SPOILERCAST - The Martian, by Andy Weir - Still Untitled - The Adam Savage Project

SPOILERCAST - The Martian, by Andy Weir - Still Untitled - The Adam Savage Project - 10_7_2014

The Martian Cast: A Discussion with the Author

As I listened to the author's discussion about casting for The Martian, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. The conversation was filled with witty banter and humorous observations, as the author poked fun at their own lack of creativity in coming up with ideas.

The author began by discussing the role of Flight Director Ed Harris, who they seemed to think could play Mitch, despite being too old for the part. However, they quickly moved on to discuss Alison Janie, whom they imagined would be the head of NASA PR, citing her frustration and annoyance as a key trait that would make her perfect for the role.

The author also discussed their own creative process, or lack thereof, when it came to casting characters. They admitted to being uncreative and relying too heavily on pop culture references, such as the lead guy from Deadwood and the captain from Starship Troopers. However, they did manage to come up with some great ideas, including Timothy Olyphant playing Watney and Julianne Moore bringing to life a strong female character.

The conversation also touched on the crew of the Hermes spaceship, with the author discussing the importance of a strong commander who could lead by example. They seemed particularly impressed by Chris Evans or Chris Hemsworth as the leader, but ultimately settled on Timothy Olyphant again for the role.

Throughout the discussion, the author's humor and enthusiasm shone through, making it clear that they were passionate about their work and eager to share it with others. Despite their lack of creativity in coming up with casting ideas, they managed to come up with some great suggestions that would be perfect for a film adaptation of The Martian.

The author also discussed the importance of audience engagement, encouraging listeners to join in on the conversation and share their own thoughts and ideas about the book. They praised fans for being knowledgeable and enthusiastic, and promised that they would continue to involve them in future discussions.

Finally, the author announced upcoming live events, including a reading and discussion at the Castro theater in San Francisco. They encouraged fans to attend and participate in the event, promising that it would be an unforgettable experience. With their signature wit and humor, the author is sure to bring The Martian to life in a way that will captivate audiences and leave them eagerly anticipating more.

In conclusion, the discussion about casting for The Martian was a hilarious and engaging conversation that left me feeling entertained and inspired. From witty banter to creative casting suggestions, the author's passion and enthusiasm shone through throughout the discussion. Whether you're a fan of science fiction or just looking for a fun and engaging read, The Martian is definitely worth checking out.

The author's love for pop culture was on full display as they discussed various characters from different movies and TV shows. They seemed to have a hard time coming up with casting ideas that didn't rely on familiar faces from popular franchises. However, this shouldn't detract from their enthusiasm and creativity when it comes to other aspects of the book.

For example, the author was adamant that Julianne Moore would be perfect as the strong female character in The Martian. They praised her acting abilities and believed she would bring a level of depth and complexity to the role that would be essential for the story's success. This focus on specific characters and actors is just one aspect of what makes the author's discussion so engaging.

In addition to the discussion on casting, the author also talked about their creative process when writing the book. They seemed to have a unique approach to storytelling, using humor and wit to bring the characters to life. However, this approach didn't always translate to their discussions about the book's characters and plot.

For example, when discussing Watney's character, the author seemed more focused on the science behind his situation rather than exploring his personality or motivations. This might be due to the fact that the book is a work of science fiction, but it's also worth noting that the author's discussion about Watney's character was certainly engaging and informative.

The conversation also touched on the audience engagement aspect of the book, with the author encouraging listeners to join in on the discussion and share their own thoughts and ideas. They praised fans for being knowledgeable and enthusiastic, and promised that they would continue to involve them in future discussions.

Throughout the discussion, the author seemed to be aware of their own limitations when it comes to casting ideas. They admitted to being uncreative and relying too heavily on pop culture references, but they also showed a willingness to listen to feedback and consider alternative suggestions.

