Dec. 11, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:52:42
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day! | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night! | ||
| All day! | ||
| Terry. | ||
| Joe. | ||
| Thanks for doing this, man. | ||
| Hey, thanks for having me on. | ||
| This is awesome. | ||
| You spent 200 days in space. | ||
| In a row. | ||
| I did. | ||
| My first flight was two weeks. | ||
| My second flight was 200 days. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| What does that feel like? | ||
| The two weeks was not enough. | ||
| I got back to Earth, and I was like, man, that was awesome. | ||
| I need to go do this again. | ||
| And after 200 days, it was awesome, but it was like, all right, I checked the box, and I've done everything. | ||
| I was a shuttle pilot, station commander. | ||
| I did spacewalks. | ||
| So I feel like I had a chance to do everything. | ||
| I made an IMAX movie while I was up there. | ||
| I feel like I had a chance to do everything I wanted to do. | ||
| When you did two weeks, is there a recovery period when you return after two weeks? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But it's pretty quick. | ||
| Like, when you land, I was super dizzy. | ||
| And I felt like everything was heavy. | ||
| I was the last guy out of the shuttle because I was a pilot. | ||
| And they came in, all right, time to get out, Virch. | ||
| And I grabbed my helmet and I was like, be careful, this thing weighs 500 pounds. | ||
| And that night I was just like, I wanted someone next to me. | ||
| I didn't fall over, but I felt like I was going to. | ||
| But after a day or two, I was fine. | ||
| But after the long duration flight, it was like, that first day sucked. | ||
| I could do everything. | ||
| I could walk around and they make you do this torture where you have to get on your stomach and do – it was like burpees, you know, get up as fast as you can. | ||
| They were trying to make you pass out from orthostatic intolerance. | ||
| So I could do all that stuff. | ||
| I just hated it. | ||
| And then the second day was a little bit better. | ||
| First day was like a couple bottles of wine. | ||
| The second day was like a bottle of wine. | ||
| The third day was like a glass or two. | ||
| And by a week later, they make you do this balance test where they put you in this big box. | ||
| You can't see anything. | ||
| And then they move the box. | ||
| And you're like, whoa. | ||
| And they have force sensors on your feet where if your feet are doing this, you have bad balance. | ||
| And if your feet go and recover, you're good. | ||
| So I did my balance test before flight and after flight. | ||
| And after 200 days in space, a week later, my balance score was better than it was before I launched, which I couldn't believe. | ||
| But I tell you that story just to say that, you know, the human body is amazing. | ||
| It can adapt pretty quickly. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| So what is the, like, from the time you land after 200 days, and then when you're 100%, how much time is that? | ||
| So, there's some rule about driving cars. | ||
| Like, they don't want you driving cars for a couple weeks, and the doctor's got to sign off before you drive. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| But like I said, after a week, I had a better balance score. | ||
| And after a week, I did 20 pull-ups at the gym. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I was not 100%, but I was like 90%. | ||
| Now, is this because of exercises that they prescribe while you're in space? | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| What kind of stuff do you have to do up there? | ||
| So, they give you two and a half hours a day. | ||
| The Russians learned on Mir that your bone density, it's like a linear progression down. | ||
| You know, about one and a half percent a month, you lose bone density. | ||
| One and a half percent a month? | ||
| And it's a straight line. | ||
| It doesn't, like, bottom out. | ||
| And they had a guy up there for 440 days. | ||
| He's the most ever time and space in one mission. | ||
| So to combat that, we exercise. | ||
| And they found that pounding, resistive exercise is what helps your bones and your muscles. | ||
| So we have a weightlifting machine. | ||
| It's kind of like a Bowflex and a treadmill and a bike. | ||
| And I was religious about those things. | ||
| I did them every day except for my three spacewalk days. | ||
| And we had this really big emergency where other than those four days, I exercised every day. | ||
| And are you sweating up there? | ||
| You sweat a lot when you exercise. | ||
| Just doing this, you don't sweat at all. | ||
| You could wear the same underwear and shirt for weeks and you don't even notice. | ||
| But if you have your exercise shirt after a day, it's like drenched and stinky, like a stinky Under Armour shirt. | ||
| Because there's no circulation of air. | ||
| There's not as much. | ||
| Well, just like if you go to the gym and you get after it for an hour, you're going to be sweating. | ||
| So it's the same thing in space. | ||
| But even if you just walk around throughout the day, you know, you can tell you got to wash your clothes. | ||
| But in space, you don't. | ||
| Like for some reason, you just don't stink on normal. | ||
| Are they giving you like merino wool clothes to wear or something? | ||
| So, we had Under Armour shirts. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| And after a day or two, it's like, they stink, and you only got one shirt every two weeks. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| So those things, they were ripe after a couple days. | ||
| So I did this experiment with wool clothes. | ||
| Like you said, it was like a New Zealand company. | ||
| I forgot the name of it. | ||
| And I was kind of worried, because I didn't want to, I thought it'd itch, you know, wool stuff. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So I wore this thing every day for a month. | ||
| Got completely drenched, sweaty every day for a month in it. | ||
| And it did not stink at all. | ||
| Merino wool is amazing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It blew me away. | ||
| There's a company called First Light. | ||
| My friend Steve Rinell is one of the owners of it. | ||
| It's a hunting company. | ||
| And most of their clothing, particularly all their base layers and stuff, is all made out of merino wool. | ||
| And the first time I'd ever worn it was on a hunting trip. | ||
| You realize when you go hunting, one of the big problems is it's freezing cold out, but you're hiking with a lot of gear, so you sweat. | ||
| And then you have to sit down, and you freeze your ass off. | ||
| But you don't with merino wool. | ||
| When merino wool is wet, it still keeps you warm. | ||
| And so these guys started making hunting gear out of it. | ||
| And it's incredible stuff, because it really doesn't smell. | ||
| It's so bizarre. | ||
| I sweated, drenching sweat every day for a month, and I did that twice, and it didn't smell at all. | ||
| It blew me away. | ||
| It's weird, yeah. | ||
| I guess it's organic. | ||
| The fibers from the wool, and just for whatever reason, it just shakes. | ||
| I don't know what scientific analysis they've ever done on it, but they can't really seem to do that with synthetics. | ||
| They try it with synthetics, but they can't quite get there. | ||
| Yeah, you need a washing machine. | ||
| So were you the one who figured that out? | ||
| You brought that stuff with you? | ||
| Well, I mean, it was like a formal experiment. | ||
| You know, NASA said that I was working on mice and doing astronomy and testing out new wool fabric. | ||
| It was just one of the 250 experiments I did. | ||
| But it was a good one to do because I didn't stink for a couple months, which was nice. | ||
| That's crazy that even in space, merino wool is the way to go. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was really worried. | ||
| I was afraid it was going to be, you know, itchy. | ||
| But I got... | ||
| Like XXL. I wanted it loose. | ||
| I didn't want like wool rubbing on me, but it worked. | ||
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unidentified
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It was good. | |
| It doesn't itch. | ||
| You think of it as like being like that coarse wool that like your grandfather wore that makes you scratchy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But no, they get it down to where it feels like cotton. | ||
| It's very soft. | ||
| They got it figured out, man. | ||
| That stuff was awesome. | ||
| So when you're using these machines, they're all resistance band machines? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So in my book, I make fun of the acronyms. | ||
| It's ARED, which is the NASA acronym for Workout Machine. | ||
| So it uses vacuum. | ||
| There's like tubes, like a cylinder. | ||
| So instead of compressing the air for your force, you're pulling against a vacuum. | ||
| The A-RED machine is 600 pounds. | ||
| I can't bench or squat 600 pounds, but you can put it on there. | ||
| So you could hurt yourself. | ||
| And the really interesting thing about these machines is they're not attached to the wall of the station. | ||
| They're on springs and moving devices. | ||
| They're called vibration isolation system. | ||
| Because... | ||
| If it was attached... | ||
| Think about running on a treadmill. | ||
| That's a lot of pounding. | ||
| 200 pounds pounding. | ||
| And the Earth doesn't really move that much when you do it on Earth. | ||
| But in space, there's nothing supporting the space station. | ||
| So even though it's a million pounds, the vibration from exercise would actually start to... | ||
| You're knocking out of orbit? | ||
| Not out of orbit. | ||
| You break it apart, actually. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| Really? | ||
| They told us a couple minutes of that will snap it in half. | ||
| Yeah, because... | ||
| The whole thing starts to bend and flex, and if you're doing it in resonance, it's really dangerous. | ||
| They've got videos of the solar rays, and these things are big. | ||
| They don't fit in the football field. | ||
| They're hundreds of feet, and they start moving. | ||
| If the astronaut forgets to use the vibration system correctly, the station starts flexing. | ||
| In Houston, there's some guy that monitors, and the alarm goes off, and they call you up, stop doing what you're doing. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| It kind of blew me away at it. | ||
| It's a million pound massive spaceship, but still there's nothing stopping it. | ||
| There's nothing like supporting it. | ||
| There's no like frame. | ||
| No, it's just floating. | ||
| So even the exercise of you running on a treadmill or you doing squats, there's a lot of, if you're pushing 400 pounds this way, something's pushing 400 pounds that way, right? | ||
| And if you're going up and down in the right frequency, it'll snap the station in half. | ||
| So in this IMAX movie I made A Beautiful Planet, you can see there's a scene of me running on the treadmill and my crewmate Samantha doing weightlifting. | ||
| And the machines are just going up and down. | ||
| I mean, they're moving a lot. | ||
| When you're running on a treadmill, how are you locked into place? | ||
| Do you have a belt? | ||
| No, it's a shoulder pad thing. | ||
| So you wear shoulder pads and there are these bungee cords that hold you down. | ||
| Because otherwise you'd take one step and you'd go shooting off. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| And is it one of those self-propelling treadmills? | ||
| Like an air runner? | ||
| Yeah, there's two ways. | ||
| So you can do the electric version, which is what we normally do. | ||
| And on Sundays, I would do this four-minute sprint crazy workout where you have to push it yourself. | ||
| And that thing just kicks your ass. | ||
| I mean, it's so hard to push on the treadmill and... | ||
| It was supposed to be 20 seconds of sprint, 10 second rest, 20 seconds, but I was usually like 10 seconds of sprint, 20 seconds of rest because four minutes of that, I would put one song on and by the end of the song I was wiped out. | ||
| But it's a good, it gets your Achilles and your calf, your lower muscles to work out there. | ||
| And it works just like on Earth? | ||
| Because you're getting pushed down? | ||
| So instead of gravity, the bungee cord pulls you down into the machine? | ||
| They do. | ||
| So when you first start off, all this equipment's hard to use and it takes some coordination. | ||
| So you start off with probably 100 pounds of weight or something. | ||
| And I worked my way up to, I think it was like 130, 140 pounds. | ||
| So it's not 100% of your weight, but it's, you know, 60 or 70%. | ||
| And you have to, like, get used to it because there's all this force up here, so you're unstable. | ||
| So if you lean back a little bit, it'll snap you, you know, pull you off the treadmill. | ||
| So there's a whole skill with getting used to doing it. | ||
| How long does it take you to get used to just sleeping in space? | ||
| Yeah, sleeping was something that... | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| That's the... | ||
| See how it's moving and bouncing up and down? | ||
| You can see those bungee cords. | ||
| That is an old... | ||
| That's an old video, but you get the idea. | ||
| And the moving and bouncing is all just to prevent it from fucking up the space station. | ||
| Yeah, so it's on these spring devices. | ||
| If that was attached to the station, the station would be doing that. | ||
| You can imagine the hatches, right? | ||
| They're attached. | ||
| And if they're doing this, there's constant force on them. | ||
| It's 20 years old now. | ||
| Hopefully it'll last another 20 or who knows how long, but you don't want that metal fatigue to happen. | ||
| So, you're living up there for 200 days. | ||
| The first night you fall asleep, like sleeping in space, are you just floating above the bed? | ||
| Are you like, do you strap yourself down? | ||
| So, I was worried about this, because like... | ||
| I've never slept in space before on my first mission. | ||
| You didn't sleep at all? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no, no. | |
| You were here for two weeks? | ||
| No, I slept like a baby. | ||
| I was worried that I wouldn't. | ||
|
unidentified
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I didn't know. | |
| Oh, so this is the first time. | ||
| My first mission. | ||
| On the shuttle, there's six of us in the mid-deck, which is like... | ||
| A third of the size of this room. | ||
| Or, yeah, it's less than half of this room. | ||
| And there's six people. | ||
| There's six of us. | ||
| So, like, I'll take the wall and you get the ceiling and everybody grabs their own thing. | ||
| You got a sleeping bag that you clip to the wall. | ||
| I slept on the wall. | ||
| I slept on the starboard wall. | ||
| That was my place. | ||
| And you go in, you put your blinders on, because if somebody opens a window or something, you don't want to get woken up. | ||
| And as soon as you put your blinders on, you don't know up or down. | ||
| It's completely gone. | ||
| And you're just floating. | ||
| And I was out in like 10 seconds. | ||
| So the sleeping was not a problem at all. | ||
| Before there was Fitbits and Apple Watches, we had this NASA thing that would measure your motion. | ||
| And on Earth, before we launched, we had to wear it for... | ||
| A month or something. | ||
| And they measured your sleep patterns. | ||
| And then in space, they measured your sleep patterns. | ||
| So on Earth, I would be like, you know, roll around and fit. | ||
| It fits here and there. | ||
| In space, I was just flatline. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| Probably because I was so exhausted. | ||
| Because on the shuttle flights especially, man, it was work, work, work, work, work. | ||
| From the minute you wake up, you're just running. | ||
| Not literally running, but you're busy. | ||
| Doing things, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, what is a typical day? | ||
| So on the space station flight, so my 200-day long duration flight, the day starts about 7.30 in the morning, which is GMT, so London time. | ||
| And we would start off with like a conference call. | ||
| So everybody would get around a microphone and we'd call Houston and Moscow and Huntsville, Alabama, which they do the payloads, Europe and Japan. | ||
| So we kind of go through all the different communication centers around the world, mission control centers. | ||
| Hey, today you're doing this experiment. | ||
| Grab this piece of equipment or this thing got canceled. | ||
| We're going to do something else. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| They'd have the daily thing. | ||
| And then you get going and you got experiments. | ||
| You got two and a half hours of exercise. | ||
| You got to fix broken shit. | ||
| There might be a SpaceX cargo ship coming up with stuff. | ||
| You may be getting ready for a spacewalk. | ||
| Every day was different, which I loved. | ||
| And then at the end of the day, you had another call about 7 o'clock at night, and it was the same thing. | ||
| You'd go around, hey, when I use this piece of equipment, it was serial number 1002, and tomorrow be ready for this. | ||
| And every day it was the same thing. | ||
| It was Groundhog Day. | ||
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unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| When you know you have to be committed to something for like 200 days, does it start to feel prison-like, where you're kind of counting down the days you can get back to early? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Or are you still enjoying it? | ||
| I enjoyed it the whole time. | ||
| It was supposed to be 169 days. | ||
| And then we had... | ||
| There was three rockets that blew up back to back to back. | ||
| An American one, the Russian one, and then another American one. | ||
| When the Russian one blew up, it was in the middle of my mission. | ||
| And the Progress cargo ship uses the same rocket as the people, as the Soyuz rocket. | ||
| It's the same rocket. | ||
| So the Russians said, hey, we don't want to launch your replacement crew until we know what the problem was. | ||
| And so since you don't have a replacement crew, you guys are going to stay longer. | ||
| So we got kind of stuck in space, you know, and we didn't know how long we were going to be there. | ||
| And we were kind of getting low on supplies since that was the second cargo ship that had blown up. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| So, you know, and it was all about attitude. | ||
| It was just like COVID. It was like all of a sudden you're stuck and you're low on supplies. | ||
| It was a similar, like when COVID happened, I'm like, this is like when I was in space and we got stuck there. | ||
| Do they have an emergency supply of food for you guys up there? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| There was enough food that we were good. | ||
| The NASA guy, there's a ground team that manages, you know, they want to have margin on oxygen and water and food and everything. | ||
| And they handled three failures back to back to back. | ||
| And used up all the margin, and they kept the full crew there. | ||
| But there was no more margin. | ||
| It was time for something to work, and it did, thankfully. | ||
| Oh, God, imagine if it didn't, if three more back-to-back-to-back? | ||
| Yeah, if four would have happened, we would have probably had to start bringing guys back and just leave a skeleton crew up there. | ||
| But thankfully that didn't happen, and thanks to the guys in Houston and Moscow and everywhere, they had managed the backup food that was... | ||
| What are you eating up there? | ||
| It wasn't bad. | ||
| I actually liked it. | ||
| It's better than what I cooked for myself as a bachelor. | ||
| Really? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, it was pretty good. | ||
| It's like MREs that the military guys eat, the green bags of food. | ||
| The NASA food is basically MREs. | ||
| So you just rip it open and stick a spoon in and eat it. | ||
| You can warm it up if you want or just eat it straight. | ||
| There's dehydrated food in these plastic containers. | ||
| It's like crunchy meat or vegetables or fruits or anything you can dehydrate. | ||
| You stick it in the machine, dial in how many milliliters, push a button and 10 minutes later it's food. | ||
| - Wow. | ||
| - The Russians have similar kind of, it's a different system but similar. | ||
| And the Russian food was great, I loved it. | ||
| - Is it better than the American food? | ||
| - It's different which is important. | ||
| Over 200 days, you don't want to eat the same thing every day. | ||
| The Russians have great borscht. | ||
| Their soup is awesome. | ||
| Mashed potatoes were great. | ||
| And the fish was really good. | ||
| We didn't have any fish. | ||
| So they had these little cat food cans of fish. | ||
| And the cosmonauts were sick of them, like another day of cat food. | ||
| But I loved them because I was never getting fish. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there was a few things that we didn't like that they loved. | ||
| So I started this bag of like uneaten food. | ||
| So whatever we didn't like, we put in there. | ||
| And about once a week, those guys, the Russians would come down and radar. | ||
| They would eat everything that we didn't like. | ||
| And we would go down there and eat. | ||
| They'd have like boxes of these cans of fish. | ||
| And we loved them. | ||
| Do you speak Russian? | ||
|
unidentified
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Da. | |
| Yeah, really? | ||
| How, like, completely fluent? | ||
| in Russia, you can't be fluent. | ||
| - Really? - Yeah, it's such a crazy language. | ||
| French is pretty easy, Spanish is pretty easy, Russian is not. | ||
| I can have a conversation, but it's after duh, it's obvious that I'm not Russian. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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- It's that complicated that you have to be born Yeah, for sure. | |
| They have these things called cases. | ||
| It's just the way the grammar works that we don't have. | ||
| The letters you can figure out. | ||
| Everybody's like, oh, they're different letters. | ||
| Lesson one was a couple hours, and then I had the letters figured out. | ||
| That's not hard. | ||
| It's like the way of saying things and the accent. | ||
| It's impossible to be perfectly fluent. | ||
| You can't tell the difference. | ||
| Can you read it and write it though? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you could read like War and Peace in Russian? | ||
| I could read the words out loud. | ||
| I'd only know what half of them mean. | ||
| I wouldn't know what I was reading. | ||
| But yeah, I could. | ||
| We used to watch, in class we'd watch Russian TV programs. | ||
| So in like an hour class, I'd get through five minutes of the show. | ||
| Because it'd be like, all right, stop. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Okay, that's it. | ||
| And so that's how I try to learn colloquial, modern Russian. | ||
| But I love languages. | ||
| It's funny, when you get to NASA... You think you're good at something, right? | ||
| The astronauts are usually pretty good at something before you get there. | ||
| So I thought I was pretty good at languages. | ||
| I lived in Finland and I did an exchange in France and Russian just kicked my ass. | ||
| And it was like years of just torture. | ||
| And I felt like my brain was Teflon. | ||
| Like I'd have to say, I go to class for an hour and I'd learn one word. | ||
| You know, it was just really painful. | ||
| That's interesting because it's an advantage for them because they can learn English pretty well. | ||
| If you can learn Russian, that's why they're so smart. | ||
| Russians are so smart and educated. | ||
| They have to speak Russian. | ||
| I think it is an advantage for them. | ||
| But it was like years, and I finally got over this hill. | ||
| So it went from being really tough to like, I loved it, and I needed it, and I wanted more, and I put my phone on Russian, and I was always trying to just speak Russian. | ||
| So it was this weird, like it went from... | ||
| Probably like exercising. | ||
| When you first start running, it sucks. | ||
| And then after a while, it's like you get the endorphins and you want to run some more. | ||
| For me, Russian was the same thing. | ||
| Now, you obviously, flying into space wasn't your first flights, right? | ||
| You flew jets. | ||
| You were a test pilot as well, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's got to be nerve-wracking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's, you know, and by the way, you know, shout out to Chuck Yeager, you know, my hero and just passed away. | ||
| The Right Stuff was, it's what motivated me to be an astronaut. | ||
| I read that book in high school and it kind of, I didn't know anything. | ||
| No one in my family had ever been an astronaut or a pilot. | ||
| And so that Right Stuff book showed me how to be an astronaut. | ||
| And it was a lot about Chuck Yeager. | ||
| Those guys were gangsters. | ||
| They were... | ||
| And, you know, one of my goals in life was to not have a street or an elementary school on an Air Force Base named after me. | ||
| And, you know, when I was at Edwards, it was just... | ||
| When you watch the right stuff, it's this old 1950s... | ||
| When you die, is that when they named it after you? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| They call it buying the farm, yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, so that was one of my goals. | ||
