Mary Roach

And I'd come across the bedrest facility, which is a very cool place where people are paid to lie in bed for months.

It's like an analog place.

for losing muscle and bone in space.

You know, you kind of create those situations and they can find countermeasures and do tests.

Anyway, weird place.

So now I have two chunks, two chunks, nuggets.

And I'm like, what's the book that goes around this?

So that's how Packing for Mars, because I sort of realized that what happens here on Earth in terms of NASA is kind of more interesting than what happens up in space.

But that's usually how it happens.

It's rare that I have a desire to write a book about a certain topic.

There used to be these ads for Kohler Faucets.

It's this faucet company.

There's this ad where this couple comes into an architect's office with a Kohler faucet and they put it on the architect's desk.

So...

And they go, design a house around this.

Around this.

I was like, what assholes?

But anyway, like, the...

Toilet was my Kohler faucet.

It was the seed.