Speaker 1: Hey, you can find all of my podcasts in one location,
all seventeen of them. Sure. I love the platforms that
have been available all these years, but it's now time
to centralize it ero dot net A R R o
E dot net and thank you so much for your
support for all these years. Hello on good morning everybody.
Speaker 2: Good morning, this Chet Richards.
Speaker 1: How are you? How are you doing today?
Speaker 2: I'm doing fine? How are you?
Speaker 1: Absolutely fantastic and very excited to share a conversation with
you because you take us into a world that we
all assume and now you're going to break things down
that really open up our imaginations as well as our
desire to explore.
Speaker 2: Well, I hope, so we'll see what happens.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean to have that side of your personality
because you know, I've seen your resume, I know what
you have done. But now you're in that mode of
you know, sharing things, which which I'm always inspired by.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm very glad to have an opportunity to share
with people. As you say, I've had a many adventures
and some of them are pretty thrilling, death defying kind
of things, not only in my travels but also in
my profession. Because I've worked in the aerospace industry, and
I've worked on satellites and rockets and all kinds of
interesting stuff. So I'm an old geezer now, But when
I was a kid back in the nineteen fifties, I've
read tons and tons of science fiction, and now I
live in a science fiction world. I've made my whole
career science fiction, and I've really enjoyed the quality of
people that I've met in the industry. You have to
understand that the guys that put us on the moon,
and I've had the privilege of working alongside the guys,
they're really outstanding individuals, both in terms of their personalities
but also in terms of their intellect. These are really
first class people, and I've had the great privilege of
being able to write about these people in my stories,
so that you get a chance to see behind the
scenes what was really going on and what kinds of
people were actually involved in bringing us to this wonderful
world we live in today.
Speaker 1: You know what's really interesting about what you're doing in
sharing it is is that I love sharing this book
and everything else that you've written with my neighbors across
the street, because I believe that tomorrow's science fiction people,
or even anything up in space or technology. It has
got to start at that age when they are five
and six years old, and books like this give them
that opportunity to explore themselves.
Speaker 2: Well, I hope, So I hope younger readers come to
find my book. I think the fact that I had
some something to do with the early Star Trek series
will attract younger, younger people. Of course, that was an
early adventure. I was a student at the time that
I was involved with Star Trek. So that's a whole
other story. And that's written up in the two books
that I've published now, this latest one and then the
one that came out a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: So now, when did you decide to put it in
book form? Because are you reading from your journals? I mean,
because I mean these stories feel like they're happening even
as we.
Speaker 2: Speak, Well they are. Well, there's really two classes of stories.
Number One, in my outdoor Adventures, I kept the journal,
a daily journal of what was going on during that
particular day, and what I was doing mostly was whitewater
river trips. I did Whitewater river trips from Alaska all
the way over to Africa, And of course I had
a lot of friends that I did these excursions with,
and they noticed. My companions noticed that I was making
notes every night, and they wanted me to start reading
those notes around the campfire. Well, it turned out they
thought I was a pretty good storyteller, so I got
in the in the habit of reading around, reading the
day's events around the campfire. Of course, you have to
be perfectly honest when you do that, because these guys
sitting around the campfire were there, they saw exactly what happened,
So you have to be really honest in the way
you tell it. So those kinds of stories that are
literally drawn from my journals, they have an immediacy because
they were written down within a matter of hours after
the events portrayed. But then the other stories, I have
a very visual memory, so I can put myself back
in a situation that maybe happened half a century ago,
and I can rewrite that as if it were happening today.
A lot of the stories are written in exactly that form.
Speaker 1: What I'm feeling through your words is I feel like
that science chows you, and in that process of you
learning and taking chances with science, that you started feeling
it in your heart that it may hand. Not only
did you were you chosen for science, but you had
to share the story now and it was time to
grow it forward.
Speaker 2: Absolutely well, you know, rereading science fiction as a kid
just absolutely entrap me into this business. I had to
get into it. So I studied physics and engineering in school,
both in physics as an undergraduate, in both physics and
engineering as a graduate student. So it was a natural
thing for me to migrate into the aerospace industry because
that's where the real advanced action was taking place.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And of course I've had well interesting experiences like, for example,
being on a rocket test and when the when the
rocket engine blew up. That was that's certainly got my
attention at the time, and I've written a story about
that to put the reader into the into the peculiar
circumstances of sitting in the blockhouse when everything blew up outside.