| And thankfully, you know, that didn't happen. | ||
| But... | ||
| But when he was doing it back then... | ||
| It was every week, yeah. | ||
| Those guys were so savage to be able to do that and to know that there's a high percentage of these things that you're testing that are likely to fail and you're breaking the speed of sound. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| And the right stuff... | ||
| By the way, on my first flight, my commander, George Zamka and I, we watched the right stuff the night before launch. | ||
| We went in the room and we sat down and put in the DVD. And I flew the DVD... And I wanted to give it to Tom Wolfe, and unfortunately, he passed away, too. | ||
| But, yeah, the odds in the 60s and 70s and 40s and 50s were not good. | ||
| And there's a scene in The Right Stuff. | ||
| I don't know if you remember, like, Jaeger's out riding his horse, and he falls off of it and breaks his arm. | ||
| So his engineer, like, does this thing, puts a broom handle, and just to let... | ||
| He couldn't close the cockpit. | ||
| So... | ||
| You know, he was flying with only one arm, that X1 on that first flight that went supersonic, which is... | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, a big pair for sure. | ||
| Too big for this room. | ||
| Big brass ones, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's so crazy. | ||
| And what kind of stuff did you test fly? | ||
| So I was in the F-16 test squadron, so all different versions of the F-16. | ||
| But during test pilot school, it was really cool. | ||
| We got to fly all different types of airplanes. | ||
| So I flew a MiG-15 or old Russian Korean War MiG and like a F-80 T-33. | ||
| So the two planes that were fighting each other in Korean War, I got to fly both of them, which was cool. | ||
| I flew some World War II propeller airplanes. | ||
| I got checked out in the Eagle to do this high-G test in the F-15. | ||
| Can someone buy an old fighter jet that doesn't have weapons on it? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Like a person who's a pilot can go and buy one, fly around in it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| There's a whole market for this stuff. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Some of the jets we flew, the Air Force didn't own them. | ||
| It's these rich doctors and stuff. | ||
| There was an F-104 that Chuck Yeager flew in the movie. | ||
| This guy would bring the F-104 out and A couple of test pilot students would get to fly one D flight once, and then we would give him a ride in one of our F-16s or T-38s as payment. | ||
| How long could those things go without running out of gas? | ||
| Not long. | ||
|
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Half hour? | |
| F-104s, yeah. | ||
| I directed a film last year where we set a record flying around the planet, and we used an F-104 as our chase plane because we were going really fast and we needed something fast to film us. | ||
| But they could only pick us up about 15 minutes out because they were out of gas. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| So it wasn't like they could fly for hours filming us. | ||
| We only got filming on the last 15 minutes of the flight. | ||
| The wildest thing to me is refueling in air. | ||
| Did you do that? | ||
| Oh, yeah, for years in the F-16. | ||
| That seems so nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not easy because... | ||
| The plane's real sensitive and you don't want to get too crazy because you'll break the boom and get a nickname out of that. | ||
| Get a nickname out of that? | ||
| You'll get a call sign. | ||
| If you go up and you break the tanker, your buddies will give you a call sign afterwards for doing something stupid. | ||
| By breaking the boom, you mean breaking the arm? | ||
| Yeah, there's this long metal gas tube. | ||
| You're talking to morons. | ||
| Help me out. | ||
| It's a tanker, right? | ||
| It's a KC-135 or a Boeing. | ||
| You pull up underneath of it. | ||
| And there's a guy in the Boeing that's flying this boom. | ||
| It's this long metal tube, but it's got little wings on it. | ||
| So he flies it up, down, left, and right. | ||
| And you're supposed to be just rock steady. | ||
| And he inserts it into your plane? | ||
| He'll put it in. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Whereas the Navy system, it's probe and drogue. | ||
| So there's this big basket. | ||
| And they fly up and they... | ||
| Put it in the basket. | ||
| But you don't get as much gas with the big tube system that the Air Force has. | ||
| You can pump the gas a lot quicker, so you can get more airplanes on and off the tanker. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| That's an F-4. | ||
| 1959, you can buy it for $3 million. | ||
| That's a bargain. | ||
| You probably negotiate it down a little bit. | ||
|
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This is the more expensive one. | |
| There's a couple for under 500 grand on here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would think that those things have a lot. | ||
| Oh, look at that, 255 grand? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| That's a gnat. | ||
| The L-39. | ||
| There's a T-30. | ||
| I flew one of those at Tesspot School. | ||
| 210 grand? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, the problem is not the purchase price. | ||
| The problem is the maintenance. | ||
| And the L-39 is the most popular one. | ||
| Dying in it. | ||
| Yeah, there's that. | ||
| You can buy a Harrier. | ||
| Wow, there's an L-39. | ||
| How much has the technology changed in something from 1992 versus 2020? | ||
| So the technology is all in the avionics. | ||
| I mean, jets, the compressor, the combustion, and the turbine has been the same since the 1940s, jet engines. | ||
| Suck, bang, blow, I think is how we learned it at test pilot school. | ||
| It's the same technology. | ||
| But the avionics and the stealth are what's the new thing. | ||
| This is inside the 92, one we were just looking at. | ||
| Oh, so it looks like they upgraded the system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's obviously an aftermarket system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the F-35 is the new fighter that we have. | ||
| So that's like a fighter plane rest... | ||
| There's an iPad. | ||
|
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I didn't realize it. | |
| It's a resto mod. | ||
| It's like what they do with old muscle cars. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, what I was going to get at was that you'd obviously been high above the earth and flying in fighter jets. | ||
| How much of a difference in perspective is it being a fighter jet pilot to being in actual space? | ||
| There's a lot of really important similarities. | ||
| In fact, I think the best training that we do as astronauts is in jets. | ||
| NASA has T-38s, which you could probably buy some of those on the civilian market. | ||
| It's a supersonic trainer. | ||
| And the stick-and-rutter skills of how to land a T-38 don't matter. | ||
| You're not doing that in space. | ||
| But the mental skill of having situational awareness and being able to stay ahead of the jet, you're flying at 300 knots or 500 knots, so things are happening fast. | ||
| And you're out of gas as soon as you take off and there's bad, there's Texas thunderstorms and so that being able to think under pressure. | ||
| And it's not a simulator. | ||
| If you're in a simulator and you crash the shuttle, you hit pause and then you go to lunch. | ||
| But in T38 there's no pause button. | ||
| It really helps astronauts, especially those who were not fighter pilots in their previous life, just get used to working. | ||
| T-38 is, what is it? | ||
| It's not a simulator. | ||
| It's a jet. | ||
| It's just a jet. | ||
| They have them here in San Antonio. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| So what you're saying is that flying this jet prepares you for space travel just because of the fact that it's difficult to do and because the principles apply? | ||
| Yeah, there's NASA T-38. | ||
| That's right there. | ||
| That's Dennis. | ||
| That's in Mississippi. | ||
| That's the rocket test stand. | ||
| What a sweet-looking piece of equipment. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| And so, when you're flying a jet, it's just like flying in a spaceship. | ||
| Like... | ||
| Things are happening fast. | ||
| You have to anticipate a couple moves in front of the jet. | ||
| You have to stay calm when something bad happens. | ||
| I flew at the Blue Angels once. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| In the FA-18. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| The feeling of G-force. | ||
| You need to experience that just to understand what it's like to get smashed down. | ||
| Just get smushed and see your consciousness closing. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| They taught you the G maneuver where you squeeze your legs and your stomach. | ||
|
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Hook! | |
| All that kind of shit. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty wild. | ||
| Yeah, that's awesome. | ||
| But how much difference is it perspective-wise when you're in space and you're looking down on the earth? | ||
| Like, that has got to be the ultimate mindfuck. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| So this is what I'm trying to do in life. | ||
| A couple books I've written, some films I've done. | ||
| Seeing the Earth, I remember early in my first flight, it was like, okay, I'm in outer space, and there's my planet over there. | ||
| It was this profound thought that, wow, I'm not on the planet anymore. | ||
| And over seven months in space, it never got old. | ||
| It was always like, man, Earth is beautiful. | ||
| It is this incredible planet. | ||
| We could talk for hours about this, but I think for me the biggest perspective change was I'm less of a black and white person now. | ||
| Before I went into space, I knew right and wrong. | ||
| When you're young, you're black and white. | ||
| As you get older, you get wiser. | ||
| Seeing the planet, it's like, yeah, this thing's been around for a long time and it's going to be around for a long time, so you probably don't need to get as uptight about the day-to-day stress of life. | ||
| It just kind of put things in perspective, like don't get too excited about the Kardashians or whatever the latest political tweet was or whatever. | ||
| Things are going to go on for a long time. | ||
| So it helps put that in perspective in a big way. | ||
| It's interesting that an actual physical perspective changed. | ||
| Just being in a different place where you're looking down on it from a different vantage point. | ||
| All the astronauts seem to say that. | ||
| It has this profound shift in how you think of Earth and how you think of humanity in general. | ||
| You know, one of the interesting things... | ||
| I've been traveling since I was a kid. | ||
| I did some exchange programs in Finland and France and in the Air Force. | ||
| I lived all around the world. | ||
| And whenever I would go to France or Korea or wherever, it was like, all right, I'm in Korea. | ||
| And then I get back to the States. | ||
| I'm like, all right, I'm back home in America or whatever. | ||
| And now when I travel, and I've been traveling a lot the last couple of years, I don't ever... | ||
| I always feel like I'm home. | ||
| Like, it was weird. | ||
| One time I landed in the Middle East and I remember thinking... | ||
| I didn't think anything, and that really struck me because it used to always be such a big deal wherever I landed. | ||
| I kind of feel like I'm home no matter where I'm at, which is interesting. | ||
| And that's from the space travel? | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It wasn't conscious. | ||
| I didn't expect it or whatever. | ||
| I just realized that, hey, I don't ever feel like I'm not at home. | ||
| And my crewmate Samantha said something really profound. | ||
| She said, like, you see Earth and you can tell it's going around the sun. | ||
| Like, you can actually see the motion sometimes if you're watching stars and stuff. | ||
| And it's like we're on this spaceship together, so we ought to be crewmates and not just passengers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, we all had to kind of take care of the planet and our cell, each other and stuff. | ||
| Do you find that most of the, or many of the astronauts share this similar perspective shift? | ||
| That once you go up, you do realize how weird it is that there are these tribal differences between us? | ||
| Yeah, you're like, what the hell are we doing? | ||
| I got a story about that. | ||
| But to be honest, we're probably not the best communicators of emotion. | ||
| We're not necessarily all touchy-feely people, but some of my close friends that we talk about this, there's a very similar perspective of we're all here on the planet together. | ||
| I was on my first flight on the shuttle, and it was the fifth, I remember it was the fifth night there. | ||
| And when I looked out, we were going over the Mediterranean at night, and you could see there's this U-shape where there's Egypt and the Nile, there's Israel and Syria and Lebanon are right there, and there's Turkey and Greece. | ||
| And it's this little area. | ||
| And Israel is this little thing that's surrounded by Jordan and Lebanon. | ||
| They're all right there. | ||
| And I remember thinking, like, guys, what's the problem, man? | ||
| You're literally living together on a postage stamp on this big planet. | ||
| And it wasn't anything about Israel or the Middle East specifically. | ||
| It was more like, why can we not get along? | ||
| And the crazy thing is, if you ask most people, their position is they'll never be peace in the Middle East. | ||
|
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So... | |
| Which is crazy. | ||
| One of the things, after my flight, so they'd sent us to Congress and we talked to congressmen and senators, and I got to talk at the White House a couple years ago at the National Space Council. | ||
| And my message to them is always the same. | ||
| It's always, you know, for a space program, it's not about the rocket science. | ||
| It's about the political science. | ||
| Like, we've got to figure out politics to get things working well. | ||
| And whenever I go to the American Congress... | ||
| They're always like, you're right. | ||
| It's exactly right. | ||
| If it wasn't for those other fuckers on the other side, we could get this right. | ||
| Republicans and Democrats all said that they all totally agreed with me and it was always the other guy's fault. | ||
| There's definitely a problem that is going to be tough to overcome. | ||
| How much benefit would there be in getting those people in space? | ||
| Yeah, you know, people talk about that. | ||
| If only that leaders could go into space, and I think for some of them it would make an impact, and some of them, they wouldn't care. | ||
| I mean, there's this— Well, the goal of politics and power is just to keep yourself in power and get more stuff for yourself and, you know, throughout human history. | ||
| It's not normally, you know, altruistic democracies, the way we run ourselves. | ||
| So, which we need to move in that direction. | ||
| Because that's the way life gets better. | ||
| But I think some of it would benefit and some of it wouldn't. | ||
| The thing is, no one really wants the job that is balanced and healthy and intelligent and has a good perspective for humanity. | ||
| The people that want the job, they want to be the King Poobah. | ||
| They want to be the big dog. | ||
| It's just a weird kind of person that wants that job in the first place. | ||
| People are like, why don't you run for office and... | ||
| And I always say, well, give me a fork. | ||
| Do you have a fork? | ||
| Because I want to stick that in my eye. | ||
| Because that would be more fun than, you know, you try and do something nice and you're just getting nonstop hate mail. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's rough. | ||
| Girlfriends from high school. | ||
| Testifying before Congress. | ||
| This thing that happened 30 years ago. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's fascinating to me how many of the astronauts do have this incredibly profound experience. | ||
| Again, just from the physical act of being above Earth and looking down on it, where this perspective shift just kind of changes your overall thoughts about being in space. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Humanity on this organic spaceship in the universe, rather than being locked down in Chicago, clouds above you, so you don't even think about space, stuck in traffic, on your way to work every day, same grind. | ||
| You get stuck in this narrow-minded perspective. | ||
| Almost every astronaut who discusses this says that it was a profound, life-changing moment to look at Earth from above. | ||
| Yeah, it was. | ||
| If I'm in one of those shitty situations, you just close your eyes and it's like, right now the sun is rising somewhere. | ||
| That's the most beautiful thing. | ||
| You can't imagine it. | ||
| I took a lot of pictures. | ||
| I did movies. | ||
| But unless you see it with your eyes, you can't imagine how awesome it is. | ||
| So that takes the edge off the traffic you're having to wait on. | ||
| It does help. | ||
| But the thing is taking that experience and sharing it with as many people as possible. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| When do you think that's going to be commercially available? | ||
| Where people are going to be able to go up there, like regular folks? | ||
| So people always are like, when can regular folks go in a space? | ||
| And I always say, well, clearly regular people haven't been in a space. | ||
| I mean, well, I don't know who am I. Like some middle class guy from Maryland. | ||
| Yeah, but you're an astronaut. | ||
| I wasn't born an astronaut. | ||
| I understand, but you worked really hard to get to the position where they decided to put you in space. | ||
| What I want to talk about is like Mike, the UPS driver. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When can he go in a space? | ||
| Yeah, like his wife buys him a ticket. | ||
| Oh shit, I'm going to space. | ||
| Well, if he can save up a couple hundred thousand dollars, I think next year. | ||
| That's a little problematic. | ||
| When is it going to be like two grand? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That may never happen. | ||
| It's a question of energy, right? | ||
| It's one half MV squared. | ||
| And if you want to go 500 miles an hour, you can spend $49 on Southwest Airlines and go from Austin to Phoenix, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you got to go 5,000 miles an hour to do a nice suborbital flight. | ||
| And you got to go 17,000 miles an hour to go in orbit around the Earth. | ||
| And it's MV squared, so the velocity is squared. | ||
| So if you're going to double your speed, it's four times the energy, which is also roughly cost. | ||
| It's not exactly cost, but... | ||
| And if you're going to go, so from 500 to 17,000 is 30 times, 25 times, 30 times faster or more. | ||
| So that's like, well, that's a lot more expensive to get into space. | ||
| Right now, the way they've been doing it, I mean, they're getting better at it, but it's really burning fuel. | ||
| Burning fuel with a propulsion engine that shoots you into space. | ||
| When there's something that's better than that, that's when things can change pretty dramatically. | ||
| Gravity sucks, man. | ||
| When you get back from space, you're like, shit, man, this is heavy. | ||
| Gravity sucks. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| If Earth were just a little bit bigger, we could never leave it. | ||
| Like, physics would not allow you to leave it because of the rocket equation. | ||
| This Russian guy, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 100 years ago figured out that how fast you can go in a rocket is directly related to how fast your propellant goes out the back. | ||
| So the faster you shoot your propellant out the back... | ||
| The faster you can go forward, which makes sense. | ||
| And when you burn a fuel and an oxidizer, so chemical propulsion, you can only get it going so fast. | ||
| You can't shoot stuff out the speed of light. | ||
| You can't burn diesel. | ||
| There's a limit to how fast you can go. | ||
| So if Earth were just a little bit bigger and gravity were just a little bit heavier, no one would ever be able to leave the planet unless they figured out some other transportation system that physics says is probably not going to happen anytime soon for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So is there any other propulsion methods that are on the table that they're trying to figure out? | ||
| What are they? | ||
| So I've got a chapter in the book about how to get to Mars. | ||
| So you can use normal chemical rocket, and it's a three-year trip to Mars. | ||
| It's six to nine months to get there. | ||
| By that time, Earth and Mars have gone around the sun, so you've got to wait a year and a half and then six to nine months to come back. | ||
| So it's a three-year round trip. | ||
| So it is possible to come back. | ||
| Yeah, on a three-year round trip, which is a lot of food and underwear and spare parts to bring with you. | ||
| If you use electric propulsion, which a lot of satellites use electric propulsion, so instead of burning something and shooting it out the back, you take an ionized gas like xenon or helium or hydrogen or something, you make an electric charge, you have an electric plate, and positive and positive, it repels itself. | ||
| So you shoot ionized gas out backwards. | ||
| It goes a lot faster. | ||
| It's a lower thrust level, so it's not as much force pushing you. | ||
| But because the propellant goes faster, and you're just using a little bit of repellent, you can burn it continuously for six months. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| The people that go to Mars that can come back in a year and a half, is that because they never land on Mars? | ||
| That would have something to do with it. | ||
| If you land on Mars, you're fucked, right? | ||
| If you landed and then took right off, that would help you save time. | ||
| Because what I've been reading about Mars and the idea of terraforming and colonizing is that the people that go there are there forever. | ||
| Like Buzz Aldrin and other people. | ||
| Like Elon, I think, wants to go live on Mars. | ||
| He belongs there. | ||
| My favorite part of... | ||
| He'll make it awesome. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| No smoking dope today, by the way, please. | ||
| My favorite part of John Kennedy's speech, we commit to achieving the goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. | ||
| So that was my favorite part of his speech, was coming back to Earth. | ||
| Yeah, not just let him die up there. | ||
| I mean, I would love to go to Mars, but I'd also love to come back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| Stay here, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| I know. | ||
| The Earth is good. | ||
| There's a lot of good things here in Earth. | ||
| I just don't see how much different it's going to be. | ||
| I mean, you've already been to space. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it'll probably be pretty fascinating for a little while. | ||
| And then you're like, well, I guess I just live on Mars now. | ||
| Three years. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| And there's nothing, you know, it's kind of dry and desert. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think space travel is in our future in terms of going to other planets. | ||
| I just wonder how long it'll take before that's a thing where we really do colonize other planets. | ||
| I mean, do you think that's a thousand years from now? | ||
| Is it 500 years from now? | ||
| The problem with colonizing planets, and you mentioned terraforming. | ||
| So if you've got a small telescope, you can see the polar ice caps on Mars. | ||
| You can see water on Mars from your backyard in Texas. | ||
| The problem is, let's say you went up there and you melted all that water and you made an atmosphere. | ||
| It would blow away really quickly because there's no magnetic field. | ||
| See, the reason we have an atmosphere on Earth is because we have this magnetic field that protects us from the solar wind and from radiation. | ||
| That's why we're alive today is because we have this magnetic field. | ||
| Mars doesn't have that, so you can never terraform Mars. | ||
| Even though there's books written about it, people talk about it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| The reality is the lack of that magnetic field Means that no atmosphere... | ||
| That's why there's no... | ||
| Mars used to have an atmosphere and it's gone. | ||
| What happened to Mars? | ||
| They think it got hit, right? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| That's why we're sending probes and stuff there. | ||
| It had ultimate climate change. | ||
| I mean, it used to have wet oceans and now it's the driest desert on Earth. | ||
| It's not as dry as Mars is. | ||
| And what are the competing theories? | ||
| They think one of them is an impact, right? | ||
| Something hit it. | ||
| Yeah, I think, honestly, I don't think they know yet. | ||
| You know, there's asteroids and stuff hit it. | ||
| The lack of a magnetic field means that for sure the atmosphere is going to get blown away. | ||
