Barbell Shrugged - Optimal Health, Nutrition, and Training for Life to Thrive on Mars with NASA Humanworks Chief Cody Burkhart w/ Anders Varner, Dan Garner, and Dr. Andy Galpin Barbell Shrugged #654

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged we cover:   Why physical fitness is important in space. How zero gravity changes your physiology and creates complexity to human movement. What is needed to sustain health on the moon or mars. How to build and maintain muscle in zero gravity. How to optimize your nutrition living in space How optimal health in space can help us better understand the human body on earth.  The latest technological breakthroughs in optimal health for astronauts living in space.   To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthreport.com   Connect with our guests:   Cody Burkhart on LinkedIn   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   Dan Garner on Instagram   Andy Galpin on Instagram   ————————————————    Please Support Our Sponsors   Eight Sleep - Save $150 on the Pod Pro and Pod Pro Cover   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we're hanging out with Cody Burkhart. You may not know who he is, however, he has an extremely important job. He's the performance director at NASA, which means his job is not only to get really healthy people up into space, but to actually figure out what kind of training program and what kind of nutrition program and how to optimize astronauts' health so that when they get to the moon, they're healthy. When they live in the space station, they're healthy. When they potentially go to Mars. But how do we get humans, in the bigger sense,

how do we get humans to be able to live on different planets and be able to maintain physiological health in the way that we actually understand it here on Earth? With zero gravity, living in an ecosystem that nobody actually knows what's going on there there's tons of complexity because the only place that we have that we can train is on earth but what happens when you ask yourself the larger question of how do we train on earth to prepare ourselves for mars or for the moon or living a life in a completely on a completely different planet that's wild stuff and i think it's really important think it's really cool. It's a conversation we very rarely get to have. And I think it's awesome that we get to meet people like Cody that have extensive knowledge

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Like I said, this free bundle offer, which includes a bottle of Masszymes plus three free e-books, is only available while stock lasts. So, you'll want to go to the exclusive link to take advantage of it. Masszymes.com forward slash shrugged free. M-A-S-S-Z-Y-M-E-S.com forward slash shrugged free. Masszymes.com forward slash shrugged free. Oh, and in case you're wondering, there are no strings attached to this offer. There are no automatic subscriptions or renewals, so there's nothing to cancel so just go to masszymes.com forward slash shrugged free now to get your exclusive free products let's get into the show welcome to barbell shrugged i'm anders varner i always want to say doug larson because i've been saying it so many times for some reason he didn't come on this trip. Dan Garner, Andy Galpin, Cody Burkhart, the performance director.

You run human performance at NASA. I do not run all of human performance. No, that would be an unfair statement. I am the chief of human works. Human works. Of course NASA has, like, some thing. You can't just call it director of human performance. For the record, for many years, any time I describe or introduce Cody, I always say the director of human performance at NASA. record, for many years, anytime I describe or introduce Cody,

I always say the director of human performance at NASA. And he always goes, and I'm like, bro, that's what you do. You're allowed to give yourself the layup and say you're the director. He's like, actually, it's a totally different – stop. We don't care. Hold on a second. We can keep this quick because I'm sure your bio, we could talk about it for forever and all

the things you've done but how uh one how did you get into nasa like what was the background sure um and then um really kind of like the progression to to sitting here and hanging out with us and getting into the position you're in uh so i'll say i kind of started with that whole space is a challenge conversation uh I really wanted to get into something that was hard, right? And that required you to be at that top of yourself. And so building through school and just really being interested in engineering and sciences and those kinds of things made sense, right? Math, I wasn't afraid of that conversation. I actually did a whole bunch of undergrad type work in

high school. I say that because at the time it was just AP classes. It wasn't the same like go to college at the same time. I had enough credits to be considered a sophomore so I ended up going to one of those career fairs and ended up getting a job for a co-op back and forth. I can't believe a career fair actually

worked for someone. No, it blew my mind. I went there and handed out my resume to a bunch of people, and I got the phone call of like, hey, yeah, we'd like to do an interview tomorrow. Are you available? And I'm like, yeah. And so I had all these plans, and they all changed because I was like, I got a chance. This is the place. This is what I wanted to do. And so it went down that path. The way the co-op works, you go back and forth between work and school you know the 2008-2009 financial crisis looked like a really great time to get a job so when they offered me a full-time job I was like yes I will take this you don't have to push

me too far my other option is starving so this sounds good and I got into vehicle system designs multi-mission space exploration vehicle it's like a submarine on wheels I got into vehicle system designs, multi-mission space exploration vehicle. It's like a submarine on wheels. I got into Argos, which is like a cherry crane picker that offloads people, right? And then eventually stumbled into ARED, which, you know, addendum story. While I was doing all this,

I had started this human performance conversation. I started, you know, hanging out with Brian and learning how, like I introduced it earlier this week, Silicon Valley didn't just have an increase of technology. They had an increase of new ways of thought. And so being around San Francisco CrossFit, for instance, with Kelly and Brian and Diane and Carl, right, meeting you guys, like that was so much information

that was not untapped by everybody else. And so for me, it was these intersecting paths that came together. Ended up getting the job, which I still currently do, is the project manager for ARED, which is the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device. That's what we have on the ISS. It's the primary way astronauts exercise in space. The deadlift machine.

Yes, exactly. The deadlift machine, right? We have that. We have the T2. We have the primary way astronauts exercise in space. The deadlift machine. Yes, exactly, the deadlift machine. We have that, we have the T2, and we have the SEVIS. And I've been taking care of that for a number of years, working with a really great team, and at the same time, that human performance background piece, I was like, we're doing some things right.

But man, the challenge for exploration, going to Moon and Mars, very much different than Leo I'm actually super curious so we handle strength conditioning in a gravity system where do you even start to think about strength conditioning

and how do you one the deficiencies that are going to happen once you get into zero gravity and then now you have to go keep muscles and bone density and all this stuff. Like, how do you even start to do the, like, problem solving? Because that's not, like, it can't be an easy code to crack. Yeah, I mean, you said solving, right?

I wouldn't say it's problem solving yet, right? It's problem understanding at this point. Because we're still very, very new to the entire experience. When it comes to muscles, like, you know like one of the conversations I had more recently was just that after about six months, DOMS changes, right? It's a very different type of conversation. Why? Well, I mean, the N number is low.

I can't tell you that specifically, right? But it just becomes a question of how do we continue to interact with that physiological change? Because, like, to your point, you know how to handle it in gravity. But literally, to me, when I take gravity away, I mess everything up. I don't just mess up how you lift something. When you do ARED, you actually don't lift up and down. You can watch a video online. It clamshells you like it's smashing you.