Speaker 1: Now, we've we've seen the videos on YouTube of explosions
and things like that, especially when it comes to what's
happening in space nowadays, and then people just kind of
shrug it off, saying, now that's just part of learning
how to do it right. But The thing about it
actually is that we don't hear the explosion. You've been there, dude,
is the explosion loud? Is it delayed? I mean, tell
me about what you go through when when things don't
go right.
Speaker 2: Well, I have to tell you. I was in the
blockhouse and monitoring my instruments, and what happened was there's
a little pop. Sound just popped. Really, that's all I heard,
was a little pop. All the instruments all across the
you know, everybody was watching their instruments. Everything went dead
at that point, and one of the technicians said, oh,
I asked him, what's going on? He says, we just
blew up the rocket test stand. But there was essentially
there was no noise. Basically you knew what was going
on by watching your instruments. But we couldn't go out
because the rocket engine was a hydrogen fluoride rocket engine.
It was very, very dangerous to go out there until
all the hydrogen fluoride had cleared away. So when we
went out and took a look at the rocket test
and it was completely gone. It was like somebody had
just taken a knife and sliced away the whole rocket
test stand.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: I mean, you have to understand how big and massive
steel beamers, beams and things like that weren't involved and
they just they just vanished, They just vaporized.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with Chester L. Richards
coming up next talking to an honest to god rocket scientists.
Oh my god. The name of the book, The Trek continues.
This is the second of three books. We got to
jump back into that conversation with Chester L. Richards. I
got to tell you how important this book is. We
are in the age of AI technology. And the thing
is is that a book like this is teaching those
that are discovering AI, but they're also getting the roots
of where we were and are before AI started getting
into the act.
Speaker 2: Yeah, AI it's a big deal. I would rank it
roughly as the equivalent to the discovery of movable type
for printing. Oh yeah, it's really going to change everything now.
Along with that, just as the printing led to all
kinds of disruption in Europe, AI is going to cause
a lot of disruption, and we have we have to
learn that the AI is a really dangerous tool. It's
a dangerous technology. It's like we had to learn how
to get around get along with fire and master fire.
You know, our ancestors had to figure that out. We're
going to have to figure out AI, and so there's
a lot of danger involved in there's and we have
to build institutions that protect us against. One of the
problems with AI is it's very good at counterfeiting. Yes, yeah,
I mean you can you can make you can take
somebody and make a replica of that individual and have
that replica do all kinds of things that you that
are counterfeit things, and that's very, very dangerous. We're problem.
We're finding that out.
Speaker 1: But what what AI cannot do is build a replica
of what you did at the Big Bull in Colorado.
But I'll tell you what I experienced in reading about
this and seeing photos. Dude, it was almost like you
were at the ocean, and it's almost like a hurricane
had hit this area. I mean, because the Big Bull,
we don't get that dang close to it. But yet
you write about it and you pull us into that storyline.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, of course, that's that's what the job of
a writer should be, is to pull people in. Let
me say this, we'd use the term artificial intelligence AI,
but you have to really understand. This is not an
intelligent machine. This is a machine for extracting patterns of
information from the environment, and it does not have intelligence
by itself, so you have to be really careful in
using the terminology. It's a very powerful machine and it's
capable of doing wonderful fakery, but it is not by
itself a substitute for human beings. Doesn't have that kind
of the same kind of creativity, and that's where human
beings will always be the master of this. You know,
we're basically building the world through our imaginations and AI
does not really have that ability.
Speaker 1: You know what's really interesting is that that I and
may I could call this a science project. In the
way of saying that, I love having an argument with
chat GPT. I love calling it out saying it's wrong.
You're not listening to me, you're not answering the question
the way that I think it should be. And dude,
the chat GPT will argue back with.
Speaker 2: Me, Yeah, well, it'll sharpen your your wits in the process.
But you're still talking to a machine. You're not talking
you're basically what you're doing is you're talking to a
series of patterns that have been pre recorded.
Speaker 1: But I okay, I'll tell you one thing that really
sticks out inside your book, and I cannot wait to
find out what your answer is. In the prologue you
dated October twenty twenty five. That was new to me.
That that really captured my attention, and I just wanted
to hear in your heart. You know. It was like,
I'm not used to a being you know, because I
got the book in October of twenty twenty five. You
wrote that, and you know, you know what I mean.
It's like, WHOA was this guy time traveling? No?
