Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Finding Mastery Goes to Space, Part 1: Preparing For Takeoff | NASA Astronaut, Woody Hoburg

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

This week, we’re beyond excited to share a very special conversation with you… maybe the most special and ambitious podcast we’ve ever done… Finding Mastery… is going to space.Sometimes, life can present us with moments where even our most meticulous planning and preparation reach their limits. These moments are where we find ourselves at a crossroads, needing to decide whether to boldly leap into the unknown or to stay grounded in the familiar.  Now, imagine the weight of that choice when it involves venturing into the ultimate unknown: outer space. Today's guest doesn't have to imagine; he's lived it and has found true growth playing on this edge.Among a staggering pool of 18,000 applicants, all vying for the rare opportunity to train and become a NASA astronaut, Dr. Woody Hoburg emerged as one of the mere 13 individuals selected in 2017.Fast forward to 2023, and on March 2nd, he launched to the International Space Station, piloting NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 mission. And before he left for his incredible journey, I had the absolute honor of connecting with Woody. In this episode, you'll hear about how he prepared himself – physically and mentally – for venturing into space, the most extreme environment known to humanity.But, our exploration, just like Woody’s, does not stop here.We're embarking on a 3-part series chronicling Woody's entire space expedition. Be sure to come back next week for Part Two, where I had the incredible privilege to chat with Woody directly from outer space. (Seriously.)And Part Three (which will come to you early next year) will uncover the profound insights he’s gleaned during his time among the cosmos.Woody truly embodies the spirit of exploration, whether it's tackling intricate technical challenges, scaling cliffs, or traversing the cosmos. His relentless curiosity isn't just admirable; it's contagious. And he believes we're in the golden age of space exploration. And after tuning into our exciting conversation today, I have a feeling you might just agree.  Tune into Part One of our 3-part series as Finding Mastery embarks on an interstellar journey with the remarkable astronaut – and human – Dr. Woody Hoburg._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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you're going 17,500 miles an hour and you're in orbit. Okay. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. Today, we have a very special conversation for you. Maybe the most special and ambitious podcast we've ever done. Finding mastery is going to space. In life, we can be presented with moments where even our most meticulous planning and preparation reach their limits. And these moments are where we find ourselves at the crossroads, needing to decide whether we go for it or we play it safe. Now imagine the weight of that choice when it involves venturing into the ultimate unknown outer space. Today's guest

doesn't have to imagine. He's lived in it and he's found true growth playing on his edge. Among a staggering pool of 18,000 applicants, all vying for the rare opportunity to train and become a NASA astronaut, Dr. Woody Hoberg emerged as one of 13 individuals selected in 2017. So then fast forward to 2023 and on March 2nd, he launched to the International Space Station, piloting NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 mission. And before he left for his incredible journey, he had the honor of connecting with Woody. Today, you'll hear about how he prepared himself, physically and mentally, for venturing into space,

one of the most extreme environments known to humans. However, our exploration, just like Woody's, does not stop here. We are embarking on a three-part series chronicling Woody's entire space expedition. Be sure to come back next week for part two, where I had the incredible privilege to chat with Woody directly from outer space. I mean, finding mastery in outer space. It's unreal.

So then part three, which will come to you early next year, will uncover the profound insights that he's gleaned during his time among the cosmos. Woody embodies the spirit of exploration. In my mind, he is the best of us. Whether he's tackling intricate technical challenges, he's scaling cliffs, traversing from outer space, wrestling down what it means to be a good human, deeply committed to his relationships, his relentless curiosity isn't just admirable, it's contagious. Woody believes that we're in the golden age of space exploration.

And after tuning into our conversation today, I have a feeling you might agree as well. So with that, let's dive into part one of our three-part series with the remarkable astronaut and human, Dr. Woody Hoberg. Woody, I'm so stoked to sit with you. This is the first interview I've ever had, the first conversation I've ever had with somebody who is preparing to go to outer space. I am so stoked to be here. It's such an honor to be here. Thanks for having me. Oh, man, we're going to start in a fun way okay so the path to becoming an astronaut is not clear it's not clear to me i think it's not clear to a lot of people so it's rare space it's only a handful of folks are led you to have the opportunity to be an astronaut? The path to becoming an astronaut was not clear for me either.

I always knew, even being as a little kid, I thought it would be the coolest job ever, but I did not know how to do it. And I think it's common for many, everybody wants to know how, what are the steps to get this job? And the answer is there is no set of set, defined set of steps. So if you look at my class or the astronaut office as a whole, we have such a diverse set of backgrounds. We're about half and half military and civilian. Even on the military side, NASA used to be all test pilots, and we still have lots of test pilots in our Corps, and they're a hugely important part of our Corps.

We have submariners. We have Navy SEALs. We have helicopter pilots. We have surgeons. Do you have any psychologists that are going to space? Is there a chance still? There probably is. I suspect there is in the future. Um, any fifth decade. Okay, good. And then on the civilian side, which is where I come from, we almost have even more diversity. So we've got geologists, we've got scientists, we've got engineers.

I'm an engineer. We've got microbiologists, you name it. People with kind of a technical and operational background end up becoming astronauts. And so I can talk about my specific path, but I just want to emphasize how broad. It's so varied, um, all the different ways that people end up in the office. Okay. And your class is your class, 2017, 2017. Okay. And then how many people were, are part of your class? There are, we have 11 Americans and two Canadians that were part of my class is called the turtles. And we all trained together,

um, got selected at the same time. Turtles. Yes. We get named by the class the previous year. The previous class gets to name the incoming class. They got you. That's great. Okay. So did you say 12 turtles? Yeah, we have 13, 13. So it was 11 and two. Yeah. All right. And how many people applied for that job? 18, over 18,000. Okay. And 13 were accepted. Yeah. All right. So what, what do you think, and we're going to go backwards to understand kind of how you grew up and some of that work, but what do you think was, you had a package. It's not like just one thing, like you did this and now you're in like what is the package that was you think looking back now that was really attractive that gave created the opportunity here it's a great question so i i actually think i i actually struggled throughout grad school and my first couple jobs

i struggled with maybe an identity crisis where i felt like i wanted to be really technical. I was working as an engineer, as a computer scientist, I was solving these really technical, hard problems. What age are we talking? We're talking mid, mid twenties. Okay. And I, it felt to me like there's a path for people that want to do that sort of stuff. And then I had this whole other, other side of me that didn't feel like it was fully captured in that path and that's the I want to go outside be a I was a you know working search and rescue and I was flying airplanes and I wanted to be out climbing I just wanted to be doing cool stuff did you think that was integrated no I couldn't figure out how to integrate it. Okay. But it was compelling.

Yes. You wanted like, that was you saying, I want to get, you said search and rescue. Yeah. I want to be on the edge. Yeah. I want to be in the frontier. I was in grad school. I want dirt under my nails.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I want to carry heavy loads up hills. Like why? Just, I just wanted to, I just knew I wanted to, for nothing else than the experience almost. Wait, wait, stay here for a minute. Like why, why did you want that experience?

Um, search and rescues in particular, I had been, I was doing a lot of climbing and we could maybe figure out why I wanted to climb. I was testing my limits in some way, but I was doing a lot of rock climbing. I was out doing trips over the summer, spending every weekend out in the mountains. And I realized I kind of wanted it to be more structured and meaningful in some way. And for me, that was doing rescue rescue, where I was going to use those skills for another reason for, you know, high angle rescue doing, um, putting those skills to some kind of actual service an actual job that's useful um okay did you go all in on the climbing like did you live

the quote-unquote dirtbag life you know i i actually tried it the first summer after college so in college i was i was this weird kid that was always gone on the weekends climbing. And I graduated with an engineering degree from MIT. And I think I was supposed to go to grad school then. Supposed to. I took the summer off to climb. And I took the summer off with the intent of living the dirtbag life and being a dirtbag climber and traveling around all summer. And I started doing that and loved it.

But I also deeply, deeply missed solving hard technical problems. Like I missed the office job. Okay. So this is really cool because there's something there's something right here that's that i'm not sure how to unpack this part but you loved solving hard problems technical hard problems yeah that that interest eventually led you to a significant level of excellence at a young age to get into mit you had this shadow side yeah right yeah like this this non-conformist didn't quite fit the mold of the mit traditional okay you're the weird kid

were you bullied no no not growing up no no bullying i had a weird name my name's woody so there's some name there's yeah kind of weird stuff going on there but no i was not okay yeah okay so you had this shatter shadow counter culture side that and it just was manifested through um or expressed through climbing yeah right okay and then this is important for me to try to map is that you went all in, in climbing. Yeah. I, well, keep going. Yeah, no, no. I went all in.

I, I'm not, I'm a mediocre climber at best. I'm not like some of the people you've had on your show. That's what all the climbers say, by the way. Well, I mean it. Even Alex says the same thing. Alex says the same thing. Yeah. Okay, good. But I really am i'm not i'm by you know no stretch no exaggeration in no way am i anything like an elite

climber um i've spent a lot of time on like big walls spent multiple nights out there stuff that probably people that don't climb sounds pretty extreme but as a climber i know that i'm not i'm just a weekend warrior, you know, that's it. Okay. So I didn't go all in, in that sense, but I did go all in, in feeling like I really, I might want to make this a job, or I might want to make this part of my life experience where I really take this somewhere. And for me, that was the, the search and rescue stuff I did in grad school. And then that string that I'm pulling through here is that the investment in it, the counterculture investment in it, non-traditional decision to

go climb coming out of MIT, and then saying, wait, there's something about putting this in service for others. Search and rescue. So explain, not everyone understands just how heavy search and rescue is. Like it's a consequential environment for you and obviously incredibly consequential for the person that you're rescuing. So can you talk about what goes in from the psychology of those that are good, that are skilled at search and rescue? Like what were you challenged by? What skills did you need to have in place or develop quickly to put yourself in those dangerous environments? It was actually joining that team was a great kind of microcosm of the skills that you need to be a good astronaut, it turns out. I only see that in hindsight. I didn't know it at the time. But I remember talking with people about the job at the

time, search and rescue. And I worked on the Yosemite search and rescue team. And I told people that you need three skills. You need the ability to climb. You need some medicine. So most people on the team are EMTs and you need to get along well with others. And that's it. And for me, I absolutely got thrown into the deep end. I had, I had just gotten my EMT certification. I had no real experience. I got, I got lucky enough to be selected to be on the team. I went out there, started the summer, did the training course, and then started responding to calls. And I was in the deep end.