You just basically stay in one spot, and the device moves around you. That it's smashing you, right? You just basically stay in one spot and the device moves around you That's because of gravity right? We're in microgravity. We no longer have that environment So when you think about that your perception of like how I would train Changes yeah, because now I'm seeing that you're going to interact with the environment differently and on top of that your psychology, too I don't you ever seen this brain games ones where they put your finger in the middle of two gray blocks and suddenly there's no more shadows. Because our brain literally uses gravity to tell me that light is up here and this is down here. So if I see a horizon line, then these shadows should look like that. It's a lie.

It's just misinformation that your brain has going, it's roughly like this. It should be like this. I'm going to do this for you, and we're going to solve that problem. Now to Andy's point, I start distorting your vision because now the arterial return function has changed as you have no more gravity pulling down all

of the blood towards your bottom of your feet. I'm pulling up. You see pictures where the very first days are like this, and then they, over time, you're short. They blow up vertically. Yeah. My traps are short, right, when I use those kinds of things.

And so suddenly I don't have myself holding my hands down my side. It's not like you can just go do farmer's carries. Right? You can't. The 100-pound dumbbells are going to float. How are you going to load your spine? Exactly. Exactly.

Those are really tough challenges. And so you going to load your spine? Exactly. Exactly. Very difficult. Those are really tough challenges. And so you have things like your heel bones, right, your femur, your pelvis. They go through a lot of bone absorption, right? And so that's another reason, like, when we start talking about kidney stones, if you have a history of that, it's going to be sometimes a disqualifier relative to flight because you're sloughing off so much calcium through your body as you're not breaking that down through that osteoclast osteoblast relationship. There's no, there's no damage. And so when you run on a treadmill,

right, we try and pull you down with a harness system to try and give you more, you know, force to that strike. You're trying to do, you know, you call it the deadlift machine, deadlift squats, heel raises is a big one. Heel raises for every single person, right? So you're really trying to find these areas that are part of that kinetic chain that it would otherwise be loaded by being in gravity all the time. Yeah, in muscle physiology, we generally could describe muscle as either, like, movement, locomotion, or anti-gravity, right? So your soleus, think about your calf, right, your gastroc is meant for propulsion. That's the big one, if you point your toe towards

your head, that's the big one that pops out in the inside, right? The other one behind that is your soleus. The soleus doesn't move you forward at all, it's to keep you vertical. It's called anti gravity, right? Specifically, because when you do things like remove gravity, the soleus is train wrecked. Like we can't do anything about that problem because we can keep the gastroc alive up in space. Just give it a little bit of strength training.

It's used to contracting a few times a day at high force. It's good. The soleus is used to being on, if you're not sitting all day, 10 hours a day. It's anti-gravity. When you remove that, how do you replace that stimulus? Those are the muscles that just get wrecked. And there's been no, I mean, I don't know what the, as far as the last time I looked, there's just been no solution for all those muscles.

We try new things, right? Our lab, for instance, we have a device that's called Adept that is built off of the Biodex knee dynamometer to be able to generate now truly motorized conversation and biofeedback. This is like the solution to the pigeon suit. Yeah, yeah. The penguin suit. Yeah, there you go. And that's another one. I mean, like, lower body negative pressure suits are a good conversation

for a lot of different things, but, like, the penguin suit is just this, you know, conversation. I'm going to put you into something that basically makes you want to do this. You have basically rubber bands. Put rubber bands on all your joints so that they're in constant tension, just being in normal position. And they tried that. That was the Chinese. I think it was Russian. The Russians. Didn't work. In other words, threw that out. Now go back to your isokinnect

dynamometer. Because that was the better solution to that. So ADEPT, again, is just looking at the first conversation of a joint, right? So Biodex makes a really good knee dynamometer. And the was to say can we hit gold standard right can we make it that way so successful you know check that off now that we've had that it's the question of saying how do i do other things to it and put so the adept portion is an ai driven conversation that's what the a and d are because what we want to be able to do eventually to the point of like where the penguin suit falls apart is that it's not just about tension. It's about optimized or correct tension at the correct times. And we take that for granted that we do that as humans.

But like you don't stand in a really dumb position for very long. You shift your weight to somewhere else and you shift your weight to somewhere else. You already have this AI system that's like, I'm going to solve how I'm not going to overload myself. That changes in space. I have a... I hope this doesn't come across as too ridiculous.

If we're going to be living in space, does it make sense that we have to stop trying to maintain what makes us human on Earth with gravity? Or is this, we should actually be training people to change their physiology on Earth to match the environment that they will be living on in Mars? If you're driving right now, pull over.

Because it almost feels very backwards to be like, we need to keep you homo sapien. in Mars. If you're driving right now, pull over. It almost feels very backwards to be like, we need to keep you homo sapien. But when you turn, but when you go to Mars, we actually, what we need to be doing is changing your body to meet those requirements. You're now a Martian. Let's make you a Martian.

We're solving the wrong problem. Instead of trying to keep you human, or homo sapien, if we're actually trying to get people to be able to adapt to that, the faster we start to live under those conditions on earth, the want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you.

Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program. And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're

able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. So when you say homo sapiens, the way I like to have this conversation is homo astra, right? The idea of the cosmic resident. You know, if we're going to go that direction, right, there are a lot of those evolutionary standpoints that we're going to face along the chain. But it makes me think, Andy,

back to one of the questions that we talked about, like I think it was one of your grad exams, like one of the bonus questions of like, if you could do one thing for space, what would it be, right? I'd put you on a T-cycle, right? Get you large and in charge before I send you into a place that's going to completely dump you. And that's, you know, not the motif, right?

That's not the conversation. But it's like, why not? If we're on Mars, what are the gravitational demands on Mars? Is it more? Is it less? What do I weigh on Mars? So a 200-pound person weighs 150 pounds on Mars or 100 pounds on Mars. So take like a

one-third multiplier is a pretty good idea. So if you're going to take 100 pounds, take 33 of those pounds. So if we have a 300-pound suit and astronaut with a backpack combination,

they're going to feel like 100 pounds. That's a giant difference. It is. I feel so lean today because you weigh 60 pounds all of a sudden. And that's another challenge to it

right it's like now you don't have that same kind of load and so how do i again keep that for a long period of time because if i take you on a long journey there and maybe you have a long journey back and at the end of this whole tunnel of going through this whole mess you have to come back to where everything is back to g again. How does that work out? Right now, when you land as an astronaut, particularly right now, you're basically moved immediately from that capsule into a chair where somebody is just taking care of you, and they ship you within 24 hours back to JSC,

and you're taken care of. You have all the health and protection that you need. Pay dirt does not look like that. No. Right? It looks like you against it. And whoever your team is and whatever autonomous agents, the robots that you brought along with you,

the resources that you have there. But if you didn't bring it with you, if you forgot it, if in that moment you realize that you're too far left or too far right relative to the needs that you have and you can't go back and get them i mean you don't get you don't get the chance i can't even begin to imagine over millions and millions of years of human evolution how connected our hearts and brains and blood and veins and nervous system and everything is connected to gravity yes how long is a projected plan in which we would actually be able to adapt to even just being on the moon, much less Mars or something along those lines?