For example, when discussing Watney's character, one listener suggested that Chris Evans or Chris Hemsworth would be perfect for the role. The author took this suggestion seriously and began to discuss the pros and cons of each actor taking on the part. This exchange demonstrated the author's openness to new ideas and their commitment to engaging with their audience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enshall we start a podcast I think that's a good idea all right welcome to still entitled the Adam welcome to still Untitled the Adam Savage project I'm will I'm Adam and I am Norm greetings everybody it's a lovely Saturday morning here in San Francisco it is I'm sorry for getting you guys up so early no good brought pastries P fromes skin lice skin lice only Kaiju skin mice you know there's only one way to kill two it's with the Blade Runner blast I don't know if you talked about this on the show before but when you saw Pacific Rim and saw the skinite which they made animatronic ones we did a video at Comic-Con about the Legacy effects the moving ones um you recognize that there was an actual creature a real creature in the world they're called isopods isopods isopods and um they're not nearly as cool looking as this they uh I think they get really big down by Antarctica please don't go by me I'm not a font of actual everything is half remembered you one on TV and my brain is old so if I remember correctly they grow really large down by Antarctica like like this large they do not have eyes like these they're more like um they're they look more like rly poies and they do not have such beautiful detailed legs they're more like horseshoe crab kind of legs but the cool thing is that because they're of interest to scientists and like science museums companies sell plush versions of those and seen for example I have a couple somewhere right if you want to cosplay at a convention or go for Halloween as Charlie Day's character that's a perfect companion piece absolutely it's an easy costume too totally right yeah and yeah all you got to do is talk like this oh my God so we've been doing a bunch of spoiler casts lately I'm going to love them and as far as I can see from the comments no one's really complaining I mean people people like them so much they've asked us to actually break it out make its own separate podcast and we just do a regular spoiler cast I don't know that we can do that just logistically um cuz it's hard enough getting just one podcast done but but it's going to be another spoilercast we want to do another spoilercast this time about the just an amazing book an incredible achievement um and it's called the marsh I thought you were going to say this time it's personal this time this time it's personal it's a different kind of sport cast cuz this is about a book yes it's a book club but what a book and I keep on reading keep on getting tweets from tested members and from of my regular tweets thank you for recommending the Martian I'm reading it I've read it I love it it's incredible what's the story behind The Martian written by Andy Weir so from what I actually don't know a lot about Andy we I know that this is his first book I know that he has to know a couple of really really bright people at Nasa at least who are polyic in their knowledge of NASA Hardware but but I mean even if he doesn't well first off he lives in the Bay Area I think he lives down in Foster City he's of a friend yeah um he uh he he even if he's not even if it doesn't have friends at Ames or JPL or wherever a lot of the information that's in the book is probably online in white papers and stuff like that so we should explain what the book let let's start from the beginning yeah it it it reminds me a lot of if you ever read the hunt for October which was Tom Clancy's first book and it was something he had spent like 12 years or something researching and figuring out how submarines work he wrote These incredibly detailed long narrative sequences about interesting failures inside machines complex Machinery like that's the thing that stands out to me about about it's a Spy book but that's that's interesting thing to me Andy Weir does a lot of the same kind of stuff with the Martian um but it's told mostly from the first person it's mostly from the first person and the thing that's remarkable about it is on the at the broadest overview and I haven't been able to really talk to anyone about it because I keep just telling people to read it and then I make sure I tell them nothing cuz the less you know the better so if you haven't read the book just stop right now and read the book and then come back and listen the Kindle told me it took me five hours to read last night go read the book the audio book's like 10 hours long I read it on my flight to New to Australia and then I just listened to the podcast so what I was in Australia I was lucky enough to actually have breakfast my wife and I had breakfast with Chris Hadfield and his wife Felina um and they are lovely lovely people and helina said Chris had read it but but helina had actually listened to it and said that the uh the the audio book is fantastic because the reader the guy who reads it whose Name Escapes me right now but it's we can put it up on our on the website um he does all the characters oh really it's one guy doing all the voices one guy doing all the voices including at Nasa two distinctly different Indian accents oh wow so that you can tell when these two guys are talking to each other who's who he does Southern Accents he does Chinese accents he does everything and I mean it's it's a tour force of audiobook I want to talk about the Audi book in terms of how this could as people are movie fans how that affects your perception of what a movie of this would be like but we'll get that in a little bit okay Brad let's talk about the book the broad Strokes are it's an American astronaut stranded on Mars the opening it has I think one of my favorite opening lines of all time which is just I'm pretty much well I'm pretty much yeah um he he is it's a very curs book oh well I I mean I think this situation absolutely but it actually made me think about the I know I'm going off on another tangent but it made me wonder about the movie cuz I'm I'm sure they're going to aim for a PG-13 on the movie when it really should be an R cuz everyone says all over the place book I think I think I mean here's the thing it's written it's first person written by a guy who is on the public is already losing interest in going to Mars it's the third Mars mission Public's losing fade interest is fading and then there's a mild disaster a few days days into the trip and they have to abort but he gets left behinde hostile EnV and as we talk about this understand that in this book every last bit of the technology that's explained how an antenna hits him in the side knocks him out makes his suit lose pressure but because he falls on the antenna his his suit keeps enough pressure he bleeds into the hole that's leaking air enough to actually keep him alive until he wakes up from having passed out to find that his crew has actually left him thinking he's dead because the antenna also pierced his life support transmitter and they all got readings that he was dead they saw his signs drop off they looked for him for a few minutes and then they had to go or their escape sh was going to die and so every last technological thing in this book is described in the most painstaking detail and it's correct from an engineering standpoint it's correct it's also important to say it's not tedious like you could you could do like the reason I compared it to hunt for October is it is the same level of gripping he sets up everything you need to know even if you have no knowledge of this stuff at all to to understand why it's concerning like he there there's a there's a passage early on where he talks about the sequence of things that can go wrong that will kill him right and it's like a it's just a paragraph and he's basically talking about I'm looking at my notes he says if the oxygenator breaks down I'll suffocate if the water reclaimer breaks down I'll die of thirst if the hab breaches it's just I'll just kind of explode if none of those things happen I'm eventually run out of food and starve to death so yeah I'm that's all in the first chapter yeah right and the the format because it's in first person is his journal so he typing these journals well so it's yeah it's a journal or it's recorded but it's basically as he's trying to survive he recognizes that this uh the chronicle of his survival will be interesting to somebody else who comes to Mars so for posterity he's recording it and it all it's a very honest voice well but but I think it starts out that way and I think about let's say cuz he's on we're going to spoil here he's on Mars for a year and a half yeah he about 3 or four months in I think it becomes his way of keeping saying oh Absol absolutely right right right no I agree and that's what I mean is that the journal goes through a progression that doesn't ever feel you never feel like you're being handed Exposition right even when halfway through the book they actually cut to third person and you start or about a big twist like when when they jump to the NASA perspective NASA that's weird what's going on I I thought was in this guy's head very and then suddenly you got like a very and then he experiments with different ways of formatting the chapters and even goes to uh even more distant third person to talk to you about the manufacturing of parts of the habitat that he's in that will fail called the hab right um when that the airock when the seam breaks there's you know and and it's interesting because it's the kind of thing you think oh this crazy sequence of events could never happen and then you go back and think about what you know about Apollo 13 and the and you know the Challenger disaster and the Columbia disaster and the the tiny series of mistakes hundreds and thousands of hours back down the supply chain that caused tragic failures right a Bolton being slightly bed I I think from him writing this CU he has to write not only the problems that naturally come from how do you survive without enough food and come with ingenious ways but also then incorporate new new challenges that just and then reverse engineer ways to solve that from writing perspective incredible it's really amazing and because it's all he even shows his math and it's never tedious like like like talking about the calories calories right he's like he has enough food for 400 days but he has to survive for at least 950 days if he's going to wait until the other crew comes back TOS worst case scenario and it's a book for nerds like we all do the fun thought experiment how you survive how would you deal with this situation and he walks through every little bit in a way that like oh I I wouldn't have thought of that oh my gosh even down to how NASA's water reclaimers work within a sealed habitat and a closed system so that as you're breathing and exhaling and sweating and urinating all of that water is being reclaimed filtered and fed back into the system and how he hacks that to both um build his own water from a separate tank of of hydrogen and oxygen oh my God yeah that oh no it's not even it's hydren he burns he breaks down hydren to make hydrogen and oxygen and then that was terrifying totally amazing there's chemistry there's Material Science using the airlocks and using the the the different parts of the pieces to hack themselves and give them fake readings so that they'll do things they're not designed to do so so in the fiction he's a engineer he you know multiple roles on on a right they're sitting on a multi Mars mission they make sure that every crew member does double duty at least and so he is both the botanist and the seems like the handman material engine and both of those turn out to be critical to his survival and he's also personality-wise the the jokester right um which is what leads up to like you know the first chapter if you were someone string on Mars like he he goes straight into like very Frank conversation conversational tone there's a great bit when um so the the the the crew that leaves him Mars as the book is progressing is still on their way back to Earth from Mars 8 month journey 8mon journey and NASA is late in informing them that their crewman is still alive because they're worried about their morale because they won't be able to do anything about it and when he finds out when the main character finds out he's like he writes are you kidding me tell them already and he's told by the NASA guy hey please watch your language there's a billion people reading every single one of your misses from Mars and his next missive is hey boobies with AIC yeah um now that's the one thing that I thought in terms of the writing like it's his first book yeah he like the balance uh oh and we're back uh had a slight Malou function there