I went on my first body recovery a few weeks into the first season. And there was no real preparation other than just doing it. Okay, so for many people, that could be a deeply traumatic experience, recovering a dead person, a body at that point. How did you manage, what was that like the first time that you, that first time, two weeks in fresh and here you are recovering a body what was that like for you that was hard um i didn't know how i was going to react and later as i gained more experience doing that type of work i started to see the patterns of what that feels like but the first time i you know vividly remember and uh you know didn't sleep the first. It was just a kind of scarring experience. The thing that got me through it for sure was my teammates and being there with the

couple of people I was there with and talking about what we saw together. That's for me what made it all okay. Okay. Quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort.

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slash finding mastery. Let's jump right back into the conversation. So one of the ways through acute stress, which is the beginning phase of PTSD sometimes, right? You need a handful of weeks, about three to four weeks of acute, high alarm, high vigilance stress after some sort of event before we start thinking about PTSD, okay? And I know we're not talking about that, but one of the ways to manage acute stress is community. So it's relationships, it's shared experience,

it's calibration, it's shared experience, it's calibration, it's being able to bump up against other people that have a deep insight and they see you and they're in it with you and they're there for you. And it's like a sane making experience. Community can be. So what, what did they do? What did you do to be part of that, um, the triangulation of don't, they're just wrong. And so then I think for me, that maybe seemed like the start of where you would start having trouble processing what I had seen, but then just verbalizing that with the people that were there and say, Oh yeah. And it put words to it. Um, was so therapeutic. Yeah. Amazing. When you're talking about it now, what happens in your body? Uh, what happens in my body? Yeah. What are you feeling

right now as you're talking about it now? Probably slightly increased heart rate. Yeah. And that is a signal to you that, that I'm thinking about something that was hard probably. Yeah. And that is a signal to you that. Then I'm thinking about something that was hard, probably. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right, cool. Just a note. And we could go into more detail, but yeah, you probably don't. Yeah. I don't think the detail is important. I think the experience that you're sharing right now is how you move through it because there's an all time high in stress levels for sharing right now is how you move through it because there's an all-time high

in stress levels for people right now. And this is ringing the bell, like be part of a community. And to be part of the community, you have to actually show up and say, I'm a little upside down. I'm not sure what to make of this friend. And they're like, oh, okay. So there's a vulnerability required for healing is my point. I think that's so true. Yeah. I also knew that I wanted to be there. Like I knew that those were hard experiences, but I also knew that I had chosen to be there and do those things. And it was my job. And so no matter how hard it was, I was going to do it and get through it with my community. Purpose. Clarity of purpose.

Yep. Okay. Can you set the scene of your first rescue? Where you were, what it was like, how old you were, what you were wearing. Can you set the scene for me? My first rescue was, I mean, I had shown up to Yosemite National Park, living up in Tuolumne Meadows, and we had been training for a few weeks, getting ready for the season. And I think it was a rainy night. And I mean, it was a lost hiker.

So a fairly mundane, typical call, but it was the first one. And so it's not a particularly interesting story. The thing I remember is I'm maybe embarrassed about it. I, uh, I was just so stoked. It's like, we're going on a rescue. And I mean, I was just ready to charge out there and find somebody, which is not the optimal way. That's not the season. That's not how you want to be. Right. So my stoke level was probably too high i see okay so you were you were the young the young bull yeah that that that yeah okay so with experience you start to realize

that that's yeah slow down your role slow it up just slow it up a little yeah okay all right um so let's let's do a little bit, help me understand what it was like growing up. What was the household like? What was the dinner table or breakfast table conversations about? Hmm. Uh, I grew up with wonderful parents, uh, just the most wonderful parents. Um, and one brother, he's two years younger than me. Uh, so I had an awesome life. We, um, grew up together. We're buddies. Um, let's see, what was the dinner table and breakfast table conversation? Like, uh, we didn't talk about, we aren't great at always eating breakfast together. That's for sure. It was like, get up, eat on the move and get going okay and then uh dinner um honestly like sports was off and on

so we were off and you playing sports watching it watching sports did you play sports i yeah i play yeah if there was like if if dad was here you know and i said what did you talk about most with what would he think he talked about most with you oh that's tough what did we talk about most with Woody? What would he think he talked about most with you? Oh, that's tough. What did we talk about? My dad would always want, my dad's a engineering professor by, uh, yeah, by profession. Where? Uh, he was, he taught at Carnegie Mellon university. There you go. So you had an, he had, and you had an appreciation for higher education. Yeah. And he just had such a deep appreciation for truth and for certainly for mathematics, but just truth about the world. So I remember every once in a while, uh, he would show up and he would say, I want to show you something. And he would have a small sheet of paper and he would like start just showing me something he thought was cool

with him usually with math and i was at times exciting i was at times more open to these demonstrations than others uh but yeah he he always he wanted to share kind of his love for truth about the world i think how does that play forward for you now? I think that is ingrained in me. Yeah. And wanting to just understand things deeply. What is your, if I could, this is a hard question to answer, but what, how would you articulate your process to get to the truth? So there is a hard question to answer, but what, how would you articulate your process to get to the truth? So there's a hard problem. There's something that's complicated. There's lots of ways to maybe explain something or understand something. Pick any problem you want,

you know, hard science or otherwise. What is your process to get to the truth? Yeah. I think for me there's an open-mindedness at first with being willing to consider many possibilities. And I think about, for example, in my current work where let's say we're trying to understand a failure involved in a spacecraft or something's gone wrong and we want to figure out what happened so it doesn't happen again. Um, yeah, for me it's a process of, okay, does our understanding of what we think happened, are there any holes in there? Could, could something else be at play? Are we,

are we missing anything? So there's a sort of, sort of maybe vigilance or skepticism, making sure we've thought of everything. Okay. So, so there's an openness and then you drop in skepticism. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. How do those, what does that mean to you? I think for me, the openness is a willingness to consider all the possibilities. So not to say, yep, we figured it out. This is the answer. We already figured it out. Don't consider anything else because we've got the answer. So that it's, it's important to have that openness. And then the skepticism, what I meant is that kind of, um, at any point, if we're feeling like we know everything, no, we don't know everything we need to have that still have that

openness. So there's a, I don't know if I would call it skepticism. There's like, and this is going to sound jarring maybe, but there's a high criticalness. And I don't mean like what some people might think like self-critical, but there's a critical nature to really driving into the problem and the solution and making sure that there's a 360 approach like have we looked at this because if a mistake happens or a okay let's let me just ask do mistakes happen in space yes yeah so i didn't absolutely a lot right a lot a lot of mistakes so yeah but there's there's kind of different classes of mistakes so there's one way door decisions and there's two way door decisions. So on the one way,

like fatal mistakes and then like minor, let's call it. Right. And so can you paint a picture of like a, a mistake that the team or many people might go, Oh my God, that happened. Like, and you say, let's stay curious. Do you you have some some example that you can pull from that would demonstrate like okay well this happened and i can give you a couple that happened on the stratus project or other projects where i learned so much because the team most teams would freak out xxx thousands or millions of dollars were on the line years or many months were on the line to get to this testing experience. And then all of a sudden, bang, something goes wrong. And these extraordinary test pilots and aerospace engineers were like, OK, all right.

And it was like, great, this happened. Do you have any examples that you could pull from in your history of being, um, your history that demonstrate this? Well, we can, we can talk from my direct experience. We also have, I mean, the, the three obvious ones are Apollo one, the challenger accident and Columbia, where we had space flight accidents, where entire crews perished. And in all three of those, something happened that of course the team did not expect as a team. And for example, in Colombia, in hindsight, it's clear that people were thinking about the failure modes that did occur. Same thing with Challenger. example, in Columbia that, you know, in hindsight, it's clear that people were thinking about the

failure modes that did occur. Um, same thing with challenger, but, um, as a team, we did not arrive at the correct decision. Um, so how do we take that level of deep failure and stay open and curious? Like, how do you work through the emotions? How do you work? Whether it's a, that's a huge one. Then there's like a middle tier where it's in practice, something goes really wrong. And then there's these small mistakes that we make all the time. Right? So it's those, the small mistakes are like, it's easy. It's like, oh, that's good information. If I carry my something this way and I spill the water, like, okay, I can learn. But what about when I'm carrying something that's precious? And then when I'm caring about something that's irreplaceable, like there's

stages or levels to it. So that, but that middle, I'm trying to get to that middle where it's highly emotionally charged and a mistake happens and it, people could undo themselves with a project in that moment. But you're saying that your, your way through that is to stay curious. So there's an unlock in here that I want to understand. This is actually what I love about space flight, I think. It's so hard. I mean, what you're poking at here is so difficult. And it shows up in any high-stakes environment with complex machines and people and organizations. There's just so many ways for things to fail, and it's so complicated.

And so, I mean, in spaceflight, we can kind of have an academic discussion of potential failure modes and what are all the things that could go wrong and do we understand, and I'm advocating we have to stay curious and we have to have an openness to understanding potential new failure modes and just, you know, really checking all our boxes, dotting all our I's, crossing all our T's, making sure we're actually ready to fly.

