 Well, as I said, I'm Andy Weir, and I wrote The Martian. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you the story behind the story, which could, you know, I think the title of it, yeah, how I accidentally used open source ideology to make a best selling novel. Yeah, that's a pretty good title. Bungle into a best selling novel might have been a better set of verbs. Basically, so just so you know, I come from a software engineering background. I spent 25 years as a software engineer. I always wanted to be a writer, but I also liked eating regularly and not living under an overpass. So when the time came to choose a career, I was like, hmm, software engineer or writer? Money. So I ended up going to school, dropping out of school, kind of standard engineer story. And I got a job in the software industry, and I was happy. I liked it. I liked programming computers. And I'm reasonably good at it because you can't do something for 25 years and not get at least a little competent. But I also always wanted to be a writer. And so around the late 1990s, when I was working for America Online, they merged with Netscape and I got laid off with about 800 of my closest friends. And because I happened to get hired at AOL at just the right time, I had a bunch of money worth of stock options. And because I got laid off at just the right time, I ended up being forced to sell them when they were at their peak. I assure you, I would not have made a wise financial decision, left my own devices, but I was forced into this. So I ended up with a bunch of money. And I thought, there we go. I'm gonna take my chance. I'm going to be able to write a book and try to get it published. I've got enough money. I can go years without having to work. So I did it. I took three years off. I wrote a book. It is not The Martian. You have not heard of this book, have you? Because it wasn't very good. And it's the standard writer story. I spent three years while I wrote it and then I couldn't get an agent. I couldn't get a publisher interested. I just completely fell flat. And so I thought like, well, now I don't need to wonder what might have been. What could have happened? I took a shot at following my dream. Now I'll go back into engineering, which I really enjoy. So it's not like I'm hanging my head low and going back to something I hated. I really like programming computers. In fact, I just quit my full-time programming job just over a year ago to go full-time on the writing. And that was a bittersweet moment for me. I liked working. I worked at Mobile Iron. That was the last job I had. I liked it. I liked my boss. I liked my coworkers. I liked the environment. I liked being a computer programmer. So don't get me wrong. It's not like this was some huge life failure, but it was time to move on. So around this time, the internet was just kind of increasing more and more in popularity. And I realized I had an avenue where I could be creative at people without having to get published. So I started writing my own stories and just posting them onto the internet, the World Wide Web. Very exciting. I made a bunch of web comics. I made short fiction. I did stuff like this for about 10 years. And during that time, I accumulated a reader base of about 3,000 people. And here's where we start to get into the open, sourcy thing. Right around the time I started writing The Martian, I also wrote a short story called The Egg, which some of you may have heard of, I don't know. But that was really popular and it made the rounds on the internet. And it got posted around from blog to blog and that ended up bringing a lot of people to my site. That turned out to be really handy because I ended up with a mailing list of a modest about 3,000 people because of it. So when I started writing The Martian, I was just posting it a chapter at a time to my website. I usually, it was a serial. It was like, you know, the father adventures of Mack Watney on Mars. And it was just like the idea was to just, I don't know, just wander meander with it forever. I didn't even think of it as a book initially. And what was really cool about this is they kind of bungled into this is, so I had a bunch of really scientifically minded regular readers. That means nerds. Just like me. And they would read everything I wrote and go through it with a fine tooth comb and tell me if I did anything wrong. So this was extremely helpful to get the feedback as I'm iteratively posting one chapter at a time of The Martian. And that worked out really well to make it a much more solid story, I think, than it would have been if I had just made it as a fate of complete and done the entire book at once. I got to respond to their feedback. So it's kind of like an agile release process for a book. So anyway, I finished the book, I finished the last chapter and I called it a day and I'm like, okay, I'm done, off to other things. And I started to get email from people saying like, hey, I really like your book but I hate reading it on your website because your website's crappy. And it was, it is, it still is. And they said, can you make an e-reader version? And so I'm like, okay, sure, here's what I'll do. I figured out how to make an e-pub and a Moby version. I posted them to the site and I said, all right, everybody, there you go, you can knock yourself out, download it, go to town, it's still free. Okay, then I got other emails from people saying, hey, love your book, hate your website. But I really don't, I'm not very technically savvy and I don't know how to download a thing from the internet