You're highly adaptable. I mean, human beings are pretty good at that. So it's not like you won't find a way to exist, right, and to appreciate that existence. You also have to have enough energy to build a farm on Mars. You're saying optimization, right? Food. Are you doing that?

Or is a robot doing that? Right, so these are the questions, right? These are the challenges. You go, I do want you to be human. Most certainly. I want you to think

human thoughts. I want you to have human emotions. I want you to be engaged in the experience. But to like some of the conversations we were having yesterday, right?

Like after I've achieved survival if i have to spend 18 hours of my day to maintain survivability will i feel like i'm thriving will i feel like i'm actually being a human or will i feel like i'm just a robot like probably more like a robot right we want to get into a place where then we have robots or autonomous agents that actually allow us to thrive okay Okay, so in that thriving context, what would that look like, right? That doesn't always have to look like here. But going back to your previous point,

there is some preparation that's probably logical. Right now for astronauts, basically our training is a decade-long conversation, right? And it's very immersive and very deep i'll at least say and this is not me speaking for the agency right this is me speaking from my own personal standpoint i don't think we are ready for the deeper missions it's one thing again to be able to know that in six months i can bring you back and I can wrap you in all the recovery techniques and all the cool widgets and toys and sensors and everything.

I'm not going to do that when I go the other direction. Yeah, because when you have a plan of colonizing, even say the moon, you have to be thinking in at least a decade. I mean, honestly, if you're thinking about colonizing, you've got to think about permits. It's a one-way. Yeah, it's a one-way ticket.

Yeah. At the beginning, sure. There's going to be a bunch of people that are going to have one-way conversations. colonizing, you've got to think about permits. It's a one-way. Yeah, it's a one-way ticket. Yeah. At the beginning, sure. There's going to be a bunch of people that are going to have one-way conversations. And right now you've said six people that have been to the space station for a year. There's three, I think, that have done the full over a year. Yeah. It's like the most recent was Mark Vande Hei. Yeah.

In that kind of situation, a year in space, from an immune system perspective, because it's unbelievably sterile up there it has to be so when you come back down is there extreme immunosuppression that somebody has through being in such an unperturbed environment

for the immune system where it didn't actually have to utilize because the body is the ultimate efficiency machine if it's not being insulted by outside invaders it's not being insulted by outside invaders, it's not going to use up resources in order to remain efficient against those outside invaders. So I would assume in such a sterile environment

for such a long period of time that immunity would drop. And then that would, when we get them back on Earth, then they could be under immunosuppression for some period of time until they build up resilience again. But if we were on a deeper mission, then I feel like not only would they be immunosuppressed when they got there, but there are things that we don't even know are there that having a good immune system is probably a great idea. Right. Or not needed at all.

To your point, I think at least the portion that I'll really address is just the notion that there's a lot of things that we have here that, to your point, challenge the immune system. How do we get those with us? When I walked out on this hike this morning, I was getting in tons of organic plant material and spores and just all of this flora and fauna. I will not have that in the context of where I'm going. Now, I can bring that in kind of like a backpack. Like a localized ecosystem type thing to keep your physiology on its toes. Is that what I should do, right? I mean, I still have the memory in my immune system, right?

So it's not like my immune system has forgotten all the things it's seen here. I could make an argument and say, actually, before you go to space, I want you to travel to 20 different countries Airbnb style until you've seen all kinds of weird... So to your point, when you go someplace, you've got a lot of different mechanisms to play with that. But it is a question. What are we going to find? What's it going to look like? How is it going to react to a system that has been built in one controlled system with a very specific subset of rules on a space you know this

is a spaceship right earth is a spaceship it's a very very controlled one and it's really really smart and every conversation we keep having having is how do i bring home with me right how do i make you be able to wear a t-shirt inside of this capsule because it's okay it's a space hotel right that's what we're trying to do. So bring home with us. So again, to the immune system conversation, how do we really bring the true sense of home with us? It's really critical to do those things. And I know I've seen some groups that are working on things like humidity and temperature control in environmental spaces. So you can grow basically any type of plants and that's that's the opening but insects too right like

nobody's ever has a conversation about insects i know it seems ridiculous but like dr scott solomon if you haven't seen his stuff he's got a whole bunch of stuff on it where again these are a really critical part of our whole backbone we don't think about how many pieces play a role right um yeah i feel like there's's YouTube channels where it's like, they put seven deer into a forest, and then the river changed. And you're like, hold on a second. Now we're going to Mars? Wait a second.

How did this work? Can we back up a quick second, actually? 12 months on ISS. Obviously, we talked about they're going to use ARED, and there's cooler stuff. But what actually has to happen, how cool are the things that they're using to keep them alive for 12 months? Are they taking very specific immune protocols? Do they have a lot of medication that they're taking that is optimized to them, special diets?

What other stuff are they doing that people would be like, oh, I never even thought about that? Or is it just like, here's a bunch of pre-made meals in your workout plan? Are there cool things like, yeah, there are soils up there that we're taking just to expose them to keep them around.

So, like, what does that actually look like? So I'll say I don't know all of it, right? How dare you? This is why you're not the director of human performance company. See, this is why we keep saying don't use that title this is why you're the president of nasa this is why you didn't get that promotion the would you like some of this brain health there are a lot of different protocols in place and you know i can earnestly say that a lot of those are

individualized to relative to who you have as a you know kind of your watch group and i say that because right there are different flight surgeons there are different uh acers and so they set a relationship up beforehand right and then each individual crew member has some place that they want to go with that conversation so are there there, you know, pharmacological techniques? Yeah, sure. I mean, when we think about sleep in space, super darn difficult, and it's really critical. And so how do we get somebody to fall asleep, besides just doing a light shift inside of their like zip in pouch, right? There are some, you know, responses there, and then trying to make the, you know the other side of that token after you've gone to bed and now trying to wake them back up.