| Did they believe at one point in time it had a magnetic field? | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think so, but... | ||
| So it never had an atmosphere? | ||
| It could have cooled, you know, as the planet cooled down, maybe the... | ||
| You have to have iron spinning in the planet. | ||
| The reason we have it is because the iron in the middle of Earth spins, and that's what creates the magnetic field. | ||
| So as the planet cools, maybe the iron stops, but... | ||
| Man, I'm just a fighter pilot. | ||
|
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I don't know. | |
| You gotta bring in some scientists. | ||
| What are your thoughts on extraterrestrial life? | ||
| So that's a good question. | ||
| I wrote a chapter about that too. | ||
| So here's what I think. | ||
| There's so many planets out there. | ||
| When you turn the lights off in the cupola on the space station and you let your eyes adjust, just like the stars are bright, you know, deep at night and deep in the heart of Texas. | ||
| There's so many billions of stars. | ||
| It makes what you see from Earth dwarfs in comparison. | ||
| There's so many billions of stars. | ||
| And we have these planet hunters that find planets around stars. | ||
| So there's a lot of planets out there. | ||
| You'd think there would be life. | ||
| If there's life once, there should be life a billion times. | ||
| But the other thing, Joe, I got to do a lot of experiments on my body. | ||
| I did like ultrasound on my brain and my eye and my heart and stuff on mice and plants. | ||
| And I just don't think life just happens on its own. | ||
| It's so complicated. | ||
| Like if you got this bottle of water here, if you had a pile of plastic for a billion years, it would never make a bottle of water. | ||
| Like somebody had to make the water, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And life is infinitely more complicated than a bottle of water. | ||
| So I came out of my spaceflight thinking, not religiously, but from a scientific point of view, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. | ||
| The physics behind the weak electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force and the How our bodies are made. | ||
| It just points to design. | ||
| So you'd think there would be aliens, but I think if there are, somebody had to have something to do with somehow getting them started. | ||
| Does it point to design in the idea of intelligent design, or does it point to... | ||
| A way that the universe is structured that encourages complexity and constant change. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that these things adapt and change and shift and you have all these biological forces that are competing. | ||
| Like if you think about life on Earth. | ||
| You have all these various biological forces that are competing for dominance, right? | ||
| There's animals that are eating animals, animals that are taking over resources, and then you've got this one animal that figures out how to manipulate matter, and how to manipulate environments, and how to use its opposing thumbs, and use its brain, and the brain grows larger, and you see this process. | ||
| But this process all has to do with trying to adapt, trying to innovate, and competing with all these other forces. | ||
| It seems like problems and difficulties present themselves, and these organisms either make their way through these problems and come out on the other end adapted to them and better, or they don't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is the weirdness of life, right? | ||
| And this is why 90% of all species that have ever existed are gone. | ||
| I think it's more than 90. Yeah. | ||
| They couldn't adapt. | ||
| But in our minds, we instantly like to go to the simplest possible explanation. | ||
| The simplest possible explanation being that there's some sort of a creator. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I don't think so. | ||
| I'm just – I want to talk science, not religion. | ||
| I'm a Christian, but I don't want to talk religion. | ||
| But just – I don't know how it happened. | ||
| It's not a simplistic – somebody just went poof and everything happened. | ||
| Obviously, there's – things evolve and there's science behind it, which is the fun part of – Living is learning how stuff works and learning the science behind it. | ||
| But just at the end of the day, I think somebody had to set things in motion with a point of view. | ||
| Here's the question. | ||
| Who set them in motion? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Ultimately, there had to have been somebody that, before the Big Bang, right? | ||
| I wrote a, I did a short film this year called Cosmic Perspective. | ||
| I want to turn it into a series. | ||
| And I talk about how in the beginning of time, there were perfect imperfections. | ||
| So when the Big Bang happened, if it was like perfectly uniform, the universe would just be this giant balloon, right? | ||
| But the way, it wasn't mass at the time, it was just energy. | ||
| The way it was like started was a little bit imperfect. | ||
| And that's why you have stars and galaxies and galaxy clusters and everything. | ||
| And if it was a little bit off, the whole universe wouldn't exist, right? | ||
| So just things point to that. | ||
| What is your perspective on the Big Bang? | ||
| A lot of people's views vary depending upon what the most recent theories are. | ||
| Some people believe that the universe started with the Big Bang, and some people believe that it's always existed, and it's a continuing cycle of Big Bang's endless expansion, and then ultimately contraction, and then it starts all over again. | ||
| And that there's infinite numbers of Big Bangs that are occurring through multiverses and various universes all over the world or all over the cosmos. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I'm reading this book right now called The End of Everything by a friend of mine. | ||
| Katie Mack wrote it. | ||
| It's about the end of the universe. | ||
| And it's really cool. | ||
| It talks about exactly what you're saying. | ||
| So there was a big bang. | ||
| You can see it, actually, in the cosmic background radiation. | ||
| There's this microwave anisotropy. | ||
| It's like everything's not uniform, and you can see that. | ||
| It's like two or three degrees Kelvin. | ||
| It's really cold. | ||
| So the question is, does it explode, and then does the big crunch, you know, does it come back? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| They think there's a stuff called dark energy, so does it continue expanding? | ||
| And she calls it heat decay, or this other one's the big rip where it just keeps on expanding, accelerating, and like even electrons can't, everything just disintegrates into nothing. | ||
| And no one knows what's going to happen. | ||
| But the really cool thing, I was just reading the chapter about... | ||
| As it expands super fast, I forgot the name of it, Boltzmann's brain or something, there's some weird thing where, because of quantum physics, which is completely not understandable, if you say you understand quantum mechanics, you don't. | ||
| Things can just randomly appear. | ||
| So if the universe is going to be around for trillions of years, like in theory, At some point, two trillion years from now, Joe Rogan could just suddenly create itself out of nothing in the universe, and you'd look around and go, wow, what's going on? | ||
| And then you'd disappear instantly because of quantum mechanics. | ||
| Wait, what? | ||
| Explain that again? | ||
| The theory is you could have an entire universe just because of quantum mechanics. | ||
| Mechanics, which is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, right? | ||
| You can't know position and velocity. | ||
| You can only know one or the other. | ||
| And an extension of that, again, man, I'm just a fighter pilot. | ||
| I'm not a physicist. | ||
| But things can just suddenly appear somewhere. | ||
| And so given enough time, even though it's highly unlikely, this water bottle could create itself out of nothing just because of physics, quantum mechanics. | ||
| I remember my teacher at the Air Force Academy used the example of all of the electrons and protons and stuff could suddenly move themselves and you could just fall through the floor. | ||
| Now, the odds of that happening, it ain't going to happen for a trillion years, but these weird things can happen. | ||
| And so she uses this kind of cheeky, funny example of, you know, your brain could just suddenly create itself out of nothing and given enough time, the probability would... | ||
| So some people say the whole universe is just this temporary thing that created itself, but I don't know. | ||
| It's very disconcerting when you hear them talk about quantum mechanics. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I figured relativity out. | ||
| You start going, wait, two things can exist simultaneously in different places, and one of them could be in motion, the other one could be still, and they're the same thing, and they appear and disappear, and what? | ||
| And now there's quantum computers. | ||
| Yeah, that's weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you understand that? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't think... | |
| No. | ||
| I spoke at a conference, and I followed the quantum computing guy, so it's cool stuff. | ||
| I've had guys like Sean Carroll try to explain it to me on the podcast, and it just goes in one of my chimp ears and out the other. | ||
| You and me both, man. | ||
| Like I said, I love it. | ||
| It's cool to learn about it. | ||
| It does make things seem a lot more mystical than just the standard... | ||
| Sort of Newtonian physics perspective of life and gravity and matter and carbon-based life forms. | ||
| When you start getting into just listening to what they're talking about when they're talking about quantum weirdness and entanglements and things in superposition, you're like, wait, what is the world made of? | ||
| When you get down to the smallest possible measurement of life, the smallest things that you can measure, the world becomes magic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On the smallest scale and also on the biggest scale. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's the weirdest part about the universe, is that... | ||
| I'm inclined, especially as I get older and I think about things more, to think that everything is kind of fractal. | ||
| And what the universe is probably, it's probably a part of some other organism. | ||
| Some immense organism that's in a universe that's impossible for us to comprehend the vastness of it. | ||
| There was a thing they just did recently where they mapped out the human... | ||
| They were talking about human brain cells and the universe. | ||
| And they were talking about the way the universe functions and the universe functions the way it looks. | ||
| Like if you do a scan of the universe. | ||
| Like it looks far too similar to a human brain cell. | ||
| This is a talk I want to do, Joe. | ||
| So I saw these patterns from space. | ||
| There's this one picture of a river in Indonesia I took. | ||
| It looks like arteries, like all these blood vessels coming out. | ||
| And I remember thinking, there's all these patterns that repeat. | ||
| The seashells, there's these spiral elliptical seashells. | ||
| And then there's hurricanes. | ||
| And then there's galaxies. | ||
| And these patterns repeat from the microscopic to the macroscopic. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And I don't understand them all, but in images, they're really cool. | ||
| Have you ever seen videos on fractals where they show you things like the Mandelbrot set and how the closer you get to these fractals, the same sort of pattern repeats itself over and over and over again? | ||
| It's one thing to comprehend it if someone's explaining it to you in a lecture, but it's another thing now with the advent of CGI technology, you can see these fractals be repeated over and over and over again. | ||
| And the Mandelbrot set is a particularly interesting one because it's so beautiful and weird. | ||
| And each part of that as they go deeper... | ||
| See if you can find a video on it because it's pretty badass. | ||
| Mandelbrot set, fractal, demonstration. | ||
| I know it's on YouTube. | ||
| But that these patterns, if the universe really is a part of an atom that's in a being, or a part of a cell that's in a being that exists in, you know, the idea of infinity, too. | ||
| We think of the universe as being massive. | ||
| It's 14 billion light. | ||
| That's not infinite. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not even close. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 14 billion years is like nothing. | ||
| No, it's not infinite. | ||
| No. | ||
| At all. | ||
| So this is the Mandelbrot set, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, cool. | |
| And so what these artists have done is as they zoom in, the Mandelbrot set repeats itself over and over and over and over again. | ||
| And it becomes the same exact thing at the lowest possible levels of comprehension or of illustration. | ||
| They keep getting closer and closer to it. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| I was a math major in college, and I learned about fractals, but they didn't have videos back then. | ||
| I needed this video to see it. | ||
| Well, this would blow you away, right? | ||
| Because it shows it to you in a way that appeals to the brain. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's so hard for us to comprehend or to try to illustrate it ourself. | ||
| This is the kind of shit that you see when you're on psychedelic drugs, too. | ||
| This is another reason why it makes me weirded out. | ||
| This is a mushroom, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, like if you go on a super trip, like a real trip where you can't come back for four or five hours, this is the kind of shit that you'll see. | ||
| And it makes you wonder, like, are you looking at the very fabric of the cosmos itself? | ||
| So I think there's a theory, string theory is kind of popular for small stuff, what electrons are made out of in the smallest subatomic level. | ||
| And if I remember right, 10 to the minus 33rd meters, which is pretty small, but I think that's as small as you can get. | ||
| Like there is a smallest particle. | ||
| You can't just keep on going infinitely smaller. | ||
| Just like you can't go infinitely bigger because the universe is only so big. | ||
| So it is bounded. | ||
| That can't happen forever. | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| But 10 years from now, everything we think we know is going to be disproven probably. | ||
| Were you a Christian before you were an astronaut and a fighter pilot? | ||
| I was, yeah. | ||
| When I was a kid, I kind of made that decision on my own. | ||
| So yeah. | ||
| Is there pushback against that at all in science and in dealing with these experiments that you're dealing with and being someone who's in space? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think some people take religion and try and torture science to fit their view of religion. | ||
| In the 1600s, the Catholic Church used to kill people if they said the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. | ||
| And that's not at all what Christianity or the Bible says. | ||
| It says very little about it. | ||
| There's like a page or two in Genesis that basically says there was a beginning. | ||
| First there was light. | ||
| - There was stars, then there was a planet, and then it had basic life and then more advanced life. | ||
| Like if you read the Genesis creation story, it describes what happened. | ||
| It describes it in the language of 5,000 years ago. | ||
| It's not a cosmology textbook, it's two pages out of a thousand page book that actually describes, so Einstein, Didn't believe that at all. | ||
| He believed that the universe, the steady state universe, and he eventually said it was the worst mistake of his life, but he didn't think there was a Big Bang. | ||
| He thought everything just was forever. | ||
| So in some ways, ironically, it kind of says what it is, but from my perspective, I just want to learn the science behind stuff, and I don't get, I don't think it conflicts with religion at all. | ||
| I mean, I think just learning about stuff points to somebody really smart who's had something to do with making it all. | ||
| The interesting thing about these people that lived 5,000 years ago that had this perception of things beginning and then the universe existing. | ||
| They talk about God making the universe in six days. | ||
| I think when we're talking about things like that and you're getting translations that are thousands and thousands of years old... | ||
| And no one even speaks those languages anymore. | ||
| You know, like ancient Hebrew, which is the original language that the Bible was written in. | ||
| Good luck reading that. | ||
| I know. | ||
| How many people can even read that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| Six days and what inertial reference frame? | ||
| Because six days for you was different than six days for me on the space station. | ||
| Because that was a chapter in my book about relativity. | ||
| I actually aged less than you did. | ||
| What is six days? | ||
| Does it really mean six days? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Or is it a metaphor? | ||
| Yeah, there's expressions. | ||
| You know the expression when suicide bombers would believe they're going to get 72 virgins in heaven? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's not really what it means. | ||
| 72 is just like a million. | ||
| Like if a kid says, how many pieces of candy are you going to get? | ||
| I'm going to get a million. | ||
| They don't really mean a million. | ||
| It's a metaphor for, it's a phrase for an enormous number. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it lets you know that It just lets you know that the universe was created in some orderly fashion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| First there was light. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God said, let there be light. | ||
| And the Big Bang was light. | ||
| I mean, it was actually what physicists, it took them thousands of years to figure out that that's what happened first. | ||
| It would be so fascinating to sit down. | ||
| If there was a way where you could do like Google Translate on people who lived 5,000 years ago, you had a time machine, sit down with the very people who were Trying to figure out how to write this stuff down, and that this is important information to pass on to other people. | ||
| Like, how do you know this? | ||
| Where are you getting this from? | ||
| Like, too much of it is applicable. | ||
| Like, they knew too much about human... | ||
| Obviously, there's a lot of shit in there that's clearly been put in there by men. | ||
| Condoning slavery, treating women like second-class citizens, but there's so much... | ||
| There's so much knowledge in there. | ||
| They had so much of an understanding of human nature and how to get along peacefully with each other. | ||
| What are the principles of harmony? | ||
| What are the rules that you can have to have a society function in a beautiful way? | ||
| Well, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. | ||
| That's pretty good wisdom. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For people that were literally tooth and claw 5,000 years ago. | ||
| That summarizes life. | ||
| Know that piece of wisdom and live your life that way. | ||
| You're going to be in pretty good shape. | ||
| Everybody would be in pretty good shape if everybody lived by that. | ||
| Do you feel, without defining it as God or whatever, you feel like there's some sort of a creator that's responsible for all of this? | ||
| Or a creation force or something? | ||
| I do. | ||
| And there's a religious aspect, but I'm just going back to the scientific aspect, like an eyeball. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| how does an eyeball evolve? | ||
| Cause like in theory, you know, the cosmic ray hits the tadpole and one guy, it gets mutated. | ||
| But if you only have half of an eyeball, you're not, that's not going to help you out evolutionary. | ||
| You're going to die. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You kind of need the whole thing. | ||
| Otherwise all the intermediate steps are just, you're in your worst shape than your buddy until the eyeball's working and can detect things. | ||
| Um, Blood clotting. | ||
| You can't gradually get blood clotting. | ||
| Let's just start with the eyeball. | ||
| You know there's parallel versions of the eyeball, though, that evolved in very different ways. | ||
| In similar functions that you can see things using light, but like the octopus, the octopus and human beings. | ||
| If you follow evolution and you go back to when a human being and an octopus had a common ancestor, how many millions of years is that? | ||
| That would have been a long time ago. | ||
| Long-ass time ago. | ||
| But learning that stuff, I think, is cool. | ||
| It doesn't threaten... | ||
| For me, as a Christian, that doesn't threaten me. | ||
| I just want to learn about it. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| But I think that people want to simplify things and look at it in terms of that there's a creator, that that's the reason why these eyeballs work the way they work. | ||
| And I think part of our problem is an inability to not just... | ||
| To be able to comprehend it, but a complete inability to recognize the scale of time. | ||
| You can say it. | ||
| You can say, four and a half billion years ago, the Earth was created. | ||
| But that doesn't mean anything. | ||
| It goes in there and it barely... | ||
| You know the number. | ||
| I know the right zeros to write down on a piece of paper. | ||
| I can say the name, four billion or eight billion or whatever... | ||
| Enormous number you want to talk about. | ||
| I don't think our brains can comprehend it. | ||
| So when you're talking about millions and millions of years of evolution until an eyeball pops up, I think it's just such an incredible span of time and these changes that take place. | ||
| There's shifts in natural selection and random mutations and adaptations and all these things. | ||
| It's just so complex and it takes so long. | ||
| It's like we're, you know, the ant on the table can't understand the ceiling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like we're ants on a two-dimensional planet. | ||
| I think there's so much more. | ||
| I don't want to pretend like I know anything because there's probably so much stuff that I haven't even scratched the surface of understanding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is pretty cool, but it's fun to try and learn as much as we can about how stuff works. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I worry when people want to simplify it in terms of thinking of there's a person or there's a thing who created it. | ||
| Because my take is always like, okay, who created the person? | ||
| Who created the thing? | ||
| Was God always just hanging around? | ||
| He was bored? | ||
| And then one day he decided, you know what? | ||
| I'm tired of being bored. | ||
| I'm going to make the whole universe. | ||
| Or has there always been something? | ||
| Has there always been something forever? | ||
| Even before the Big Bang, was there what you talked about before, where there's this insane expansion of things to the point where everything dissolves and disappears, and then somehow or another on the other side, it contracts? | ||
| Or are there infinite universes and each one of them has a lifespan? | ||
| And then there's just a constant cycle of new universes being birthed out of Big Bangs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like the thing we were talking about before, the Boltzmann brain. | ||
| Besides the Joe Rogan getting reincarnated, the whole universe could get reincarnated. | ||
| Whenever you mention simplify, I think man and religion tries to simplify things and then it turns into ideology. | ||
| Ideology is like the root of all evil. | ||
| I think we need science. | ||
| We need to have an open mind and learn how stuff happen because Once humans get involved, they use it as a way to control people. | ||
| Well, that's also why people get weirded out when someone discusses Christianity, because it's an ideology. | ||
| And people worry that, especially a person who's a person of science, who works in science, who's religious as well, that you might have these little roadblocks that you put up where you won't look past your religion or your ideology to try to get a more nuanced perspective of a very, very that you might have these little roadblocks that you put up where Right. | ||
| And so you have to have an open mind as a scientist. | ||
| But that also comes back to a bigger problem, not just science, but certain groups preach tolerance. | ||
| We have to be tolerant of each other as long as you believe and as long as you're ideologically pure from their view of things. | ||
| So there's very little tolerance for open discussion of anything today, right? | ||
| Cancel culture, whatever you want to call it. | ||
| Well, it's also, they're cowards. | ||
| There's some religions that are horribly repressive, and they'll never criticize them at all. | ||
| Because they're scared of being labeled Islamophobic, or labeled, you know... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Figure out whatever religion it is that you're discussing. | ||
| People are worried about that, but they're never worried about criticizing Christianity. | ||