and put it on my e-reader. Can you just put it up on Amazon? So I'm like, all right, let's see how that works. So I used Amazon, Kindle Direct Publishing, which is you can just post whatever you want up there. And you're not allowed to give it away for free. They want to make money, so they have the minimum price of 99 cents. And so I set the price to 99 cents, meaning that they get like 69 cents and I pull down a cool 30 cents profit per copy, the absolute minimum that I was allowed to set it. So then you give it to them, it doesn't cost you anything and they hold on to it for like 48 hours just to make sure it's not goat porn or something. And then, don't judge. Okay, so they hang onto it and then they push it and then that's it. And so then I told my readers, I'm like, all right, you can read it on my crappy website, you can download the e-reader versions for free or you can pay Amazon a buck to put it on your Kindle for you, basically. And more people paid for it than downloaded it for free, which really shows you the reach that Amazon has into the readership market and also shows you that people are willing to pay a buck to get around technical hassles, because it's just a buck. So anyway, the book started to sell really well and it kept selling and it kept selling, people gave it lots of positive reviews, which is awesome. And it started showing up in Amazon's You Might Also Like Blah lists and You Might Also Like This and it started to really kind of steamroll. It got into the top sellers lists for sci-fi, hard sci-fi, they have about a million top sellers lists and once it got into the top 10 of sci-fi, then it really started to roll because of course, you know, you're like, oh, I wanna read a book, I don't know what I want, I want sci-fi. What are the top 10 sellers in sci-fi? Let's take a look. And so it dramatically increases your odds of making a sale once you get up under those lists so you get this kind of exponential thing. Well, that caught the attention of an editor at Random House named Julian Pavia. And Julian was talking to a colleague of his, an agent named David Fugate. And he was like, oh, I'm getting a lot of, I'm hearing a lot about this book, The Martian, but I don't know if it's just gonna be, you know, engineering porn or something that's like really people might like. And so David, who's a literary agent said like, well, you realize you just told me you might be interested in an unpublished book. So I'm gonna go read it now and if I like it, I'm gonna end up being that guy's agent. Is that a problem? And Julian's like, yeah, sure, whatever. So he read it, he liked it and emailed me and said like, hey, do you need an agent? So at this point, after three years of not being able to get an agent early in life, sending out letters, help, I want an agent, stuff like that, no, no, no, but now one comes to me. So that was a bit of a surprise and I'm like, sure, that sounds good. And then Random House is like, okay, we'd like to make you a, we'd like to talk about making a book deal. And I'm like, well, talk to my agent. And so, and around the same time that David was working out the deal with Random House, then 20th Century Fox came for the movie rights. So that was pretty exciting. And so David has another agent that he uses, a colleague that he uses to work out film rights deals and all these things were going on at the same time. And ultimately the book deal and the movie deal were agreed upon four days apart. So that was a very, very eventful week for me. And by the way, at this time, I'm still working at Mobile Iron as a software engineer. So I'm sitting there at my desk, you know, my cubicle fixing bugs, then I gotta go take a call about my movie deal and then back I go fix more bugs. And so that was a really surreal life. In fact, I didn't really believe it initially. I actually, I was like, am I being scammed? It's like, these are all just voices on the phone and like text in my email. I mean, it's like, but once they started sending me the checks, then I started to believe them. Then of course, over time after once the book came out, it got under the New York Times bestseller list, which made Fox start to take it a lot more seriously. So Drew Goddard attached himself to the project and wrote the screenplay. And then he was also set to direct. And then, you know, so that's like step one of like, oh, cool, we're gonna get, it's a little more likely to get green-lighted. Because you gotta realize like movie companies, they'll get the film option on a book, like they buy breath mitts. I mean, they'll go get hundreds of film options for every one movie they make out of a book. It's not, it doesn't really mean much and you don't get a bunch of money unless they actually green-light the film. So anyway, Drew Goddard wanted to write the screenplay and he wanted to direct. Okay, now it's more likely. And then Matt Damon said he wanted to play the lead. Okay, now it's much more likely. Right? And then Drew Goddard had to leave to go direct the next Spider-Man movie. Okay, well then it became less likely. And then Ridley Scott said, well, I'll direct it. So then it was like, okay, this is happening. A lot of people ask me what my role is in the movie production. And I can just tell you that as the writer of the novel, my primary job on the film was to cash the check. And I've done that. So what's the moral of this story? The moral of this story is that you can be an intellectual property-sharing hippie and a money-grubbing capitalist at the same time. Because I'm both. Thank you.