Taken too far, that is way too risk averse because at some point you have to go fly. You would never get this. You will not get anywhere. You have to make decisions and execute and just keep going. And if you're worried about, let's say every little tiny thing that could potentially catch on fire in the right conditions, you're ending up putting every single thing in three layers of fireproof bags and avoiding that potential risk. So it's really hard. How do you do the mission that's an important mission and a risky mission and high stakes while still making sure you don't miss anything that's going to actually kill you what is dangerous about you

going to the iss there are international space international space station yeah um it's just a lot of energy so the the two we call them dynamic phases of flight. The two obvious ones are launch and return, reentry, and then landing. And you're starting at rest on the surface of Earth, sitting on top of a rocket filled with chemical fuel. And less than 10 minutes later, you're going 17 17 500 miles an hour and you're in orbit so there's a lot of exchange of energy occurring so how big is the rocket so a little it's over 200 feet tall okay and that's mostly fuel and oxidizer so what is that what is it like what do you think it's going to be like you because you haven't done this before. So I know exactly what the launch profile is going to feel

like from simulation from. Yeah. So we get a centrifuge ride. We go up to a centrifuge at Wright-Patt and we do. What is Wright-Patt? Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Oh, OK. There's a centrifuge there. So you get in and we do a full launch profile where you feel the G loading that we're going to experience. Which is how many? So we start at about one and a half. So you take off and you feel a little heavy. You can feel that in a fast car. Yeah.

It's not a lot. It's not a lot because the rocket's full of fuel. So even though it's got a huge amount of thrust, it's really heavy. So you're not accelerating all that much by the end of the first stage we're somewhere around four g's so you feel very heavy and you're on your back so it's not like an airplane where the blood leaves your head um it's actually just feels like it feels like somebody's sitting on your chest okay your arms are heavy. Um, breathing is labored. Um, it's, it's a bit distracting.

It's hard to think of things other than how many G's you're under. Oh, so is there, is that accounted for in the decision-making process? Yeah. So it's actually in my training, we do a lot of training, uh, in Hawthorne in this simulator. It's a very, um, high fidelity mock-up of the actual spacecraft, but it doesn't accelerate. So we don't get to feel the sensations, but we do all our procedures. We work through the launch sequence and actually during those simulations, thanks to having the experience of doing the centrifuge training, you know, when I see three G's as our G loading, I think to myself, okay, I'm not all that sharp right now. I need to move slowly because I'm just kind of distracted. I can't really move my arms around.

So I kind of intentionally in the training act a little slow. Real life mental imagery. So you're using your imagination to go to the place that you think you're going to feel. And so you're getting a real rep at it as close as you possibly can. That's my goal. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday.

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my crew is crew six. It's a crew of four. We're flying on a SpaceX. We're flying in a SpaceX dragon capsule on a Falcon nine rocket. So we're on a SpaceX mission to the ISS. Yeah, there's four of us. So Steve Bowen's the commander, I'm the pilot. And then we have Sultan Al-Nayadi, he's our mission specialist one, and Andrei Fedayev is our mission specialist two. Got it. Okay. And as a pilot, what are your primary responsibilities? So monitoring all of the Dragon systems throughout launch and reentry and landing, responding to any malfunctions that occur. Basically, in concert with... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Malfunctions?

Yeah. Like, does that happen? It happens in training all the time. By design? Like, they're designing them. Like, okay, let's trip these four wires and see what happens. Yeah. See how he responds.

Yeah. OK. Yeah. Because we want to be ready for anything that could go wrong. Yeah. That's great in training. Does it happen like live? So thankfully, so far with the commercial crew program, so I'm commercial crew program is using commercial providers like SpaceX to fly our astronauts to the space station. So far, we haven't had any what I would call major malfunctions.

Everything's been quite nominal, which is how we like it. Yeah. We are less one. So my flight, my flight will be the seventh flight with crew. So this program's in its infancy compared to shuttle. We're in the very very early days so but thankfully thus far things have been i mean plenty has gone wrong but we're talking kind of minor minor things that we learn from and correct uh but do not they don't have a

major impact on the crew so it's not like you press a handful of buttons lift off and then it's kind of autopilot. It actually is like that. So your job is not that hard. Come on. Yeah, okay. My job is not that hard. It actually is not that hard.

I was saying that totally quickly. I did not mean that by any means. But it is kind of autopilot. I don't imagine you're steering if you're going to like. Yeah, that's correct. In the nominal mission, actually, we don't, we're not issuing guidance commands to the that's correct in the nominal mission actually we we don't um we're not issuing guidance commands to the vehicle at all during the nominal mission not what does nominal mean nominal just meaning everything's going to plan the normal way there

have been so yeah off nominal would mean that there's been some malfunction or a contingency occurring okay and that's like fire or a great example so So on the space, and I guess I should say just for context. So my mission is Crew 6, and that is the SpaceX vehicle that's taking us up to the space station and bringing us home. That's about 48 hours of activity. It's about a day up and a day back. We spent six months on the space station. We do spend, I would say, a disproportionately, a correctly disproportionate amount of the training time on the things that are either hard or relatively dangerous or important. So launch and reentry being two of those spacewalking being another example.

But yeah, we'll spend six months on the space station. So you mentioned fire on the space station. So you mentioned fire. On the space station, for example, there are three emergencies. There's fire, there's depress, and there's a toxic atmosphere. Those are the three emergency class events that we train for and prepare for. Toxic atmosphere meaning it's like gas? Yeah, this gets into a bit to the details of how space station is constructed. But long story short, there is an external cooling system that uses ammonia as the working fluid.

The internal cooling system uses water and those cooling systems interact at a heat exchanger. And the external system is much higher pressure than the internal system. So what that means is that if there were ever a rupture in the heat exchanger, ammonia would flow into the cabin. And it's like a toxic level. We need to be on masks and get out immediately. So there's only three emergencies. What I meant by that is we have a caution and warning system

on the space station that can issue different classes of event. So there's cautions, there's warnings, and there's emergencies. This is a really interesting life philosophy almost. So there's cautions, warnings, and emergencies. And those are progressively more serious. How would you map? Let's just for fun. Let's try to map that into an anxiety profile for people. For me in particular, let's say is that,

look, if it's not in the red zone, the emergency, these three things, like you're going to, there's plans. We'll figure it out. It's going to be difficult. You're going to have to be on your game, but nobody is, this is not according to plan but this is part of the pivot and adjust and solve and you know like okay and there's two layers of that and then there's what would you say the big emergencies are in life where it's like okay it's on and then i want to ask you i want to go back to how many times you've done imagery and i want to ask you right now about after you explain this what your ideal mindset for emergencies are okay so what do you think in life how do we crosswalk your three

emergencies to the to kind of the big things in life if you will that um grab your attention in a significant way those are so different are they Are they different? I don't know. I think they're very different, but I'll have to think about that. So let's play it out. Fire. Yeah. Okay. So there's a radical environmental change that is life-threatening and it's temporal. It's right now. And so in real life, is there anything that meets that threshold for you that is if this happens it's temporal it's on that this is something that requires emergency level activation for me it's kind of like a health issue medical yeah you know like death of a loved one death of a loved one could be uh maybe yeah okay

i'm going to drop everything immediately because this is important this is yeah oh there it is that's the decision making i'm oh so that's the decision making from level one two and three is i'm going to drop everything because this needs to be attended to immediately immediately okay that's clear we could fill in the gaps from there, couldn't we? So what is the decision tree for level two, which is warnings, not caution? Yeah. So, and again, not to get too into the details, but there are some big, we call them integrated failures.

So examples are like a critical bus loss. So this means a power channel has gone down. Um, and so we know that if a power channel goes down, we know that the, as a result, we're going to actually get multiple cautions and warnings. It'll be a whole slew of cautions and warnings. Email program goes down for me. Yeah. And it's just like, Oh, okay. There's a lot that's gone wrong, but I know this this signature i know that i should expect all these cautions and warnings because we've had a power channel failure so go to go to the kind of rely on the training and go into the right procedure for that scenario which will guide us through

responding and prioritize this absolute so it's a priority yeah It's a priority and there's training that you've had to be able to execute against that warning. But you do need to drop. Do you need to drop everything? In that case, you would drop everything. You still need to drop everything for level two. Yeah. Okay. But what is different between level two and the highest level of emergency? So emergency is life threatening. If you don't take action it will uh it would be life-threatening and this it's actually um this is good because this is uh the mission control team

that supports us where would they be it's not houston it's houston yeah it's houston for nasa and there's actually control centers all around the world so there's a control center in munich there's one in scuba japan there's uh one in russia and moscow um and houston um there's one in Munich. There's one in Scuba, Japan. There's one in Russia and Moscow and Houston. There's one in Huntsville, Alabama for some of our science work. When they prioritize, it's safety of the crew, safety of the vehicle, and mission. In that order. So in that order. And is that true across all military? Probably. Yeah. I wonder, I don't, I really don't know. Yeah. I think it's the right priority. I mean, it's, if you were a

high ranking officer, you would say that's the way I'm going to design my missions. Of course. Okay. Yeah. So if you need to decide between some, uh don't know, experiments that some, let's say, blood has been collected and needs to be put on ice, otherwise we're going to lose science. But also the solar arrays on the ISS are in danger. Which do you do? You protect the solar arrays. decision-making tree that is running in the background that feels natural to you? Or is it, is there effort into making decisions like that? That seems pretty easy. Yeah. It feels natural thanks to the training and procedures. I mean, the beautiful thing is we've, in most of these cases, we've thought of the possible failure modes before. So we've had the luxury of time to decide what the right response is and so it's just executing at that point okay so I do want to get into training eventually but let's go with your ideal mindset for

emergencies for it's on right now what is your ideal mindset muscle memory what does that mean for me that means that I've done it many many times I know what I need to do. There's no thinking, like zero thinking. Zero thinking. It's just put the mask on, go just. So you're trained for the most radical emergencies that you have in advance thought that could take place. Yep.

And you've actually done them. And they could happen while we're asleep. So I, so in my mind and that's, yeah, in my mind, if I'm asleep and the alarm goes off and I know what it's like to get woken up super groggy at the worst possible time. And I look over and I see, Oh, it's, this is a toxic atmosphere. I know what I need to do. I need to go get a mask. What if I were to say to you that muscles don't have memory? I think you're right. Yeah. Neurological patterning is actually.