Speaker 2: No, that's just when the book was released to the public. Okay,
I did the time traveling seventy years ago. Actually, I
did do some time traveling. Let me go into that
a little bit. So when I went to Africa, I
was on an expedition that went through wilderness areas on
a river excursion, and when we got out of the
wilderness area, we were in an area with tribesmen. At
the level of culture of the tribesmen was Neolithic. Their
culture was about basically about ten years ago, and so
when we were dealing with this people, it was like
we had gotten into a time machine and gone back
ten thousand years. Now. The interesting thing about that, in fact,
we discovered one of the tribes in the area that
nobody in the outside world knew about. We actually reported
the existence of this tribe to the outside world. That's
how primitive these people were. But the interesting thing, and
the thing that I find most remarkable, is how easy
it was to get along with these people. I mean,
we had no language in common, and we had a
ten thousand year golf in our cultures. But we did
a lot of handwaving, we did a lot of smiling
and laughing, and basically for the few days that we
were there, we got along fine with the natives there.
Speaker 1: Wow. Wow, you know, the book is so fascinating those
you can't wait to talk to somebody about it. And
are you getting that from your followers as well as
your fans, because you don't mind responding to them at all.
I mean you're like right there in the circle with them.
Speaker 2: Well, the interesting thing is, first of all, I've gotten
no negatives. It's been one hundred percent positive, and that
is so wonderfully gratifying, as you can probably imagine. But basically,
what people are saying to me is that what I
record in the books are not just the positive events,
but also the troubles that I've had along the way.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: For example, when my wife passed away nearly twenty years ago, Now,
that threw me into a terrible depression, and writing the
stories was actually the way that I used to get
out of that depression, to climb story by story back
into some kind of sanity. Because if you've been if
you've had that kind of experience, you know just how
profoundly affecting it is to you in a very negative way.
So the stories helped me recover to some kind of
sanity and back to a more or less normal life.
You never get back to the same kind of normality,
of course, not after the many years that I lived
with my dear Sarah. But what I'm finding from a
lot of the feedback that I'm getting from readers is
that my descriptions of how you get out of that
situation is very helpful to people. Everybody's got problems, of course,
and it's nice to be able to help through my
experiences help people get through their experiences negative experiences as well.
Speaker 1: Wow, So now you being a rocket scientist, you being
a writer, is there a side of your personality that
would like to reinvent the writing instrument. Because I've been
a daily writer since July of nineteen ninety four, I
want to reinvent that writing instrument. I wanted to be
more comfortable. I wanted to have endless amounts of ink,
not when the best thought hits me and all of
a sudden, your writing instrument is empty.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, the rule of thumb in writing a good
story is to get a good lead sentence. Yeah, if
you can figure that. If you can get the lead sentence,
the story will follow.
Speaker 1: I just love where your heart is. Are you going
to put this in a podcast or are you going
to put this on something on Hulu and or Netflix?
Because it's like, we read the words, we're hearing your
voice today. Oh my god, there's such a connection here
with you and everything growing forward.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't plan to do podcasts, but I've had
a number of interviews and a lot of those have
been posted. I do have a website, Chesterel Richards dot com.
People can see interviews that I've done with other podcasters,
which you'll give. You know that that will put a
little bit more life because they'll be able to see
me actually talking at the at the camera. But and
so you know, you'll get a greater sense of liveliness
when you uh uh uh take a gander at my website.
But basically, most of the time I'm busy doing my
work here. I'm writing, and I've got a third book
that I've been working on that's coming out in a
year or two that'll be the completion of a trilogy
that cover my memoirs, and so that that's keeping me busy.
And and you know, every once in a while, I'll
get into this business of talking with people with podcasts,
both video podcasts and radio podcast like this one. Yeah,
so that happens every couple of years. But I don't
plan on doing podcasting as a regular uh kind of thing.
It's it's just not as you know, that's a lot
of work. Yeah, I'm final lazy.
Speaker 1: Well, what I love about you, Chester is the fact
that you did it. You read all the sci fi
books you and you became that that rocket scientist. Me.
I was that punk kid that turned over his dog's doghouse,
and that was my rocket ship to the moon. And
to this day, when I look at a doghouse, that's
that's still my rocket ship to the moon, so you
at least did it. I just look at doghouses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, probably a bit more than that, because, after all,
you're living, you're doing a science fiction thing with these podcasts.
Speaker 1: Wow. I never even thought of that. Now you're making
me have a big ego.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. Well, we all need a little ego,
you know, maybe we need to grow that little ego
into something bigger.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's what you have. You have to do that
in order to get anything done. You know that.
Speaker 1: That's true. That's so true. You've got to come back
to this show anytime in the future. The door is
always going to be open for you.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you. I'm really enjoying my conversation with you
and look forward to more of that in the future.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, will you be brilliant today? Okay, sir, I plan to.
There you go, I'd say attitude right there.