Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - How to BEAT failure, CRUSH obstacles, and THRIVE with NASA Spacewalker Scott Parazynski! (#117)

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

Scott Parazynski is an American physician and a former NASA astronaut. A veteran of five Space Shuttle flights and seven spacewalks, Parazynski's phenomenal book, THE SKY BELOW, tells the gripping first-person account of life at the Universe's extremes. Join me in the live chat with Scott Scott is also the founder of https://fluidity.tech/ Fluidity Tech is a Houston-based technology company focused on redefining movement through 3-dimensional space. Founded by former NASA astronaut, pilot and physician, Scott Parazynski, the company’s mission is to simplify and improve motion. In Fall 2018, Fluidity Tech introduced the FT Aviator, its first patented drone controller designed to dramatically increase the precision of drone flight, while tremendously simplifying it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I'm talking today with a phenomenal, a hero of mine, someone that I've admired for a very long time. I did an experiment. I reached out to him on LinkedIn, and he said yes. So this is great. This is wonderful to welcome to The Into the Impossible podcast, none other than Dr. Scott Parazinski. How are you today's Scott? Great to be with you, Ryan.

I'm thrilled to be part of this podcast with you. And I've been very admiring of the work that you've done and all of the stuff you did in Antarctica in particular. That's an area where we overlap. So I want to hear some stories from you too. Absolutely. You know, I was before I got to the last chapter of the sky below, I was like, awesome. I've been to somewhere. This guy has not been.

This guy is a literal cosmic voyager, but I've been to the South Pole. And in chapter 25, you're like, one place I haven't been. in as Antarctica. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to be, do something. Go boldly where Scott has not gone before. And then chapter 26, I'm not going to spoil it. Scott ends up there and he finds a very expensive rock. Well, I'm not going to talk too much about that. But I love that story. It's a phenomenal story. Scott, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast. I remarked to you that you are not the first astronaut, not the second, not that they're not, well, you are the fourth astronaut, but you have a first, you've gone boldly where no man has gone before, because you're my first male astronaut

to ever come on the end of the Impossible podcast. I think that's really exciting. You know, it's so emblematic of the fact that, you know, there are more and more women as part of the program doing, you know, out on the cutting edge of space exploration, and that's only going to increase as the years go along. So I'm glad to be the first male on your show. Yeah. Astronaut, I should say.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a real treat. And I think the stories that you tell really are so gripping. I mean, I couldn't, you know, turn off the, I listen to the book as I do most of the time. I actually have accelerated learning by just doing a 2x speed on most of my audiobooks. But I had to slow it down because there's, first of all, you speak relatively quickly at certain points and you narrate the audiobook, which is a great accomplishment. But some of it is just like so gripping. The personal aspect of this book is where I want to turn to.

Because it's not only a story of adventure, of exploration of the indomitable human spirit. It's a love story. It's a story of very tenderness and appeals to me as a father, as a husband. And I want to talk first of all, just get very deep, very quickly, and ask you, the first time you said goodbye to your wife and your son, you know, after already haven't been in. space, right? But saying about it to Luke, named after Luke Skywalker, not only the New Testament Luke, but the Luke that all of us nerds worship, but that moment, what was that like as a father, as a man, forgetting about this indomitable spirit that you have? What was that like as just as a human being? It is just a gut-wrenching time in your life. You know, you've worked so hard to get to a

point to basically live out your childhood dream of going into space, and yet you realize that the risks that you're about to take are really significant, and there are things that you can't control. And so I think one of the things that happens is just there's this compartmentalization that you have to invoke. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to say goodbye to your kids. It's just you rationalize that the work that you're about to do has benefit to society, to humanity, to the world, and sometimes risks are meant to be taken to the betterment of society. And so that's how you have to approach it. But if you were to just think about it in terms of, well, I'm going out to go take a fun ride

and I may not come back. I'm not sure I would have been able to do that without a sense of purpose. Yeah, you talk in the book, it's so heart-wrenching. You talk about, of course, space flight, you know, we lost something like 2% or 3% of the astronauts who traveled on the shuttle. And I say, you know, I'm a private pilot, nowhere near any of the colleagues that and the experiences that you've had in high-performance, you know, fighter jets and obviously on the space shuttle and beyond. But, you know, from the perspective of aviation, like, no one would get on an aircraft, you know, commercial aircraft. You knew you had a 2% chance of dying. And you talk about writing these, like, basically a card to your children and your wife, you know, if you don't make it back and how this. What is that ceremony like? What does that feel like to do that? Well, you really are getting right to the core. We'll get to the constipation story later.