That's a much better term for what's actually happening. We're both nerds. We can appreciate. I can appreciate that. The shorthand is muscle memory, but. I like that. Muscles don't have memory, right? Yeah. It's the neurological patterningning which is part central nervous system

part not as well yeah okay so all right um that's interesting so that's not a mindset that is what but if i extrapolate from that the mindset that i hear you saying is like there's an ability for me to go to no mind and i have because of that so i'm not thinking I know how to respond because of that. I have a confidence that I'm able to execute. So there's that surrounding it, which gives you the ability to be more free and non-emergency environments because you're like, no, I can do that. And so now that allows me in, let's say in this conversation right now, even, or when you're making breakfast in the ISS or whatever it is that you, you can be fully more present, I should say, making breakfast because you're not worrying about later if later happens. So, so there's something very important here.

And then the other piece is that I want to understand when you're in that mode, are you smooth and casual? Are you intense? Are you edgy? Are you like, would somebody not notice that that's Woody or that's a different Woody? I don't, would your mom be like, well, I've never seen that Woody. Or is it like, Oh no, what he's in his thing. Like, so I'm trying to get the, the, the, the shape and the feel of your ideal mindset when the stakes are as high as they can get. Yeah. I like that. I've never responded to an actual emergency aboard the ISS cause I haven't been there. Right. So I've only done the training

and I know from doing the training, I mean, you mentioned earlier, do mistakes happen? I've made so many mistakes in training, so many, right. And so that's the purpose of that's the purpose and training. Yeah. And so for me, when I'm in these training events, I'm just always kind of watching myself saying, Oh, at this moment I hesitated, or I didn't know the right thing to do for a, I had to think for a moment about the right thing to do here, or I was confused, or I almost skipped a step in a procedure or did skip a step in a procedure. So for me in the, in training, those are the things where I was saying,

ah, so glad I had that training because I cannot do that again. That was a mistake. Okay. So that's your commitment from your dad about honesty. So people ask me all the time, like, what is it about the special ones? What is it about the ones that go to outer space? You know, what is it about the ones that are like the half of half percenters? And I say this and it doesn't quite, I don't know if I'm translating this properly. So like, please be a tuning fork. There is a radical commitment to the truth.

And I'm looking at Alex, the producer, like how many times have I said that? A radical commitment to the truth. Does that'm looking at Alex, the producer, like how many times have I said that a radical commitment to the truth? Does that, does that feel right to you? That feels right to me. And then that commitment to the, to being honest, you, you say you're examining yourself or watching yourself. Are you doing it real time? Like, is there a explain that? Yeah. Because that can be really distracting and it can also be a great learning mechanism. Yeah. Because that can be really distracting and it can also be a great learning mechanism. Yeah. Okay. So I think real time I'm taking notes, but I also, I mean, it's critical to be able to keep going when things go wrong.

This is why I got it. Right. I'm sorry. Because this is it. This is why I think meditation and mindfulness practices have been so significant for me and so many others is it is that the practices, it's the practice of being aware, but not being, not being overridden by that, that mistake or that new thought. So it's a hello and goodbye. I see, Oh, I just skipped a step. And so pin it, note it, post it, whatever it is in your mind, like this is okay. And then it's the swift, accurate ability, the graceful ability to get back to the next task. Absolutely. Oh yeah. Yeah. I feel like my life makes sense right now. And this is not just, I mean, I have to put in a plug

for like mission control, for example. I mean, this is how the whole team thinks. This is not just how the crew members think. You know, people, mistakes happen.

And the whole team has to just kind of, without judgment, accept where we're at, however we got there, and take the correct next action at all times. That is so freeing to me. That's the type of team I want to be on. I was in mission control for Stratos, Rebel Stratos Project, and 20-some folks, I don't know,

I can't see the exact number in my head, but there was, there was no criticalness. Like what did he just do or looking over to your, somebody, two headphones over, like what are they doing? It was like all in on the task and it was, I got you. Mistakes happen. I got you. I hope you got me too. Like we got each other.

That's the family I want to build. That's the teams I want to be on. That's the, but it's a radical commitment to the truth. There's an honesty about it. Yeah. And then for me also, that key step of at the end of that hard day where maybe it was training or maybe it was the real event and everybody's tired and a lot has happened, taking that few minutes to debrief and learn. Do you have a debrief process? Always. Yep. Is it a hot wash or is it, and I'll explain that in a minute.

Is it like, is it like super fast? Like a dirty hot wash? It's like, I'm not totally clean from being out in the, in the, in the jungle or whatever it is. Or is it like super methodical and thoughtful? I think it depends on the event. So I mean, for, yeah, depending on what event we're in, um, we might have a 10 minute debrief. We might have an hour debrief. We might have a 30 second debrief, the 30, 30 second, couple of minutes,

like a hot wash. Like, and there's a set of questions I was asked, what are your questions that you both make? So that an easy one is one up one down what is that actually i think that's that's really useful um for kind of softer stuff but one up one down is just tell me one thing that was good about today and one thing that was bad about today one up one down but at least the point being let's create a culture where we intentionally talk about what happened where that's the right thing to do. Um, I love that. How do you do that? Just, Hey, like we had a long day today. Let's just real quick. Like, Hey Mike, what were your one up and one down for today? And so give me an example. A one up is easy. Give me an example of

a powerful one down. I mean, I, I often, if I can think of something that I really think I could have done better, I mean, it's kind of a cop out, but I like, um, that's an easy one down, right? I'd say, Hey, you know, for me today, the down was I, I, Hey guys, I missed that procedure step and I'm sorry. It set us back. Um, and so next time I'm gonna, um, just be a little more methodical, not rush and make sure that I get everything. What does a great teammate do in that moment? I think a great teammate, and this for me is actually the highest level of honesty you could ever have with somebody, the best thing somebody could ever do in that moment for

me would be to say, hey, Woody, there's one thing I could think you could have done better and it's this that's dope and i will always give them a hug and say thanks for telling me right why because because i'm probably because i'm somewhere deeply uh deeply at my core wondering if i'm aware of all of the things i might be screwing up but what keep going i don't know wait we're right so you know what i just heard as a psychologist at my core i'm worried about all the things that could go wrong but i don't see you as a pessimist i don't see you as i don't see you as a highly anxious person. I don't feel that. I think it's just that going back to that openness and, uh, you know, wanting to make sure I've kind of, I'm aware of everything, situational awareness. Maybe I, I always want to be aware of any blind spots, I guess.

So for me, it's deeply, um, it's a big gift. If somebody says, in particular, if somebody says, Hey, I don't think you're even aware that you're doing this, but I just want you to know, like, whatever that comment you made kind of hit me the wrong way. What's happening for you right now? What are you feeling right now? Yeah. I don't know. Is there somebody that comes to mind for you? No, no, no. Right now? Yeah. I don't know. Is there somebody that comes to mind for you? No.

No. No. And I think I'm advocating actually for a culture that I think we have in the astronaut corps where we say we all want to improve all the time. We all want to be our best selves. And let's watch out for each other. And now one final word from our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth.

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for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. And with that, let's jump right back into this conversation. What does best self mean? We want to be our best selves. What does that mean to you? For me, that means live up to my potential. And then how do you get your arms around what your potential is? What does that mean? For me, I think, Oh boy. Okay. Pause. Pause before we get to the answer. What just happened in that nanosecond in the silence? Yeah. What did you just do in that

moment? I was trying to decide if I should give you an example from kind of previous life or now. Okay. So that was going back to previous life. And what was the decision tree like that you were making about, do I give the example from my past life? Well, we've been talking about kind of training. I didn't want to change the subject, but I think the best examples that I have are from early on. And why didn't you want to change the subject? Seems normal to stay on topic. Topic. Okay.

So that was an interesting pause because I knew you were working to go somewhere. And I'm wondering what the bumpers are that you, that you navigate, which is like, you know, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to look weird going back to my climbing days i don't you know i'm wondering what those bumpers are about why that was even an issue for you yeah i don't know you don't know yeah well that's two that's why you're good at this okay good so let's just get right back into it like what what is the what is the best example so i think i mean you asked about like what does it mean to live up to your potential right i immediately the place i went was actually early on i've i've always wondered like why i got into climbing and i i think i got into climbing because i wanted to test my limits. And for me, that was the way to do that. I did not know what I was capable of.

I knew that climbing up the side of a rock face was dangerous and scary and hard. And I wanted to see if I could do that. And yeah. Okay. So when you think about your potential, do you thin slice it? potential as an astronaut my potential as a son my potential as maybe a one day you know spouse like do you thin slice it or do you think globally my potential as a human it's funny i get i get personally i get lost when i try to do it globally as a human because there's so many things i could be working on yeah and i have i mean like all the way back to the beginning i was talking about like i always had this technical side of me that wanted to solve hard problems do engineering you know improve the world maybe and then this other part of me that wanted to be out climbing rocks doing really hard things

that are maybe difficult in another way and I don't have a way to kind of choose which of those is most living up to my potential. They're just all interesting things to go work on. So for me, I think it is moment to moment. And, um, I love the, there's one of my, uh, colleagues who recently flew to space and just came back, told me that near our exercise equipment on the space station, there's a sign and it's actually, it's just handwritten. It's like almost just a kind of afterthought little sticky note. And it just says, there's nothing more important than what you're doing right now. And it's not even, it's just like next to the exercise equipment. It's, you wouldn't think that it's the most, a place where you really need to make sure you don't skip a step or

it's the scariest thing you'll do all day, but it's just, there's nothing more important than what you're doing right now. And I think if I can live that way always in every moment, then I'll be more likely to be living up to my potential. That's awesome. I I'm smiling quietly because that's, that's how I think about it too. And it seems pretty simple, but really hard to execute when I've got so much stuff going on inside my head that, you know, it's, so it's a hello and goodbye. Hello and goodbye. Come on back. Come on back. Come on back. And then then if i can just if i can find that entry point into deep focus which is just no more complicated than stringing a couple moments together purity like purely stringing

a couple moments together to the task at hand which is listening you know like that's your task right now mine is to find the the most well-placed word to capture what I'm experiencing inside of me. And if I can just commit to that, then I am at my potential, beautifully at my potential. So I thin slice it up against the roll, but then I thin slice it even further down to it's like this moment and this moment and this moment. And either i'm self-critical you know distracted doing something that is like not relevant to the mission or the promise or the purpose that is matters to me and and those are kind of the off-ramps so it's like a self-critical anxiousness type of thing or a deep distraction that is not mission critical purpose driven i love that okay

yeah cool that sounds good so so let's go to let's let's take a little detour here great what are you trying to solve so you're gonna you're you're an astronaut you're gonna have an opportunity to go to the iss what are you trying to solve? So I really mean this. I think we are living in the coolest times in human spaceflight history. It's so wild. Because we have everything we're doing on the ISS. I'd love to. You know what's a cool date?