| Criticizing Christianity is like a free token. | ||
| It's encouraged. | ||
| Yeah, it's encouraged. | ||
| But criticizing other religions, then you're racist. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's an odd thing, because I think there's genuine beauty in most religions. | ||
| You can learn a lot about human beings and the way they use ethics and morals in their life and what they've learned from their religion. | ||
| When you watch the Muslims gather around Mecca and go around that circle, you don't think there's something kind of beautiful about that, amazing about that? | ||
| Peacefully get there. | ||
| They all dress the same and they all like move around this thing and show respect. | ||
| Obviously, it's doing something for them. | ||
| It has this profound effect on them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've got a lot of friends who are Arabs. | ||
| I spent a lot of time in the Middle East. | ||
| I love them. | ||
| They're awesome. | ||
| There are some factions that say we got to go blow ourselves up and that's obviously wrong. | ||
| There are some factions of Christianity that are like that too, right? | ||
| 100%, absolutely, in America, right? | ||
| And I guarantee you, if we were being invaded and attacked by Muslims all the time, there'd probably be some radical fundamentalist Christians that would want to do the same thing that some Muslim sects have done. | ||
| Yeah, so getting into the... | ||
| There's good and bad that come from religion. | ||
| When it's used by people to keep themselves in power and repress other people, that's really bad. | ||
| And when it's used to do unto others as you would have them do under you, that's really good. | ||
| Don't lie, cheat, or... | ||
| Don't kill other people. | ||
| Don't steal. | ||
| Those are good ways to run society. | ||
| I think some of the problems are the same problems that we were talking about earlier when we were talking about politicians. | ||
| The problem is a person then takes control of the reins, and then their ego gets involved, and then they want to impose their rules and their structure on other people, and then you get crazy fundamentalist pastors or radical imams and all these different people that... | ||
| Or in control of the texts, or in control of the leadership. | ||
| When you see someone, whether it's Joel Osteen, on stage in front of thousands and thousands of people, leading them in this... | ||
| Is that really Christianity anymore, or is that a cult of personality? | ||
| That's like a guy. | ||
| It's a cult of personality. | ||
| There's a song called That's Not Jesus, and it talks about that. | ||
| And whenever it comes down to... | ||
| God says you should do this or else. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then you end up with the Crusades, then you end up with the crazy shit. | ||
| Inquisition, yeah. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| You just described why we need term limits. | ||
| You know, religion starts out as a good thing, and then it turned over time. | ||
| You know, guys go to Washington, they're going to make the world better. | ||
| And after 30 years there, they're corrupt. | ||
| And so... | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| I just thought of that. | ||
| But it's true. | ||
| You know, the same problem with religion happens in politics. | ||
| Well, the real shift of religion would take place if we were in contact with extraterrestrials. | ||
| That would be a crazy shit to see how people react. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what would be the adjustment? | ||
| Like, how would they treat... | ||
| If there was undeniable proof of extraterrestrial life that's visiting Earth, and then everyone knows it, it's real, it's as real as the NFL. It's real. | ||
| The NFL's not real. | ||
| I heard it's real. | ||
| Jamie's been to a game. | ||
| It's all filmed in a studio in New Mexico. | ||
| But if there was something along those lines, that would be interesting to see how people adjust to the idea that not only is there life out there besides us, that our origin story is not unique, and there's origin stories of countless planets all throughout space, and they're ahead of us. | ||
| They're not just where we are right now in 2020. They're where we're going to be in 30-20. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or even... | ||
| 30,000. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whatever it is. | ||
| 30 million. | ||
| So what you're describing is like super hard to take what you thought you believed and change your beliefs, right? | ||
| It's really hard to go. | ||
| You think everything's one way. | ||
| You have a certain ideology, your certain worldview, and then to go, you know what? | ||
| That was not right. | ||
| That was fucked up. | ||
| I got to switch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's hard. | ||
| That's really hard for people to... | ||
| Everything's been happening politically. | ||
| Some people are going, I used to think this way, but maybe that was wrong. | ||
| I try to encourage switching your mind as much as possible. | ||
| It's hard to do, man. | ||
| It is. | ||
| People have a hard time. | ||
| You can do it by, like, it has to be a principle. | ||
| And the principle is just don't be married to your opinions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And don't defend them if they're wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Because you are you. | ||
| You are not your opinions. | ||
| And if you attach yourself to your opinions and you're married to those opinions, and you have to defend them if you know they're not correct, you lose respect for yourself. | ||
| And it becomes very bad. | ||
| You put on blinders, you get locked in, and next thing you know, you're Joel Osteen on stage in front of 20... | ||
| Or Lindsey Graham or other people that they used to say one thing. | ||
| There's a book called Factfulness. | ||
| Have you ever read that? | ||
| No. | ||
| By Hans Rosling. | ||
| Highly, highly, highly... | ||
| You need to read it. | ||
| Bill Gates recommended it. | ||
| About a year ago, and it's amazing. | ||
| It's ten reasons why the world is better than what you think it is. | ||
| But the point of the book is don't hold onto an opinion because you believe it. | ||
| Have opinions that are grounded in facts. | ||
| And the point of the book is most people think the world's going down the tubes, everything is getting worse, there's war and famine. | ||
| And the reality is most of human life has gotten much better over the last 50 or 100 years. | ||
| Yeah, we tend to concentrate on things that are dangerous. | ||
| We tend to concentrate on the problems we have, whether it's crime or violence or whatever it is. | ||
| We think, this is what we need to think about. | ||
| This is the only thing there is. | ||
| But there's so much that's good in the world that wasn't good before. | ||
| Extreme poverty. | ||
| It used to be the West and the rest, right? | ||
| America and Europe was developed and everybody else was developing. | ||
| Now it's not like that. | ||
| I travel around the world. | ||
| There's KFC everywhere. | ||
| The buildings in Dubai. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| I don't think that's good. | ||
| We're spreading our disease to everybody. | ||
| But the point is, the world has developed. | ||
| And the people living in extreme poverty, that percentage has really shrunk. | ||
| Because of free market economies and liberal democracies in the last 50 years plus, these things have really transformed the world. | ||
| And even Africa is the most behind of all the continents, but all the trends are moving in the right direction there. | ||
| Like the birth rate's coming down, literacy rate's going up, women... | ||
| A lot of it comes down to how women are treated and places where women are treated better, all the metrics are better, the whole economy gets a lot better. | ||
| So anyway, a lot of things in the world have gotten better. | ||
| Hopefully we can continue that trend and hopefully this current, this is kind of my mission, this current divisive universe we live in, hopefully that doesn't reverse it because if it does, it'll suck for life on earth and we need to keep things moving in the right direction. | ||
| Yeah, I'm hoping that we come out of this, that this is a bad wave that we're on and we're going to come out the other end and recognize that there's real value in community and in getting along with each other and coming to agreements and real danger and divisiveness and being completely locked into these tribal beliefs like red versus blue. | ||
| But how do we come out of it? | ||
| Young people. | ||
| Young people growing up with a better perspective, listening to people that have gone through more in life and kind of understanding where the pitfalls lie, understanding the mental pitfalls that exist, just the natural inclination that human beings have to be tribal. | ||
| And that these, when you're blaming everything on the Republicans or blaming everything on the Democrats or blaming everything on, you know, whoever it is that's in power. | ||
| There's a lot to be said about being a human being in 2020 where it's pretty fucking amazing. | ||
| Even during the pandemic. | ||
| It's pretty amazing. | ||
| And we need to accentuate the good stuff and concentrate on the good stuff. | ||
| The things that we have in common are far more than the things that we have dispute over. | ||
| See that from space. | ||
| But I have a lot of hope in young... | ||
| In America, young people are not nearly as tribal as we were. | ||
| By race, by religion, by country, whatever it is. | ||
| Old people tend to be very tribal, and young people, they're happy to have someone from a different race, friends, and they don't care what your religion is. | ||
| High schoolers and college kids that I know have, I think, a pretty good attitude. | ||
| We just need to make sure, you know, between the media, the things that they see, you know, AI, and I don't know where that's going, but that is a force that does not necessarily unite us. | ||
| The incentives are to divide us and make you angry and that's where they get monetized. | ||
| Do you worry about that in terms of like AI, like in terms of algorithms for social media, which is, that's a big premise of the movie, The Social Dilemma. | ||
| That's an amazing movie. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| I worry about it a lot. | ||
| So Jim Cameron made these amazing films, Terminator, right? | ||
| Where AI, whatever, the robots come to life and they fight us like a World War II scene. | ||
| Like in Star Wars, it's just World War II battles. | ||
| Big armies shooting each other. | ||
| That's not the problem. | ||
| The problem is they take over our lives. | ||
| You've talked about this before. | ||
| Those algorithms are not there to make sure that we all live in harmony and improve our lives. | ||
| They're there to make sure they get more eyeballs and more revenue for advertisers and that kind of stuff. | ||
| And the way to do that is by encouraging hate and anger and, oh my god, I can't believe they did that, and you click on the next one. | ||
|
unidentified
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Look at this. | |
| This guy's such a moron. | ||
| And that's the kind of thing that generates a quick buck. | ||
| It's not what improves our political system and our society. | ||
| Yeah, it's really just that's what people gravitate towards, unfortunately. | ||
| Those things are smart, right? | ||
| They've figured out how humans work. | ||
| But they're not trying to divide us. | ||
| The misconception is that they're devising these algorithms to make sure that people fight. | ||
| No, people like to fight. | ||
| They like to argue with each other about stuff. | ||
| My friend Ari, I've talked about this too many times. | ||
| I apologize to people who have already heard it. | ||
| My friend Ari did an experiment where he only looked up puppies on YouTube. | ||
| And then all YouTube wanted to recommend to him was puppies. | ||
| Just constant puppy videos. | ||
| So it's not necessarily that YouTube's trying to divide you by showing you all these... | ||
| You know, discussions on abortion or free will or philosophy or Antifa. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Immigration. | ||
| Those are just the things that you're gravitating towards. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And it recognizes you're gravitating towards. | ||
| If you shifted that and only started looking up self-improvement. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And exercise and diet, nutrition. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| That's all they would recommend to you then. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's artificial intelligence, right? | ||
| So it learns. | ||
| And it learns what works for you. | ||
| And its goal is not to be evil. | ||
| Its goal is just to make money because that's who programmed it. | ||
| And unfortunately, the way people work is if we get this emotional response, then we'll do more and more of it. | ||
| And it figures that out. | ||
| So the algorithms are like... | ||
| Well, they talk about the echo chamber. | ||
| It's a self-reinforcing, self-licking ice cream cone where it just... | ||
| Unfortunately, it's taking us in a really bad direction, right? | ||
| Well, that's why people like Trump supporters are absolutely 100% convinced that he won this election and there's been a massive fraud. | ||
| And Democrats are 100% convinced that he's delusional and there's no evidence whatsoever of voter fraud. | ||
| And if you look at a person who is a Democrat who goes on YouTube all the time, you look at their YouTube feed, It's everything reinforcing those ideas. | ||
| CNN and MSNBC. And if you go to someone who's a hardcore Trumper, everything is Newsbacks, Sky News Australia, Breitbart shit. | ||
| It's all stuff that's reinforcing the idea there's massive voter fraud. | ||
| And you have like two different worlds that are existing. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| And I'm, you know, I'm a radical... | ||
| Moderate. | ||
| I think we have to have a third party. | ||
| I think that we have three decades of data points that show that the two-party system doesn't work. | ||
| I mean, they can't even pass a budget, right? | ||
| And I was a math major. | ||
| So there's this thing called a bell curve, right? | ||
| Most everything in life is in the middle of the fat part of the curve. | ||
| There's some extreme on the right, some extreme on the left. | ||
| If you look at the batting average of catchers or how many people are in a Whole Foods or the average temperature in July, everything's a bell curve, right? | ||
| And I think politics, most people are not radical, right? | ||
| Most people are not radical left. | ||
| A few people are. | ||
| And we should have a party for them. | ||
| But most people want to have a job. | ||
| They know we need some taxes. | ||
| They don't want too much taxes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| We've got to have police quit shooting people. | ||
| They believe in reasonably moderate stuff. | ||
| And the political system, you talk about the algorithms in social media, the political system has the same thing. | ||
| The primary system, the way you do gerrymandering, all of this is a self-reinforcing mechanism that promotes extreme right-wing candidates that are batshit crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| AOC, right? | ||
| And most people are not AOC and they're not QAnon. | ||
| Most people are like they just want their kids to have a good school and they want to have a good job. | ||
| The problem is when people who are moderate Democrats and they support radical leftist ideas or when people are moderate Republicans but they support radical right ideas, then other people start thinking like, well, that's then other people start thinking like, well, that's what the right is or that's what the left is. | ||
| And then they become more polarized. | ||
| When the people in their own party don't call out the ridiculous people on the fringes, then those people define you. | ||
| The most radical people in your party define your party. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| That's because that's what the Republicans are saying. | ||
| Oh, my God, Joe Biden's crazy socialist. | ||
| We're going to be the Soviet Union. | ||
| No, he's not. | ||
| He's the most normal guy in America. | ||
| He's a wolf in sheep's clothing. | ||
| This is what he's going to do. | ||
| He's going to bring in a bunch of hardcore bankers and hedge fund people, and they're all going to run economic policy. | ||
| They're all going to run. | ||
| They're going to be dealing with all the special interest groups. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And then they're going to have all these other people that are on that are talking all this left-wing woke shit. | ||
| And everyone's going to go, see, this is the most progressive Democratic candidate ever. | ||
| The best president ever. | ||
| But it's going to be two different things going on simultaneously. | ||
| And they're not going to call it out. | ||
| All the same things they called out about the Trump administration. | ||
| There's going to be a few people, like the really radical guys like Jimmy Dore, that's got balls, is going to talk against it. | ||
| But there's going to be a tremendous amount of people that just go along with it because they don't want to be called out for not supporting the party. | ||
| Well, they'll get a primary, right? | ||
| The worst thing for an incumbent is to get primaried as a verb because of the system we have that's so perverted. | ||
| Like, you have to be as right as possible to win your primary. | ||
| Or you have to be socialist in San Francisco, right? | ||
| God, it's bonkers. | ||
| You're 100% right. | ||
| We do need a third party. | ||
| And not just like... | ||
| Not Ross Perot. | ||
| We need a real one. | ||
| One that everybody gets behind and goes, hey, this makes sense. | ||
| A radical centrist. | ||
| That's me. | ||
| That's most people, I think. | ||
| I think that's most people. | ||
| And if you had that, then the best thing would be if they got 40% of the vote. | ||
| So then some things they'd have to partner with the Republicans to get this through. | ||
| Or some things they'd have to partner with the Democrats to get that thing through. | ||
| And then they'd actually have to make a deal to get stuff done. | ||
| Whereas now, you know, Supreme Court justices used to be approved 90 to zero. | ||
| Not too long ago. | ||
| And now, you know, you can't pass the Pledge of Allegiance and it's 51 to 49. You know, the partisanship. | ||
| And it's so insane. | ||
| And like Putin doesn't have to do that much. | ||
| He just has to watch us destroy from within. | ||
| You know, his goal is to... | ||
| Of course he wants America weakened. | ||
| China wants America weakened. | ||
| They're not trying to strengthen us. | ||
| And they kind of just need to let us go do our own thing because we're doing it to ourselves. | ||
| Well, you know, in their defense, we want China weakened and we want Russia weakened too. | ||
| It's a fucked up world. | ||
| And everybody needs to go to the goddamn space station and look down from the sky and have a perspective that's different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just look at it that way. | ||
| How many world leaders have ever gone into space like that? | ||
| None of them? | ||
| Well, we just had Mark Kelly was my colleague, astronaut. | ||
| He got elected into the Senate, so he's not a president, but he's a senator. | ||
| You know, there's a few former astronauts. | ||
| John Glenn ran for president, but he didn't make it. | ||
| It's pretty rare. | ||
| Most politicians are politicians. | ||
| They're not... | ||
| They didn't have a useful career before. | ||
| They were lawyers and they just kind of came up through the political ranks. | ||
| But something like that. | ||
| Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer. | ||
| He was a Naval Academy grad. | ||
| So he was like, he wasn't an astronaut, but he was at least technically trained. | ||
| He understood basic stuff. | ||
| He also saw a UFO. He tried to put us on the metric system and lost elections. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| I was in grammar school, or whatever school I was in, and they tried to force soccer on us and the metric system. | ||
| You got to fight the battles that are worth fighting. | ||
| Those things will get you not elected. | ||
| Well, the metric system was interesting, because I was like, wow, this makes so much more sense than inches. | ||
| Everything's in denominations of 10. The whole world uses it. | ||
| It's way better in every way. | ||
| It's just Americans don't like it, so... | ||
| Well, we could have learned that. | ||
| That's not that goddamn hard. | ||
| I'm writing a kid's book right now, and I think I'm going to do it all in metrics. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Just to get them used to kilometers and meters and kilograms, yeah. | ||
| Well, muscle cars you have to keep in miles per hour. | ||
| I don't give a fuck what anybody says. | ||
| And airplanes you need in knots. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Nautical miles per hour. | ||
| So the whole world, everybody uses metric, but airplanes are always in feet, like your altitude is feet. | ||
| Because otherwise you've got to do it by 300 meters, which is weird in knots. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, meters versus yards. | ||
| In the military, when they're ranging targets and they're assessing distance, do they use meters? | ||
| I think they do, because most soldiers talk in meters when you talk to them about stuff. | ||
| So for a fighter pilot, the runway visibility range was in meters or statute miles, which it depended on the thing you were reading. | ||
| What's a statute mile? | ||
| A mile. | ||
| Well, that's what you see on Interstate 10 is statute miles as opposed to a nautical mile. | ||
| Oh, what's the difference? | ||
| 15%. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because one degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles. | ||
| So every minute is a nautical mile. | ||
| So if you're looking at a map, you can just go, there's five minutes, there's five miles. | ||
| It's a really convenient way to measure distance. | ||
| That does make sense. | ||
| It's just different than statute. | ||
| The Brits, man. | ||
| My buddy, British guy, was trying to explain money. | ||
| And they've got like farthings and shillings and pence and it's one twelfth of this and it's one eighth of... | ||
| I don't know how... | ||
| That's an old system, man. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, they also have fucking stone. | ||
| And they drive on the left side of the road. | ||
| He's ten stone. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Ten stone? | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| I'll be back in a fortnight. | ||
| Yeah, oh, that's rough. | ||
| But they do measure themselves in stones. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, when I used to do the UFC commentary in England, I would do the weigh-in, because I do the commentary for the weigh-in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so they would give me, you know, 155 pounds, and then I'll say, you know, like, 11 stone! | ||
| Like, whatever, I don't know. | ||
| Was a stone 13 pounds? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| 14? | ||
| 14. 14 pounds. | ||
| So if someone was fighting at 145 pounds, it'd be like, 10 stone 5 pounds! | ||
| And 4 pence. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And they put stuff in the boot and the bonnet, you know, when you're driving. | ||
| That's interesting, too. | ||
| Yeah, the boot and the bonnet instead of the trunk and the hood. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, I love them over there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it is interesting that their country and their system is so old. | ||
| They still have the goddamn king and queen, but they don't mean anything anymore. | ||
| They have the prince, and they have the queen, and they treat them like royalty. | ||
| Like when Meghan and Prince, whatever his name is, Harry, is that what it is? | ||
| They get kicked out of the royal family. | ||
| Everyone's like, aghast. | ||
| Kicked out of the royal family. | ||
| Getting more hits than Justin Bieber, probably on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, but it's just like royals. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You guys have... | ||
| You still have the ancestors of the people who suppressed your ancestors you hold at high value. | ||
| Like, that's so bizarre. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's a very uniquely modern, but yet bizarrely antiquated... | ||
| Culture. | ||
| They love it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They love the Royals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they love British culture. | ||
| British people love British culture. | ||
| Yeah, they do. | ||
| It's really fascinating. | ||
| I love it, too. | ||
| That's pretty fun. | ||
| I'm still pissed about the burning the White House thing. | ||
| Burning the White House thing? | ||
| In 1812, you know, Dolly Madison had to, like, roll up the picture of George Washington. | ||
| Yeah, when the Brits came here, they burned down their White House. | ||
| You're still upset about that? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I'm holding the grudge. | ||
| Gotta let that go, bro. | ||