but we Mark watt need that there we go we figured it out so now we're no longer recording on a GoPro we're recording on a laptop yeah classy um so I was saying uh the one thing that became really apparent was it it's his first book and he obviously focus a lot on this story and the technical aspects there's a lot of the structure in terms of the writing like ending a chapter with a punchline that he repeats a couple times yeah but it's it's fine I thought I I actually like that I like like the the bit when he finds when he's when he because he part of it is he has a lot of Deadtime too like he does a lot of hard work and then has a lot of time where to just wait for stuff to happen right and sit for 12 hours waiting for his batteries to charge books no radio contact a lot of thre company it seems like yeah 70s TV yeah 70s he ends a chapter with like his his missives about 70 TV and and disco and stuff like that which I think is okay also I there was a convention he did when he when he cuts to the third person it's to show you what's going on on Earth about the fact that an astronaut turns out to be alive when they thought he was dead and you know they they cut to the P NASA's PR person and she's thinking I'm going to have to make this announcement and everyone in the world will see this so the language has to be good in fact every documentary that will ever air about this occurrence will include my first statement at this press conference which is a fantastic like way of giving you the scale and the scope of the way people and that's really what the book does beautifully is describe the scale and the scope of Nas NASA's Mission and how the people within it understand their roles the organizational behavior Logistics so you have the culture of NASA which isn't perfect they're just real people too and there's some real people actually deal with the the the the dysfunctional parts of the NASA culture you have the elements of the Apollo Apollo 13 where like dump everything on the table solve this problem except a much larger scale yeah you have elements of gravity of survival where that was in real time several hours close to real time this is over a span of a year and a half um and originally you think it's going to be much longer actually and then you have the thing like from Moon where the isolation and what that does to you and how do you pass time you know doing your errand is becoming a space trucker a space farmer and and every bit of it is is riveting I was so I read it the first time like I said I've been listening to it and I just finished listening to it the second time and I found in both cases um it's repeatedly hilarious and also moving in almost oscillating uh uh uh uh uh what do you call it uh moments right so there's there's a point in which you realize how much a billion people will be watching the attempt to rescue him from Mars things that unite Humanity I mean talk about and to spend hundreds of millions to save one person it's the the theme of the book at the end yeah where he talks about my journey it's it's as much about survival as why we why people United to do this why we explore yeah why and and why it was worth the time and then there's this funny stuff when he's driving he ends up having to drive 3,000 km from One landing site to another which what like like 1,000 miles no it's like uh 1,700 miles 1800 miles it's a long journey right well and it's in 90 km chunks is amazing or less in many cases uh and and he's as he's driving he starts naming stuff that for himself he's like screw it I'm the first one to see this I'm calling this the Watney triangle no there there's there's a couple of moments where where he he's like well I guess this is the first time anybody's done this and and they just keep piling up right um the the idea like the bit about him growing crops so he he he realizes early on that he only has enough food to get through a couple hundred days and he needs enough food to get almost a thousand days and because it's a longterm mission to see how things grow and explore soil science and stuff like that they actually have packets of Earth soil complete with all the Flora and FAA and and then also uh stuff to plant like they it was happening over Thanksgiving so they happen to ship some potatoes out he's like well so he was able to use those to make some extra calories glad I'm a botanist right um and then and then the interesting thing about that and and is he he finds out because it's NASA and because it was all you know cleansed before it was shipped up and because he's in a in a in a clean environment his potatoes grow crazy well but he has to make the soil and the making of the soil is an endless back breaking operation of moving hundreds of trips of of Martian soil wetting it down combining it and doubling it with the soil he's already growing to get the bacterial growth and he's going to grow in a way that you wouldn't Farm because it'll deplete the soil but all he needs is you know a few calories Martian soil then like a little bit of Earth soil then his own you know bacteria his own poop his night soil problem become surface area like where does he find the actual physical area to grow mathematically enough for his caloric intake per day it's it's really every bit of it is thrilling even having read it and listening to it only a month later I'm just on the edge of my seat I'm listening to it every time I've been driving over the past week well and so then the other thing that I thought was was wonderful is the there's a period of time where there there's no contact he doesn't know that they know he's alive uh which actually I thought was one of the problems with the with the book I wouldn't have I would imagine that if na like he explains it a way I feel like if NASA had lost somebody on the surface the first thing they're going to do is bring the overhead if they have any kind of satellite that can do overhead photography they're going to look at the CRA at the site of the accident as quickly as they could well oh I see to see if there's they would have known he was alive 6 hours after the ship took off it's a smaller it's a it's a nitpick yeah that's a pretty nitty pick but the interesting thing about it is him not realizing that they know he's alive and they don't realize he's alive and then they figure it out and then they have to kind of deconstruct what he's doing with absolutely like for no other reason than to satisfy their own curiosity because there's no hope of communication whatever and that's also this ancillary thing that he doesn't really talk about that I found super moving which was you can imagine if there was an astronaut standed on Mars it would be like they're like welcome to CNN's the Watney report right there's an immediately a program about of course there would be why wouldn't you then you start to realize that his Ingenuity would likely Inspire generations of kids oh yeah right so every time he solves a problem the ingenious way in which he does it would be this thing the whole world is watching it would be absolutely decipher all imery and they're alling I also found that incredibly moving realiz what the doesn't understand like he builds a little a room for himself and they call it a workshop oh he must need a workshop but it's psychological he needs space to stand yeah well during his 2000 km trip the there's a there's a wonderful moment where you don't exactly know what he's doing you know he's going to go on a test drive to see how the Rover it's a long trip it's or 30 days and Midway through Andy like lets you know oh he's going for the Pathfinder which was the like or what 2000 maybe I guess is when it landed around there 2002 um so now it's a decades old he doesn't actually ever give you the year that this book is happening no it's an interminate period of time in the future I seemed like at most 30 years in the future but he also doesn't let's make this really clear there's nothing in the book where he leaps towards an impossible a technology that's currently impossible there's no Dex mas no it's not hard science fiction no it's and the only bit the only he doesn't quite explain is he talks about the Eva Suits now being pretty trivial to move around in well presumably that's at the end of our they hard work but nowhere near as hard as the current Eva suits right because there's no way anyone in current Eva suits could get in and out 10 minutes could also like load up folders and he that in the beginning he's like oh that's the one thing we've really improved his EVS but he doesn't say how you've seen one well I mean but but there's work going on in NASA right now toward that end that is the end goal of the current work on absolutely so he posits that that's been perfected and you can get in and out of an Eva suit in 10 minutes Yourself by yourself like right now you can't do that and so but that's as far of a leap as he makes on any of the technology the two pieces of Technology the water reclamators and O2 generator are those things those are the things that seem like the magic device those are real things the water reator is on right now they drink their own pee every day wow and they detach they're big things and I I mean I don't know whether you could detach it or not the close system is what it is and it works very well and then the The Rovers the two Rovers yeah those seem like a little the fact that you have interior space and again though when he's talking about it remember he says it takes uh 250 seconds to get through to drill a hole each hole through the fiberglass shell which which means it's got to be dimensionally super thick at the same time as it's lightweight so it's layers of carbon fiber and some filler in order to be an atmosphere right I think that from a mission standpoint I know you need to for the story and they're at a point where they can build habitats on Mars which is amazing but sending two Rovers per Mission well but the habitats the habitats on Mars aren't inflatable are inflatable that's the thing that's been in works I mean we've even demoed that in space are inflatable canvas resin you know enhanced Fabs that that were in orbit um like that stuff I I I found that stuff very plausible the solar cell stuff totally makes sense especially if there's people there to sweep them off occasionally discovery of the storm oh it's so good and then problem solving problem solving the storm by laying so there at a certain point during his long journey if you haven't read the book you should stop listening you should have stopped listening a long time you're a bad person we don't like you anymore I'm sorry there's a point at which there's a dust storm coming towards them he doesn't know it's there cuz he's lost contact with NASA they can see it's coming everyone's freaking out and then there a certain point he climbs to the edge of a crater and looks out and he's like it's hazier over there than over there a yeah yeah and then he realizes dust storm now I've got to figure out where the dustorm is and he knows it's moving east to west but he needs to know whether it's moving north to south Versa he finds out it's moving east to west by looking at the relative efficiency of the solar panels that he brings with him to recharge the Rover every night that is bananas no I know and he lays them out in an 80 km Loop in order to see and film them and see what their efficiency is at exactly noon it's beautiful that's the kind of thing that he doesn't cut Weir doesn't cut back to Earth but that's the kind of thing I could imagine all of Earth being like Oh What A Genius Like There's the one moment he's now entered the storm from the Earth's perspective but you never get this big like oh my God he solved this problem I composit all of that that that's actually happening and it it it makes the it's an added sort of subtext that's really moving I got te a whole buch in this book The and the the so then okay so then Midway through there's a su there's a there's an attempt to send a probe with food to cover the Gap because even with the potatoes even with successful potato growth he's not going to have enough calories to last for the next Mars mission uh at that point they say okay we'll take a big booster we're going to load it up as fast as we can with food and radios and stuff and blast it off to him and then it blows up 30 seconds after it takes off scenario and the way they and they describe in great detail exactly why it blows so brilliant like to explain in a way where you can imagine NASA Engineers not thinking about this because they were rushing that particular it's a very small thing and a couple small things Cascade yeah and again it's it's every bit of it is understandable and made really really clear is the best kind of science writing and by I might mention Chris Hadfield absolutely loved this like oh it's so great he blurb the back of the book yeah he did and it was a genuine genuine passion he just thought it was incredible