To deal with these kinds of emotions in a long time. But, but yeah, you write a note to your children that you want. them to know that, you know, they were how much they meant to you and, and, you know, how excited you are for their future. And, you know, you end up writing these things with tears in your eyes, hoping that it never, ever gets given to your kids. So we have another fellow astronaut who is kind of there to support our families while we're on our mission. And we give these cards to this person who hopes that he never has to deliver them. Unfortunately, I was in a similar role in the aftermath of the STS 107 Columbia tragedy.

I was one of the designees and it's just a horrific loss. Yeah. When I think about all the stories that you tell and just trying to rank all the things that you've done your life, your medical doctor, you're a mountain climber, you're an explorer, you're an astronaut, you're an entrepreneur, we're going to talk about your business. I usually ask, you know, because I am such a nerd, but I usually ask my audience, you know, or I ask my guess, rather, if an alien comes, you know, from, and I know you can't talk about the alien autopsy, I promise you, that's off limit. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, he's flashing it up. He's flashing up the alien gang sign. Uh, but if it, if somebody comes, wakes you up at three in the morning in a fever dream and says, Scott, who are you?

What, who, how do you reflexively answer that question? You've done so much in your life. You're doing so much in your life. This, this amazing, you know, project that you're involved with now that, oh, we're going to get in. to, but tell me, who are you? Oh, yeah, first off, Brian, thank you very much. You're very kind. No, I guess I'm an explorer at heart, and my main passion is to, you know, try and leave the planet a little bit better off than when I arrived into it. Yeah, I've been very fortunate, and I think you can look at yourself in the mirror and say,

you know, you've been incredibly fortunate as well. those of us who have been gifted, you know, wonderful families and friends and education and opportunity, it's our obligation to try and, you know, help those around us. And so I've been around long enough. I'm pretty old. Presting, you know, this upcoming summer, 60 years old. So I've learned through that pathway through life, what my strengths and also my weaknesses are. One of my strengths, I think, is creativity and my inventiveness. And so, you know, I'm using that to the best of my ability to, you know, create, hopefully technologies that help people. So it's what I enjoy, but it's also my way of, you know, giving back. So that's my purpose

in life. I've been very fortunate. You know, my parents were very adventurous growing up. So I lived all over the world that lived in West Africa, the Middle East, and graduated from high school in Athens, Greece. So I had a travel bug and adventurous spirit. And so that kind of led me into exploration, into climbing, into other things, diving, and had this opportunity to become an astronaut. And what I found through my journeys is that when we go to challenging places like you going to Antarctica, you know, when explorers go deep beneath the oceans or up into space, you know, it challenges the innovators to gather science there, to support human life there, to go, you know, work and do more in those environments. And when you, when you're able to do that,

you can bring back value to all of us back here on Earth. And so that's kind of in a nutshell, what gets me fired up and how I got here, I guess. That's lovely, yeah. So just a quick interlude, because this is a part, you're all part of an experiment, not the kind that Scott used to do on living subjects, but you are a part of an experiment on Clubhouse, on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitch, even.

I think I'm on Twitch, thanks to Jake Cune, who's my Jack, Jake of all trades. It does so much for the podcast. I want to say hi to everybody in Clubhouse. Scott is on Clubhouse, which convinced me to get over the hurdle. I'm going to say, how do you folks over there? This is the Into the Impossible podcast where we talk about very, very difficult, challenging things that expand the human spirit.

We do that with high achievers, performers, ranging from billionaires to Nobel Prize winners, and we want to involve you in these conversations. And I look to people like the Joe Rogans of the world who I love very much, and I'm a religious listener thereup. But the one thing I'm claiming I can do that Joe's not doing is involve you guys. in these conversations. So please think of questions you want to ask to Scott. How often do you get to talk to a real-life spacewalk or veteran of seven spacewalks, I believe, five shuttle missions, international cooperation with the Russian government. Actually, that brings up one thing that I wanted to lead off with, which is what I asked Jessica from here. So you and I are talking. You're in Houston right now, Scott? Actually, I'm in Phoenix.

You're in Phoenix. Okay, a little bit closer. So I talked to Jessica back in January about a year ago, exactly just last month. And she was on the ISS. And she had just completed the all first all female spacewalk. And I was like, she's actually closer to me, you know, in space over her alma mater than she is when

she's in Houston or whatever. So you're currently, you're in Phoenix. But yeah, thinking about the distances and the notion of NASA as a brand. I have T-shirts, my kids have T-shirts. NASA's like the most powerful brand in the universe, maybe giving this guy

I run for his money. This is my SpaceX mug for those of you on YouTube. I'm Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube. So I've got a SpaceX mug, but I think the NASA brand is even stronger. What do you think about NASA, you know, kind of ink? What are your perceptions of that as an insider? It's seen the world over. I've done a lot of high altitude climbing, including up on Everest. And in the Kumbu region of Nepal, in remote parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, you see the NASA meatball. It's ubiquitous. I think it harkens back to the triumphs of the Apollo era.