| Those guys aren't even alive anymore. | ||
| I mean, talk to my therapist. | ||
| Get back to Aliens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everybody's favorite. | ||
| Do you know anybody who's seen anything? | ||
| You know, I have not talked to people directly. | ||
| The weirdest thing, honestly, are those Navy videos that came out a few years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Those things are just bizarre. | ||
| I talked to him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Was he on the show? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a very believable guy in the way he describes it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's not crazy Area 51 guy. | ||
| He's a fighter pilot. | ||
| And he's had one experience. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But in talking to the other people that he worked with, those things would appear every couple of weeks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They would find them and see them. | ||
| They'd see them on radar. | ||
| They'd track them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I was, by that point, I was not, I was at NASA, I wasn't flying F-16, so I never heard about it. | ||
| But other guys had heard stories about it. | ||
| And, you know, there's, you can look at the radar tapes, and you can look at the HUD, the infrared HUD heads-up display, you know, the view out the front of the airplane. | ||
|
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|
Mm-hmm. | |
| So you can see them, and they're going up and down pretty fast. | ||
| So I don't know what it was. | ||
| I don't know why an alien would fly to Earth and then hide in the ocean and tease an F-18 and then never be seen again. | ||
| That's kind of weird, but something weird was happening. | ||
| It wasn't lightning. | ||
| It wasn't a cloud. | ||
| It wasn't a special... | ||
| I don't know what it was, but it's definitely bizarre. | ||
| But you never got a chance to see anything when you were up there? | ||
| Now, there's a YouTube video of me hiding in a UFO, because this UFO came. | ||
| I'm doing my spacewalk, and there's a flash of light or something, and then I just move my hand in front of it. | ||
| And there's a guy, 10-minute commentary about, and there, Terry Virch just is blocking it. | ||
| There's a UFO out there, and he's- Oh, no! | ||
| Because the camera, because clearly the other 10 cameras won't see it. | ||
| The only camera that sees it is right here, and I just happened to- So it's a conspiracy theory guy? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's total conspiracy theory. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I've seen ones where they're talking about people in the space station, where they say that the space station is all green screen, and you can see there's a glitch in the video quality. | ||
| So they say, here you see, there's an error, and he's not even holding the hammer anymore. | ||
| Have you seen any of those videos? | ||
| I have heard those. | ||
| I haven't watched them, but I've heard about them. | ||
| We're on wires like Sandra Bullock and Gravity. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, here's the thing. | ||
| People say, excuse me, we didn't land on the moon. | ||
| You know, you can't see any stars. | ||
| Well, so Bill Clinton couldn't cover up Monica Lewinsky. | ||
| So how is NASA covering up 300,000 people? | ||
| They convinced them all to never say a word for 50 years, you know? | ||
| Like, of course you can't cover anything up today because somebody's going to get a video of it. | ||
| I think you can cover things up in the 60s a lot easier than you can cover things up today. | ||
| Yeah, but we got satellites that are taking pictures of the Apollo 11 lander, and you can see the boot prints where they walked around and, you know. | ||
| So, you can see... | ||
| In fact, we just found one of the old boosters was up in space and it kind of came back to Earth. | ||
| And the astronomers just found it. | ||
| Yeah, the space junk. | ||
| They just found old space stuff from rocket launches that they were trying to figure out what this object was that was hurling around Earth. | ||
| And they realized that it was... | ||
| One of those old boosters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is pretty wild. | ||
| They were like throwing... | ||
| Giant metal tubes off into space, letting them float around out there. | ||
| Deep space is fine, but I think one of the biggest problems humanity has is debris in low Earth orbit. | ||
| Well, have you ever seen a map of all the debris? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's just a... | ||
| It's horrifying. | ||
| There's so many pieces of shit up there. | ||
| Yeah, it's just a big fat crayon of stuff. | ||
| There's tens of... | ||
| The Air Force... | ||
| Well, the Space Force tracks tens of thousands of these things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Space Force. | |
| Space Force. | ||
| That's a new thing. | ||
| Patrick Air Force Base and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station just got renamed yesterday, I think. | ||
| They're Patrick Space Force Base and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. | ||
| Now, when they say Space Force, what structure is there? | ||
| Are there generals in the Space Force? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there fighter jets that can go into space? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I was going to say that are in development, like something that we could actually use to wage war in space? | ||
| So we've had a Space Force for 50 years. | ||
| I mean, the budget the military has is much bigger than NASA's budget, right? | ||
| So we've been flying satellites in space. | ||
| GPS is an Air Force program. | ||
| There's spy satellites. | ||
| There's communication satellites. | ||
| There's weather. | ||
| There's offensive capabilities and defensive capabilities. | ||
| We've had that for years. | ||
| The problem was it was organized in the Air Force working for a pilot who never did anything space in his whole career. | ||
| Or in the Navy. | ||
| The Navy has its own little space command. | ||
| Or the Army has its own space command. | ||
| So it kind of didn't make sense to have all these space guys that are launching rockets and not flying satellites working for the infantrymen, right, or a boat driver. | ||
| So they kind of just organized it all together. | ||
| So they didn't, like, create stormtroopers or X-Wing fighters. | ||
| It was more of a reorganization thing. | ||
| Personally, I think we need a cyber force also because... | ||
| Those guys are super important. | ||
| You don't need a million of them, but you need tens of thousands of computer nerds that know how to do computer stuff, because it's really important. | ||
| Today, they're working for an infantryman and a boat driver and a pilot, and I think they need their own organization, too. | ||
| Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. | ||
| But this Space Force thing, how do they plan on expanding this? | ||
| Like, it just was named Space Force for the last couple years, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And the idea is that we need to concentrate on the possibility that there will be military action that takes place in space. | ||
| So when I was commander of the station, I had to maneuver the space station to avoid debris that the Chinese created back in 2007. Really? | ||
| So the Chinese military launched an AI satellite weapon. | ||
| They just wanted to show us that, hey, America, we can do this. | ||
| They blew up a satellite a couple hundred miles up. | ||
| And this debris is still there today. | ||
| They're still maneuvering the station a couple times a year to avoid it. | ||
| And so there is military action already in space. | ||
| When did they do this? | ||
| 2007. Did anybody tell them, hey, assholes, if you do this... | ||
| Well, no, they didn't ask. | ||
| And to be honest, I think the general that did it probably got a life sentence or something. | ||
| I think the Chinese were embarrassed about it because they realized what a disaster it was. | ||
| Because all these satellites are now having to maneuver, the space station is having to maneuver to avoid the debris. | ||
| Unfortunately, our Indian friends did the same exact thing last year. | ||
| They're beating their chest, look what we can do, and they blew up a satellite in low Earth orbit and created debris. | ||
| So countries need to not do that shit, because this debris doesn't go away. | ||
| Is there a way to catch it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, yeah, there is. | ||
| It's going... | ||
| Eight kilometers a second. | ||
| It's going five miles a second. | ||
| So you could launch a rocket, go up, and pick up this piece of metal that got blown up, and you could grab it with a robotic arm and bring it back to Earth. | ||
| There's 10,000 other pieces that are going eight kilometers a second in other directions. | ||
| So then you need to launch another rocket to go pick up the other one. | ||
| What about like a net? | ||
| Like a big net that you scoop it all up with? | ||
| It's going 8 kilometers a second, so it's got to be a strong net. | ||
| And they don't stay within a couple feet of each other, right? | ||
| They're going to diverge. | ||
| So there are people trying to think of it. | ||
| There's really smart Silicon Valley tech. | ||
| If you could figure it out, you could make a lot of money. | ||
| Does anybody have any sort of viable plan? | ||
| I've heard about some gel concepts where you just kind of move the thing and it gets stuck in it like a fly, not a fly net, but sort of like flypaper. | ||
| Something like that, yeah. | ||
| That's how NASA did a mission years ago, Stardust, where they flew this gel through a comet's tail and all the particles got stuck in the gel. | ||
| It's going really fast, but it got stuck. | ||
| And then it came back to Earth and they dug through the gel and picked out these little dust particles. | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| So there's things you can do, but the best thing to do is just don't create the mess. | ||
| Yeah, but we already have so much mess up there, right? | ||
| And then there's also satellites that are eventually going to go dark. | ||
| So the Russians had a satellite that died maybe 10 years ago, and it... | ||
| Ran into an Iridium satellite, which is a satellite telephone satellite. | ||
| So when you do sat phones, it goes through Iridium, one of the systems. | ||
| Anyway, it exploded, made a bunch of mess. | ||
| We got to maneuver the space station a couple times a year to avoid that debris. | ||
| So if you actually had a shooting war where some country said, you know what, America depends on, our military is dependent on satellites, and we want to blind them. | ||
| We want to poke them in the eye. | ||
| It's a lot cheaper to build an anti-satellite weapon than it is a massive space infrastructure. | ||
| So let's just shoot down their satellites. | ||
| The debris that that could cause could make access to low Earth orbit. | ||
| Not possible for centuries or thousands of years. | ||
| And these super constellations of these little satellites, SpaceX is launching one, Airbus is launching one, Starlink. | ||
| They want to launch tens of thousands of small satellites that will provide broadband, which is great for these African countries. | ||
| They don't have broadband. | ||
| It's an amazing thing if you could get it. | ||
| The problem is there's tens of thousands of satellites flying around. | ||
| And if 10% of them break, there's thousands of satellites flying around uncontrolled. | ||
| So the risk to debris is pretty profound, and there's no government organization regulating it. | ||
| There's no FAA or Coast Guard or anything like that for space that regulates it. | ||
| What's the thought process behind it that eventually we'll figure out how to get it down and fix it? | ||
| I think the thought process is let's launch them and make money from it as soon as possible. | ||
| I think that's the thought process. | ||
| I mean, I've talked to people, top levels, the U.S. government. | ||
| They think it's a huge problem. | ||
| Other, you know, PhDs, CEOs, you know, I think it's a problem that not a lot of people are talking about. | ||
| Yeah, sounds terrifying. | ||
| The movie Gravity was based on that premise, the Kessler syndrome, where one satellite makes a cloud, and that hits 10 satellites, and that makes a bigger cloud, and it's this cascading effect. | ||
| Hopefully it doesn't happen, but if it did, it would make a mess that's not clean-up-able. | ||
| If we pollute a river, you can stop polluting it, you can clean it up. | ||
| Within years or decades, it'll clean up eventually. | ||
| But when you pollute space, you may have to wait thousands of years for the stuff to decay. | ||
| We'll have to call upon the aliens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Time lapse of space debris from 57 to 2015, it says. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I love this. | ||
| I've seen this before. | ||
| We're still in the 70s. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| We're still in the 70s. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now we're going up to geosynchronous orbit where there's all that stuff around the equator, all the communication satellites. | ||
| And that's just 2015. Yeah. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| We're so gross. | ||
| Aliens must be like, these assholes. | ||
| That's why they're not coming. | ||
| They don't want to fly through that mess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| To get back to Earth. | ||
| Like, legitimately, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I bet it's probably really difficult to get through all that crap. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| You know, we used to have shuttle launch. | ||
| We were waiting until the last second to launch a shuttle to see if there was going to be a, we call it a conjunction, when two pieces come together in orbit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| To make sure that wasn't going to happen. | ||
| It's a tough problem. | ||
| When I did my spacewalks on the outside of the station, you see lots of little divots like the size of this, you know, just little things where a piece of paint or a... | ||
| A nut or a bolt or something hit it going 8 kilometers a second. | ||
| A nut or a bolt? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Wouldn't that pull right through it? | ||
| Something that... | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I mean, at a certain point, it's going to just go through it. | ||
| But a chip of paint would actually leave a dent. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Do you hear things? | ||
| Like a bink? | ||
| Do you ever hear like a... | ||
| What I heard was like popping and creaking from the state... | ||
| When it gets hot and cold, it expands and shrinks and expands and shrinks and... | ||
| I remember my first flight, I went into the European module, the Columbus module, and I was sleeping there. | ||
| And all night long, it was just... | ||
| And sometimes in my sleeping quarters, I'd hear this and I'm like, there's nothing I can do about it. | ||
| There's no need to worry. | ||
| Has anybody died up there? | ||
| Not on the space station. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, I wrote a chapter about what to do if, you know, what do you do with a body if your crewmate died. | ||
| But thank God that hasn't happened. | ||
| But, you know, we're humans and we don't last forever. | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
| Oh, is that a glass hole? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is it a flick of paint, it says. | |
| It looks like it hit the window, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| A flick of paint created that smashed window. | ||
| The windows are full of little holes that you're like, uh-oh. | ||
| I remember one morning we woke up and I saw that. | ||
| And I had to take a picture and send it back home. | ||
| Look at that one! | ||
| It's like a test, I think, is what it said. | ||
| This is the damage that a half ounce of space debris can do. | ||
| Click on that so I can see the full... | ||
| Yeah, that's what the little craters look like. | ||
| There's gravity. | ||
| So this must be right after gravity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's what the craters look like, yeah. | ||
| They're smaller than that, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, fuck that. | ||
| It's kinetic energy. | ||
| One half mv squared, right? | ||
| That's just a big V. It's an insane impact. | ||
| So if we want to have commercial travel, space travel, they're going to have to sort that out. | ||
| So the suborbital flights, it's not an issue because they go up to 100 kilometers and come right back down. | ||
| They're not morbid. | ||
| But yeah, for all space travel for the future, we need to manage debris smarter. | ||
| And it has to be in a way that it can't just be America because every country can launch stuff. | ||
| So we really need a global cooperation to let everybody agree to not ruin Earth orbit. | ||
| And if someone goes up there and gets hit with debris and then their spaceship blows up up there, then we're triple fucked, right? | ||
| The shuttle actually had these big payload bay doors, right? | ||
| The things would open up. | ||
| The radiators were there. | ||
| And you had to have the radiators where it would overheat and die. | ||
| And when it came back, it was like somebody shot a.22 through it. | ||
| There was this perfect hole that went right through the radiator. | ||
| But luckily, it didn't hit the line where the fluid would have leaked out. | ||
| But everybody went, holy shit, man. | ||
| We got lucky on that one. | ||
| Literally, it was the size of a.22, a little bullet hole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're there for 200 days going, I hope nothing hits because there's nothing you can do about it. | ||
| So I hate to keep harping on this alien thing, but that's all I'm fascinated by when it comes to space travel. | ||
| You never talked to anybody that saw anything weird? | ||
| Not that I can tell you about. | ||
| No, not that you can tell me about. | ||
| I'm joking, yeah. | ||
| I don't believe you're joking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Did you ever like, I mean, you're up there, you're seeing so many stars and so many, I mean, you have this insane view of the universe as you were describing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think I would have just stared out the window all day. | ||
| I would love to have, you know, filmed it. | ||
| I did as much as I could. | ||
| The problem is it was all in my spare time because they give you this. | ||
| How much spare time do you get? | ||
| Not a lot. | ||
| I mean, maybe a couple hours at night, but I would have a pocket full of little CF cards for my camera. | ||
| So, once I had dinner, I would always try to... | ||
| There's you, buddy. | ||
| There I am in the cupola taking pictures. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That was my favorite thing to do. | ||
| So, and you see those little dots on the window? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's something hit the window on the outside. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what those are? | |
| Yeah, it's the impact debris from a piece of paint or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, on the outside. | ||
| A lot of paint flying around up there, huh? | ||
| Something small. | ||
| So at nighttime is when I would download all the images I'd taken or I'd run down and try and take another picture or something like that. | ||
| Because the day was just full of normal work. | ||
| You've got to work to earn your paycheck. | ||
| But I was taking pictures whenever I could. | ||
| Now, what has changed in terms of the materials that they use to construct these things? | ||
| Because I know you wanted to talk about graphene. | ||
| Yeah, graphene's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think it has some potential maybe radiation shielding or debris shielding. | ||
| Because graphene, I don't know if you know much about it, but... | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| I've learned in the last couple years, helping a couple startups with it. | ||
| But it's basically a single layer of carbon. | ||
| And it's in these hexagon, like six carbons bond together and another six and another six. | ||
| And so... | ||
| It's like 20 times stronger than steel, more conductive electrically than copper. | ||
| So you can make some amazing things out of graphene, nanotubes. | ||
| The potential is massive, right? | ||
| This stuff was only discovered in like 2004, I think. | ||
| Guys won the Nobel or the prize for discovering this. | ||
| But it's really hard to work with because it's so thin. | ||
| It's hard and expensive to make. | ||
| You know, it's difficult to do stuff with it. | ||
| But I think for space travel, because in space everything's about mass and weight. | ||
| It's tens of thousands of dollars a pound to launch stuff. | ||
| So you can make stuff stronger and lighter, which is pretty important for anything in life, but especially space travel. | ||
| And how long has this existed for? | ||
| They discovered it in 2004. A Russian guy and a British guy in the UK. And I think they were working with graphite. | ||
| So just pencil lead. | ||
| A piece of rock they pulled out of the ground. | ||
| And the story goes that they were trying to shine it or grind it down and they were having a hard time. | ||
| So a guy took a piece of tape and he's like, that's a really thin layer of carbon. | ||
| So just like scotch tape pulled off this single layer of carbon atom that was this amazingly strong material. | ||
| And there's a lot of promise there. | ||
| The problem is actually getting it into these products. | ||
| Interesting, you can put it in like concrete or asphalt and it's, you know, 10% stronger, cures 10% quicker, which in construction is massive. | ||
| The Rome airport just paved a taxiway with graphene-infused asphalt, which is pretty cool. | ||
| In Austin, there's not a lot of potholes, but imagine if you had roads without potholes. | ||
| How much money could the local government save and how many tires would be saved from that? | ||
| If you could 3D print materials that weren't just bendable plastic but were super steel, what applications could you do with that? | ||
| Probably a lot of different things. | ||
| And it would be incredibly light, too. | ||
| Yeah, if you could do plastic bags that were biodegradable or 50% less plastic because they were stronger. | ||
| I know someone who's working on that who's actually demonstrated it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa, whoa, whoa. | |
| Go back up there. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| BAC debuts first ever graphene constructed vehicle. | ||
| Look at that fucking car. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| You can also use it in tires. | ||
| So that's carbon fiber. | ||
| That's carbon fiber. | ||
| So is that... | ||
| What is... | ||
| Carbon fiber. | ||
| Graphene? | ||
| You can infuse graphene into the carbon fiber. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, so strength and lightweight qualities that surpass that of carbon fiber make graphene the potential game changer in the car world. | ||
| According to a BAC press release, graphene is made of sheets of carbon that are just one atom thick and significantly lighter than standard carbon fiber. | ||
| It's also stronger than carbon fiber, meaning that it can bring weight reductions around 20% while being 200 times stronger than steel. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I missed a zero. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And you can also... | ||
| Tires are made of something called carbon black, which is just awful. | ||
| It's just nasty. | ||
| So if you can replace that with graphene or some percentage of it... | ||
| And Goodyear's done that. | ||
| They've actually made... | ||
| I think they've got some bike tires for sale. | ||
| But don't tires need to be sticky? | ||
| So they need to be soft. | ||
| How are you going to do that with graphene? | ||
| You'd have to do it. | ||
| You need strength in a lot of it. | ||
| But where the rubber meets the road needs to be sticky. | ||
| That would have to remain rubber. | ||
| You'd have to... | ||
| They've got a lot of smart PhDs doing this stuff. | ||
| But figuring out how to... | ||
| Integrate it is not easy. | ||
| If it was, everybody would be doing it. | ||
| It's been like the promise of tomorrow for the last 15 years. | ||
| But I think some folks are actually making materials and products with it, which is pretty amazing. | ||
| It is amazing when you think of the potential for innovation, whether it's graphene or different clean energy sources. | ||
| I'm sure you've been in an electric car and you've driven one of those. | ||
| They're preposterously fast. | ||
| The acceleration is awesome, yeah. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| Like, they're so superior. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I was driving my buddy's Ferrari. | ||
| He's got a 488 like this. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| I got to drive a LaFerrari once. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| A Tesla just buries it. | ||
| 2.5, 0 to 60, or whatever it is. | ||
| Yeah, I have a Model S. It's insane. | ||
| It's insanity. | ||
| It's crazy, yeah. | ||
| It's hard to believe. | ||
| The limiting factor is the tires. | ||