October 31st of 2000. Halloween. Halloween. I was in ninth grade. It's like, it's a long time ago. October 31st of 2000, before September 11th. So that was the last time that all living humans were on earth.

Come on. We sent somebody. Somebody sent somebody to space. That was the launch of Expedition 1. And that crew, that first crew, Expedition 1, flew to the very, very small, still under construction beginnings of the International Space Station and inhabited it for six months

and they got relieved by Expedition 2. So I will be, when I arrive on board, I will be part of Expedition 68. We've had a continuous human presence on the International Space Station since fall of 2000. Continuous at all times. That is really cool. So not all humans live on. Some of them are living and working in space, and that's been true since 2000.

And so that has I mean, some of it's very mundane. We don't I don't think people think about that all the time. And yet 22 years of experience living and working in space, we have learned so much about spaceflight. And so what that sets us up to do now is to go further. And that's exactly what NASA is doing. So with the Artemis program, we're going to be going to the moon. We're going to be not just going to equatorial regions, but going to the poles, which are really interesting. Humans have never been to the poles of the moon. There's water ice there. Um, we intend to set up a continuous human presence

or at least a sustained human presence on the moon. Um, going there, not just for brief trips, but to stay. And we're going to set up a proving ground to go to Mars. That's what we're going to do with the moon. So that's going to be like base camp, not to launch from, but that's like, can we prove that we can live in a hostile environment, a different environment than our atmosphere? And to really mature the techniques that we're going to need to do Mars. So for example, in situ resource utilization, which means in situ.

What it means is let's use the resources of another planetary body. So let's say we want to use some water ice on the moon to make oxygen or rocket fuel. We're going to actually pull resources out of the ground and use it for the mission. So that could be a very important part of actually achieving people on Mars. And if we're going to do that for real and have people's lives depending on that technology for them to make it home, then why not go do that and exercise that on the moon where if it fails, we can come home with other means. That's what we've been doing on the International Space Station for 22 years.

When the space station started, we flew all the water up. It came from the fuel cells on the shuttle. We just made as much water as we needed. We didn't recycle it or anything. Now we have more than 90% efficiency recycling urine back into water. So yesterday's coffee is today's coffee. That was planned. That's a bad, that's an engineer joke that you just were waiting for that moment. That's so good. Totally. Okay. So it's like a self-sustainability. So that technology, I mean, when the space station started, if I had said, you're going to go to Mars and you're going to recycle your urine into drinking water that sounds pretty risky and scary if your life's

going to depend on that yeah if you say that now it's like well we've been doing that for 22 years we have we've learned what we need to learn about that technology and it's mature enough to where we we actually can use it are there aliens have they have what do you think i don't know what do you think um i think the universe is very big we talked about this the team before you got here what did you say like okay i wish my wife was here because she'd say you know what would he he watches ancient aliens the tv show like it's like have you ever seen it no it's so bad it's wonderful and so there's all it's like a have you guys seen it it's like these conspiracy theories that like the last time we're on the moon you know or whatever that uh there's

there was actually materials on the moon that were planted there by aliens before. It's all this stuff. So for real, you think that the world is huge. The universe is huge. And thereby the chances of life in other forms or intelligent life, I guess. I don't know how I'm calling it. Sentient beings are Are present. Yeah I mean

I if you I think we started to get a view of this with Hubble and now we have the James Webb Space Telescope to really Get that visceral sense of just how much is out there not I mean in our galaxy and then you realize that our I mean our galaxy is outrageously large. The distances are. The Milky Way. The Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy.

The distances are incomprehensibly large. Help me understand. Help me. Light years, right? What does that mean? What's a light? A light year is the distance light travels in one year. And, I mean, light can, light travels, I think it's out and back across the United States 30 times in a second.

That's about right. So that's how fast light goes. So wait, it goes out and back across the United States 30 times per second. Light does. It's 186,000 miles per second. So that's like from the sun to the earth. That's about eight minutes is how long it takes light to go. That's 93 million miles from the sun to the earth. Is that? That's about eight minutes. Eight minutes. That's 93 million miles from the sun to the earth. 93 million miles. Yeah. That's already, what is 93 million miles? I don't even, that's outrageously far, right?

What does it take to get around the earth once? The earth is 24,000 miles in diameter. So light travels 186,000 miles a second. So very roughly that's seven. So the light, light would go seven times around the earth. That takes one second. That's light. So was that new math for you right now?

Did you just do that math? Yeah. Or is that like, I happened to, I happened to know the 186,000 miles per second. And I think I was wrong about the back and forth across the U.S. That was fun for me to watch. You kind of like just kind of like.

So and so I I'm going I'm going 17,500 miles an hour on the space station, which is like 17. I think a high powered rifle bullet is like a thousand meters per second. I'm going about 8,000 meters per second. So I'm going outrageously fast, right? We think about how fast we're going in space. Very little perspective. Like it's hard to know that speed. Yeah.

Or impossible to know the speed, but you're looking at the earth. It takes me 90 minutes to do an orbit. It takes light, you know, a light would do seven orbits in a second. So, so my point is the universe, you know, back to the. Wait, no, let's stay on this before the universe. So you're going to see right is the the orbit is staying still. Right. We're going around the Earth in an orbit which is inclined. I'm doing it at an angle because it's inclined relative to the equator. And underneath of that, the Earth is rotating, doing its 24 hour rotation per day. So every orbit, which is every 90 minutes, we kind of shift around the earth to a different spot. Okay.

All right. So you're going to, every 90 minutes you'll rotate. We'll do a full revolution. You'll see the full world, whatever latitude or is it longitude? Is it latitude at that point? It's both because we're, we're inclined. So we'll go, for example, an orbital pass might go up over Northern Europe and then down through Asia, down by Australia,

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what what do you okay so we've got a little bit of the technical mission, you know, like the ISS is a research laboratory. Yes. So help me understand what you're going to research. And I also want to know what you're going to research personally. And I still don't quite understand what you're trying to sort out, right? That's like the, I'm trying to get at it another way. What do you, what is going to happen happen what do you think is going to happen for you and i also i'm going to come back to the imagery i promise i also want to understand like what are you afraid of like what are the things that you're going to get right up against and so let's let's hold those yeah let's hold it i won't forget these okay good so what. So what is the research that your mission is on?

And then personal mission right after that. Yeah. So like you said, the ISS is, it's actually a national laboratory. It's one of the national laboratories. So the purpose of the International Space Station is scientific research. And what do you research? What are you going to research? There are hundreds of experiments going on at any given time.

So we can talk about that. I'm actually a test subject for many of them. So we actually, we sign consent forms to be, to participate as test subjects. I think it's a really important part of the job since I'm there. There's plenty of interesting science to do on the human body with regard to, I mean, we're spending six months in weightlessness. Um, so I mean, throughout the space station program, we've learned a lot about how that affects, uh, muscles and the musculoskeletal system. Um, we've learned a lot about the exercise countermeasures that allow us to, uh, still come back healthy despite that environment right now. Um, there's a condition called sam space affected

neuroocular syndrome it's a it's actually um like macroscopic changes that occur in the eye um that are associated with living in the weightless environment for a long time and it's not fully understood so like during my mission will be that'll be one of the things that we're looking at so i mean we literally go in and like measure the pressure in the eye um and we do uh we take a bunch of images okay like i i know that teams go and look at the thickness of uh the retina um when things go wrong from an experiential standpoint, what are those things? You could have a degeneration of the eye. What are some of those other things that are almost like inherent risks that could go wrong?

I mean, just from the experience of being there. So if we didn't, for example, if we didn't exercise, if we didn't use our exercise countermeasures, we would come back incredibly weak. It'd be almost like doing bed rest for six months. So that would not work. That's a problem. You would not, yeah. You're going from weightlessness for six months.

So the human body adapts incredibly quickly to new environments, right? And so it adapts to realizing, well, I don't need these big muscles that allow me to walk around in 1G. Might as well get rid of those. Oh, look at that. And then you come back into 1G from you've been floating around for six months and then you try to stand up and no. How often do you, what does your training program look like when you're up there? It's about two hours a day of exercise. And there are three machines that we can do exercise on, well, that we typically do exercise on.

There's also some exercise equipment on the Russian segment. But we have a resistance machine. So we can do squats, deadlifts, push-ups, or sorry, bench press, like rows, any of those kind of basic. Big muscle. Big muscle groups, just the resistance strength. And then the other two are cardio. So we have a bike and we have a treadmill. And the RPE, rate of perceived exertion, is about? Good question.

How hard are you working? Yeah. So we actually, we have a team that prescribes our exercise program. They would be able to answer that question yeah we start off pretty light just getting used to doing exercise in weightlessness it's weird um and then you ramp up to kind of the the loads that you are um going to be using for most of the mission um i've heard some people come back stronger than they were when they launched. Do they? Yeah.

So they get in there. You're doing two hours a day. You're really doing it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then what are some, what keep going?

So that's, I did, I did want to say, I mean, so there's the research component. That is the purpose of the space station. And then that takes up a lot of our time. And then the other big thing that takes up,

and then there's taking care of ourselves. So the exercise is a big thing. And maybe some time off on the weekend when we can fit it in. But then the other thing that is really important that takes a lot of time is keeping the space station flying. So all of the maintenance, upgrading systems, potentially doing spacewalks to do upgrades or repairs. But just keeping all that infrastructure, you know, there's, there's nobody but the crew to take care of the place. How many people? And I, that came out wrong. There's nobody physically there to like, let's say take out the trash or clean the galley that the crew has to do it. We're the only ones there.