You know, when the planet came together as a whole, it wasn't the United States and NASA who set foot on the moon, but it was humanity that had done it. And there's a global ownership of that, imagining that we can. actually, you know, surmount a challenge like that. So I think it's the most, as you say, the most powerful brand on Earth and outer space as well. But SpaceX is a phenomenal brand as well. I'm really bullish about what they're doing and the vision to colonize Mars and do other extraordinary things. It's an exciting time to be alive, right? It really is. You look at the, you know, what happened with the Apollo program, as you just mentioned,

And I should say it's really tough. We'll get into Everest, hopefully in a little bit. But, you know, Scott is, I think you're the first, maybe the only astronaut to ever climb the summit of Mount Everest. This is the second person now. Second person now. Okay. But you were the first person.

I would do it. And you brought with you a moon rock, which I think is just so accepting. You know, it's like maybe defeats the purpose. It's like, they have some interesting rocks up there too. But I thought it was so cool. And you did it in a way as a tribute to your comrades, to the people that got you there. And the thing I like most about you is I kind of feel like it reminds me a little bit about Neil of Neil Armstrong,

speaking of the moon, speaking of Apollo 11 for a second. Do you know what Neil Armstrong, what was his profession? What is the only profession that can top being the first human being to walk on the moon? Do you know what he did after he came home back to Earth? Well, I mean, he always considered himself first and foremost a pilot. A test pilot. That was his in his blood. And yeah, oh, by the way, I got a chance to fly to the moon. Very, very humble about it. Yeah. But no, I'm not sure what he would have said to that question. Well, he, I don't know either. You certainly have a much closer contact him. But he did become a college professor.

So when I'm down in my profession, I say, oh, they're, you know, this three hour a week job is so hard. You know, what do I get? But I think back that this is the profession chosen by the first human being to ever go of the earth. made me think of something that I associate very deeply after, you know, I haven't known you very long, but I know you, I feel like I know you. One of the most important things about you that I want to take away from this book, besides your spirit, besides these wonderful quotes in the book, is that you are incredibly coachable. What I see you as, as, you know, back now, you're 60, but you still seem like you have that beginner's mind, that student's mind. And I always point out, you know, some of my listeners in Clubhouse or of Russian extraction, and they'll correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure. But the word science,

in the Russian language, you probably know this better than I do, having studied Russian, the word scientist means one who was taught. And to me, that means that a scientist or someone with a scientific curiosity should be a teacher, but should also be a student. And what do you say about that? Were you just born with that kind of coachability? Like, some of my kids have it, some of them don't. Can you train someone to be coachable, trainable so that they can become a leader like you? Interesting concept. And thank you for those kind words. I would, consider myself insatiably curious. You know, I have a, and I'm self-taught in many different areas. I'm probably not an expert in very many things, but, you know, I like to challenge myself in different

areas. And so I like to, as an inventor, I'll digress here for a moment, I like to figure out not just the areas that in our society that are broken, but I like to think through, you know, how can we fix those things? And I consider the best. inventors, essentially motivated whiners, people who not only identify problems, but then have the wherewithal, the curiosity, the gumption to come up with solutions. And so that's how I see myself. But yeah, I think it is possible to train people to be more curious. If you show them how exciting it is to understand how something works and to question, you know, is this the best way we can do this. And, you know, so I'm a physician by training. And, you know, I talk about this all

the time when I give keynotes, but, you know, if we didn't have a perpetual sense of curiosity, we'd still be doing bloodletting for everything that ailed us, right? We'd just be, we'd be nowhere. And think about, you know, our understanding of the heavens and astrophysics if we didn't, you know, continue to challenge ourselves. Fantastic. So I have my first ever question, and it's fitting that it comes from a good friend of mine. Philip Greenspun, who is actually responsible for me getting invited to Clubhouse. It's a select club like going to the moon and being a NASA astronaut, I'm sure. But Phil is up on stage in Clubhouse, and he is going to ask a question. He's not only an incredible friend, but he was actually one of the people who got me the deepest I've become

into aviation and was kind of a mentor to me as a pilot, and still is. And he's actually an upcoming guest. recorded an episode of The End of the Impossible podcast with Philip Greenspun about a month or two. Anyway, Phil, Dr. Phil Greenspun, how are you doing? I call Phil the most interesting man that you've never heard of. Phil, do you have a question for the good Dr. Astronaut, Scott Varzinski? That I've actually read. You know, it's much better to talk about books that I haven't read, but I have read Scott's book. And in fact, I read it to one of the kids as bedtime reading. So thank you for that, Scott. Oh, that's wonderful.