| The tires can't keep up with the motor. | ||
| And he's going to come out with that Roadster that's going to be significantly faster, half a second to 60, faster than that car. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 1.9. | ||
| 1.90 to 60. Humans can't control that. | ||
| That's a dangerous... | ||
| That is a dangerous car. | ||
| Well, even a Ferrari, right? | ||
| Like, you'd think just some regular asshole like me or you could just go and buy one of those. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't have to have, like, race car skills. | ||
| Right, no. | ||
| You don't have to be Jeff Probst. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| You can just be some... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can be... | ||
| Or Randy Probst, I should say. | ||
| Jeff Probst is a survivor guy, right? | ||
| Whoops. | ||
| Randy Probst, race car driver. | ||
| I had a crewmate at the Air Force. | ||
| That's the Roadster? | ||
| That's real. | ||
| Oh my god, that's insane. | ||
| 60 miles an hour in 1.9 seconds. | ||
| 250 miles an hour top speed. | ||
| 600 miles, wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's going to be the fastest thing on the road. | ||
| I need one of those. | ||
| Oh, you definitely do. | ||
| Yeah, I definitely need one of those. | ||
| But it's vaporware right now. | ||
| Right now it's vaporware, and he's really concentrating on the truck, the Cybertruck, before he puts this thing out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which really sucks. | ||
| I think some people actually bought it in advance, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| A couple of years ago. | ||
| Put a deposit down. | ||
| I don't think it's a deposit, son. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Reservation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| $250. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pre-pay. | |
| Bro, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I think it's supposed to be delivered already now. | ||
| Yes, it has! | ||
| Big delays. | ||
| The stock's at $600. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| It's an amazing vehicle. | ||
| That's for sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's amazing. | |
| I need one of those. | ||
| But is there ever going to be a time where something like that can be used for space travel or for rocket travel? | ||
| Like, do we need... | ||
| Obviously, with a car, you're dealing with friction and traction on the ground with the tires. | ||
| You just need something to spin the tires. | ||
| But with a jet engine or with a rocket, you need something to push out the back to make you go forward. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're on to the right thing because it's the first minute that's the hardest part of any spaceflight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's gravity. | ||
| You're not moving. | ||
| There's air. | ||
| The air is really thick here. | ||
| You go up 100,000 feet, there's hardly any air. | ||
| So that initial part is like half of the energy required to get into space. | ||
| And so there are some air-launched options where you go up on an airplane and, you know, you drop down and then launch up into space. | ||
| Paul Allen from Microsoft had a company, unfortunately, just went out of business. | ||
| Richard Branson has Virgin Orbit. | ||
| So Virgin Galactic is the $250,000. | ||
| You launch from an airplane, go up for five minutes and come straight back down. | ||
| And it's a quarter million dollars? | ||
| It's a quarter million dollars. | ||
| They're doing that right now? | ||
| No. | ||
| They did it in 2004 for their first test flight. | ||
| And here it is, 2020. Hopefully next year they're going to do it for real. | ||
| Um, but they have origin orbit where instead of people, they put a big satellite on there and launch it into space. | ||
| And the idea is you, you know, instead of having boosters for the first stage, you have a airliner for the first stage and that gets you to 500 miles an hour and 30,000 feet, which is a lot of the requirement to get into space. | ||
| They did that with the Space Shuttle, right? | ||
| They did things where the Space Shuttle was on top of a plane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was called SALT, Shuttle Approach and Landing Testing. | ||
| That was like 1977, I think, where they put it on a 747, and then the 747 pushed and the shuttle pulled up, and then it just came into land. | ||
| But that was a glider enterprise, Space Shuttle Enterprise, the test landing. | ||
| Virgin Galactic is launching a historic human space flight this week. | ||
| I did not even know that. | ||
| Very cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
By Friday they're going to try to get it up. | |
| They're coming to the end of their test program and I would not be surprised if they're launching paying customers next year. | ||
| You have to be really brave. | ||
| There is risk. | ||
| There is definitely risk. | ||
| Well, didn't Elon's thing blow up yesterday? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Rockets blow up sometimes. | ||
| What the fuck was that? | ||
| What the fuck does that mean? | ||
| The launch was fine. | ||
| That's the landing part. | ||
| You need to have that part. | ||
| You can't just not have the landing part. | ||
| We used to say, you know, if you can walk away, that's a good landing. | ||
| If you can use the airplane again, that's a great landing, so... | ||
| Well, that's the whole process, that they want to be able to use these things over and over again. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| When you were talking about the three explosions that happened in a row when they were coming to relieve you guys or bring you supplies, how often do these things blow up? | ||
| What's the average? | ||
| Not that often. | ||
| Three in a row seems like it was a bad year. | ||
| Yeah, if there was three Teslas in a row that just blew up, people would be freaking out and want them pulled off the road. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I know. | ||
| The Rockets are pretty reliable. | ||
| The Atlas, which has been around for years, the Atlas V has never had a failure, so knock on wood. | ||
| The Soyuz has been around for 50 years, and it's less than 5% failure, so they've had a lot of successes with that. | ||
| 5% is a lot. | ||
| It's a few percent have failed. | ||
| 1% is 100 launch. | ||
| Would you get on an airplane if 99 times out of 100 you get to land? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| No. | ||
| 5% is way more. | ||
| It's a lot more. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| That's every 100, five people die. | ||
| Five things blow up. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| We lost two out of 135 shuttles. | ||
| So that's more than 1%. | ||
| 98.5% or something. | ||
| How much of that could have been prevented? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Both of those were not technical problems. | ||
| You could figure out what the technical problems were, but they were management problems. | ||
| The Challenger was a management problem. | ||
| I teach this course at Harvard Business School, and we talk about Challenger and Columbia, the case studies. | ||
| It was the same mistake in both cases. | ||
| There was a problem with the shuttle that was talking to them. | ||
| It was talking to them. | ||
| They knew about it. | ||
| They knew about it. | ||
| And they... | ||
| And people below them were saying, hey, this is a problem, this is a problem. | ||
| And they just kind of barreled full speed ahead. | ||
| How do you feel about private businesses getting into space travel as opposed to NASA? I think it's great. | ||
| I think that, in general, the government is just a giant bureaucracy. | ||
| It's the self-licking ice cream cone. | ||
| You're just trying to get jobs for congressional districts. | ||
| And when you look at today's government programs, they just take decades and cost billions and often don't produce very much. | ||
| Private companies, on the other hand, can't raise taxes, so they've got to get their stuff flying as fast as they can. | ||
| So there's this incentive to, if you blow something up, fix it and launch again the next day. | ||
| So that's really good, and you can get... | ||
| You know, engineers going right out of college, and there's a lot of really great things about the private space. | ||
| Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, a guy named Tim Ellis at Relativity, who's amazing, is young, he's probably 30 years old now, has this amazing rocket company, and I think he's raised over $100 million in VC funding. | ||
| So that's the good side of it. | ||
| The bad side of it is they do blow up sometimes, and they don't necessarily have 50 years of lessons, we always say they're written in blood. | ||
| The rules are written in blood because somebody died and you had to come up with a new rule. | ||
| So you have to balance. | ||
| For satellites, it's great. | ||
| For people, you've got to have some adult supervision to keep the engineers with their hair on fire under control a little bit. | ||
| Do you think that competition within private industry, like you got Jeff Bezos company, you got Elon Musk company, Virgin Galactic, you got all these different companies that are trying to compete against each other. | ||
| Do you think that that is going to push innovation further than just relying on, like you're saying, these bureaucrats? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Without it, there is no innovation. | ||
| I mean, without the Yankees, the Red Sox are going to suck, right? | ||
| So you have to have, in fighting, in life in general, you got to have competition or you're not going to, you won't push yourself to that next level. | ||
| Right, and the Russians were always our competition during the initial space race, right? | ||
| So the fear of that Soviet flag on the moon... | ||
| I don't know if you know the story. | ||
| We were going to do this slow buildup project and then Apollo 1 fire happened that slowed everything down. | ||
| The Soviets had this big N1 moon rocket and NASA made the really ballsy decision to send Apollo 8 on a lap around the moon, which kind of sped up the moon landing by one or two missions. | ||
| That enabled it to land in 1969. Had they not made that kind of gutsy call, Apollo 11 probably would not have happened in 69. So sometimes you've got to take a chance. | ||
| And they're talking about putting some sort of a base on the moon. | ||
| How feasible is that? | ||
| Well, you could do anything you want with enough money, right? | ||
| With enough time and money, you could do whatever you want. | ||
| So if you had a president that was motivated and you got the Congress and the Senate and the House, you got everybody behind them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The American public's behind them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Spend that money. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| They could conceivably have a base on the moon where astronauts could go there, visit, do their stuff, and then come back the same way you do with the space station. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, you'd need a special lander, like the funny-looking moon lander. | ||
| But yeah, you could do that for sure. | ||
| We did, look, in 61, the beginning of 1961, nobody had ever flown in space. | ||
| Eight and a half years later, Buzz and Neil were on the moon. | ||
| In eight and a half years in 1960s, there was no iPhones, there was no computers. | ||
| That's how fast we did it in the 60s. | ||
| So you could definitely, if you had the money and you had the vision and you knew what you were going to do, that kind of thing definitely could happen, yeah. | ||
| That would be the ultimate tourism. | ||
| That would be pretty cool. | ||
| I probably would have stuck around at NASA. What is this, Jamie? | ||
| They just, just within the last day, released a plan for the... | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| Detailed plan for 2024 moon base camp. | ||
| Wow, that sounds ambitious. | ||
| Four years from now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that was political. | ||
| That was for Trump's second term. | ||
| He came up with that date to... | ||
| You think he's full of shit? | ||
| We're not landing on the moon in 2024, for sure. | ||
| But the good news, the good thing about having a deadline is that it lights a fire, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At anything. | ||
| If you're going to the gym, you've got to have some... | ||
| Some goals. | ||
| Compelling reason to get it done. | ||
| If you don't, you're just going to be lazy and not get it done. | ||
| The advantage of having a deadline. | ||
| I think the reason we landed by 1969 is we didn't have quite enough time to do it. | ||
| And we were able to do it. | ||
| If you make a crazy thing, then you're never going to get there. | ||
| Like if I say I want to run a marathon in three hours, that's never going to happen. | ||
| But if I go, I want to run a marathon without running, I could probably get there. | ||
| So you have to have goals that are probably more, you know, on the edge. | ||
| You can't make some crazy goal that's never going to happen. | ||
| Being a part of this whole space program and having spent so much time in the space station, do you ever, like, just daydream and think, what is it going to be like a thousand years from now? | ||
| What is it going to be like 5,000 years from now? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| So I liked science fiction as a kid. | ||
| I liked Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov and stuff. | ||
| And these guys, that's what they had. | ||
| They had bases on Mercury and Venus and stuff. | ||
| So you wonder, can we get there? | ||
| And I think, again, it all comes back to politics, Joe. | ||
| If we can figure out how to be smart about how we live our lives on Earth, we can do amazingly great things. | ||
| If it's all about fighting each other and stuff, then we're going to be cavemen, you know, again. | ||
| But is this where private enterprise comes into play in terms of, like, space travel? | ||
| Because privately fund space travel is not as saddled down by politics. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| That's the hope that I have for our space program is in good old-fashioned American innovation. | ||
| There's nowhere else like it. | ||
| China claims that they have a private space program, but they're just copying the SpaceX Dragon capsule and it's government funded. | ||
| So I think America, of all of our faults, our innovation is pretty damn good. | ||
| And that's where we have our competitive advantage over the rest of the world. | ||
| And we don't want to use it to beat them. | ||
| We want to use it to lead the world in the right direction. | ||
| Like, what is, amongst other astronauts, what is the feeling about the future of space travel? | ||
| Are people divided? | ||
| Are people optimistic? | ||
| Or do they have, is there sort of a universal view of what the future is going to look like? | ||
| Most astronauts are just worried about their next flight. | ||
| Like, how do they get the next space flight? | ||
| And today, that just means space station. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's kind of the main thing that people are focused on. | ||
| There are definitely some visionaries. | ||
| We'd fly in our T-38s to the Kennedy Space Center or whatever. | ||
| We'd have an hour to sit there and talk. | ||
| And we would always talk about, you know, should we go on to the moon or should we go to Mars or what kind of... | ||
| Should we do a gateway? | ||
| We'd always debate these policies. | ||
| And I think most astronauts would like to see some exploration. | ||
| Low Earth orbit's great, but we want to go to the Moon. | ||
| We want to go to Mars. | ||
| That's the kind of stuff that we want to do in the long term. | ||
| I'm very disappointed that you don't know more people that have seen UFOs. | ||
| That's a bummer to me. | ||
| I expect you to have like a gang of stories. | ||
| Now we've got to turn the microphone off. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No. | ||
|
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I'll turn it off. | |
| I need to know. | ||
| I've become more fascinated over the last few years, like three or four years. | ||
| And then after the New York Times story three years ago, the front page of the New York Times, they're talking about the footage that these fighter jets have acquired. | ||
| New York Times, CNN had a thing. | ||
| The Washington Post had a thing. | ||
| This is not UFOs.com. | ||
| This is legitimate UFOs. | ||
| It was a legitimate thing. | ||
| I know the guy at the Pentagon that was running that office to look into it, and they're like, yeah, that was crazy. | ||
| We're not sure what it is. | ||
| Does that, when you're in space and you're looking out that window, is that ever on your mind? | ||
| That there's something out there? | ||
| Here's the problem. | ||
| So we talked earlier, are there aliens or not? | ||
| There probably are. | ||
| But the problem is those planets are far, far, far away. | ||
| So if we launch Voyager, the Voyager probes back in the 70s, the fastest thing humans have ever launched. | ||
| If we launch them towards Alpha Centauri or Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, it would take them like 60,000 years or something. | ||
| It would... | ||
| You know, they're never going to get there. | ||
| And to think about building a spaceship, and that was just a little small thing the size of this table, to build a spaceship big enough to hold hundreds and thousands of generations would be huge. | ||
| There probably isn't enough chemical propellant on Earth to launch something that fast that would take thousands of years. | ||
| So the ability to get to these other stars is, I don't think it's ever going to happen. | ||
| It's going to be thousands of years in the future. | ||
| Well, this is with our limited understanding. | ||
| With our understanding, right. | ||
| There's a novel called The Three-Body Problem. | ||
| It's a Chinese novel by Xi Xin Liu. | ||
| It's probably the most famous book on Earth because it's Chinese. | ||
| It's really a good book. | ||
| And it's about sending people to Proxima Centauri. | ||
| And the other problem is the propulsion is one thing, but just knowing that there's aliens there or not, if they were sending out signals, you know, we've been sending, you're going out into space right now. | ||
| So a thousand years from now, our conversation is going to end up at some star in the middle of the galaxy. | ||
| The problem is it's competing with the sun and the sun is a lot louder than our transmitter here, right? | ||
| And so the signal-to-noise ratio, you would never be able to tell that there's aliens there. | ||
| In this three-body problem, they invent this thing where we send a signal to Jupiter, and Jupiter is a big amplifier, right? | ||
| It's like your electric guitar amplifier. | ||
| But the science fiction writer understood signal-to-noise ratio, and he knew that nobody would ever be able to hear our signal. | ||
| So the two problems are, how do you know that there's aliens there? | ||
| Because unless they're sending out a flashlight brighter than their star, which would destroy their planet, we're never going to hear them or know that they're there. | ||
| And then even if we knew they were there, how do you launch something that's so far away it would take a thousand generations of people to get there? | ||
| Whatever Fravor saw, there was a measurement of this object that went from 60,000 feet above sea level to one in a second. | ||
| It was better than the Tesla Roadster. | ||
| A little bit quicker. | ||
| So maybe there is technology that we don't have. | ||
| We certainly don't have it yet. | ||
| We don't have it yet. | ||
| But if they have it... | ||
| They got the advantage. | ||
| Well, that's why they're here. | ||
| Because they can do that. | ||
| You know what's funny? | ||
| Why do aliens go to Roswell? | ||
| Have you ever been to Roswell? | ||
| Well, that was also the place where they were... | ||
| That was during the... | ||
| Right after the war. | ||
| This was Roswell. | ||
| Like the 50s, yeah. | ||
| Roswell, New Mexico, that Air Force Base had... | ||
| That was a big part of our military. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there was... | ||
| There was... | ||
| It was explained by James Fox and Jacques Vallée the significance of Roswell in terms of the military in 1947 when that crashed. | ||
| A lot of the nuclear programs out there in New Mexico is where we did the Trinity site, the first nuclear weapon. | ||
| Well, that's where Los Alamos Air Force Base is in New Mexico as well. | ||
| There's a lot of nuclear weapon work that's done out there. | ||
| I would imagine if they were concerned with these Silly, territorial monkeys with nuclear weapons. | ||
| That's where they would go, to where the weapons are. | ||
| To take out the nuclear weapons. | ||
| Well, the weapons were at Barksdale Air Force Base and Minot Air Force Base. | ||
| Well, they probably went to a lot of these different places. | ||
| Supposedly, there's a documentary that's out called The Phenomenon that shows all the different instances that were reported on military bases, Freedom of Information Act requests that showed things that happened in different places. | ||
| And they seem to have concentrated... | ||
| On areas where there was nuclear weapons and areas where there was testing facilities after the first atomic bombs were dropped. | ||
| So after the Trinity Project, after the Manhattan Project, when they started detonating nuclear bombs, that's when the uptick of alien activity. | ||
| Which makes sense. | ||
| If you're following chimps in the Congo, and then some chimp figures out, listen, if I take this This bamboo thing and pack it full of dynamite. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And light a fuse. | ||
| Like if some crazy chimp figures some wild shit out. | ||
| How to make guns. | ||
| They figure out how to start fire. | ||
| And they lead a bomb. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, they make a bomb and blow something up. | ||
| We would be fascinated. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Like we blow up bombs all the time. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| But if someone else did it, like some other kind of primate, that would be one of the most important discoveries in anthropology ever. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| That would generate our interest. | ||
| So I would imagine if you were an advanced being, millions of years advanced of Earth, and then all of a sudden you get this signature that purpose-built nuclear bombs are being dropped on cities. | ||
| This is not like some sort of a crazy reaction that happened naturally. | ||
| These crazy monkeys got together and they made a bomb. | ||
| And then they dropped it out of an airplane. | ||
| On each other. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On other chimps. | ||
| Yeah, and wiped out half a million people. | ||
| Just like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would say they'd visit. | ||
| See, I always thought if I was going to travel across the galaxy, I would go to the Bahamas or Hawaii or Aspen or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| That's a nicer place to go. | ||
| But the weapons are probably a bigger threat, I guess. | ||
| But don't you think just flying above the Earth is probably about as beautiful as anything you're ever going to see on the surface level? | ||
| Who gives a shit about Aspen when you can fly over the whole thing and look at it with the stars? | ||
| The stars have to be the most beautiful thing you can see. | ||
| I had a telescope as a kid. | ||
| I know the basic constellations. | ||
| I know my way around the sky. | ||
| I could never pick out anything in space. | ||
| There are so many stars. | ||
| There are so many billions of stars. | ||
| I couldn't pick out Orion or the Big Dipper or Sirius or any of that stuff. | ||
| You can see planets, but I could never... | ||
| You can see planets? | ||
| Yeah, the planets show up because they're so bright. | ||
| Jupiter is this giant orange. | ||
| Mars is this red thing. | ||
| You know, one of the planets that was really cool, most humans have never seen it, I don't think, is Mercury. | ||
| Because it's always right next to the sun. | ||
| So if you live somewhere where there's buildings or trees, you're not going to see Mercury. | ||
| It's only visible right at sunset or sunrise. | ||
| And in space, I saw it all the time. | ||
| It was really cool. | ||
| It's like a planet you never see from Earth, but I saw it from space a lot. | ||
| I went to, there it is. | ||
| Look at that motherfucker. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| Yeah, that's pretty wild. | ||
| Is that what it looks like? | ||
| Well, I think that's probably the minerals. | ||
| It looks like a moon. | ||
| It looks like the moon. | ||
| Yeah, why is it depicted in that color view like that? | ||
| I'm guessing that's an infrared shot, and that's probably like cobalt and silicon. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| So it's showing all the different elements. | ||
| And how do they know that? | ||
| I think they're scientists. | ||
| They're smart. | ||
| You know, the nuclear thing, I was flying at Nellis Air Force Base, which is where we do our big exercises, Red Flag and stuff. | ||
| Area 51's out there, and it's called the box. | ||
| There's this big square. | ||