and he wants to talk to him weird he's like I don't know where he got his information but it's amazing so so when after that fails a a presumably um a presumably brilliant but you know maybe a little touched astrophysicist oh yes richel richel that's the bit right rich pcel comes up with a parcel maneuver which is which he didn't call it that they ended up no but to use the currently returning crw acceleration speed to do a gravity assist from Earth while picking up a food supply and slingshot back to Mars faster than anybody else can because they don't have to stop and stop and start again they but the there's a bit of a mutiny MH and the Mutiny is announced by the Hermes 3 Aries 3 Hermes ship or the Aries 3 crew sending a missive to NASA saying Rich Parnell is a Steely eyed Rocket Man well that's the point of which I got a little te I was like that's awesome well and then there's a moment there's a moment as the Hermes is coming into Earth where hold on okay Dona yes could you grab me one of the um zero waters on my laser cutter Frankie stop putting on come on what we got to put some other St you got to put some other stuff on your head I'm kidding you don't have to there's nothing in Arms Reach anymore I was trying not to make noise I want that Hellboy to be wearable one yeah you could wear it it's a nice looking one yeah his eyes need some trimming because they poke right into my eyes as they currently are it's a nice looking mask though make better one all right so so there there's a go ahead there's a moment as the Hermes is coming back to Earth you know there's time delays through the whole thing and actually Andy Weir wrote a program to help him manage both the astrophysics and the time delays and the relative time on Earth and Mars from the start to the finish so all that stuff's right um he the when the when Hermes is close enough to Earth that they can have close to real-time Communications with their families the Aries 3 crew the people who you don't really you kind of know because um M Mark Watney talks about them a lot but you don't know them because you don't spend that much time on Hermes and they start talking to their families and talking about you know what goes wrong if the food resupply Mission doesn't make it to the ship yeah they all die well they all die but one presumably oh yeah that's I'm we can just leave that okay yeah yeah yeah yeah that that's a it's only there for half a chapter it's it's a sentence it's like one sentence but he does that he does that he brings in that drama of showing you the characters in their private moments with their families in beautiful the guy who has a a 2-year-old kid and he said his wife is pissed his wife's pissed you're going to be gone for another two years you and this is the thing had to do it I get it I think it would be better translated in movie form cuz we're talking about the crew which already spent you know 8 months getting there did not get the the full 30 days they wanted on Mars and then had to come spend eight months getting back and they have the moments of the family but you never get that one shot which you can I guess is best done visually where they finally see home again and then they're going to have by then they go we have to come back and then goodbye for another two years right and home again means that they can actually talk to their family with only like a 6sec to it's it's looking at the Earth shot they never get that overview shot because it's a book but I can imagine the movie you know the crew right they could have stopped here but they're going to go back for their friend now so it is a movie it is being developed as a movie right now by Ridley Scott I actually know some of the guys that might be working on the space suits um and I have heard I have not seen I have heard tell that Matt Damon might be playing m Mark wat I thought that I thought that's what I heard I didn't know if that was have to get rid of great choice they would have to get rid of the the dude who doesn't get laid bit at the end that's hilarious um Scott is a perfect choice for this uh he really understands the drama of space and has worked with it a bunch um I know that Prometheus has mixed reviews but rley Scott really is an amazing amazing director and I I I found myself listening to it the second time knowing that it's being developed thinking about you have to cut a whole bunch You' have to chop a whole bunch of action out of this film I but so much of it happens in his head I think you just you remove the number of disasters on Mars to cut those down and it's less Exposition and more showing there less Exposition more showing um it can't be total voice over so my guess is that where the book spends about 80% of its time in watney's journals if not a little more but I think that's pretty accurate I think the movie end up being almost like 50/50 if not a little more on Earth bouncing back and forth for expositional purposes and for scope and scale yeah because the challenge with a lot of the stuff that happens on Mars is that if you didn't have the text that Andy Weir does such a good job explaining it wouldn't be believable right like if all of a sudden the airlock just blows off for no reason the hab depressurizes you're going to be like well that what what what caused that I wish right now right now more than almost anything else I want to see the art Department's pre-production design for the Rover the trailer and the the trailers the hab the the the terrain the filling it up with the Pathfinder filling the second Rover with the oxygenator and the water and the water tanks all of that stuff and I imagine a lot of that in the screenwriting process gets transferred over back to NASA as they problem solve because they're in committee form they will verbalize the stuff so I'll tell you that compressed see there's there's a thing about the book is that you keep on getting watney's humor um even when really bad stuff happens and it's all actually happening after the fact right so you're always reading well that didn't work I blew up the hab here I am writing from the Rover but in the movie it's all going to be as it's happening it's actually going to be even more dramatic and I frankly just finish I feel like it's going to end up feeling a little like touching the void like almost almost abusive in terms of like Jesus can anything else happen to this guy but there's nothing unrealistic about what happens to him I think I mean in fact actually the narrative structure is more than that it's it's here's what I'm going to do and then time passes and then well that doesn't work right like it's so there's a lot of replication in the book from one one section to the next that that I think can be that will be condensed nicely yes um the thing that I worry about is the touch is the is the NeverEnding Downer Fest of bad things happen they're going to have to they're have to I they're going to have to what am I saying have I directed a movie no I have not but I would IM you watched a lot of movies though I've watched a lot of movies that makes me an expert in watching them thus I will pass judgment on a movie that hasn't been made um I I would feel strongly that a properly done adaptation of this makes sure that you that you temper the difficulty that Watney goes through with his deeply survival sense of humor yes montages of watching the TV shows there's a great like the stuff that's easy to translate is when he's like tend tending to his potatoes yeah like when he finds get into that routine of survival yeah um and then you have natural cadences of like problem solving living and then hurdles and then problem solving and so right there's entire I mean a good 20% of the book is him just talking about how he might do something and his potential scenarios all that's kind of get sure chucked in a 160 page screenplay I also think the ending I really think it's going to be well over two hours long it's going to be a long movie I hope it's like gravity but you know a year and a half and and I loved gravity but realistic yeah unlike gravity and I think the ending is going to need some epilogue or something more than how the book ends let's let's talk about this because the book ends it just hits a wall and basically as soon as he's off Mars the book ends which which means that the book is about his time on Mars so which you know starts when he's left behind and it finishes when he when he leaves the planet and successfully gets on the ultimate the ultimate to me the takeaway from the book is the tenacity of life right that is the repeated refrain from the bacteria that survives the Habs uh de depressurization and freezing to his never ever giving up even when he's in an airlock 120 MERS from the hab that's already deflated and he has no idea how he's going to survive this uh with a broken face plate uh his tenacity and so I I I think you're right an epilogue might show him like I frankly for all of its campiness I love the epilogue in Saving Private Ryan the reun yes yes right he's an old man and that preciousness of Life that preciousness of understanding how both delicate and tenacious it is and in equal measures the connection that he has with an entire planet and an entire planet's connection with him which is not direct and in the book never get you never see that reciprocated that I think for viewers you need to have that all the people at Nasa all the SE supporting members and the the the the the the clarity that astronauts get chosen for a specific type of of of tenacity and unflappability and also a desire to explore like Watney never loses the understanding that he is doing something that no one else has ever undergone and it's important for science he keeps on throughout the ENT hbook collecting soil samples and noting where he got them from for posterity and hold on just a second uh it's that exploration I asked Hadfield during a Q&A we did down at Nasa last year um admittedly a softball question but it needs to be you know one he's totally ready for but needs to be answered all the time which is why go to space we have plenty of problems down here to spend money on and Chris Hadfield pointed out in this beautiful way he said every generation since we've been around a campfire has sent its best and its brightest out to the edge to explore what's there to the frontier and that's what we do as a species it's just it's innate and it's genetic it's evolutionary and the book never loses that either it's completely understands that that's the purpose and the point I I can't imagine like I can't imagine some of the stuff that's described as here's what I do every day like like every day on the road Road when he's driving from from where he landed to the to the site of the next Mars mission where he's going, 1600 km 1800 km away 3 3 prob 1600 miles um he he has to get up in the morning pack up 27 presumably large solar panels stra half a meter half a square meter each yeah put them on the side of the of the of the Rover in the trailer stack them in St stack them get everything ready to go that that is preceded and and proceeded by Eva taking off his suit folding in his bedroom that he built just so he could stand up while he's on this trip without a space suit on he then has to bring into the airlock and fold up and put back in his Rover every single day for 95 days or something like that he has to 50 days yeah make his potato he take his multivitamin and then drive 25 km an hour for 90 kilm he's eating not just a potato he's eating like five or six a day L of Cal calories the category 250 calories each and he wants to get tea Mar coffee well the the the potato skin tea the brief the brief experimentation I had a c of nothing tea That's when you heat water and you put nothing in it I tried potato skin tea but the less said about that the better that was good um it's a it's a absolutely lovely book I it's a it has its language I think it's appropriate for anyone you know it's it's appropriate I feel like I have different lot of people but it's honest and it's for a first book it's dramatically remarkable how much throws at his character and then it's it's like I love writers who paint their characters into corners and then they pull themselves out in ways you you couldn't have imagined that are totally feasible he's a little faultless yes um I I see what you mean about that I see I I know what you mean about that um like the psychological strain I know isn't the point of the book but it doesn't get you get glimpses of it never like this he never becomes a plot point it's true this is all this is totally true but again he's been if you're an astronaut you've been selected from the top of a very big pyramid yeah I mean selected for all of these qualities including exactly this kind of relentlessness and it was you know it was um I can't remember which one is this it's an early Apollo mission where the uh that that NASA doesn't like to talk about where the astronauts got really cranky