Probably science

All right, awesome. We are joined by Matthew D. LaPlante. Do you always go by the D in the middle? I want to make sure I get this right.

I mean, like, when my friends introduce me, like, when we're out to dinner with people,

people don't go like, hey, this is Matthew D, but... But I actually, I started using the D because when I first started as a writer, there was another

Matthew LaPlante out there.

Screw him.

Yeah, but he's gone now.

He's disappeared, so I could probably get rid of it. I feel like there's a Mac Kirshen that I've pushed to something like page 10 of Google,

and I can't imagine he's happy with me, but there we go. I've won the online battle.

There's a really good story here about like people with similar names who are like fighting with each other for Google predominance.

Yeah. Oh, God, absolutely. You're the journalist. You're there. I'm following.

I'm so on this. Well, this, by the way, we'll get into the book in a second. I thoroughly

enjoyed this book. It was a great read. But you had a relatively unconventional route into science writing via the military and then

straight journalism and now the science. Can you talk a bit about how you ended up in this world?

Yeah. So first I should say like I pretty much failed or nearly failed every single one of my science

classes in high school, which is why my grade point average was not really good, which is why my

college options were not really good, which is one of the many reasons why I ended up in the

military. And I never really thought that I'd return to science.

Even though I actually really liked science, I loved science.

I just wasn't good at it.

I didn't feel like I was good at it.

This is something we hear so much when we do episodes with comedian guests, which is

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