| You're not allowed to fly through the box. | ||
| So we show up. | ||
| It's the first mission. | ||
| I'm the flight lead, and we're flying, and I'm watching my map, and there's bandits trying to shoot me down, and I'm trying to avoid going into the box, because that's a no-no. | ||
| You're not allowed to fly into the box. | ||
| What happens if you fly into the box? | ||
| Well, so I'm flying along, and I'm like... | ||
| Holy shit, where there's giant divots. | ||
| It's like a golf ball hit a sand trap divots everywhere except for they're miles wide. | ||
| And I'm like, I don't see that on my map. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| And then all of a sudden on the radio, spooky flight turned south immediately. | ||
| And I'm like, shit. | ||
| And I had flown into the box. | ||
| And our squadron weapons officer, who back then you had to type in the coordinates manually and they would draw lines on your display where you were navigating. | ||
| But it was some person typed the coordinate in. | ||
| He typed the wrong coordinates in my... | ||
| In my display. | ||
| So I was flying, you know, in the wrong area. | ||
| And that's where all the nuclear testing was done. | ||
| All these big divots was from where we were dropping bombs, either underground or above ground in the 50s. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| So then I got my buddy and I, we got a free plane ticket home the next day. | ||
| They sent you home? | ||
| You get sent home if you fly in the box. | ||
| Because if you fly in the box, it's an accident once. | ||
| If you fly in the box a second time, it's not an accident. | ||
| It's a lot worse for you if you do that. | ||
| So they just take that option off the table. | ||
| They don't even let you fly there again because they don't want you to accidentally fly in it a second time. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it was the idea that you'd be snooping around and you would find some government secrets? | ||
| I wasn't snooping. | ||
| I was trying to avoid getting shot down by these bandits. | ||
| But yeah, they don't want you to... | ||
| They don't even mess with it. | ||
| It's like, if you do it once, you get one get-out-of-jail-free card. | ||
| So I had to fly back. | ||
| We got a picture of us. | ||
| We got a selfie in front of the base, smiling like we got sent home from Red Flag. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How wild is that though? | ||
| You're flying over those places where they detonated those bombs. | ||
| It was pretty cool, but I'm like, I wonder if there's any radiation here, you know, what's going on. | ||
| Is there still? | ||
| I'm sure there's some. | ||
| That stuff takes thousands of years to go away. | ||
| But I mean, is there some that's in the air as you're flying over it? | ||
| Would that be... | ||
| I don't think it's much. | ||
| I mean, if they're... | ||
| Las Vegas isn't that far away, it's only... | ||
| That might explain a lot. | ||
| Why Vegas is Vegas, that might explain a lot, yeah. | ||
| But the size of these things, if someone detonates a bomb under the ground and it leaves these divots... | ||
| Oh yeah, you can see them for sure. | ||
| How big is it? | ||
| I mean, I'm going 500 knots. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| There's images of them? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't know if that's them or not. | ||
|
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I was hoping you could say which ones. | |
| This was a long time ago, but I just remember seeing these types of divots in the Nevada desert. | ||
| Nuclear test site location from Google Earth. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Google Earth. | ||
|
unidentified
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Boom. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, it would go, and then back down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you gotta, there you go. | ||
| Yeah, you can see, when you're flying in an F-16 a couple hundred feet above the ground, you can definitely see those things. | ||
| How many different places are you restricted from travel like that? | ||
| Like Area 51. So you can't fly around the White House. | ||
| There's this box around the White House that's bad if you fly in that. | ||
| There's Adnellis Air Force Base. | ||
| There's restricted areas in a lot of places just because they're doing military stuff, but it's not like there's restricted areas and then there's the restricted areas. | ||
| And the only ones I know of, that's the only one I know of is in Nevada. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The other ones are all kind of—they turn them—while you're doing military training, they're on, and then if there's nobody flying, they turn them off because the airliners want to save gas and fly through them. | ||
| So the airliners are constantly pushing the military to open up this space to let them fly through just to save gas. | ||
| So there's just a handful of them. | ||
| Yeah, there's not a lot. | ||
| There's not a lot of like super secret places. | ||
| Because Area 51 was super secret for a long time, but now everybody knows about Area 51. It's like part of pop culture. | ||
| Do you think there's some other areas that they have like Area 51? | ||
| Area 50. You can't talk about Area 50. You can't? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I always laughed. | ||
| I'm like, why is there? | ||
| It's like WD-40. | ||
| Like, is there a WD-41? | ||
| Like, is that even better? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is there that kind of questioning going on while you're in the military? | ||
| Do guys ask questions like that? | ||
| We would laugh about it. | ||
| I mean, to be honest, there's hundreds of thousands of guys in the military. | ||
| So it's not like we're all... | ||
| Let's say, hypothetically, if there's the alien that is hidden in a bunker, they're not going to tell me about it. | ||
| Like, why would they tell me about it? | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| That would drive me nuts if I worked there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'd be like, I need to know. | ||
| I need to be friends with the guy who knows. | ||
| Well, that's the problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that kind of stuff is kind of the crazy stuff. | ||
| But there is some need. | ||
| I understand the distrust of government. | ||
| But, like, you've got to be able to have secrets. | ||
| Well, you definitely do if there's other countries out there. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| There's countries that everybody doesn't have our best interest in mind. | ||
| And, you know, I know there's conspiracy theories and the government's doing this and that. | ||
| I was in the Air Force for 30 years, and the people are good people, and they're just trying to keep us safe. | ||
| They're not like super MIT PhDs with all this crazy stuff. | ||
| They're just going to work from 9 to 5, doing their job, trying to... | ||
| And they find out some information that some country is trying to do something. | ||
| Those are secrets that we have to be able to keep. | ||
| Because when they get out, the people that learn those secrets get killed. | ||
| If you release intel... | ||
| If it's gathered from a satellite, that's bad because now they know what our satellite can do. | ||
| If it's gathered from a person, that's really bad because you're putting people at risk when you release secrets to the world. | ||
| Now, when you get out and you write a book, do you have to vet that book? | ||
| Does that book have to go through Department of Defense or someone where they have to read? | ||
| It does, yeah. | ||
| The first book I wrote for National Geographic, I sent it to the Air Force Space Command to look through. | ||
| But there's nothing secret in it. | ||
| I was pictures of Earth and stories from being an astronaut. | ||
| But other guys, like I got a Navy SEAL buddy, a guy named Clint Emerson, he's got a – it's a hassle because he's talking about stuff that does need to be vetted. | ||
| So they do have a process for making sure you're not releasing classified stuff. | ||
| Yeah, Jack Carr, the novelist, who's a friend of mine who's been on the podcast before, Navy SEAL, who's writing these books, these intense books about a Navy SEAL and all these adventures and different things. | ||
| He has to send all of his books in. | ||
| Yeah, the SEALs are especially susceptible to that because all their stuff is human, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So in his books, it'll say redacted. | ||
| He'll literally say, he'll type it out, redacted. | ||
| He doesn't just put a black line. | ||
| He ought to just put black lines. | ||
| He just says redacted. | ||
| So like all the different things where the name of the base was sensitive or the name of the mission was sensitive, it's all redacted. | ||
| Kind of makes it more legit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because you know, this guy's talking about actual real places and actual real missions and actual real things that have gone down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But those are the stuff you want to know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's definitely, for guys like that, there's a whole process that you've got to do it. | ||
| Otherwise, you don't want to put your fellow SEALs or whatever, people that, who knows who they are, put them at risk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| What was the feeling of writing a book? | ||
| What gave you the motivation to do that? | ||
| Because writing a book is a giant undertaking. | ||
| If they had the award, I would have won the least likely to write a book in high school. | ||
| Man, I sucked. | ||
| I never read any books in high school English class. | ||
| I got C's. | ||
| I was not a good English student. | ||
| And being in space, seeing these amazing things, I just wanted to share the story with people. | ||
| So I came back. | ||
| The first book, I wrote it in two weeks. | ||
| The publishers were just, they couldn't believe it. | ||
| And then my second book, I wrote pretty quickly. | ||
| I got interrupted by doing a movie. | ||
| I got a chance to film a movie in the middle of it. | ||
| But this How to Astronaut book that's out right now, I just wanted to share. | ||
| I didn't want to write another memoir because there's a million astronaut memoirs. | ||
| That story's been told. | ||
| We don't need to tell it again. | ||
| I wanted to talk about the cool aspects of spaceflight. | ||
| Some of them you've thought about. | ||
| Flying jets. | ||
| How do you do emergencies in a space shuttle? | ||
| How do you do medical training? | ||
| That stuff. | ||
| But other stuff you probably haven't thought about. | ||
| Aliens. | ||
| What do you do with a dead body? | ||
| Have astronauts had sex in space? | ||
| What do you do with a dead body? | ||
| Well, thankfully we haven't had to do it, but there's a couple things you can do. | ||
| You can bring it back to Earth. | ||
| You can put it in one of these cargo ships and just have it burn up in the atmosphere. | ||
| You can do a burial at sea where you kind of, you know, push it off and float away in space. | ||
| Won't it become space debris? | ||
| That's why you may not want to do that. | ||
| It depends on what orbit you're at. | ||
| Or you put a parachute on him so that he'll decay within a few weeks. | ||
| That would be a crazy scene in a Gravity-style movie. | ||
| That would be a great scene. | ||
| Some guy slams into the space station, some frozen dude. | ||
| Where did he come from? | ||
| The Russians ejected him in the 1980s. | ||
| That would be an amazing beginning. | ||
| That would be an amazing beginning to the moon. | ||
| That's a great idea. | ||
| Just see this frozen body coming out to like 8 kilometers a second. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Or if you're on the moon, you'd have to make the first cemetery, right? | ||
| Yeah, first cemetery on the moon. | ||
| Or if you're on Mars. | ||
| Now there's like human biology there. | ||
| Ooh, that's a problem, right? | ||
| It might be. | ||
| I would imagine it would be a giant problem. | ||
| We do everything we can to not contaminate Mars, and it's called planetary defense. | ||
| Well, we know there's no atmosphere on the moon, and Mars is a mess too, but it is possible that there's some sort of biological life in the crudest form on Mars, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if they contaminated that with a body... | ||
| That could be a real issue. | ||
| A thousand years from now, some astronauts go there and they would find life, but it came from this biology. | ||
| Yeah, so that's why you don't want that to happen. | ||
| I think there was one of the moon missions in the 60s, like a surveyor, where the Apollo 12 landed and they got some parts that had been there for a couple years and they brought it back and they still found bacteria, if I remember right. | ||
| But there has been cases where you found bacteria that lived a long time in space where you'd think the vacuum and the sun would have just destroyed it, but it was still viable, I guess. | ||
| Well, there's some life forms like tardigrades, right? | ||
| Those little weird... | ||
| Life is pretty tenacious. | ||
| Yeah, that's what they're called, right? | ||
| Tardigrades, those little bears? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know what I'm talking about? | ||
| No. | ||
| Isn't that what they're called? | ||
| Like at the bottom of the ocean or something? | ||
| It's a very small, microscopic little animal that apparently can survive in space. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I had not heard of that. | ||
| What's so funny? | ||
| What are you laughing at? | ||
| Huh? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| A crashed Israeli lunar lander spilled tardigrades on the moon. | ||
| So that's a tardigrade, that little thing. | ||
| That thing does not look like what you want to meet on the moon. | ||
| Yeah, and they can live up there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, they survive. | ||
| Those little fuckers survive everything. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| A few thousand. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| They call them water bears. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| Well, hopefully they're not there when the NASA guys go back. | ||
| Yeah, or they become something new. | ||
| See, if something like that can survive... | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty wild. | ||
| What is the... | ||
| It's the before and after of the crash. | ||
| The crash site. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I think the engines had a software problem or something, and the engines shut down. | ||
| And how do they know that it had tardigrades? | ||
| Did they bring them into space to see if they can survive? | ||
| It must have been one of their payloads. | ||
| Part of the experiment? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, they're supposed to be able to survive in incredible environments. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's kind of scary. | ||
| So we go through a lot of effort. | ||
| You've got to irradiate satellites and everybody's wearing their PPE just to make sure you don't get accidentally some Joe Rogan DNA going to Mars. | ||
| Yeah, well that's one of the theories about how life got here in the first place is panspermia. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| The idea that asteroids and things carried all the building blocks of life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like Prometheus. | ||
| You remember that movie? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Where the alien like disintegrates himself into the water and that creates life. | ||
| Very underrated movie. | ||
| Prometheus? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought it was underrated. | ||
| I love the music. | ||
| The imagery was really good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was cool. | |
| The alien dudes were very weird looking. | ||
| They were all jacked. | ||
| He was... | ||
| Like an alien race of bodybuilders. | ||
| Very strange. | ||
| The original alien. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How old were you when you saw that? | ||
| Well, I was 79, so I was probably 10, 12, 12-ish. | ||
| Yeah, I was the same age. | ||
| I saw that, and it blew my mind. | ||
| Oh my god, it's one of the greatest horror movies of all time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| It's so good. | ||
| There's a Russian version of that now that's out? | ||
| Not a Russian version of it, but their take on what would happen. | ||
| It's called Sputnik. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| And it's all in subtitles. | ||
| And it's out now. | ||
| I'll watch it. | ||
| It's a wild, alien suspense movie. | ||
| And it's the same sort of deal. | ||
| Where somebody gets contaminated. | ||
| It's heavy. | ||
| It was such a cool movie, man. | ||
| This thing that was scary, you didn't see the alien. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You saw it at the end, but it was like this... | ||
| Things that you don't see, I think, are scarier. | ||
| Well, in that film, for sure. | ||
| But the special effects were pretty spectacular for what they had available for 1979. Yeah, they were amazing. | ||
| But the thing about it is... | ||
| You go to Aliens, which is the second one, and now they're everywhere. | ||
| You see them, and then they're also stupid. | ||
| You can just shoot them. | ||
| Whereas Alien 1, it's really smart. | ||
| It's tracking people. | ||
| It knows how to sneak up on people. | ||
| In Alien 2... | ||
| You were hunted. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In Alien 2, they're just shooting them. | ||
| Bang, bang, bang. | ||
| They're killing a bunch of them. | ||
| It was a World War II battle. | ||
| I didn't like Aliens. | ||
| Alien was just spectacular. | ||
| It was so scary. | ||
| It's also a movie where there's a female hero and no one feels like they tried to force it down your throat. | ||
| It wasn't political correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| She was amazing. | ||
| Sigourney Weaver was spectacular. | ||
| Ripley, I think. | ||
| Yeah, Ripley. | ||
| You bought every second of that movie. | ||
| Including the robot that sells people down the river that knew. | ||
| Ash. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That Ash. | ||
| And his head was like sitting there. | ||
| They blew his head off and he was still talking and green stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| I was terrified. | ||
| And Yafet Kodo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I just watched some old Bond movie and he was the villain in Live and Let Die, which was like the worst movie ever. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| Yeah, it was awful. | ||
| Is that Roger Moore? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, it was his first one. | ||
| When Sean Connery died, I watched some James Bond movies. | ||
| I'm like, I don't remember. | ||
| I never saw this as a kid. | ||
| The Roger Moore ones were kind of cheese. | ||
| They were cheesy, but this one was the worst. | ||
| But Yafet Koto was the bad guy, and he was, was he Parker in Alien? | ||
| There it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Roger Moore. | |
| Oh yeah, there he is. | ||
| That's him on the right. | ||
| Those were cheeseball movies as opposed to the Sean Connery movies. | ||
| It was a different kind of bond. | ||
| You know, I watched Dr. No when Sean Connery died last month. | ||
| It was a really good movie. | ||
| I mean, for 1962, it was a good movie. | ||
| Sean Connery was a beast. | ||
| He was a beast. | ||
| And then he had the forgettable ones. | ||
| Like, what was the fucking guy's name? | ||
| Really handsome fella. | ||
| Timothy, no. | ||
| Timothy Dalton. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton. | ||
| Was Timothy Dalton Bond too? | ||
| He was two or three movies, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I blocked that out. | ||
| He was like 89 or something. | ||
| Pierce Brosnan was who I was thinking of. | ||
| The 90s. | ||
| Those were like they were made in the same factory that homogenizes milk. | ||
| They took all the spice out of it. | ||
| Daniel Craig's the best Bond. | ||
| Daniel Craig's amazing. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| He is hands down. | ||
| People don't like to think he's the best because of Sean Connery. | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| Daniel Craig's better. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| I believe him. | ||
| He's totally believable. | ||
| Sean Connery's a little overacting, but he was still great. | ||
| But Daniel Craig's the best. | ||
| Different era, different time. | ||
| But in terms of looking at a guy and thinking he could be a fucking straight-up killer, it's Daniel Craig. | ||
| And he's gone from 06 to 20, so he did almost 15 years of Bond. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've got to be in shape, you know. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| Yeah, look at all these. | ||
| There's Timothy Dalton. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Pierce Brosnan, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| And who's that other dude? | ||
| George Lazenby. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| He did one. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| And now who's going to be Bond? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've heard some... | ||
| I think it's going to be a black chick. | ||
| There was a black guy. | ||
| A non-binary trans woman. | ||
| No, I don't know. | ||
| It's hard to beat Daniel Craig. | ||
| The only one I didn't like. | ||
| I just watched Quantum of Solace and I did not like that movie. | ||
| But all the other ones are spectacular. | ||
| Well, they have a new one that they've been sitting on forever. | ||
| And I just don't get it. | ||
| Let it out. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Make it streaming. | ||
| They want people to go to the movie theaters. | ||
| They're not going to movie theaters anymore. | ||
| That shit's over. | ||
| You gotta let it go. | ||
| Then the theater loses hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| Then the theater loses hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| Just like all the gyms, just like all the restaurants. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got hit by COVID. Yeah, I know. | ||
| Release the fucking movie. | ||
| Hey, I'm with you, but I'm not a shareholder. | ||
| Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| I mean, they have Omega has released an official 007 watch. | ||
| That's out. | ||
| The movie's done. | ||
| Come on, put it on iTunes. | ||
| Apple TV, let me buy it. | ||
| I don't know what they're going to do, but man, it sucks to be a movie executive in 2020. Oh, well, cry me a river. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It sucks to be a lot of people in 2020. Or a nurse or a school teacher. | |
| That's what I'm thinking. | ||
| Waitress. | ||
| Or someone owning a restaurant or a small business that got forced to close down. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, it's such a strange time. | ||
| Such a strange time for people. | ||
| Yeah, and I was looking forward to that movie. | ||
| So that may be one of... | ||
| They just need to do something. | ||
| Release it! | ||
| Take one for the team. | ||
| Release it! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're talking about releasing it in April, I think. | ||
| Is that the... | ||
| Online or it'll be in theaters. | ||
| I think they're going to try to do it in theaters, but... | ||
| Well, Tenet was in theaters, and it didn't make... | ||
| The box office was terrible. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Why would you risk your life to see them? | ||
| You know, they're not doing COVID tests at the theaters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, what are you doing? | ||
| And the home, you know, people got big TVs. | ||
| I don't even think you're really necessarily risking your life, but just the idea that you could be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just, it's, I mean, how much more dangerous is it than going to a supermarket? | ||
| I don't, you know, is Walgreens or Walmart less dangerous than sitting down in a movie theater? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What has it been like for you this whole year? | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| I was speaking a lot, corporate speaking. | ||
| Still? | ||
| Until March, and then it went from 100 to zero instantly. | ||
| I've done a few things online. | ||
| I did a thing for Google this morning, actually, but for the most part, that has come to an end. | ||
| I wrote a book, directed this short film, Cosmic Perspective. | ||
| I'm trying to develop some of that. | ||
| I've done a few things with startup companies, trying to help them as a tech advisor, which has been super cool. | ||
| It's one of the things I want to do. | ||
| So ironically, my income went to zero, so that sucks. | ||
| But it has given me some time to do some other things that I've wanted to do. | ||
| Which, you know, it is what it is. | ||
| I can't control COVID, so all I can control is how I react to it. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good perspective. | ||
| And that's the perspective that I think a lot of intelligent, adaptable people have used to realize, like, hey, this is what it is. | ||