with that was Sky laab no no earlier than that earlier than that there's one where they literally just stopped talking to NASA for a couple of days oh on Skylab they just turned off the radio and we're like we're taking a vacation we'll talk to you in a few days and then those guys never went to space again right well but also NASA learned about the personality types that might work in spit well and also learned about schedule I mean this when we talked about Hadfield um one other thing they hit on that they that he missed Hadfield and we know about it because we talked to Hadfield about cooking in space yeah is that they have the the Hermes has a cent centripedal spinning so you get a false gravity but it's not just for exercise you have to do that so they can cook too uhhuh um and I have heard tell by the way that the uh that the that the Tracy desarden space burrito is now a thing station fantastic that they love it so who would you cast I me say outside of mat day man if we let's say we all agree Matt dam is a great choice supporting Cass uh do you know who I think would make actually I love Matt Damon and actually I think of him as one of the great actors in Hollywood right now because he's a character actor pretending to be a leading man because he can also be a leading man but he is as good as any character actor I would also make a deep pitch for Carl Urban as Mark Watney wow oh yeah because you think about it he's on this he's on Mars you're not going to see his face We Know Carl Urban can do that in the in the hab you can Carl Urban is and if you don't know who Carl Urban is played Judge Dread without ever taking his helmet off in dread 3D um he also plays uh the nephew of King theodan from The Two Towers he also plays Bones in the Star Trek movies you've seen him in a mill he also plays the Russian villain in the second born films you've seen him in a million things was he in Terminator or something too I he might have hadn't seen Terminator Salvation I haven't seen that yet heard want to see it anyway but uran is one of those actors who you've seen him in everything you didn't realize he's that good and that versatile I think he's too manly to play Watney it's more I think more of a Mark Ruffalo uh Mark ruffalo's Ruffalo yeah could be well here's the thing astronauts aren't young people it's true and you know yeah yeah interesting so uh what about the the people back on Earth because there are a lot of big personalities there's the the uh flight director Ed Harris you mean Ed Harris is too old to play that now but the Indian guy Ed Harris could totally play Mitch I think no I think Ed Harris plays the villain I think plays the guy Teddy oh the coward the spess guy yeah um really I kept on seeing Alison Janie as the head of NASA PR yeah that sounds right oh Annie yeah just because I love Alison Janie as the head of PR from and like her frustrated like just like disgust you know just like I'm sick of cursing like get me a picture of him right now yeah um I I was being really uncreative in my casting as the girl who was The Mindy who spot who's the first one to spot Watney and then tracks him of course I was going to cast the um the goth girl from CSI no really no I'm being terribly uncreative in oh boy see I never play this game when I'm reading books I don't know what it is nonstop yeah but see I didn't play it enough that's why I'm being uncreative about it I thought like like cuz I think Mitch is probably the strongest character back on Earth he's the one he's he's the point of contact uh for Hermes it's told from the other guy's perspective be an older guy how wanted Sumer halfman if he was that would be he would be amazing at that when he tells off Teddy i i i i' Mark that one uh uh uh what's the name of the lead guy from Deadwood the um the guy with the black mustache yeah the lead guy who's one of the captains from the third Pirates of the Caribbean film come on you know who I mean Sam something I know everyone's yelling at your computer because we're old and we can't remember I'm sorry um um the leag guy in space is dangerous Mitch snaps it's what we do here if you want to play a safe all the time go join an insurance company it's great so good Hoffman um H Tim Tim olant oh Timothy olant from Timothy olant could play a great choice to play White talking to people off camera yes yes we do have a we have a audience today it's a very special ticket um uh Tim olant would be amazing to play Watney yeah you're totally right about that um and then and then the whole crew there's a whole right the whole crew of the Hermes um you have le the commander um a very strong female character I kept on imic and this is me being unimaginative the captain from Starship Troopers oh see I was thinking about like Chris Richards no no no her her boss oh her boss who sacrifices herself right right right oh I was thinking about um what's her name from The Good Wife um oh J marges yeah but or Christine Barky either one works but you know Christine no I'm kidding Julian and marges would be fantastic as Lewis she would be terrific as that CU I was picturing somebody that's like late 40s early 50s who's really super competent and serious and Brilliant yeah um yeah I could see that I mean if you've seen the movie sunshine it's a lot of like that those type of personalities I haven't seen it I keep the first two thirds are wonderful the first two thirds have very similar you know we're out this is how much water we have this how much air we have I'll watch I'll watch it I promise it's it's worth watching it's worth watching just because Danny Bo let's hear you let's so go ahead and and and and post your Dreamcast for for for the Martian because who knows you might actually affect the outcome I don't know about that well they read you know the internet yeah it's all out there um and that'll do it for us today I suppose I think we've talked about this we've talked about I really think we've talked about it enough I feel like we've covered it you should okay you shouldn't have listened to this if you haven't read the book yet but you still enjoy the spit out of it it's really good totally um and we'll be back next week with another episode of still entitled uh don't forget tickets for the live show are on sale now if you would like to come see us I mean they're presumably still on sale now they may be sold out by now we're they're selling through pretty fast um it's tested live. eventbrite.com it's October 25th 1 p.m. at the Castro theater in San Francisco uh hope to see you guys there and it'll be on the site later if you can't make it but thanks for watching we'll see you guys next week thanks guys bye byeshall we start a podcast I think that's a good idea all right welcome to still entitled the Adam welcome to still Untitled the Adam Savage project I'm will I'm Adam and I am Norm greetings everybody it's a lovely Saturday morning here in San Francisco it is I'm sorry for getting you guys up so early no good brought pastries P fromes skin lice skin lice only Kaiju skin mice you know there's only one way to kill two it's with the Blade Runner blast I don't know if you talked about this on the show before but when you saw Pacific Rim and saw the skinite which they made animatronic ones we did a video at Comic-Con about the Legacy effects the moving ones um you recognize that there was an actual creature a real creature in the world they're called isopods isopods isopods and um they're not nearly as cool looking as this they uh I think they get really big down by Antarctica please don't go by me I'm not a font of actual everything is half remembered you one on TV and my brain is old so if I remember correctly they grow really large down by Antarctica like like this large they do not have eyes like these they're more like um they're they look more like rly poies and they do not have such beautiful detailed legs they're more like horseshoe crab kind of legs but the cool thing is that because they're of interest to scientists and like science museums companies sell plush versions of those and seen for example I have a couple somewhere right if you want to cosplay at a convention or go for Halloween as Charlie Day's character that's a perfect companion piece absolutely it's an easy costume too totally right yeah and yeah all you got to do is talk like this oh my God so we've been doing a bunch of spoiler casts lately I'm going to love them and as far as I can see from the comments no one's really complaining I mean people people like them so much they've asked us to actually break it out make its own separate podcast and we just do a regular spoiler cast I don't know that we can do that just logistically um cuz it's hard enough getting just one podcast done but but it's going to be another spoilercast we want to do another spoilercast this time about the just an amazing book an incredible achievement um and it's called the marsh I thought you were going to say this time it's personal this time this time it's personal it's a different kind of sport cast cuz this is about a book yes it's a book club but what a book and I keep on reading keep on getting tweets from tested members and from of my regular tweets thank you for recommending the Martian I'm reading it I've read it I love it it's incredible what's the story behind The Martian written by Andy Weir so from what I actually don't know a lot about Andy we I know that this is his first book I know that he has to know a couple of really really bright people at Nasa at least who are polyic in their knowledge of NASA Hardware but but I mean even if he doesn't well first off he lives in the Bay Area I think he lives down in Foster City he's of a friend yeah um he uh he he even if he's not even if it doesn't have friends at Ames or JPL or wherever a lot of the information that's in the book is probably online in white papers and stuff like that so we should explain what the book let let's start from the beginning yeah it it it reminds me a lot of if you ever read the hunt for October which was Tom Clancy's first book and it was something he had spent like 12 years or something researching and figuring out how submarines work he wrote These incredibly detailed long narrative sequences about interesting failures inside machines complex Machinery like that's the thing that stands out to me about about it's a Spy book but that's that's interesting thing to me Andy Weir does a lot of the same kind of stuff with the Martian um but it's told mostly from the first person it's mostly from the first person and the thing that's remarkable about it is on the at the broadest overview and I haven't been able to really talk to anyone about it because I keep just telling people to read it and then I make sure I tell them nothing cuz the less you know the better so if you haven't read the book just stop right now and read the book and then come back and listen the Kindle told me it took me five hours to read last night go read the book the audio book's like 10 hours long I read it on my flight to New to Australia and then I just listened to the podcast so what I was in Australia I was lucky enough to actually have breakfast my wife and I had breakfast with Chris Hadfield and his wife Felina um and they are lovely lovely people and helina said Chris had read it but but helina had actually listened to it and said that the uh the the audio book is fantastic because the reader the guy who reads it whose Name Escapes me right now but it's we can put it up on our on the website um he does all the characters oh really it's one guy doing all the voices one guy doing all the voices including at Nasa two distinctly different Indian accents oh wow so that you can tell when these two guys are talking to each other who's who he does Southern Accents he does Chinese accents he does everything and I mean it's it's a tour force of audiobook I want to talk about the Audi book in terms of how this could as people are movie fans how that affects your perception of what a movie of this would be like but we'll get that in a little bit okay Brad let's talk about the book the broad Strokes are it's an American astronaut stranded on Mars the opening it has I think one of my favorite opening lines of all time which is just I'm pretty much well I'm pretty much yeah um he he is it's a very curs book oh well I I mean I think this situation absolutely but it actually made me think about the I know I'm going off on another tangent but it made me wonder about the movie cuz I'm I'm sure they're going to aim for a PG-13 on the movie when it really should be an R cuz everyone says all over the place book I think I think I mean here's the thing it's written it's first person written by a guy who is on the public is already losing interest in going to Mars it's the third Mars mission Public's losing fade interest is fading and then there's a mild disaster a few days days into the trip and they have to abort but he gets left behinde hostile EnV and as