So trying to build this new, essentially, a circadian rhythm. How do you build a circadian rhythm when you're flying around the Earth every whatever hours? So they have some lights inside of their sleeping cabins where they can do a red shift on it. And I've had some conversations with some groups recently that are trying to do that with the VR. And that's really interesting right i think that there is a a lot of capacity uh to help in that one small zone but it's such a big zone such a big conversation and just one part of it right because then we start getting into nutrition right so they've got a food testing lab right they love to ask the interns especially to come out and try all their new, like, three-bean salads and stuff like that. But they have a new app that's supposed to be tracking a lot more of those, you know, detailed steps.

But you're also trying to then bring in things that are important, like this astronaut likes mustard. This astronaut wants a cup of coffee, right? So how can they bring some of those home attachment pieces? Even further, a new thing they're doing is called Chapia. C-H-A-P-E-A. You can look it up online. It's a three-by-one-year food study where they're going to have people, and they 3D printed this whole basically habitat thing,

and they're not going to be able to see human beings, and you're not going to interact with anyone, and they're going to give you, like one group, the same food for a year. Next group, a little bit of variation. Next group, pure variation. It's trying to understand what happens to them as they go through that experience, which is really fantastic. Yeah. I wouldn't submit myself to eating nothing but the same thing.

Some people would. Some people would, and they like it. It's like we create these diets, right? You're like the one I'm really dialed in. That's basically what it looks like. You two are both. And you feel great. Yeah. No variation.

The interesting part, though, I think about this is you created that system here through a consistent feature set of repeatable circumstances. That shit isn't that way. It's not going to be repeatable. And to the point of emotional shearing that would come from the apprehension of saying oh this might happen i might die because like i've walked outside and you know at a car almost hit me kind of thing you're like oh that was that was a moment but like anything that goes wrong could be a moment to, like, still trigger that thought process of, like, here's my fear of doom. And so that's, again, immune system conversation.

Now am I super stressed with that in the back of my mind? So, you know, we heard, like, Ron Guerin talking about the idea of the overview effect and, like, creating this interdependence such that you're playing a secondary game. And this goes back to a question you asked, right? How do you get somebody ready for it? To me, it's make them play a better game, right? Two games, not just one. I'm not in a game just of my own. I'm in this much larger game. And if I'm playing this much larger game, I can make localized sacrifices to myself because I know I'm getting a reward somewhere else so I can give, right? I can give an exchange. How do we get more people to think that way, right? When entering

into this mix, because you're picking people like PhDs and fighter pilots so far. And I love both groups, but both of them have systems that are designed to kind of take away some of your self worth in a way, right? And then remap that to a confidence that's built on some very key cornerstone rule sets. Very authoritarian lines of conversation, right? If you're in academia, this is the path, right? If you're in the military, this is the path, right? It's not like you're going to crisscross

like you guys have done, right? That just doesn't happen as much. And so because you have these linear frameworks, how am I going to get those people to see their entire interconnection? Because if you can linear frameworks, how am I going to get those people to see their entire interconnection? Because if you can see that, then suddenly I reduce your stress. If I reduce your stress, I reduce your reactivity.

If I reduce your reactivity, I have a lot more capacity for my body to do what it does best, right? To solve problems that I don't know about. Like when you really think back to the immune system, it's Brownian motion. If you don't know what that is, it means basically random. That's it, right? And so through random motion, we will catch an invading element

fast enough to make sure that we don't die. Wherein, if we didn't do that, some things could kill us in as fast as 30 minutes, right? Even faster. And that's crazy to me. It does that without you asking for it. You don't do that, some things could kill us in as fast as 30 minutes, right? Even faster. And that's crazy to me. It does that without you asking for it. You don't have to like encourage it. You didn't even know. Yeah. And, and all these things like, oh, I'm going to boost your immune system. No, don't do that. Right? Like the boosting of the immune system looks like it eating you alive. When you boost things, it's not real. And so we get stuck in this loop, I think, of trying to ask ourselves,

how am I going to immediately solve the human performance problem when you've worked with enough athletes, you guys have seen enough athletes, right? I don't care if you're an athlete or a special forces operator or a grad student or the president of NASA, I don't care if you're any of those things, your ability to engage to a level of stress, work through that stress is, is the game, right? So it's your headspace. It always comes down to that conversation. What is your psychology? And so can I, A, make your headspace cleaner? And then B, can I start to enable the protection of that long term? That to me is going to be the most effective tool because the general physiology that we have that's evolved over millions of years is pretty freaking great. It's so amazing. It does such a great job. I don't need to screw with that.

But what I do need to do, right, is shield the brain. I need to protect it from a lot of negative ramifications and choices because, like, if it's giving me a signal that says, send in a cytocline rush, why? Because you're inflamed in this one area, and then that's the response it's going to get? No, it just means your blood isn't going through your legs today. That would be a really bad thing, right? So how can we get in these positions where we protect that brain so that it can have the opportunity to do the command architecture for the body that we already want to have?

Yeah, it's like the common problem with AI is it's still only as smart as what you program its core mission to be. Correct. This is the brain, right? It knows its core mission here. We have to reframe its core mission to be. Correct. This is the brain, right? It knows its core mission here. We have to reframe its core mission up there. Do we? Or we don't. But that's the idea.

You're not solving this problem anymore because that blood flow is never coming back because you're staying here forever. I need you to learn a different problem, right? The way that you can package it is, us as a species, we've really only had two core missions in entire existence.

Core mission one, reproduce. Core mission two, reduce stress. Let's form cultures so that we're safer. Let's form housing for thermal stress. Let's form core cultures for food. It's all stress reduction. If you now move off this planet, it's like, oops,

our whole goal was to reduce stress and we did it. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Now we're dying. The whole problem up there is all the stresses that we want to remove are gone. You won.

Oops. Now we've introduced new stressors we never thought about, so the entire stresses equation is flipped, and now it's like, okay, I have to re-engineer as many of these stressors back in. Or my whole operating system is running on the wrong machine. You just put Apple operating systems on a Mac, on a PC. Watch what happens. You reduce the basic functionality.

I got Word to function. Nothing else works, right? So you have to reframe and rethink about that whole problem, which is kind of what you're saying. It's like, no, no, no. Stop solving what is optimal physiology on Earth because it's just not the same thing. It's like your very first question

as a coach in an intake form. What's your goal? Yeah. My goal is to be on Mars. Well, let's design a program for you to be on Mars, not for you to be on Earth at Mars. Yeah, that's actually a nice lead-in to... What's Scion Lab? In addition to running NASA,

you have a separate lab called the Scion Lab. What is Scion? And then tell us some of the cool shit you're making have made in Scion. So Scion stands for Physiology, Sensing, Intelligent Optimization Nucleus. I'll say that. Yeah, that's the face that we got.

So now we're called Human Works. It's a lot easier to digest. Do you really want to get into acronyms? I highly recommend hanging out with space people. We do. I will refuse to acknowledge this as anything but Scion the rest of my life. That is such a badass name. Thank you.