We have an incredible support team on the ground. And, mean, that's I know one of your questions was like, what are you what what does Woody accomplishing or what is my focus? And I mean, when we're up there on our six month mission, we are just the eyes and hands and ears of the ground team. Right. We're operators operators we're just there's a team of experts that's supporting us they're the real like they're really doing the work and we're up there just doing the business of the day okay it sounds uneventful potentially i mean just meaning that on any given experiment i am not the expert Somebody on the ground is the expert. I might be in the position to describe what I'm seeing, to convey results as they're coming in, to execute whatever procedures

I'm doing, but ultimately the teams on the ground are the real experts and are the ones directing what we're doing what makes a great team trust keep going what makes a great team you trust each other yeah and i maybe uh mission so i think i almost i almost overlook this because i think it's just so obvious and easy in my current job so i feel really lucky that we just have such kind of

clarity of, it's easy to see what the mission is. Um, so clarity of mission. Yeah. And, and it's also a fairly, you know, spaces, we like to say space is hard. It just is hard. It's, it's a non, it's not a forgiving place. And i think that also uh shared challenges i think allows a team to thrive is that different than the mission shared challenges i i think so as i'm as i'm reverberating it with you yeah the commission is like okay we're gonna go take that hill or we're gonna go to the iss or we're gonna to do whatever together. And then you have shared hard times together where you're working out. Can I trust you or not? Yeah. And I mean, even kind of like I was just laying out the purpose or the mission maybe of the ISS, for example, is scientific

research. That's why it's there. But yet we're going to spend a huge amount of effort and resources on, for example, keeping the space station flying. So like we're currently on a campaign of solar array upgrades where we're flying up new solar arrays and installing them. There's a bunch of spacewalks associated with that. So that's really important to allow the mission to occur. It's not the mission, but it's an important aspect of enabling the scientific research to continue. Yeah. Are all astronauts, do they, are they as humble as you? I think even more so probably. Yeah. Okay. That's a funny way to say, yeah. Okay. This is a different word, but closely related. You're really thoughtful.

Is there a thoughtfulness? Is that a common thread for astronauts? I think so. I also think going back to, you know, you were asking about my dad, for example, and I think that's instilled. I'm just naturally pretty curious. And, um, I'm, I mean, that's one of the reasons I've really enjoyed your work and watching, um, the interactions you have with your guests and cause it is just so thoughtful. And I, you pose these questions and I think I've never thought about that, but that's really interesting. Can I take us in a direction about your dad? Sure. Okay. Your dad passed away in September. Correct. Yeah. And your dad took up a presence in your life that he taught you about being honest and getting to the

truth. I would imagine this is me being romantic for a minute, but that would be an important moment for you and your dad to see you launch. So what do you imagine is going to happen? What is that going to be like for you? I have no idea. Yeah. I mean, I know what it, um, yeah. So I don't know if, I don't know how much detail to go into, but my dad passed away unexpectedly of a condition called pericardial mesothelioma. It was completely unexpected. It's a, um, he basically had a tumor around his heart. Um, he was a super, super active guy, um, running races. What's his name?

James Hoburg. He was very active in the mountain running community in New Hampshire where he had chosen to retire. Um, so well into his mid seventies, he was out just being super active and what, I mean, he was so healthy. Um, and so it was a, it was a very quick and unexpected kind of decline into illness last summer. I was in the thick of training at the time and I mean, I just, yeah, ultimately, I guess to get back to your question, I know that he would have loved to come to my launch and of all the things he always showed up for me in life. He was at every soccer game, every silly little kids thing that I was doing, he was there engaged in the details, interested.

He showed up. And, uh, so of course he would, would have wanted to see my launch. Um, so it's sad that he won't get to, um, but I'll certainly be kind of carrying him along with me on the mission. How are you processing that grief? It's been so busy, the training schedule that I think I am. Um, I mean, it was hard. Um, it is hard. It is hard. Yeah. You're not through it yet. Yeah. I think I've done some compartmentalizing for sure. Um, yeah. So on the, like grief is a, there's a long tail to it. You know, it's not like, oh, I went to the funeral. I'm done. Or, you know, there's a long tail and it's individual specific for all of us. And I would imagine if I was in your shoes and I don't, is your dad, your hero in some respects? Like, did you look up to your dad and did you have that

type of bond with him? Yeah. I, uh, I don't want to over romanticize anything you might have had a terrible relationship with your dad no we had a fantastic relationship we had a very honest relationship um yeah i would imagine that was me and i'm gonna go do something i've always wanted to do and and knowing that my dad's not there that that would be an emotional moment for me. I would want, I would want to, I'd want to have some guideposts on how to navigate that before I arrived at that moment. Yeah. And your mom will be there. Absolutely. Yeah. And so how do you want you and your mom to experience that moment knowing that your dad is not there, but you two are there? How do you imagine that moment taking place for you? Where you're in your spacesuit or the day before, you'll be in quarantine?

Yeah, I'll be in quarantine. I think my mom's going to quarantine as well. She will? So that'll be cool. We'll get to spend some time together. And she'll be along with my brother. The way this works is we get in our spacesuits and then we walk out from what's called the ONC building, Operations and Checkout building. It's down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

And we actually, because I'm flying on SpaceX, we actually drive from that building to the launch pad in Teslas. And there's this moment where you kind of walk out of the building and you're getting into the Teslas and you have a moment to see your family or loved ones. And so my mom and brother will be there. And yeah, I'll say goodbye for a bit. Is that how that's goodbye? For a bit. For a bit. Is that how that's goodbye for a bit for a bit? Yeah. Honestly,

I just want my mom to not worry. Are you shaking this message for her right now? Yeah. She's been amazing. I mean, I've, I've done all these crazy things my whole life. I was climbing,

doing a bunch of climbing. I got into skydiving for a while, like, and somehow she put up with it and you know i know that it probably was hard as a mom to oh yeah to oh yeah have your son out doing dangerous things and are you a risk taker or risk mitigator i think i'm a risk mitigator but you take risk risk. As little as possible. You work in a consequential environment.

So, okay. Yeah. Could you die at the launch or at ISS? Yes. Or, yeah. I think we have to be realistic about it. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you have a higher chance of dying than I do driving? I don't even know what to normalize based on, right? Yeah. But the answer, I mean, yes, you could die. Okay. And so how do you process that? There are many things I've done in life where I could die, many. And they were all things that I wanted to do. And getting back to your question about risk taking or risk mitigating, I mean, there's so many ways, high stakes environments. I find them fascinating and attractive. Um, but I don't like taking risks. I actually find the most

attractive, attractive and interesting part of these environments to be choosing that we're going to go there. We're going to do the mission. We've made that choice and now we are going to do it as safely as possible. And I find that to be the most interesting thing is how can we make this safe? That gets all my analytical like tinkering bits., uh, so that is really working all, all the problems. Yeah. All of you. Yeah. Okay. And that's for me, like the climbing, I mean, it's scary, but I don't like that feeling. I just want to make it as safe as possible. So let's go back to your mom is that I hear you say that you don't want her to worry. So there's a, there's a part of you that is trying to minimize or not exaggerate any of the risk involved so that she will be okay.

And she's like, my son is capable, right? And this is dangerous. It's a, it's a big mission that he's part of. He loves this, you know,

this way that he's part of. He loves this, you know, this way that he's living his life. I want to support my son to literally launch in life failure to launch as a real problem for some, for some families. And so that's like you trying to almost not, is it minimizing? Are you, are you minimizing it for your mom or is it not that? No, I think I want her to know, and this is true, that we have had great training. We're prepared. We're ready. And we have a fantastic team supporting us. And thinking about the most, the tiniest minutia of what could go wrong and making sure we're covered.

So that is all in place. Yeah, cool. And I just want her to know that that's true. You know, is your relationship with your mom in order? Yeah. You say that like, of course, was your relationship with your dad in order? Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah. I just, yeah, I just, I mean, I'm so lucky, but I've had, I've had the most wonderful supportive parents. Um, they never, I can't remember them ever telling me that i couldn't do something they just implicitly i would say they supported me no matter what always so when you were graduating mit don't tell me top of your class i don't even know what that means okay

there's the humbleness again yeah okay you're graduating mit one of the most prestigious universities on the planet. And you say, I'm going to go get my nails dirty and kind of live out of a backpack. And they said, okay, that sounds like a good plan, son. That's such a good example because I remember where I was. I was sitting on their back porch and I had come back from my climbing trip. And so I had climbed all summer. I'd graduated and I had gotten into great grad schools. I was actually, I had actually signed to go to Stanford for grad school. That was my plan.

And I think it was either July or it was probably August. It was August and I had done all this climbing. And that's when this idea of working search and rescue really kind of said, I could actually do this, but it would take some work. I would need to become an EMT. And I just, I was sitting on their back porch and I thought to myself, I just, I just want to do that. And I think I want to take a year before I start. I still want to do the grad school thing. Were you nervous to have that conversation with them? Or was it like they're your partners

and you're talking to them? I knew they would support me. And yeah, I was actually. I want that. But I, I want that relationship with my son. Like, I, I don't think this is like for this conversation, but I want to learn that part from your parents, from you. Cause I want to have like for my whole life, I want to have, I want to learn that part from your parents from you because i want to have like for my whole life i want to have i want to have a great relationship with my son and so

sometimes i can find myself being you know too hard too intense um too lack like you know so i don't i maybe people think but i don't have a roadmap for it. But I want that what you and your parents experience is pretty rad. I don't know how they did it because I think I would really struggle. I don't have children right now, but I think, I mean. Would your mom come on? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's do that at some point. That would be interesting. Yeah. Let's do that at some point about going for it, about authentically supporting even in dangerous environments. And just they always let me find my own path. They never told me what the right path was. They always. How did they do that?