we talk about this understand that in this book every last bit of the technology that's explained how an antenna hits him in the side knocks him out makes his suit lose pressure but because he falls on the antenna his his suit keeps enough pressure he bleeds into the hole that's leaking air enough to actually keep him alive until he wakes up from having passed out to find that his crew has actually left him thinking he's dead because the antenna also pierced his life support transmitter and they all got readings that he was dead they saw his signs drop off they looked for him for a few minutes and then they had to go or their escape sh was going to die and so every last technological thing in this book is described in the most painstaking detail and it's correct from an engineering standpoint it's correct it's also important to say it's not tedious like you could you could do like the reason I compared it to hunt for October is it is the same level of gripping he sets up everything you need to know even if you have no knowledge of this stuff at all to to understand why it's concerning like he there there's a there's a passage early on where he talks about the sequence of things that can go wrong that will kill him right and it's like a it's just a paragraph and he's basically talking about I'm looking at my notes he says if the oxygenator breaks down I'll suffocate if the water reclaimer breaks down I'll die of thirst if the hab breaches it's just I'll just kind of explode if none of those things happen I'm eventually run out of food and starve to death so yeah I'm that's all in the first chapter yeah right and the the format because it's in first person is his journal so he typing these journals well so it's yeah it's a journal or it's recorded but it's basically as he's trying to survive he recognizes that this uh the chronicle of his survival will be interesting to somebody else who comes to Mars so for posterity he's recording it and it all it's a very honest voice well but but I think it starts out that way and I think about let's say cuz he's on we're going to spoil here he's on Mars for a year and a half yeah he about 3 or four months in I think it becomes his way of keeping saying oh Absol absolutely right right right no I agree and that's what I mean is that the journal goes through a progression that doesn't ever feel you never feel like you're being handed Exposition right even when halfway through the book they actually cut to third person and you start or about a big twist like when when they jump to the NASA perspective NASA that's weird what's going on I I thought was in this guy's head very and then suddenly you got like a very and then he experiments with different ways of formatting the chapters and even goes to uh even more distant third person to talk to you about the manufacturing of parts of the habitat that he's in that will fail called the hab right um when that the airock when the seam breaks there's you know and and it's interesting because it's the kind of thing you think oh this crazy sequence of events could never happen and then you go back and think about what you know about Apollo 13 and the and you know the Challenger disaster and the Columbia disaster and the the tiny series of mistakes hundreds and thousands of hours back down the supply chain that caused tragic failures right a Bolton being slightly bed I I think from him writing this CU he has to write not only the problems that naturally come from how do you survive without enough food and come with ingenious ways but also then incorporate new new challenges that just and then reverse engineer ways to solve that from writing perspective incredible it's really amazing and because it's all he even shows his math and it's never tedious like like like talking about the calories calories right he's like he has enough food for 400 days but he has to survive for at least 950 days if he's going to wait until the other crew comes back TOS worst case scenario and it's a book for nerds like we all do the fun thought experiment how you survive how would you deal with this situation and he walks through every little bit in a way that like oh I I wouldn't have thought of that oh my gosh even down to how NASA's water reclaimers work within a sealed habitat and a closed system so that as you're breathing and exhaling and sweating and urinating all of that water is being reclaimed filtered and fed back into the system and how he hacks that to both um build his own water from a separate tank of of hydrogen and oxygen oh my God yeah that oh no it's not even it's hydren he burns he breaks down hydren to make hydrogen and oxygen and then that was terrifying totally amazing there's chemistry there's Material Science using the airlocks and using the the the different parts of the pieces to hack themselves and give them fake readings so that they'll do things they're not designed to do so so in the fiction he's a engineer he you know multiple roles on on a right they're sitting on a multi Mars mission they make sure that every crew member does double duty at least and so he is both the botanist and the seems like the handman material engine and both of those turn out to be critical to his survival and he's also personality-wise the the jokester right um which is what leads up to like you know the first chapter if you were someone string on Mars like he he goes straight into like very Frank conversation conversational tone there's a great bit when um so the the the the crew that leaves him Mars as the book is progressing is still on their way back to Earth from Mars 8 month journey 8mon journey and NASA is late in informing them that their crewman is still alive because they're worried about their morale because they won't be able to do anything about it and when he finds out when the main character finds out he's like he writes are you kidding me tell them already and he's told by the NASA guy hey please watch your language there's a billion people reading every single one of your misses from Mars and his next missive is hey boobies with AIC yeah um now that's the one thing that I thought in terms of the writing like it's his first book yeah he like the balance uh oh and we're back uh had a slight Malou function there but we Mark watt need that there we go we figured it out so now we're no longer recording on a GoPro we're recording on a laptop yeah classy um so I was saying uh the one thing that became really apparent was it it's his first book and he obviously focus a lot on this story and the technical aspects there's a lot of the structure in terms of the writing like ending a chapter with a punchline that he repeats a couple times yeah but it's it's fine I thought I I actually like that I like like the the bit when he finds when he's when he because he part of it is he has a lot of Deadtime too like he does a lot of hard work and then has a lot of time where to just wait for stuff to happen right and sit for 12 hours waiting for his batteries to charge books no radio contact a lot of thre company it seems like yeah 70s TV yeah 70s he ends a chapter with like his his missives about 70 TV and and disco and stuff like that which I think is okay also I there was a convention he did when he when he cuts to the third person it's to show you what's going on on Earth about the fact that an astronaut turns out to be alive when they thought he was dead and you know they they cut to the P NASA's PR person and she's thinking I'm going to have to make this announcement and everyone in the world will see this so the language has to be good in fact every documentary that will ever air about this occurrence will include my first statement at this press conference which is a fantastic like way of giving you the scale and the scope of the way people and that's really what the book does beautifully is describe the scale and the scope of Nas NASA's Mission and how the people within it understand their roles the organizational behavior Logistics so you have the culture of NASA which isn't perfect they're just real people too and there's some real people actually deal with the the the the dysfunctional parts of the NASA culture you have the elements of the Apollo Apollo 13 where like dump everything on the table solve this problem except a much larger scale yeah you have elements of gravity of survival where that was in real time several hours close to real time this is over a span of a year and a half um and originally you think it's going to be much longer actually and then you have the thing like from Moon where the isolation and what that does to you and how do you pass time you know doing your errand is becoming a space trucker a space farmer and and every bit of it is is riveting I was so I read it the first time like I said I've been listening to it and I just finished listening to it the second time and I found in both cases um it's repeatedly hilarious and also moving in almost oscillating uh uh uh uh uh what do you call it uh moments right so there's there's a point in which you realize how much a billion people will be watching the attempt to rescue him from Mars things that unite Humanity I mean talk about and to spend hundreds of millions to save one person it's the the theme of the book at the end yeah where he talks about my journey it's it's as much about survival as why we why people United to do this why we explore yeah why and and why it was worth the time and then there's this funny stuff when he's driving he ends up having to drive 3,000 km from One landing site to another which what like like 1,000 miles no it's like uh 1,700 miles 1800 miles it's a long journey right well and it's in 90 km chunks is amazing or less in many cases uh and and he's as he's driving he starts naming stuff that for himself he's like screw it I'm the first one to see this I'm calling this the Watney triangle no there there's there's a couple of moments where where he he's like well I guess this is the first time anybody's done this and and they just keep piling up right um the the idea like the bit about him growing crops so he he he realizes early on that he only has enough food to get through a couple hundred days and he needs enough food to get almost a thousand days and because it's a longterm mission to see how things grow and explore soil science and stuff like that they actually have packets of Earth soil complete with all the Flora and FAA and and then also uh stuff to plant like they it was happening over Thanksgiving so they happen to ship some potatoes out he's like well so he was able to use those to make some extra calories glad I'm a botanist right um and then and then the interesting thing about that and and is he he finds out because it's NASA and because it was all you know cleansed before it was shipped up and because he's in a in a in a clean environment his potatoes grow crazy well but he has to make the soil and the making of the soil is an endless back breaking operation of moving hundreds of trips of of Martian soil wetting it down combining it and doubling it with the soil he's already growing to get the bacterial growth and he's going to grow in a way that you wouldn't Farm because it'll deplete the soil but all he needs is you know a few calories Martian soil then like a little bit of Earth soil then his own you know bacteria his own poop his night soil problem become surface area like where does he find the actual physical area to grow mathematically enough for his caloric intake per day it's it's really every bit of it is thrilling even having read it and listening to it only a month later I'm just on the edge of my seat I'm listening to it every time I've been driving over the past week well and so then the other thing that I thought was was wonderful is the there's a period of time where there there's no contact he doesn't know that they know he's alive uh which actually I thought was one of the problems with the with the book I wouldn't have I would imagine that if na like he explains it a way I feel like if NASA had lost somebody on the surface the first thing they're going to do is bring the overhead if they have any kind of satellite that can do overhead photography they're going to look at the CRA at the site of the accident as quickly as they could well oh I see to see if there's they would have known he was alive 6 hours after the ship took off it's a smaller it's a it's a nitpick yeah that's a pretty nitty pick but the interesting thing about it is him not realizing that they know he's alive and they don't realize he's alive and then they figure it out and then they have to kind of deconstruct what he's doing with absolutely like for no other reason than to satisfy their own curiosity because there's no hope of communication whatever and that's also this ancillary thing that he doesn't really talk about that I found super moving which was you can imagine if there was an astronaut standed on Mars it would be like they're like welcome to CNN's the