad topic that I've selected. And so there may be mornings like when I for bonk, I recall going to the basement of UCSF Medical School Library where they had the Journal of Sex Research, which started sometime in the late 50s, I believe, and just going through every table of contests and going contents and going boring, boring, boring. Oh, and”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wrote a humor column called My Planet. I didn't name it, but that was the name of it. And it was a short, just fun column about just random day-to-day things. It wasn't reported. So the only writing that I've done for the most part that didn't involve being a parasite on somebody else's world. It was, well, it was my husband, Ed. I wrote a lot about Ed is very entertaining. So it was just purely fun. It was just fun. And I wrote that right around the time, right up through the release of my first book, which was The Cadaver book. So there was a period of time where the two overlapped readers digest and cadavers. And that was confusing for some people.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And your organs migrate up a little bit, so your waist is tinier. So, yeah, I don't know the aging. Yeah, I'm not, I don't know what specifically he's referring to. Well, okay, your bones, yeah, your bones less affected.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, one of the things that, or if there's a collection of things that happen in zero gravity that actually has been referred to as the zero gravity beauty treatment, and that is because more fluid in the upper half of the body, because you don't have gravity bringing it down to the lower half. So your wrinkles sort of plump up and your hair is fuller, your breasts are perkier, you know, more buoyant.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Coca-Cola, anything carbonated, yeah, a lot of money went into trying to get carbonated beverages. In space, the problem is in the stomach because the bubbles don't rise to the top. I mean, in a stomach on Earth, the bubbles rise to the top. They're lighter. They end up at the top, and that's where the exit valve is where you burp them out. So if you swallow air, it comes out. In zero gravity, the bubbles just didn't rise to the top. So you couldn't belch. The carbonated beverages made the astronauts feel bloated and uncomfortable because they couldn't burp. So it was just an expensive fiasco.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, now astronaut food has gotten a lot, it's a lot better. It tends to be bland because anything sort of spicy and exciting you get tired of. So there's lots of condiment bottles up on the ISS, like hot sauce and sriracha and pesto tubes, that kind of thing. But it is better. The one that was most popular was shrimp cocktail. That seemed to be shrimp cocktail in space was almost exactly the same as it was on Earth. There was one astronaut story Musgrave with, I believe is his name. And he went, you got a menu when you're going up into space and you check off what you want. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He just went shrimp cocktail, shrimp cocktail, shrimp cocktail, shrimp cocktail.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The owner, the pet owner, wants something that's easy to pick up. So that is part of the design of the food is what kind of poop will it create in the dog?”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's only a bag, and no one wanted to use the bag, the fecal bag. Nobody, for reasons we don't, you can imagine, let your imaginations run wild. Zero gravity. So the food was low residue, meaning low fiber, just nothing left. You just absorb it. It's highly processed, very dry, and it tended to be little tiny, little tiny, cute, like toast cubes. And little because crumbs were a problem, you didn't want crumbs floating around getting into the equipment. So they were little pop it in your mouth. Bacon cubes, which were awful. They were designed. Some of the stuff was designed by the veterinary corps. It's kind of like, and similar concerns because pet food, you may or might not know that one of the concerns with designing pet food is, again, residue that...”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that depends on what era we're talking about. It was really disgusting to eat in space. Back, well, back in the Gemini Apollo, Mercury, you weren't up there long enough to really need to eat anything, but Gemini Apollo, the food tended to be highly, highly processed because the food was solving the problem of There's no toilet.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really placed. The thrill, the agony of defeat, the thrill of passivity. I don't think that no, I don't know that thrill seeking is so much a component anymore. I mean, the original astronauts were test pilots and they were the ultimate thrill seekers. These folks now, they're top of their class in the engineering department or they top of their class at West Point. They're high achievers and they're motivated and determined and driven not necessarily. Wahoo not like not that kind of person.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's how to think. I don't know how to think, but that's to me the essence of an astronaut in today's astronaut core, not necessarily back in the glory days of I'm the first person to the moon, then there were some other elements, but the modern astronaut, long missions, long days getting along with other people, that kind of amazing, placid accepting, patient. Not me, that person.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking like an astronaut here's my example of thinking like an astronaut or just being like an astronaut, this is what you need to do. This is how you need to be and think and respond this was Commander Peggy Whitson. I was watching NASA TV. I used to, when I worked on this book, I'd watch NASA TV, which I don't know what it is now, but for a while it was just raw feed of the Earth going by or mission control or the ISS. And anyway, it was in the ISS. And Commander Wits and I, you could hear the communications. Someone said, yeah, those photographs you took earlier, apparently she took some photographs of, I don't know what it was, but a whole series of photographs because they said, you know, we can't find those. And if I were Commander Wits and I would have gone like, well, look again, Lamb chop, because I don't have time to take those pictures over again. And you must, I sent them, and here's the email where I said, she just went, that's not a problem.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I want to tell you that piece. I won the, what is it, the American Association of Engineering Societies as a journalism prize and that piece won, and I went and I collected the award and I at dinner I said to the president, so just how many people in the general interest magazine category did you have this year? And he said Just the one. So, thanks for reading that. Shucks.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know what is getting in the way of the vast spread of bamboo housing, construction in earthquake prone areas. I wish that I had that answer. Your book.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or yes, bamboo, bamboo is the marvelous structure. It's kind of like a very, very lightweight reinforced concrete. So in an earthquake, you want something kind of light that can ride the waves. The other thing with bamboo is that it grows quickly. It's sustainable. It's renewable. So it's great for building houses in earthquake-prone areas. I don't know how much progress has been made since I wrote that piece. I don't know how many people are building out of bamboo. I suspect not as many as optimally would be, but...”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that people may know what they want, but they are sometimes reluctant to go for it because there's a tendency to do things that they think are expected of them, particularly with pornography and it being quite ubiquitous, I think there's a sense of performance, whereas before if you lose yourself in the moment and you are just gone in that wonderful place that you go and sex is great, you're not thinking about what part of my body am I showing or what position or what's expected of me or what was done in that film.”
2017-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source