Like mechanically, how did they do that? They just never intervened. They don't care. They just don't really care. They don't really care what you do. They're like, yeah, you're off doing that thing okay i was saying that provocatively you know they care so it's not like they were too busy in their own life that like you were what's it what's the phrase like a latch key i don't know if that's appropriate to say you know like but

my parents were very laissez-faire they love me they're a part of my life but they're like uh yeah if it's good listen if you're not home by dark i don't know it's harder to get home you know we lived i was born in the country and so there was like yeah it's just hard to get home if you're not home by dark yeah yeah you might get hungry if you miss dinner okay you'll figure it out you'll figure it out yeah okay so um what are you trying to sort out what is your personal mission and then the thin slice of that or the thin barrier porous to that is like what are you afraid of that you're going to go become intimate with on this mission let's see first part i mean

it's not that deep of an answer but i just feel so lucky to get to have this experience i mean it's a dream come true to get to fly to space um there's so much of it that's unknown and interesting and there's just pure exploration of going out and experiencing this thing that's so rare um so i'm just excited to get to do that. I also say lucky. What does like you said that a few times? Yeah. As part of the interview process to get the job, I got to see the final round applicants that apply for the job that have made it really far through the interview process. And they're indistinguishable from my point of view. They are equally talented. Yeah. Incredible. I

mean, I don't, I got to spend maybe a week with them, um, which is enough to get to know each other a bit and, um, everybody's amazing. So there's an aspect there where I just, I, I feel lucky that I happened to be picked and get to have this opportunity. So there's excitement of just experiencing the unique life experience of getting to go to space. I mean, I don't know if that's a mission, but I'm sure excited to get to do it. what I believe to be an important endeavor, which is the, the ISS and the national lab carrying out the research, research, continuing to upgrade the station. And so I just want to be part of that mission. And I'm like, so honored to get to do that along with the whole ground team. Go to the fears. What is it that you're afraid of when you go into this new territory, this new frontier?

I, I, I'm trying to think of an answer. I'm not, I'm not feeling afraid. Like, and the confidence there is based on the training. Okay. And so I just. Super interesting. I feel ready. And that's thanks to the incredible training that we've gone through over the past couple of years.

Are you afraid at all that you're going to get, let's say I'm going to introduce some things. Okay. Yeah. You're ready for this. Go. Okay. Some people are like, when you do this in sport, you know, I can't wait. You do this in sport. They're like, you shouldn't be talking about this. You know, the superstitious part is we shouldn't be talking about this no i'm ready yeah but i know that that's not kind of how you're made up all right so uh do you have any fears that you might you're going to be trapped in a confined space no and no i will be trapped in a confined space that that will feel confining constricting and there's some uh beginnings of claustrophobia that would take place no there's we um we do a lot of uh training for spacewalking we kind of

have a disproportionate amount of i don't know that's not a guarantee that's not a guarantee i would love to but it's not a guarantee at all um we spend a disproportionate amount of time though training for that because it's pretty uh high stakes and it's it's hard um there's this moment when you get back in the airlock. Um, so you're done with the space walk. It's the end of the end of the day and you're getting back inside to close the hatch and bring the pressure back up and come inside. And, um, in the pool where we train, I have a few times found it hard during the ingress. There there's a way to get what we call plus to plus contact, but that your plus is

your backpack to all your life support equipment and so you have two crew members kind of getting in there together and if those things contact one another you can get kind of jammed um so i've experienced that and in training where it's there's no consequence but enough to know okay i need to make sure that i know how to deal with this because i do not want to be at the end of the day trying to come inside and you're stuck. And literally stuck, meaning that like, is it like being stuck in like a small hole? It is. You're in a pressurized suit and you're really immobile. I mean, you're just super clumsy and you've got this giant hard backpack on and you're trying

to go and you're just like nope doesn't go that way so how would you get out of that so there's a basically the crew members just need to both kind of roll away from one another and then that relieves that specific point where the where you're getting that contact and then it all works out just fine so you don't have any real tripwires for panic? I have, yeah. No. Yeah. You've trained your way through it if you have.

Yeah. Right. You've forgotten because you're training. Okay. Maybe like spiders or something. Yeah, there's no spiders out there, right? Yeah, it's so easy. All right. So what about like constipation? Oh, interesting. It's a real problem. Yeah.

Interesting. I mean, I know every, I logically from a practical point of view, I know everybody you're there for six months. So everybody eventually gets through that. Yeah. It's not an issue. So yeah. What about, what about a teammate that, um, one of the other teammates that you're not familiar with that absolutely drives you nuts. So that I feel like we, um, get fantastic training on because we just trained together and we formed that bond. So you're going to go up with four, but there's another three. Yeah. That you ha you don't know. So, but I already know them from, you do know from previous. Yeah. So actually one of them that's out there now is my classmate, um, Frank Rubio. So, but I already know them from previous. Yeah. So actually one of them that's out there

now is my classmate, um, Frank Rubio. So, um, Oh, there you go. Yeah. So that alleviates that. So astronauts are the U S name for an astronaut and a cosmonaut is in Russian. And then is there from Japan? Is there a different name? Um, Japanese, Japanese astronaut. Yeah. So it's astronaut. Yeah. I should know the word in Japanese, but I don't. What's the chances of the cosmonaut in this highly political charged environment that we're at right now, that something is flares in the ISS

that is representative of the tension between the states and Russia? Yeah, it is. I mean, I want to first acknowledge it because it is a challenging time right now. But I wish people could see the day-to-day interaction, at least in mission control is where I've seen it the most. And then also just in training where I'm training with my cosmonaut crewmate. I haven't seen it in person on the space station yet, but I roughly know how it works on the space station as well. Um, I wish people could see it cause it's just beautiful. Like in order to operate that vehicle every single day, you have to cooperate

and that's what you do. It's just super operational. We just have to get it done. So if our toilet breaks, the Russians let us use their toilet and we coordinate that in mission control and we get it done. If we need to, let's say, avoid some orbital debris that's headed for the space station, we move the space station out of the way with thrusters. That's a coordinated effort between the two control centers because it affects the whole space station so every single day we are working together and coordinating and then i mean training together like the life experience of training together for a space flight you become friends. Okay, cool. I mean... Cool.

And we work in space. So we are... I mean, I do want to acknowledge that it is a challenging time, but I just have to do my job. And the people that I work with directly are also just doing their job. And that is to train and fly on the space station.

When you submitted your application, did you think you had to, like it was going to happen? Cause that's how things work. I apply to MIT. I get in, I apply to Stanford. I get in.

It was the opposite. I thought the probability of getting selected as an astronaut was zero. Come on. And I don't mean it wasn't 0.1. It wasn't like 1%. It was zero. I just, I did not give it any credible.

It's almost hard to believe. Yeah. So I think that, I think it was two parts for me. Number one, I really thought the probability was zero. I mean, it's just, it doesn't feel like, I was just a normal guy. I was just like doing my job and it just doesn't feel like something that. What was your job? I was a professor at the time.

Where? MIT. Okay. And I was. Normal guy. Just normal guy. Professor at MIT, you know, normal. I mean, I don't know.

I just didn't. I love that you don't know how to take me right now. No, okay. So you applied. I really mean it, though. I really, it just doesn't feel like something that is. What was your degree in? Something possible.

Aerospace engineering for undergrad and computer science for grad school. Okay. Professor at MIT teaching? Teaching aerospace engineering. I taught flight vehicle engineering and I taught dynamics. school okay professor mit teaching teaching uh aerospace engineering i had two class i taught flight vehicle engineering and i taught dynamics um and then i had a research group so you does an application class come together every year at nasa yeah no it's a it's in the past decade or so it's been about every four years okay so four years You, you, you get your application together. You submit it.

Yeah. And I mean, I found out that the application process was open at a climbing gym because my best friend told me that applications were open and we should really apply. I mean, I was laser focused on being a professor. That was my job. It was a hard job. I was staying up late, working my butt off. And I didn't even know that there was an application open. Even though this was something I had always thought

was maybe something I'd like to do someday. I mean, it had always been in the back of my mind. Maybe I'll apply to be an astronaut. Maybe someday I'd love to do that. But I didn't even know the application. I wasn't paying attention.

I was so focused on what I was doing at the time. But anyway, yeah, I fill out the application. And then you fill it out on USAjobs.gov. It's like an internet form. You fill it out onto text boxes and you press submit. And then months go by to the point where you think you probably clicked the wrong button and it got lost into some internet. It probably didn't even go through like, so, and then, you know, found out that I had been asked to come down for a first round interview,

which was just such a cool process. You go down, there's a bunch of medical tests, screening for medical issues that, issues that would make you not viable as a candidate. And then also just the whole interview process. And you're there with other applicants and it's many days in person. Amazing experience. I still thought the probability was zero. I think maybe part of that was intentional, actually. I think it was like a, in the back of my mind, an intentional, just don't get your heart set on this. Because why would you? You probably, it's probably not going to happen.

Was that, is that a practical decision or was that an emotional saving, self-esteem saving mechanism? I think it was practical because I just, I'm, I really, I was just so engaged in my job at the time. So you, you liked it. You enjoyed what you're doing. Oh yeah. Yeah. And I was deeply committed to it. I mean, I was on, I was working toward tenure, which is kind of this thing that, um, happens many years into being a professor. And, um, I was just working really hard on that and had such great students and we were doing really interesting research. And, um, I was just working really hard on that and had such great students and we were doing really interesting research. And, um, the first year of being a

professor, you're kind of lost and confused and not very good. At least that's how it was for me. And, um, and over time I started to kind of catch my bearings and figure it out. And in year three, my lab like built an airplane using our software and, you know, I won't go into a bunch of detail, but it felt like I was hitting my stride. It felt like things were starting to come together in that job. And that's when I got selected. I had something else that I was very interested in and committed to. And I also just think as a strategy, it's actually kind of a common experience. I think among many people that get selected that they, whatever they were working on, they're sad to leave. That's a cool insight. And that's almost what makes them, that's almost

what makes them the right applicant. They were not trying to become an astronaut, even though, I mean, maybe somewhere it was a dream long ago, or it was something they wanted to do, but it wasn't like, okay, what's the next step to be an astronaut? The people that get selected are like working on something else. You know, what's refreshing about this is that your identity is not wrapped into that you are going to one day be an astronaut and I am an astronaut. You are now. But your identity was not baked in a dangerous way in that. There's more available internal space to make adult decisions as opposed to this constricted adolescent, small identity type thinking patterns. So there's something really refreshing. What do you say to folks that say, you got to burn the boats, you got to burn the bridges, you got to go all in because if you ever want to have an interesting, meaningful life, you

got to fully go for it. That there is no turning back and you need that type of intense pressure to do the thing and achieve the thing and have the thing that you've always wanted. And plan B, that's dangerous. Have no plan B because as soon as you have a plan B, you won't do the hard thing. What do you say to those folks? I, I, at least I'd be interested to think about that globally. I can say with a lot of confidence for, I know a lot of people want to become

astronauts. It's a common dream. I mean, I, I had that dream as a kid. Everybody wants to be an astronaut. And I know for that life goal in particular, it's counterintuitive. But I think early on, it's great to say that's what I want to do. But I mean, when you're in middle school, you know you're not like immediately going to become an astronaut. There's probably some steps between now and then. I think for people that are getting a bit closer to that goal, where it really does feel like maybe that could be a reality in the near future. This is counterintuitive, but the right answer is you have to forget that goal. You have to find something else, anything else, but something else that you're so deeply passionate about and just throw yourself at that. And counterintuitively, that is what leads to the life experiences that are the real experiences that get people selected.