Watney report right there's an immediately a program about of course there would be why wouldn't you then you start to realize that his Ingenuity would likely Inspire generations of kids oh yeah right so every time he solves a problem the ingenious way in which he does it would be this thing the whole world is watching it would be absolutely decipher all imery and they're alling I also found that incredibly moving realiz what the doesn't understand like he builds a little a room for himself and they call it a workshop oh he must need a workshop but it's psychological he needs space to stand yeah well during his 2000 km trip the there's a there's a wonderful moment where you don't exactly know what he's doing you know he's going to go on a test drive to see how the Rover it's a long trip it's or 30 days and Midway through Andy like lets you know oh he's going for the Pathfinder which was the like or what 2000 maybe I guess is when it landed around there 2002 um so now it's a decades old he doesn't actually ever give you the year that this book is happening no it's an interminate period of time in the future I seemed like at most 30 years in the future but he also doesn't let's make this really clear there's nothing in the book where he leaps towards an impossible a technology that's currently impossible there's no Dex mas no it's not hard science fiction no it's and the only bit the only he doesn't quite explain is he talks about the Eva Suits now being pretty trivial to move around in well presumably that's at the end of our they hard work but nowhere near as hard as the current Eva suits right because there's no way anyone in current Eva suits could get in and out 10 minutes could also like load up folders and he that in the beginning he's like oh that's the one thing we've really improved his EVS but he doesn't say how you've seen one well I mean but but there's work going on in NASA right now toward that end that is the end goal of the current work on absolutely so he posits that that's been perfected and you can get in and out of an Eva suit in 10 minutes Yourself by yourself like right now you can't do that and so but that's as far of a leap as he makes on any of the technology the two pieces of Technology the water reclamators and O2 generator are those things those are the things that seem like the magic device those are real things the water reator is on right now they drink their own pee every day wow and they detach they're big things and I I mean I don't know whether you could detach it or not the close system is what it is and it works very well and then the The Rovers the two Rovers yeah those seem like a little the fact that you have interior space and again though when he's talking about it remember he says it takes uh 250 seconds to get through to drill a hole each hole through the fiberglass shell which which means it's got to be dimensionally super thick at the same time as it's lightweight so it's layers of carbon fiber and some filler in order to be an atmosphere right I think that from a mission standpoint I know you need to for the story and they're at a point where they can build habitats on Mars which is amazing but sending two Rovers per Mission well but the habitats the habitats on Mars aren't inflatable are inflatable that's the thing that's been in works I mean we've even demoed that in space are inflatable canvas resin you know enhanced Fabs that that were in orbit um like that stuff I I I found that stuff very plausible the solar cell stuff totally makes sense especially if there's people there to sweep them off occasionally discovery of the storm oh it's so good and then problem solving problem solving the storm by laying so there at a certain point during his long journey if you haven't read the book you should stop listening you should have stopped listening a long time you're a bad person we don't like you anymore I'm sorry there's a point at which there's a dust storm coming towards them he doesn't know it's there cuz he's lost contact with NASA they can see it's coming everyone's freaking out and then there a certain point he climbs to the edge of a crater and looks out and he's like it's hazier over there than over there a yeah yeah and then he realizes dust storm now I've got to figure out where the dustorm is and he knows it's moving east to west but he needs to know whether it's moving north to south Versa he finds out it's moving east to west by looking at the relative efficiency of the solar panels that he brings with him to recharge the Rover every night that is bananas no I know and he lays them out in an 80 km Loop in order to see and film them and see what their efficiency is at exactly noon it's beautiful that's the kind of thing that he doesn't cut Weir doesn't cut back to Earth but that's the kind of thing I could imagine all of Earth being like Oh What A Genius Like There's the one moment he's now entered the storm from the Earth's perspective but you never get this big like oh my God he solved this problem I composit all of that that that's actually happening and it it it makes the it's an added sort of subtext that's really moving I got te a whole buch in this book The and the the so then okay so then Midway through there's a su there's a there's an attempt to send a probe with food to cover the Gap because even with the potatoes even with successful potato growth he's not going to have enough calories to last for the next Mars mission uh at that point they say okay we'll take a big booster we're going to load it up as fast as we can with food and radios and stuff and blast it off to him and then it blows up 30 seconds after it takes off scenario and the way they and they describe in great detail exactly why it blows so brilliant like to explain in a way where you can imagine NASA Engineers not thinking about this because they were rushing that particular it's a very small thing and a couple small things Cascade yeah and again it's it's every bit of it is understandable and made really really clear is the best kind of science writing and by I might mention Chris Hadfield absolutely loved this like oh it's so great he blurb the back of the book yeah he did and it was a genuine genuine passion he just thought it was incredible and he wants to talk to him weird he's like I don't know where he got his information but it's amazing so so when after that fails a a presumably um a presumably brilliant but you know maybe a little touched astrophysicist oh yes richel richel that's the bit right rich pcel comes up with a parcel maneuver which is which he didn't call it that they ended up no but to use the currently returning crw acceleration speed to do a gravity assist from Earth while picking up a food supply and slingshot back to Mars faster than anybody else can because they don't have to stop and stop and start again they but the there's a bit of a mutiny MH and the Mutiny is announced by the Hermes 3 Aries 3 Hermes ship or the Aries 3 crew sending a missive to NASA saying Rich Parnell is a Steely eyed Rocket Man well that's the point of which I got a little te I was like that's awesome well and then there's a moment there's a moment as the Hermes is coming into Earth where hold on okay Dona yes could you grab me one of the um zero waters on my laser cutter Frankie stop putting on come on what we got to put some other St you got to put some other stuff on your head I'm kidding you don't have to there's nothing in Arms Reach anymore I was trying not to make noise I want that Hellboy to be wearable one yeah you could wear it it's a nice looking one yeah his eyes need some trimming because they poke right into my eyes as they currently are it's a nice looking mask though make better one all right so so there there's a go ahead there's a moment as the Hermes is coming back to Earth you know there's time delays through the whole thing and actually Andy Weir wrote a program to help him manage both the astrophysics and the time delays and the relative time on Earth and Mars from the start to the finish so all that stuff's right um he the when the when Hermes is close enough to Earth that they can have close to real-time Communications with their families the Aries 3 crew the people who you don't really you kind of know because um M Mark Watney talks about them a lot but you don't know them because you don't spend that much time on Hermes and they start talking to their families and talking about you know what goes wrong if the food resupply Mission doesn't make it to the ship yeah they all die well they all die but one presumably oh yeah that's I'm we can just leave that okay yeah yeah yeah yeah that that's a it's only there for half a chapter it's it's a sentence it's like one sentence but he does that he does that he brings in that drama of showing you the characters in their private moments with their families in beautiful the guy who has a a 2-year-old kid and he said his wife is pissed his wife's pissed you're going to be gone for another two years you and this is the thing had to do it I get it I think it would be better translated in movie form cuz we're talking about the crew which already spent you know 8 months getting there did not get the the full 30 days they wanted on Mars and then had to come spend eight months getting back and they have the moments of the family but you never get that one shot which you can I guess is best done visually where they finally see home again and then they're going to have by then they go we have to come back and then goodbye for another two years right and home again means that they can actually talk to their family with only like a 6sec to it's it's looking at the Earth shot they never get that overview shot because it's a book but I can imagine the movie you know the crew right they could have stopped here but they're going to go back for their friend now so it is a movie it is being developed as a movie right now by Ridley Scott I actually know some of the guys that might be working on the space suits um and I have heard I have not seen I have heard tell that Matt Damon might be playing m Mark wat I thought that I thought that's what I heard I didn't know if that was have to get rid of great choice they would have to get rid of the the dude who doesn't get laid bit at the end that's hilarious um Scott is a perfect choice for this uh he really understands the drama of space and has worked with it a bunch um I know that Prometheus has mixed reviews but rley Scott really is an amazing amazing director and I I I found myself listening to it the second time knowing that it's being developed thinking about you have to cut a whole bunch You' have to chop a whole bunch of action out of this film I but so much of it happens in his head I think you just you remove the number of disasters on Mars to cut those down and it's less Exposition and more showing there less Exposition more showing um it can't be total voice over so my guess is that where the book spends about 80% of its time in watney's journals if not a little more but I think that's pretty accurate I think the movie end up being almost like 50/50 if not a little more on Earth bouncing back and forth for expositional purposes and for scope and scale yeah because the challenge with a lot of the stuff that happens on Mars is that if you didn't have the text that Andy Weir does such a good job explaining it wouldn't be believable right like if all of a sudden the airlock just blows off for no reason the hab depressurizes you're going to be like well that what what what caused that I wish right now right now more than almost anything else I want to see the art Department's pre-production design for the Rover the trailer and the the trailers the hab the the the terrain the filling it up with the Pathfinder filling the second Rover with the oxygenator and the water and the water tanks all of that stuff and I imagine a lot of that in the screenwriting process gets transferred over back to NASA as they problem solve because they're in committee form they will verbalize the stuff so I'll tell you that compressed see there's there's a thing about the book is that you keep on getting watney's humor um even when really bad stuff happens and it's all actually happening after the fact right so you're always reading well that didn't work I blew up the hab here I am writing from the Rover but in the movie it's all going to be as it's happening it's actually going to be even more dramatic and I frankly just finish I feel like it's going to end up feeling a little like touching the void like almost almost abusive in terms of like Jesus can anything else happen to this guy but there's nothing unrealistic about what happens to him I think I mean in fact actually the narrative structure is more than that it's it's here's what I'm going to do and then time passes and then well that doesn't work right like it's so there's a lot of replication in the book from one one section to the next that that I think can be