| And lucky to be healthy and alive was to adapt and move forward. | ||
| Darwin has a great quote. | ||
| It's not the strongest that survive, it's those who are most able to adapt. | ||
| And the reality is life is different now. | ||
| Like some businesses will come back, some won't. | ||
| And you got to be, you got to kind of examine yourself and be brutally honest with yourself. | ||
| Am I in something that's going to work? | ||
| Then I'll tough it out. | ||
| Or am I not? | ||
| And then I'll have to do other stuff, you know? | ||
| So it's a tough, it's a hard thing to reinvent yourself. | ||
| But I think some folks are going to have to do that if they're going to be successful in the future. | ||
| Is this... | ||
| Are you planning on once everything goes back to the way it was to continue the way you were doing things before with travel? | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| I was traveling too much. | ||
| It's just not healthy. | ||
| I was gone all the time. | ||
| There's... | ||
| I got to know my house. | ||
| I bought this new house last year, and this year I'm like, oh, this is nice being at home. | ||
| So I'm going to really try and minimize the amount of traveling I do in the future. | ||
| Sometimes it's fun to go on a trip. | ||
| I like traveling, but not as much. | ||
| It was unhealthy before. | ||
| Did you have strategies of how to minimize jet lag? | ||
| Because you had the ultimate jet lag, right? | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| You went to space. | ||
| Well, go into space, but the two years of training for it. | ||
| We were going to Russia and Japan and Europe constantly. | ||
| And I had to actually sleep shift because the training in Russia was 9 to 5. It wasn't... | ||
| But when I travel now, I basically don't sleep shift. | ||
| Because it's usually just for a couple days. | ||
| So I just keep... | ||
| I stay on my American schedule. | ||
| And I don't try and learn how to wake up at 8 in the morning. | ||
| I just... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I sleep when I'm tired. | ||
| But if you're going to go somewhere for a few weeks, then you need to adapt. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| Sleep shifting is hard. | ||
| So at NASA... Ambien was kind of the nuclear option to get you to sleep at night. | ||
| So I would always, if I would go to Russia, I would take an Ambien. | ||
| That would make sure I got at least one night of four or five or six hours of sleep. | ||
| Because otherwise you're up all night and then at eight in the morning when it's time to work, you're falling asleep and that's not good. | ||
| But before your first flight, they do this medical testing where you have to go try. | ||
| They give you a bag. | ||
| It's ibuprofen and antibiotics. | ||
| And Provigil is one of the things. | ||
| And Ambien. | ||
| So you get one of each. | ||
| And when I went in there, the lady, I'll never forget, she had a Provigil. | ||
| And I said, she was going to put it in one of those brown medicine things. | ||
| And I was like, save the plastic. | ||
| I'll just take it. | ||
| And she looked at me. | ||
| She's like, it's 1 o'clock in the afternoon. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| She's like, well, this is ProVigil. | ||
| I'm like, that stuff doesn't affect me. | ||
| I take medicine at that, you know, whatever. | ||
| So I took it. | ||
| It was like two in the morning. | ||
| I was laying in bed, twirling. | ||
| I felt like wide awake. | ||
| You know, my eyes were... | ||
| In the Air Force, they had... | ||
| We called them go pills and no-go pills when you're flying across the ocean. | ||
| And I don't know what they were. | ||
| They just gave us medicine and I took them. | ||
| But I know that ProVigil, man, that stuff... | ||
| I was like wide awake for like 14 hours. | ||
| I've done new Vigil. | ||
| I have I've never done ProVigil, but yeah, it keeps you wide awake. | ||
| But it's not speedy, which is weird, right? | ||
| It's a weird kind of being awake. | ||
| Your heart's not... | ||
| My heart wasn't racing or anything. | ||
| It was just like I was wide awake. | ||
| So they, you know, on my first flight, we had to do a 12-hour sleep shift. | ||
| So... | ||
| Literally, instead of waking up at 7 in the morning, we had to wake up at 7 at night kind of thing. | ||
| And they put us in this room with like a thousand lights because lights have a lot to do with your sleep cycle. | ||
| That's why you have these night modes in your iPhones. | ||
| When you see blue light, your brain goes, oh, the sun's up. | ||
| It's time to wake up. | ||
| But I'm like, hey doc, look, I tried ProVigil. | ||
| That's the nuclear option. | ||
| Is there anything else? | ||
| And they told me five-hour energy. | ||
| I mean, not to do a product endorsement, but I use those for my spacewalks and whatever. | ||
| And it's not like some big wake-you-up thing. | ||
| They just kept me alert, not as sleepy. | ||
| And that's kind of what I used for not being sleepy. | ||
| Just a big dose of B vitamins. | ||
| It's just a million grams of vitamin B. Yeah. | ||
| Did you have strategies in terms of when you're traveling a lot, when you land, when you go to a place to try to get your body back on cycle? | ||
| So melatonin was the one thing that changes your cycle. | ||
| It doesn't help you go to sleep. | ||
| It just tells your brain that it's time to go to sleep, if that makes sense. | ||
| Ambient knocks you out. | ||
| I've never done that. | ||
| If I'm not tired, I stay awake. | ||
| Because I know too many people that have gotten addicted to sleeping pills. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know the one, a better one than Ambien is Sonata? | ||
| In space, the only time I ever did it was the night before my spacewalks. | ||
| I wanted to get some sleep. | ||
| So I took a Sonata. | ||
| Sonata gets you to sleep, but it doesn't keep you asleep, and it's less dangerous. | ||
| So that was the thing I used on the night before spacewalks. | ||
| I didn't want to be thinking through... | ||
| The night before a fight is probably the same. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just wanted to sleep. | ||
| And so I used that on those nights. | ||
| And I didn't have any problems. | ||
| And there's no side effects and stuff. | ||
| Ambien is a psychedelic drug. | ||
| Yeah, it does some weird shit to you, right? | ||
| It does, yeah. | ||
| Here's the thing you don't want to do is Ambien email. | ||
| So if you take an Ambien, the computer needs to be powered off in a different room. | ||
| Under a blanket? | ||
| I went to Israel a long time ago, and I took Ambien. | ||
| And then I woke up the next morning, and I was like, holy shit. | ||
| And I looked on my laptop, and there was all these emails in the outbox. | ||
| And I was like, oh my god, delete. | ||
| Oh my god, delete. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And... | |
| I didn't go to sleep. | ||
| And thankfully the back in 2003, they didn't have wifi. | ||
| So like they were all stuck in my outbox. | ||
| They didn't get sent, but yeah, you don't want to do ambient email. | ||
| No, there's a lot of people that have done some really dumb shit on ambient. | ||
| Whatever it does to you. | ||
| Kevin James is a friend of mine, King of Queens. | ||
| He cooked a meal. | ||
| Went to the store, bought food, cooked a meal, and then woke up in the morning and was ready to call the cops. | ||
| Like, who fucking cooked in my house? | ||
| Like, you forget everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, talk to flight attendants. | ||
| They've got good stories. | ||
| The worst was, I was going to Hong Kong a couple years ago, and I took my Ambien. | ||
| I'm ready to go to bed. | ||
| And then the plane broke. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| And then you're in the airport? | ||
| Yes, on Ambien. | ||
| So you want to wait until you're airborne at 40,000 feet before you take your Ambien. | ||
| How long does it take to kick in? | ||
| 10 minutes. | ||
| You can feel it coming on. | ||
| How often do you take it? | ||
| I haven't taken it for years. | ||
| I used to take it when I traveled with NASA because it would just get me... | ||
| I knew a dude that I worked with who would take two every night. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| That's what I said. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| I would always take it on my first night in Europe or in Russia because I was going to work the next day and I had to get a night of sleep. | ||
| I never took it in space because... | ||
| off and you're on ambient that's yeah that's not good well it sounded like you had an uh easy time sleeping up there i did i didn't have any problem man i was just from working hard i i think so and plus it's cool floating i mean when you're sleeping you're floating which is just amazing and And you close your eyes and you don't know which way is up. | ||
| And I had this weird thing where I would close my eyes and I was pitching forward and I was rolling left and yawing right for months. | ||
| Whenever I closed my eyes, my brain, the neurovestibular system, that was a signal that was going to my brain that I was doing this. | ||
| And then I'd open my eyes and it would stop immediately because the brain got the visual signal. | ||
| And then after a few months, that stopped. | ||
| Do you get a feeling like you're in motion when you're looking at the Earth and it's very clear that you're orbiting the Earth? | ||
| But do you have a feeling of motion? | ||
| No. | ||
| You have a feeling of falling. | ||
| It feels like you're falling. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Because you're falling. | ||
| That's what's happening, right? | ||
| There's still gravity. | ||
| It's 90%. | ||
| It's not as strong as here, but it's almost as strong as here. | ||
| But you're going forward five miles a second. | ||
| So as you fall towards the center of the Earth, you're also moving forward. | ||
| And that, if you're at the exact right speed, that curve is the same shape as the Earth, and that's your orbit. | ||
| If you slow down a little bit, your curve shrinks, and that's how you do your deorbit burn to come back to Earth. | ||
| You shrink your orbit a little bit at the right time. | ||
| It hits the atmosphere at the right place to slow you down to land at the right spot. | ||
| If you speed up, your orbit grows. | ||
| If you go 25,000 miles an hour, not 17,000, you go to escape velocity, and that's how you get to the moon. | ||
| So all you're doing, by changing your speed, you're shrinking or growing your orbit. | ||
| But it feels like you're falling. | ||
| That's the sensation you have. | ||
| It's like jumping off a diving board. | ||
| You can get a second of falling. | ||
| Or if you're in an airplane, if you get a Cessna, you push forward, you get a couple seconds. | ||
| But even though you're floating, you still have this feeling of falling? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| All the time. | ||
| And it never goes away until they turn gravity back on. | ||
| When you come back to Earth and you hit the atmosphere, that's the next time you feel like you're not falling. | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I never thought of that before. | |
| I had to mentally kind of get in my zen mode and don't flail. | ||
| Because people flail when they fall. | ||
| I don't know why, but we do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you have to not do that the first couple of days because you could punch your crewmate. | ||
| You can hurt yourself. | ||
| Because you really do think. | ||
| You feel like you're falling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is what it feels like. | ||
| I thought you just felt like there was no gravity. | ||
| You was floating. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The sensation is falling because that's exactly what's happening. | ||
| You are literally falling and moving forward so fast, but you don't feel that motion. | ||
| In fact, when you look at the earth, it's moving like this is what it looks like. | ||
| This is how fast it's moving, which is kind of like in an airliner. | ||
| It's moving about that speed. | ||
| So you're creeping your hands across the table for the people to just listen. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's about how fast stuff moves. | ||
| The problem is in space, that's like 100 miles, right? | ||
| In an airliner, that's like one mile. | ||
| I think people have a misconception of what's happening in orbit then, because I think people think of orbit as being there's no gravity up there. | ||
| No, there's lots of gravity. | ||
| There's gravity everywhere in the universe. | ||
| You're creating gravity right now. | ||
| Just from mass. | ||
| You're affecting Jupiter, right? | ||
| You're pulling Jupiter a little bit towards this podcast. | ||
| Not very much, but your gravity is going across the universe from your body. | ||
| It's not a lot. | ||
| Gravity is pretty weak. | ||
| But the reason why things are floating in space is the same reason why when you get on one of those gravity planes, when they plunge. | ||
| Zero-G, yeah. | ||
| And zero-G when people are floating around. | ||
| Well, yeah, it's because nothing's holding you. | ||
| You are falling. | ||
| Nothing's supporting you. | ||
| You're falling, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you go skydiving, you don't feel like you're falling because you hit 100 miles an hour of wind and it's pushing you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you're supported by the wind. | ||
| If you were falling, you would accelerate. | ||
| That's why base jumping is so cool, because you actually accelerate for a couple seconds. | ||
| And then when you reach terminal velocity, you don't feel, the feeling is different. | ||
| Because the air, the force from the air counteracts your weight. | ||
| So it's like standing on the ground or something like that. | ||
| But those first couple seconds, you get the butterflies and you're falling, and then you get the air supporting you. | ||
| We do spacewalk training underwater in a pool. | ||
| And you're floating in the water, but the water is supporting you. | ||
| So your whole body is hanging in this suit, so you don't feel like you're falling because you're not falling. | ||
| So is it a pool that's specifically designed for spacewalk training? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What's different about the pool? | ||
| It's big. | ||
| They say it's the world's biggest, and it has a little... | ||
| The world's biggest pool. | ||
| That's what they say, yeah. | ||
| It's pretty... | ||
| Where is this pool? | ||
| Is there videos of this pool? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Look up to NBL, Neutral Buoyancy Lab. | ||
| It's in Houston. | ||
| So there's like a half of a space station, and they used to have a space shuttle. | ||
| They build these made-for-water modules that you can go crawl around and... | ||
| It's super important. | ||
| I mean, it's great training, but you're not floating. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| So when you're preparing... | ||
| There it is. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Wow, that's wild. | ||
| It's a whole base underwater. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you're preparing for something like your mission when you stayed up there for 200 days, how much time in advance do you know about this? | ||
| And what is it like? | ||
| What's the schedule like to prepare for something like that? | ||
| So you go through ASCAN training. | ||
| NASA likes to make you feel really important. | ||
| So you're an ASCAN when you show up. | ||
| Astronaut candidate. | ||
| And then you hang around for years waiting to get assigned. | ||
| And then finally your turn comes. | ||
| You're going to space. | ||
| They assign you to a mission. | ||
| And usually the training is somewhere between two and three years. | ||
| You do spacewalk training to get ready. | ||
| You learn about all the different... | ||
| How do you handle emergencies on the American side? | ||
| How do you handle them on the Russian side? | ||
| How do you fly the robotic arm? | ||
| How do you do all the science experiments? | ||
| There's just a lot of stuff to learn. | ||
| You keep on learning Russian to get good at that. | ||
| And so the training for your mission is about two years. | ||
| And first of all, you're a backup. | ||
| So there's some guys that are going to launch in front of you. | ||
| So hopefully you don't have to fly, but if they get sick or something, you could fly. | ||
| And then you wait around six months after they launch. | ||
| Then now you're a prime crew after you're a backup crew. | ||
| And then six months later, you launch. | ||
| That's the typical thing, but sometimes it changes, but that's roughly what it is. | ||
| So when you're doing this, do they confine your movements? | ||
| Do they keep you from doing anything in specific? | ||
| Because it seems like they have a lot invested in you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you're running around Top Gun, Tom Cruise style, riding motorcycles and shit, it seems like... | ||
| So I had like a self-imposed. | ||
| I didn't go skiing. | ||
| I didn't ski for a couple years. | ||
| You know, I didn't want to break my arm or leg or anything. | ||
| They had a rule. | ||
| You weren't allowed to fly. | ||
| You weren't allowed to do like air racing. | ||
| And there was this astronaut back in the 90s who said, screw that. | ||
| And he went to the Reno Air Races. | ||
| He was flying, racing in there, which is super dangerous. | ||
| And he, I think he got knocked off his flight. | ||
| But then he came back and flew again. | ||
| And then he was chief of the office. | ||
| So it didn't hurt him too bad. | ||
| But He got his pee-pee slapped for that. | ||
| So yeah, there's certain things that you're not doing. | ||
| But to be honest, I'm a colonel in the Air Force. | ||
| I'm an adult. | ||
| I know what I should do and shouldn't do. | ||
| So I kind of just took it easy. | ||
| I didn't do any crazy stuff, especially in the year before flight. | ||
| But it was your decision to not ski. | ||
| It's not like they have a list of things. | ||
| Certain actors, when Keanu Reeves does a movie, they tell them not to ride motorcycles in their spare time. | ||
| Baseball players, you've got to sign you're not going to go skiing. | ||
| So for me, I just did it self-imposed. | ||
| There might have been a set of rules, I just don't remember it. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of rules. | ||
| But I also knew it was smart. | ||
| But don't you have to be a fan of rules to be an astronaut? | ||
| You do. | ||
| I mean, you've got to, yeah. | ||
| You've got to obey most of them. | ||
| You're a reluctant rebel you. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So do they put you on a physical conditioning schedule to prepare you for something like this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I would imagine the more conditioning you have, the less you're going to lose while you're up there. | ||
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100%. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| Plus, spacewalking is brutal. | ||
| That's a rough sport. | ||
| I mean, that suit is pressurized. | ||
| At four pounds per square inch, which is 144 square inches per foot. | ||
| So that's like 500 pounds per square foot. | ||
| It's a lot of pressure to move that thing around. | ||
| And you're in it for eight or nine hours. | ||
| So just moving around in a spacewalk. | ||
| So you do a spacewalk for eight or nine hours? | ||
| Uh, you're supposed to be outside for six and a half, but getting in and out of the suit takes roughly two hours. | ||
| It's a lot of time you're in the space suit. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And you move with your hands and that glove is pressurized. | ||
| So you're doing this, you know, forearm strength. | ||
| Mine is nothing now, but we used to do kettlebells. | ||
| Just, we would do the elephant while you just walk around the gym carrying 40 pounds of kettlebells. | ||
| Doing pull-ups is really good. | ||
| Anything that would get your forearm strength. | ||
| Cause that's the, that's the hardest thing to do is you're constantly squeezing and letting go. | ||
| Wow, so, but is this like a, did they have a structured protocol to get you prepared for something like this? | ||
| Yeah, they have, we call them ACERS, Astronaut Strength and Conditioning. | ||
| They're basically former like NCAA football strength and conditioning guys that would come in and, or gals, and help us You'd go to the gym, dude, tell me what to do, and they would just be like, all right, burpees, all right, go run this, we're squatting today, whatever. | ||
| They would just come up with the program. | ||
| For me, that was good because otherwise I would just do the same thing every day and it wouldn't be that great. | ||
| So having someone to crack the whip and tell you to do stuff was really good. | ||
| So it's almost like you're training for a fight. | ||
| You're getting in condition. | ||
| You're fighting against weightlessness. | ||
| You are training for a fight, yeah. | ||
| And the weightlessness is you falling. | ||
| It feels like you're falling, yeah. | ||
| You know, one of the coolest things about that, you feel like you're falling, but you were asking about sleep, and so dreaming, when I was in space, I would dream about being in space. | ||
| Like, I remember in The Empire Strikes Back, when there's the asteroids, and there's like that scene, the worm comes out of the asteroid and stuff. | ||
| I had that dream a lot. | ||
| Like, I'm just floating in space, and there's rocks, and It was just blah. | ||
| It was completely nothing. | ||
| It was black. | ||
| And then the Russians, one day I was floating through the middle and I heard this bird chirping and I stopped and I'm like, what was that? | ||
| And I looked in note three. | ||
| On the exercise machine was Misha Kornienko, a Russian crewmate. | ||
| Amazing guy. | ||
| He was a cop in Moscow before he was a cosmonaut. | ||
| And he was listening to this. | ||
| I'm like, Misha, is there a bird in there? | ||
| And he laughed. | ||
| The Russian psychologist had sent him sounds from Earth. | ||
| So we got all these MP3 files of jungle noises and waves at the beach and rain. | ||
| It was a glass clinking at a cafe. | ||
| And so it was like amazing. | ||
| The whole crew fell in love with this stuff. | ||
| So I went to sleep for about a month. | ||
| I put my headset on, plug it in a laptop, and listen to rain. | ||
| And I would just sleep floating. | ||
| I wasn't connected to the wall because I was in my own little thing. | ||
| So I was literally floating, listening to rain. | ||
| And that month, I dreamt of Earth. | ||
| All my dreams were like running in a field or just being on Earth. | ||
| And then I stopped. | ||
| I got tired of rain after a month. | ||
| And then my dreams went back to the blackness of space. | ||
| So my brain subconsciously knew somehow it triggered something. | ||
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Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, consciously you knew you were in space, so I'm assuming your subconscious got the memo too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| That was pretty cool. | ||
| Dude, you've lived a cool life. | ||
| I mean, it's just the idea of doing the things you've done and to be able to come back and tell people about it, that you've lived... | ||
| In a space station for 200 days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| It was my childhood dream, too. | ||
| I mean, I was very lucky in that I got to do what I dreamt about as a kid. | ||
| Very cool. | ||
| It was pretty awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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Well... | |
| Congratulations on everything, man. | ||
| And your book, it's called How to Astronaut. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's available right now. | ||
| Just came out. | ||
| Super excited about it. | ||
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| I tried to make it so it's not, like, for space nerds. | ||
| It's for anybody. | ||
| I use all the NASA acronyms and make fun of them. | ||
| And I kind of try to talk in down-to-earth language. | ||
| So men, women, old, young. | ||
| I tried to bring the experience of spaceflight. | ||
| Some stuff you'd expect, some stuff you wouldn't. | ||
| Well, the thing about astronauts is, like, to be the physical person that does that, you kind of got to be a little wild. | ||
| It's a little bit different than just straight-up scientists. | ||
| Oh, yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and we hire scientists to be astronauts, but you're not just writing equations on a blackboard. | ||
| You're actually, like... | ||
| You're doing shit, and if you don't do it right, you might die. | ||
| So you have to have that operational, common sense aspect to yourself. | ||
| It's not just a hypothetical, theoretical job, for sure. | ||
| Tell people what your social media is. | ||
| What is your Instagram is? | ||
| Astro Terry. | ||
| Instagram is astro underscore Terry. | ||
| So yeah, Twitter, Instagram. | ||
| I got a LinkedIn account. | ||
| Astro Terry, how to astronaut. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Well, thank you very much, Terry. | ||
| Appreciate it, man. | ||
| Yeah, thanks for having me on. | ||
| It was really fun. | ||
|
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I enjoyed it. | |
| Thank you. |
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