I appreciate it. A lot of people just didn't. I thought it would be S-C-I-O-N, but there's a P in there. Tell them why it's named that. Psionic powers from a standpoint of superheroes are the ones that could see beyond the senses. The objective of that entire conversation was what can I do to make you capable of seeing beyond your senses?

Example, one of the devices that we've worked on is the idea of having a hyperspectral camera that can allow me to see in UV and IR. So like a mantis shrimp does that in order to strike and get its prey. But now I'm saying if I could see a pocket of CO2, then don't go near that right that that would reduce your cognitive capacity if you hung on in that right at the same time if i'm sitting in a dust storm right on mars i want to be able to see my capsule uh wherever it is and get back home so how do i peel through those layers the same conversation allows me to turn it around on a human being yeah this is the fun part

and start peeling into you so the presumption here is that like let's give an example i put you on a met cart and i'm going to watch you train and i'm going to see where you start to deflect and what i'm going to i'm wanting to look for is when you start getting into an anaerobic region where i'm concerned about the breakdown of your technique, I know that that sign came way before you were like, oh, right with your face. How can I extract that? Can I look at the color of your skin? Can I look through the layers of your skin into your internal musculature and structure

and look for certain... Yeah, you could totally probably dig into like the nervous system and how those signals are firing. It's even better. You could like a deadlift all of a sudden you go, oh, you could totally probably dig into the nervous system and how those signals are firing. It's even better. You could, like a deadlift, all of a sudden you go, oh, you're pulling too early. Here. And in fact, you're hormonologically already too excited

when you get ready to start the lift, such that I know private event-wise, you're not really ready to hit this lift. Yeah. Like, you know, we've all been there. We walk up to the bar and then in your head it's like, I'm not going to do this. Totally.

And you're done. 100%. Nobody needs to say that to you, but a camera could. Yeah. And as you get better, specifically like Olympic lifting, when I was doing it and competing, I could tell you if I was going to make the lift literally in the first inch off the ground.

Like, is my weight balanced actually in my midfoot right now? Because if my big toe hits the ground too hard, I'm way too forward, and I might as well just set the bar down. Yeah, so in this analogy, think about, can you turn that camera into your own eye and see that cytokine storm? Not like, actually, and the answer is, yeah. That's what these cameras can do.

If you think beyond, well, I mean, here's another, throwing it out there. Right now we think about 60, right, as a hertz collection for pictures of the eye. There are higher frequency tools that are in existence now that allow you to capture new ways that your eyes move. So instead of just, like, smooth pursuit and saccades, there's actually, you know, again, we've got four cranial nerves that attach these bad boys. And every single process that we've built over time as a species, we are a stereoscopic species, right? We picked eyeballs as our winning combination for how we wanted to interpret most of the information. So our brain is set up for that structure. Every time I go through a thought or a system change, right, there's minute movements in those firing sequences, right? And so there are things that, you know, for instance, Dr. Stone out of NASA Ames,

this is some of the stuff that Z3VR has, right? He had a program called Cobra that, you know, found 19 parameters of the eyes once you moved into a frequency above the Nyquist frequency for saccades. Just taking pictures of the eye really, really fast. But now instead of a 0-1 solution to any answer, I'm getting all of these millisecond snapshots along that path.

We can develop these much more perfect psychometric curves to say here is the response across these thresholds. Now if I have these 19 parameters and I go A, B, and C flagging these thresholds when you have sleep deprivation

I see it every time. Is there a piece of this where I honestly feel like the human body and everything we have because we became very good at creating tools we're kind of like a dumb species we don't really have like speed of like tigers we don't really have like when you see like a cat jump you're like whoa yeah how do i get cat jump ability

that would be awesome or like put on cody's iron man Yeah. But like we likely will need some of those like insanely freakish things in a different environment for survival and that we'll have to adapt to that we just are dumb monkeys that can't actually – like we don't have those skills anymore. They may be in us somewhere. And that's the part of it, right? So like if I answer this in two different ways, one of them is my autonomous agents. So we know that we're going to be too far away from a phone call to help. So we're going to send autonomous agents.

What I mean by that is just robots. The reason I'm saying autonomous agents is because not all robots are a physical robot, right? Some of them are an app. Some of them are an encouraging, cheering app, they're like yeah good job way to do your workout right like a gamification experience that is a agent that's helping you right they're taking information from your performance and then making a representative model of encouragement in that case you're creating a operantly conditioning loop cycle that says, continue to do the skill, right? So beyond just the fact that I'm going to have a robot that's

going to try and help take care of me, right? So in the case of saying jump like a cat, right? I mean, I could create those kinds of systems, right? We've seen the individuals using the, you know, new drone boards that can like fly up in the air and the guys with the, that are actually now in special forces with a giant turbine pumps in their arms that can jump off of a boat and fly and land on somewhere. Those are great robots. We can see some of those robots that are probably going to make sense to

integrate with us. Augmenting the human. To the point of augmenting the human, you are the smartest to our knowledge so far, most successful, most evolved version of a human that has ever existed. I don't know. LeBron exists.

I appreciate it. Cody, have you heard of Elon Musk? Yes. We're at that level. He listens to this show. We're at that level, though, as a species. And I don't say that to try and say it arrogantly or with ego at all. It's more just like even if I look at a cat, that cat has evolved over time for that purpose set.

And so we have to kind of harness what it is that we're really great at. So like fluid reasoning, fluid intelligence. I mean, we're not the crystallized intelligence group. That's a robot. That's a computer. It will know way more than you because it does not need to stop remembering

to put in something else or to have an emotional event with somebody else, right? Like it doesn't have to pay attention to only a couple details just pay attention only to what you tell it to right I want to port this data into here check and every single time it goes in there I would love to say to my wife I'm gonna port this data into my brain it's gonna be remembered go right so that every time we have that conversation I don't forget yeah but I do right and so I not thinking about work right now

I'm totally listening to you I pour everything she says and it just goes right into the bin it's just not the bin she's hoping it lands in and that's where the fluid comes in that moment where you're trying to be like

oh no honey I'm listening yeah I mean totally I remember from last week and you're trying to in your mind go through it's the best you can

you're asking the highest power of your brain ever that existed to please land right now. Please remember it's your birthday. And so we have these two realms, right? And again, going back to that earlier question you asked, what would we do to get ready? Well, we want to make augmenting

systems, but we also want to help you augment your own experience, right? How do we immerse you into knowing systems, but we also want to help you augment your own experience. How do we immerse you into knowing why you're going there? This seems silly, but let's just say the three of you all had a conversation, and you're like,

we're going to space because humans are awesome. I don't care about anything else. Humans are awesome. I show up, and the only reason I'm there is to make fucking money. How much does this start to spiral yeah right and that's humans are like we kill each other yeah for those kinds of things and so we're going to build this situation where we start building these systems and we add more people as we build the community and you've got to have that value check flies on yeah yeah like Florida flies on Mars. Yeah, yeah.