And if you look at the diversity of the core, I mean, it's just, it's people that have done these amazing, cool things and been good at them. And there's no right, there's no single way to get this job. There's so many different paths to it. I couldn't tell you this is the path because everybody ends up just doing something really interesting. It gives them maybe some technical experience. For me, that was engineering. We have people that are geologists or working in sciences or test pilots, some kind of technical work. And then especially on the civilian side,

many of the applicants also end up doing something operational, I would call it. So for me, that was search and rescue with people that worked on oil rigs or worked on boats or, I mean, yeah, went to Antarctica, did something out there, kind of getting their hands dirty a little bit. What makes a great operator? What makes a great operator? That's such a good question. That's code for, I need a little time to think. Yes. Let me buy you some time. Is that like, we have that part of our efforts in our jobs in some

respects where we are operators. You're really full, all in some respects where we are operators you're really full all in you're a scientist you're an operator you know so but you need to go get some shit done like when i think about a great operator it's like we just get it done and i'm wondering if that's too naive too simple no i think that's right um I think when we talk about an operational environment, I think embedded in that is that there's a mission and there's some real time stuff going on that we need to respond to. And so just having that maybe mind shift, at least for me, for me, it's a mind shift being a civilian. I mean, I'm an academic, I'm like a nerd, but I identify, I do identify as an operator. And so for me, it is a little mind shift. It's like, we're going to stop thinking

now and we're going to do, we're just going to get something done. We're going to make a decision and execute. If you could speak into parents, what would you say to them as they're trying to do their very best to raise their kids? For me, what I appreciate most deeply, the gift that my parents gave me, it was freedom. If you could speak to executives, a CEO, let's just say CEOs right now, what would you say to them if they knew what you knew? One thing that I deeply value in the astronaut core is this little bit of vulnerability and in particular people know that we're gonna live and work together in this harsh environment for a long time and so the acknowledgement that the team skills are really important in particular vulnerability

debriefing like openness doesn't mean you have to be best friends but it's just that organizational um understanding that we're gonna we're gonna meet halfway and we're gonna acknowledge things and be an effective team together. Okay. So Woody, the insights that you have now might be different than the insights when you get back. So yeah, I'm really excited to be able to have a conversation later with you. And so, as you and I had the chance to get to know each other, there's maybe an opportunity that we get to talk while you're in space.

And so, what do you think some of those questions will be that will be important for you to entertain while you're in space? Here's how I think about it. There's like this is 100% of, I don't know, knowledge of what it's like to live and work and operate in space. And there's just this plateau. Like I have maybe some small percentage.

So probably I don't know, let's call it 70%. I know all these things. I have all this training. I'm prepared for the mission. But it's a plateau, meaning this 30% is inaccessible to me. There's nothing I can do right now to access that part of the experience. You just have to go do it. And so, of course, it's an unknown unknown for me.

It's just I don't know what that's going to be like. Um, I don't know what I'm going to struggle with or what I'm going to enjoy the most or what it's going to literally be like to be weightless and operate. I hear that when you show up there on day one, you're just, everything is hard. You're like, you know, how do I get a drink of water? That's so hard. That's just the hardest thing because here you can barely move around. How do I open this bag and make sure stuff doesn't float everywhere? That's the hardest thing. And then a weekend, you're good at that. Got to figure it out. But anyway, there's, there's just, I know there's this component of the experience. That's a complete mystery. And that's kind of fun for some people

not knowing is undoing. That is the essence of anxiety. And so you're not going in like, I'm super anxious about that 30%. You're going, I'm really excited about that 30%. So excited. I think that framing is materially important interesting when you come back yeah what do you think some of those differences will be for you what do you think like if the i can't imagine you'll be the same woody just because not because you're going to outer space but because there's time in between. And there's an old insight that is important for me that I live by, which is every time I meet somebody, again, they're a different person. Even my wife, when I said goodbye to her this morning, when I see her tonight, she'll be a different person. And so will I, because we've had experiences. So what do you imagine you'll be like when you return? I have no idea,

but I mean, it is a unique life experience, I suppose to say the least, right? Oh my God. So I will be changed for sure. In ways that I don't think I can fully comprehend right now. I'm excited to talk with you. You're really good at pulling things apart. And this has shown me yet again those probing hard questions. So yeah, I'm so excited for it. I'm just so stoked for that. But I mean, how could I know?

I love this. It all comes down to, how do you finish that thought? Showing up. The good life is marked by? Being present. Success is? Success is living up to your potential. If you had the chance to sit with a master and somebody that's dead or alive, uh, who would that person be? And if you only had a handful of

questions, what would be the key question? Okay. Yeah. For me, it'd be Tommy Caldwell. Um, and actually I would just thank him. I learned so much from that man in a funny early on in life actually. So I was, uh, I don't know, 20 and I was just getting into climbing. I was a nobody. I was in Yosemite Valley for the first time and I had just climbed a five, nine called central pillar of frenzy. I mean, this is not very impressive. It's a climb that you can do that many people do. It's crowded. There's a line because so many people are doing it.

It's not interesting. I was in Camp 4, which is this famous location, super famous location in climbing, and I saw Tommy Caldwell in the parking lot, and he's like a hero of mine. And I see him there in climbing. And I saw Tommy Caldwell in the parking lot and he's like a hero of mine. I mean, I've, and I see him there in person. It's my first time in Yosemite Valley. And so I just, I was super shy. I was nervous. I went up to him and I said like, Tommy, excuse me, sir. Like, I just, I just wanted to say hi and shake your hand. You're a hero of mine. And he was so gracious in that moment.

I am sure he was working on some really, really hard project. Sure. He was busy. And you know what? He asked me about my climb that day about the, I mean, he, he wanted to know what I had been doing in Yosemite. And that always stuck with me. Like, wow, this master took the time to ask about my silly little climb. Um, so now in my current job,

um, I always think of that when people want to talk to me and maybe learn what that experience of being an astronaut is like, and maybe I'm busy or frazzled or just out of it a little bit and somebody comes up, I always hope that I will be as gracious or at least try to be as Tommy was for me in that moment. I think one of the great constrictors of human potential is this obsession about what they might think whether i do the thing well or poorly or i don't do the thing or it's this obsession of other people's opinions and does that show up in any way for you that there's another narrative it's almost like a shadow game that you play or have played in your life where it's like their opinion has gotten in the way of me doing what I want to do.

You know, the best example I have related to FOPO, it's actually the best decision I ever made. And I'm glad, I'm so grateful for how it turned out, but it was back in grad school when I was exploring doing search and rescue. And I had this opportunity to. Well, actually, I wasn't even sure it was an opportunity at the time. I wanted to explore the dream of doing search and rescue for climbing, which is very unrelated to pursuing a PhD in computer science. They're just not related. And I think I was exploring my identity where I was, who, who am I? Um, and I just remember talking to some mentors at the time in academic mentors, uh, people I deeply respect and still consider friends and mentors to this day. And I just talked about this dream and it was interesting how many of them said, I don't think that's such a good idea. I'm not sure how that's going to help you in what it is you're pursuing, which was a PhD in computer science. I should say my academic advisor at the time,

Peter Abbeel, my PhD advisor, he was deeply supportive of me doing this. So I just want to make that clear. But I did talk to some earlier mentors about the idea of going off and working search and rescue or getting my EMT certification and pursuing this stuff. And people didn't think it was such a good idea. And so those were the other people's opinions. And somehow in that moment, I was just so passionate about doing that. And I just knew that I had to do it. I knew I, I knew I wanted to have that experience and, and I just knew that I wanted to listen to the, these are people I deeply trust and respect. And I wanted to listen to their opinions. But at the end of the day, I just had to make a choice. Am I going to do this? And I just knew I was going to do it. And I'm so glad I did because it was

one of the best experiences of my life in and of itself. And even if I had just had the experience and then, I mean, I used to be working as a professor. So even if that were still my job, I would tell you it was one of the best experiences of my life. And I'm so glad I did it. Ultimately, I think it also happened to help me in my application to be an astronaut. That's not why I did it. I just wanted to do it, but I think it did ultimately help me. Um, and for that reason, I'm especially glad that I didn't listen. I love that story. I also learned in that moment that even the people I respect and trust the most just, you know, sometimes are wrong about what I need.

And it's fine. What a great reference point. Thank you. There's a lot of freedom in how you just said that too. Woody, thank you for sharing your insight, your honesty, the earnest but thoughtful and deep thinking that has gone into your preparation. And to sharing the time in this really important phase of training that you're in right now to come and share the psychology and the experience of what you're preparing for. And so I honestly, like I'm thrilled to know you and I'm honored that you've had this time and committed to share it with us. So thank you. And you too. I mean, thank you so much for the ability to, to bring it out.. It's not always easy to be vulnerable. And I mean, the thoughts and conversations that you bring out in people are just exceptional.

It's so fun to watch. So honored. Yeah, thank you. Likewise. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast

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