that will be condensed nicely yes um the thing that I worry about is the touch is the is the NeverEnding Downer Fest of bad things happen they're going to have to they're have to I they're going to have to what am I saying have I directed a movie no I have not but I would IM you watched a lot of movies though I've watched a lot of movies that makes me an expert in watching them thus I will pass judgment on a movie that hasn't been made um I I would feel strongly that a properly done adaptation of this makes sure that you that you temper the difficulty that Watney goes through with his deeply survival sense of humor yes montages of watching the TV shows there's a great like the stuff that's easy to translate is when he's like tend tending to his potatoes yeah like when he finds get into that routine of survival yeah um and then you have natural cadences of like problem solving living and then hurdles and then problem solving and so right there's entire I mean a good 20% of the book is him just talking about how he might do something and his potential scenarios all that's kind of get sure chucked in a 160 page screenplay I also think the ending I really think it's going to be well over two hours long it's going to be a long movie I hope it's like gravity but you know a year and a half and and I loved gravity but realistic yeah unlike gravity and I think the ending is going to need some epilogue or something more than how the book ends let's let's talk about this because the book ends it just hits a wall and basically as soon as he's off Mars the book ends which which means that the book is about his time on Mars so which you know starts when he's left behind and it finishes when he when he leaves the planet and successfully gets on the ultimate the ultimate to me the takeaway from the book is the tenacity of life right that is the repeated refrain from the bacteria that survives the Habs uh de depressurization and freezing to his never ever giving up even when he's in an airlock 120 MERS from the hab that's already deflated and he has no idea how he's going to survive this uh with a broken face plate uh his tenacity and so I I I think you're right an epilogue might show him like I frankly for all of its campiness I love the epilogue in Saving Private Ryan the reun yes yes right he's an old man and that preciousness of Life that preciousness of understanding how both delicate and tenacious it is and in equal measures the connection that he has with an entire planet and an entire planet's connection with him which is not direct and in the book never get you never see that reciprocated that I think for viewers you need to have that all the people at Nasa all the SE supporting members and the the the the the the clarity that astronauts get chosen for a specific type of of of tenacity and unflappability and also a desire to explore like Watney never loses the understanding that he is doing something that no one else has ever undergone and it's important for science he keeps on throughout the ENT hbook collecting soil samples and noting where he got them from for posterity and hold on just a second uh it's that exploration I asked Hadfield during a Q&A we did down at Nasa last year um admittedly a softball question but it needs to be you know one he's totally ready for but needs to be answered all the time which is why go to space we have plenty of problems down here to spend money on and Chris Hadfield pointed out in this beautiful way he said every generation since we've been around a campfire has sent its best and its brightest out to the edge to explore what's there to the frontier and that's what we do as a species it's just it's innate and it's genetic it's evolutionary and the book never loses that either it's completely understands that that's the purpose and the point I I can't imagine like I can't imagine some of the stuff that's described as here's what I do every day like like every day on the road Road when he's driving from from where he landed to the to the site of the next Mars mission where he's going, 1600 km 1800 km away 3 3 prob 1600 miles um he he has to get up in the morning pack up 27 presumably large solar panels stra half a meter half a square meter each yeah put them on the side of the of the of the Rover in the trailer stack them in St stack them get everything ready to go that that is preceded and and proceeded by Eva taking off his suit folding in his bedroom that he built just so he could stand up while he's on this trip without a space suit on he then has to bring into the airlock and fold up and put back in his Rover every single day for 95 days or something like that he has to 50 days yeah make his potato he take his multivitamin and then drive 25 km an hour for 90 kilm he's eating not just a potato he's eating like five or six a day L of Cal calories the category 250 calories each and he wants to get tea Mar coffee well the the the potato skin tea the brief the brief experimentation I had a c of nothing tea That's when you heat water and you put nothing in it I tried potato skin tea but the less said about that the better that was good um it's a it's a absolutely lovely book I it's a it has its language I think it's appropriate for anyone you know it's it's appropriate I feel like I have different lot of people but it's honest and it's for a first book it's dramatically remarkable how much throws at his character and then it's it's like I love writers who paint their characters into corners and then they pull themselves out in ways you you couldn't have imagined that are totally feasible he's a little faultless yes um I I see what you mean about that I see I I know what you mean about that um like the psychological strain I know isn't the point of the book but it doesn't get you get glimpses of it never like this he never becomes a plot point it's true this is all this is totally true but again he's been if you're an astronaut you've been selected from the top of a very big pyramid yeah I mean selected for all of these qualities including exactly this kind of relentlessness and it was you know it was um I can't remember which one is this it's an early Apollo mission where the uh that that NASA doesn't like to talk about where the astronauts got really cranky with that was Sky laab no no earlier than that earlier than that there's one where they literally just stopped talking to NASA for a couple of days oh on Skylab they just turned off the radio and we're like we're taking a vacation we'll talk to you in a few days and then those guys never went to space again right well but also NASA learned about the personality types that might work in spit well and also learned about schedule I mean this when we talked about Hadfield um one other thing they hit on that they that he missed Hadfield and we know about it because we talked to Hadfield about cooking in space yeah is that they have the the Hermes has a cent centripedal spinning so you get a false gravity but it's not just for exercise you have to do that so they can cook too uhhuh um and I have heard tell by the way that the uh that the that the Tracy desarden space burrito is now a thing station fantastic that they love it so who would you cast I me say outside of mat day man if we let's say we all agree Matt dam is a great choice supporting Cass uh do you know who I think would make actually I love Matt Damon and actually I think of him as one of the great actors in Hollywood right now because he's a character actor pretending to be a leading man because he can also be a leading man but he is as good as any character actor I would also make a deep pitch for Carl Urban as Mark Watney wow oh yeah because you think about it he's on this he's on Mars you're not going to see his face We Know Carl Urban can do that in the in the hab you can Carl Urban is and if you don't know who Carl Urban is played Judge Dread without ever taking his helmet off in dread 3D um he also plays uh the nephew of King theodan from The Two Towers he also plays Bones in the Star Trek movies you've seen him in a mill he also plays the Russian villain in the second born films you've seen him in a million things was he in Terminator or something too I he might have hadn't seen Terminator Salvation I haven't seen that yet heard want to see it anyway but uran is one of those actors who you've seen him in everything you didn't realize he's that good and that versatile I think he's too manly to play Watney it's more I think more of a Mark Ruffalo uh Mark ruffalo's Ruffalo yeah could be well here's the thing astronauts aren't young people it's true and you know yeah yeah interesting so uh what about the the people back on Earth because there are a lot of big personalities there's the the uh flight director Ed Harris you mean Ed Harris is too old to play that now but the Indian guy Ed Harris could totally play Mitch I think no I think Ed Harris plays the villain I think plays the guy Teddy oh the coward the spess guy yeah um really I kept on seeing Alison Janie as the head of NASA PR yeah that sounds right oh Annie yeah just because I love Alison Janie as the head of PR from and like her frustrated like just like disgust you know just like I'm sick of cursing like get me a picture of him right now yeah um I I was being really uncreative in my casting as the girl who was The Mindy who spot who's the first one to spot Watney and then tracks him of course I was going to cast the um the goth girl from CSI no really no I'm being terribly uncreative in oh boy see I never play this game when I'm reading books I don't know what it is nonstop yeah but see I didn't play it enough that's why I'm being uncreative about it I thought like like cuz I think Mitch is probably the strongest character back on Earth he's the one he's he's the point of contact uh for Hermes it's told from the other guy's perspective be an older guy how wanted Sumer halfman if he was that would be he would be amazing at that when he tells off Teddy i i i i' Mark that one uh uh uh what's the name of the lead guy from Deadwood the um the guy with the black mustache yeah the lead guy who's one of the captains from the third Pirates of the Caribbean film come on you know who I mean Sam something I know everyone's yelling at your computer because we're old and we can't remember I'm sorry um um the leag guy in space is dangerous Mitch snaps it's what we do here if you want to play a safe all the time go join an insurance company it's great so good Hoffman um H Tim Tim olant oh Timothy olant from Timothy olant could play a great choice to play White talking to people off camera yes yes we do have a we have a audience today it's a very special ticket um uh Tim olant would be amazing to play Watney yeah you're totally right about that um and then and then the whole crew there's a whole right the whole crew of the Hermes um you have le the commander um a very strong female character I kept on imic and this is me being unimaginative the captain from Starship Troopers oh see I was thinking about like Chris Richards no no no her her boss oh her boss who sacrifices herself right right right oh I was thinking about um what's her name from The Good Wife um oh J marges yeah but or Christine Barky either one works but you know Christine no I'm kidding Julian and marges would be fantastic as Lewis she would be terrific as that CU I was picturing somebody that's like late 40s early 50s who's really super competent and serious and Brilliant yeah um yeah I could see that I mean if you've seen the movie sunshine it's a lot of like that those type of personalities I haven't seen it I keep the first two thirds are wonderful the first two thirds have very similar you know we're out this is how much water we have this how much air we have I'll watch I'll watch it I promise it's it's worth watching it's worth watching just because Danny Bo let's hear you let's so go ahead and and and and post your Dreamcast for for for the Martian because who knows you might actually affect the outcome I don't know about that well they read you know the internet yeah it's all out there um and that'll do it for us today I suppose I think we've talked about this we've talked about I really think we've talked about it enough I feel like we've covered it you should okay you shouldn't have listened to this if you haven't read the book yet but you still enjoy the spit out of it it's really good totally um and we'll be back next week with another episode of still entitled uh don't forget tickets for the live show are on sale now if you would like to come see us I mean they're presumably still on sale now they may be sold out by now we're they're selling through pretty fast um it's tested live. eventbrite.com it's October 25th 1 p.m. at the Castro theater in San Francisco uh hope to see you guys there and it'll be on the site later if you can't make it but thanks for watching we'll see you guys next week thanks guys bye bye\n"

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