It's so much of a bigger conversation than just, again, like if you went to the woods with your friends, and it didn't work out from a standpoint of hanging like five families together, well, then you learn that weekend that you're going to have to do that every couple years. Yep. This doesn't end. And you'd have to start with communism. Yeah, and you're staring at the blue of earth and all of the history that you've ever had.

So this is... I want to ask you, Cody, as the president of the United States. Right now, there's more conversations than... Director of human potential forever. There's more conversations than ever regarding multi-planetary travel. As long as I've been alive, I don't think I've ever seen as many people buzzed about this kind of thing. And it's not just the energy of this weekend. It's the way several companies have grown to tremendous heights lately.

So, like, how come there is so much interest in this at this point in time is it because we're seeing certain real warning signs from where we live right now that that should be something that we have in order somewhat soon uh so i'll approach this a couple different ways the first one is to to say I think NASA did its job, meaning a real backbone of what we were supposed to do is to make space commercializable. Tenable. To make it so that we could all do that. That was the whole driving goal because...

It was a feasibility study. Yeah, exactly. And then we figured out that it was feasible and everyone else figured out how to make business plans around it. And so, yay, right? And so now we're in this exchange where, you know, in 2011 timeframe when SpaceX was coming onto the scene and, you know, Neil Armstrong was basically making Elon cry, right?

Because of how he was choosing to approach that challenge to the ecosystem. There's been a lot of growth to that. I mean, like, I'm not going to say I like all of the way that Elon's fingerprints are left on some of these things, but there's so much supercharged from it, right? Him and Jeff and, you know, the Richard Branson, right? Like the billionaire's piece. So while I know right now, there's a lot of attachment to space of billionaires and the federal government as your kind of two entities, I think that it was still exciting, right? It was a race again. And that was fun to watch. We love watching races,

right? Look how Formula One's become super popular now. We can actually watch it more often, right? So before it was on an app on your phone, you had to like sit and watch these people race around a lap not knowing what it was. Now the app shows you where, and oh, suddenly it's exciting, right? So there is a necessity of culture and society to start moving towards something and i you know you throw that on top of the fact that we were sitting in the pandemic most recently and like what do you get to see besides every once in a while like somebody's launching a rocket that's that's actually pretty exciting and now you're sitting there actually with the chance to pay attention to it like i watched many different flights with my sons like

introducing them to those things. One of the things that actually caught my eye more than any of that I actually saw when you're in SoCal, you can see Elon launch stuff all the time. But the Red Bull guy that free-falled Bumgarner? Yeah. That blew my mind.

That was wild. I was involved in his nutrition, by the way. Oh, you were? That's awesome. Yeah, that was in example. I was involved in this nutrition, by the way. Oh, you were? Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, that was in SoCal through Prohaska. Prohaska trained me. Oh, because Red Bull. That's right.

That one really caught my eye. Yeah. These conversations of, like, the exciting challenges, because we have to remind ourselves, like, it is still a game of exploration. And I think exploration from our species is kind of part of where we got things, right? We could have stayed in that one central spot, yet we're all over the face of the planet. Why, right? Because we went pretty much everywhere except for the places where, like, eh, Antarctica, North Pole, right?

Like, we'll stick a flag in it, we'll cross it, you know, shackled in the shit of it. But we're not going to stay there so when we create some of these spaces in space right it's different than like oh the view in antarctica is white right all around but the view from space is beautiful i can make the same thing on antarctica and in space but one of them has a tether to it right so i think there's just this emotional pull to it. Then there became even just like the fact that it was a debate, the fact that Matthew McConaughey and Salesforce are like, you know, I'm here to stay on Earth, so much so that it was a Super Bowl commercial, right,

of them walking away from a space vehicle. I didn't see that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. What a statement. What a political statement. I'm not trying to make it of saying that's a negative, right? What I'm trying to say is that there was both sides.

So suddenly there was just this renewed energy of saying, you know, let's talk about space. The other piece I'll add, and again, this is not me speaking from an agency standpoint. This is me just kind of looking at what I think, right? You've got kind of another space race going on, right? Definitely. There's a big group that has become even bigger by getting a partner. You know, China and Russia have decided to put together a moon base. You know, they've invited the rest of the world.

You know, obviously from a standpoint of how the relations of our country have with both of them, that makes it difficult for us to say yes to something like that. And so there's a pod, right? They're a group and they're interested in space and they've got a lot of technology and they've got a lot of astronauts. Then we've got ourselves, NASA, right? But even NASA is kind of in a race against SpaceX in a way, right? Because we have our large vehicle and we have the intent to use it. And again, it's not a race from a standpoint of we're competitors to them, but it's more of the conversation of we used a very known strategy

to build what we assume and believe is a very safe rocket. And hopefully that's the outcome for the Orion vehicle. We didn't go through the fast churn model, like trying to make the Henry Ford, right, Model T factory that Elon did so that they could test and learn and fail fast in order to get rockets that would be reusable. It changed the entire game, right? And so by the idea of reusable rockets

coming onto the scene, that's another huge, big recent change. It's a decade-old technology, but now everybody's like, duh, right? Of course we're going to make our rocket land on itself. But when that first happened, everyone said it was impossible to have that come back down and land again. Yeah, it was like throwing a pencil into the air

and letting it land back on its tip again, right? Like, it's silly, difficult. And I think that's the really cool part about space, right? Like, again, going back to why I went down this path or what got me to NASA to begin with, it's just like it was challenge. Like, these things are hard. They're really hard. There's no joking, right? And it's not

from, again, a standpoint of trying to say egotistically, oh, we have the most challenging problems. That's not it at all. They're just, they're really hard problems, and we really want to be involved in them. And so I think the other piece to, again, that space race conversation is just who do we want

to be in charge of some of those key decisions? And I think it even comes back to a philosophical conversation of saying space probably starts very authoritarian. It has to. Because if you make a mistake, you're dead. But we have

this view that's very libertarian. It's going to be just this laissez-faire. How do we get from here to there? It has to start as literally a commune on a different planet where everybody is equal. Yeah, exactly. But there has to be hierarchy.

And then the conversation of hierarchy is that you must define that very firmly before you leave in order to ensure that the choice tree doesn't have to struggle over it otherwise you have governance and then you have like this alpha beta Charlie right like you don't need that kind of dynamic going on when there's like

6 to 12 of you imagine if somebody was like hey you qualified you're going to Mars but guess what you're going to be a laborer your only job is to sweep the floor of the dust from mars you're like fuck i'm not going like what the guy says i want to be the coolest guy at mars i don't want to be here someone's gonna have to be a first hairdresser on the moon yeah what like yeah someone's gonna have to be out there cutting his hair like oh well yeah yeah well that sucks like I'm an hairdresser?

Amazing. I don't want that. But to that, right? Wouldn't that still be the cool? Of course. I am the first hairdresser on the moon. Do you have so many Instagram followers? Yeah, I mean, so many. That's what we're using to measure our life.

Absolutely. Check out this fade I just gave my other Martian friend. A pilot says that, though, right? It wouldn't be like a Philly fade, though. It would be like a dark side fade. It would be so dope to try to cut hair that's floating away from you. Yeah. You've got to have some special skills, right?

And then the kinds of things that you're going to make or the kinds of fashions you produce. I mean, while we're making this as a silly joke, I mean, this is real conversation, right? So we've run into some groups right now, and this, I think, is the other extension of space, is that they're doing private space training, right? That is a new thing.

Because, again, going back to our core, we had pilots and military professionals, right? And then we had PhDs. You're going to need welders in space. Yeah. Right? And that welding skill could be taught to somebody who's got a PhD, but I'd rather have the person who's been out in the middle of the ocean

welding their entire life and knows the ins and outs of every single interaction who's then trained to do that in a vacuum space because it's totally different. That's the difference between teaching, what we used earlier, like teaching a protocol to somebody. Oh, yeah. Versus, yeah, like, so in this case, you're teaching an astronaut how to weld, and they know how to weld. Or you bring the welder in who goes, no, no, no, I know how this whole thing works. So any problem you bring me, I can figure out this thing.

And you need that. Yeah, because it's like, no, I'm a welder. Like, oh, yeah, this goes out, cut this this you can build this cut over they're never going to have then they're always going to be able to execute because their core is understanding the principles and how well that works so we can get to this this way and that principles piece is the big one right because like it's the intimacy of knowing what to do when things go wrong of course right and if i teach you a procedure i only teach you how to understand the boundary conditions within the if statement loops that I've created there. But if suddenly something comes from wide right and hits me, no dice. And so when we think about space again, where we are now versus where we have to be, where we are right now is like if something kind of like curves balls us, we can get people back pretty quickly, right?

We can do a lot of things very quickly. That's not going to be the case when we go deeper. When we go to Mars. You're going to have to have real-time innovation. I bring this up probably way too many times, but Magellan

had 270 men and 5 ships. One came back, made up the pieces of the other ones, and only 30 of them split into two groups because some of them are prisoners, not including him. Right? Space is going to be like that

in a way, right? It's not to say that we aren't going to make choices that are designed to keep people alive and make the right choices. It's not going to say that we're going to try and go so fast that we intentionally fail as a species to do that, right? I feel like people are going to take this seriously, right? Because your friends are going up there, right?

Your family is going up there. But at the end of the day, it's still really challenging, right? As a culture, we much longer ago had these stories to keep people out of the woods. There's snakes. There's bears. There's spiders. Tigers. Everyone's scared of tigers.

But not even that. We got into magical beings. This is where all the trolls live. Dragons. Dragons, right. The reason we do that is so that we can create a dialogue, a cultural conversation of how our civilization is going to interact with that resource. Those are old school ideas.

There are very few people in the privileged conversation that are going to be going into these places who know what it feels like to walk outside of their house and not think that they could make it that day. Yeah. Right? And so... Because the people that can go are also the most protected people on our planet. Yeah.

Absolutely. We shelter them not only physiologically as they get ready to prepare, but psychologically too. I don't get to talk on open comms to an astronaut. There is a flight director who's been trained how to talk to them, right? Who's got another back support and another back support and another back support before you hear us. So that way

we can't say things like, are they idiots? Right? Because sometimes you just want to say that to somebody. And it's not like you're trying to be rude to an astronaut. You're just like, I mean, is it not going through? And that's what I would want to say. Bro, what are you doing? Again, old me. I'm trying to get to a new phase.

But if I approach it that way, I wouldn't get into them. I was just remembering something. Phil and Cody, we had a call or something, and you were late. I can't remember what was going on. And you're like, sorry, the fucking astronaut just broke our whole machine. And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, it's a six-month study, and it's ruined because he hit the wrong button. Or some shit like machine and I was like what he's like yeah it's a six month study and it's ruined because he hit the wrong button or some shit like that

I was like what you don't have to do the details so to the conversation I'll say again I have evolved to a different planet this is last week I now respect people that aren't as smart as me

that's how he's evolved I now respect people that aren't as smart as me. That's how he's evolved. I call these people astronauts because they're not as smart as me. Something like that. I'll send anyone up there. Our system is very, very great at doing its job. The difficulty is that a lot of the ways that it can fail are from indirect or direct contact. You're talking A-RED? It was A-RED?

Yeah, A-RED. And in the context of this one, we have these cable arm ropes. So A-RED, for those of you who want to Google it and look it up, uses vacuum cylinders to generate its load. And it basically has a reverse mechanical advantage. So I'm trying to create a lever that's difficult to lift up and down, right? Instead of trying to make a wedge that helps me lift a rock.

This is the deadlift machine, by the way. Yeah, the deadlift machine, yeah. And these ropes, one of them just got knocked off, hooked around the wrong place. And then when pulled, it caused these belt pulleys that have a fan belt like you'd find in a Hemi engine, and it slipped. But it's happened before. It just happens to be that we don't have another one right now

because the other one's in space. The other one's in space and needs to be sent back down, and there's other priorities that keep some things in those positions. And so we need to get it back down. You ordered on Amazon and it got delivered from space. You can't order these things on Amazon. Is Amazon going to deliver it to the space station? I wish.

No. Those are the challenges. You're looking at the system and you're like, how do we operate on and off nominal configurations such that we can give the crew members the best capacity possible. And so we're working through a plan right now to slowly introduce load, collect good amounts of data so that we can feel confident about doing it.

Because, again, at the end of the day, my objective is not to take things away from the crew to make some decision of punishment, to be like, well, I'm not going to figure it out. No, my job at the end of the day is to get it back up to 100% as quickly as possible because there is no lie. Talk to any astronaut that has been to the International Space Station. Of course they love the toilet.

Of course they love food. They fucking love ARED. And they love it because that is the only time to our kind of original conversation point about gravity that they feel the load that reminds them of life, right?

It's the only time to, Ron's conversation, that little red line that moves across the screen of your whole day from the morning, the moment you wake up to the end of the day, that's the only time that no one's bugging them, right? You're in it. It's the only time they're not an astronaut. Pretty much, pretty much, right?

And so that means our hardware, it becomes really, really critical to them. And so if it goes down, like they do everything that they can to help us fix it immediately. Yeah. Pun intended, as we bring this conversation back down to Earth, when you're spending that much time focused on human performance and zero gravity and what does Mars look like in the atmosphere and how do we train people to get there? How does that reshape your mindset when you walk into a gym

and see people moving and just biomechanics or training? How does thinking so far into space or into a different environment, atmosphere, whatever, and then you walk into San Francisco, CrossFit, rest in peace, best gym ever. Yeah, that's why I'm like, what does it look like or what kind of like plays back into your normal life

in the fitness training realm? Yeah, it's a great question. Having gone through like the whole athlete piece beforehand, I mean, I'll be honest with you, it was a conversation of like, I'm going to read this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to hit this on you, we're going to structure this really quickly, this makes sense relative to your musculature size,

this is how much you're lifting, these are your performance numbers. Cool. I'd rather walk in and have a conversation with you. Yeah. Because finding out where you are emotionally and mentally gives me a significant amount of information as to understanding your environment. And that would be my next question, right?

What is your environment? I don't care what the gym looks like that you come to. I've figured that one out, right? Yeah. We can all, I say we all, you guys all have never done a training program in their life could pick up anything out of a muscle fitness magazine and do that for eight weeks and they'll see gains and they'll see changes. So if you're coming to me and you're in a place like San Francisco CrossFit, right, I know that it's not a conversation of your training practice. There is the other 22 hours of your day that something's going wrong, right? Nutrition, easy one.

Sleep, easy one, right? Those we are used to talking about, but we're less used to being like, hey, how many times do you yell at your kids in a day? Yeah. Yeah, there's a big feel component. Yeah. And I would imagine when you're talking to an astronaut that's doing deadlifts in space, they're like, what do I do?

You go, I don't know. How do you feel? Well, do something that feels good. Yeah, you don't want them to feel uncomfortable, right? Yeah. And they're going to be very expressive about when they're uncomfortable. Imagine being just like sore shit. You're in this tiny area, claustrophobic.

You're like, I just want to move. I can't. I'm in space. You're like this for like three days. And there's another person sitting right above you. That's it. You're just like, imagine that. And then even when you land right above you. You just imagine that. And then even when you land,

you're not guaranteed that your door is going to be an openable door. So somebody might have to come roll the vehicle over while everyone else has gotten out. I'll just sit there and try and meditate. I'm so tired of this. You're going to run out of time here in a second. Yeah, we've got like three minutes. I have two questions, but you have to give a

20 second answer to each. Because you've got to go, not us. two questions, but you have to give a 20-second answer to each. Okay. All right, because you've got to go, not us. Do you want to tell the world anything at all, and the answer can be no, about the cube? Oh, yeah. Can you give us a 20-second answer? Sure. I mean, the extraction, I think, of the cube is just the idea that in order to understand some of these things, there are parts of the experience

that we need to be able to capture, right? To data generate for a very specific purpose. So in the case of like, what does fear look like for you? Knowing exactly what that looks like becomes really important in case you run into it in real time, because I need to have autonomous systems that would be able to jumpstart that right so the idea of the cube conversation is like being able to build that space that has a ton of uh ingestible information you know so imagine walking into a room like this where 360 degrees all the walls are essentially a led display so that we can change and move that. And I slowly lift the floor while you're not paying attention, like half an inch.

And then right as I throw you off of a cliff inside of a VR kind of feeling, I drop the floor. And so we all fall for a brief second. Suddenly, right, we've stacked a lot of these variables together. That suddenly looks like pure fear, like, oh, I just dropped, right? The whole idea of the cube is to try and create opportunities for that. And what we're doing right now, at least, is trying to shuffle that into an IoT framework. So basically having a lot of edge computing capabilities

such that once we develop that immersive experience, then you can collect all the data from it. All the physiology data, all the biology data. So we can... And psychology, right? Yeah, exactly. So you can put somebody through an experience like that and go, Oh, you can't control your cortisol, because we saw your cortisol up here. So now because we understand that we can go

backwards. What for you, trains your cortisol response the best, the AI is learning that for you? Is it a light light thing is it a breathwork thing is it any other number of interventions it is a true connection between tech psychology and physiology to now engineer solutions to let you run those systems however the fuck you want right and and that's the point of doesn't matter about space or not right that's that's a human thing right i want humans to be able to have access to those tools because i've got kids right i want their future to be able to have an unlockable opportunity to get early interventions yeah that are smart instead of just like hey your whoop is an 80 heart rate and it says recover

today and you're like okay i guess we'll recover. Like, I mean, zero information really. It's like we can measure the organic acids coming out of your breath with a camera. Yes. Which you can, right? Yes. Okay, great. Now the stuff that you've done in your career, Dan, like lab-based nutrition, okay, we can measure that with a camera.

Oh, now we tie that to, oh, you don't think you're insecure or whatever the thing is, right? Like, let me measure the organic acids coming out of your mouth and show you how you actually are disappointed in your mom. Yeah. Whatever the thing is, right? Like, wow. And that's what you mean when you're like, this is for my kids to show things we get to. So we could keep going on and on, but you've got to go. Is there a thing?

Do people get in contact with you if they have really good ideas about how they could train people in space? Because they may have some good ideas. It's kettlebells. I would love for anyone who's got some conversation we're earnestly building a larger

collaboration. So we've got a lot of different groups like Space Force that we work with. ICWORKS, the CIA's version of the WORKS programs. There's a lot of these new mechanisms that we're trying to put together. So for anyone who's listening, if you want to send an email to my work email, it's cody.w.burkhart at nasa.gov. I hope you get some good ones. Yeah, me too. I'm really excited about that.

Any other stuff? I got really high the other night, and I was watching Netflix, and I had this idea. What do you think? I mean, yeah. Again, some of those ideas are good, though, right? So, peace to that. And then, again, I guess if you don't have a NASA question, and it's just another one, then my handle is nerdreinvented.

On Twitter and Instagram and all that. Yeah, I mean, I rarely use them for posting content, but if you send me a message, I look at it as a messaging app. Andy Galpin. Andy Galpin on Twitter, Instagram. Dr. Andy Galpin. Jeez, I messed it up. At DanGarnerNutrition on Instagram.

I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are BarbellShrugged at Barbell underscore shrugged. Get over to RapidHealthReport.com. Watch Dan Garner break down my labs and tell the world about my low testosterone. Peace out, friends. We'll see you guys next week.