One of the things that really struck me from your book, you said that, you know, humans are suffering a lot of back damage when they spend time in zero gravity. Right. And I'm wondering if you can talk about limits human ability to hang out in space and do all the stuff that Elon Musk and other people have mapped out for humans in space. Is it our backs that will let us down? Yeah, it's terrible to have when your back throws out on you. But it's a great question, Dr. Philip. and I appreciate your kind words about my book as well. So there are a lot of threats, actually, for prolonged habitation in space.

And I'll just run through them quickly, but radiation. When you're outside of the Earth's magnetic field, you're much more susceptible to galactic cosmic radiation and kernel mass ejections and all this radiation flux from around the, not only our sun, but from around our solar system. So that's one big threat, higher risk of cancers and other sequelae from radiation. To the extent that when we go to Mars, when Elon gets us to Mars, they're going to have to actually bury the habitats underneath the regolith to shield the crew from those deleterious effects.

So that's a big, big problem. Another issue is eyesight. our long-duration astronauts are experiencing significant shifts in their visual acuity, likely as a result of increased intracranial pressure. It's pressing on the backside of their eyeball, flattening it, and they're coming back with what appears to be potentially permanent changes in their vision. So if we're to live indefinitely in space, would this effect stop? or would it cause astronauts to go blind over time?

It's hard to say. And then the third element that you raised is disc disease. And as you're probably aware, the spine is made up of these vertebral bodies. And in between them, they're sort of like a jelly donut. There's a inside the jelly donut. It's called the nucleus pulposis, not to get too nerdy about it. but it's a piece of kind of gelatinous material that with a lot of stress can shoot out, tear the tissue around it called the annulus, and press on your nerve roots.

And that's what happened to me, actually. I ended up throwing out a disk on a mountaineering expedition to Mount Everest, actually, was at 24,000 feet above sea level and I threw a disc, which is really a bad spot to get injured. but I persevered. I had to turn around, of course, and came back to Houston and had corrective surgery. The reason it's happening is without the gravity vector pressing down on our spines up in microgravity, your spine straightens, and it's also likely that those jelly donuts kind of swell without the continual gravitational force on the skeleton. And it's tearing the donut, if you will, and allowing the disc to fly out.

So a lot of astronauts have had both cervical spine, neck spine issues, as well as lumbar disc disease, which is what affected me. So, yeah, it's a real threat for long duration astronauts. And it's very, oh, so Scott, on Clubhouse, if you wouldn't mind, you can go up on the stage and then just mute your microphone so we don't get feedback but um but then people are um are there yeah there you go okay good okay there's feedback yeah if you just mute the phone volume good okay yes all right great i follow instructions well perfect yeah you are coachable that is great there we go okay so jake let me know if that worked uh i want to say that yeah when you were on the

the scenes of you and and and mount ever are really thrilling. You talk about your back. You talk about, you know, this pain. And then one just hilarious line you're talking about, you know, you had to come down in your first attempt and you're lying on this glacier and you're like, well, at least it was the world's biggest ice pack. And I just feel like you have this good cheer.

And I think, you know, not to like really, I'm not going to make the comparison. I'm going to stop the mutual admiration society soon, trust me. But they say, you know, people that survive horrific things in life, whether or be awful prison sentences that they didn't deserve, let's just say, things like that, that, you know, the ones that survived were not the ones that were just like, uh, just relentless optimist, like, Admiral Stockdale, a famous example, John McCain, they weren't optimistic, but they went with things. In other words, they would look at a situation. Again, I'm not comparing what you went through it. Obviously, you wouldn't say it, but I wouldn't say it either. But nevertheless,

to have that kind of attitude of looking towards, well, almost like stoic, but, but in a good natured way. Again, is that something that you're born with? Is that something you can coach somebody to be, you know, to adapt in those ways? And if so, you know, what age do you have to start? You know, when my kids turn teenagers, is it too late? Well, teens are in kind of their own little category off to the side. And then they reenter society a little bit later. So don't, don't worry about that. After the aliens return their brains to their bodies. Correct. No, resilience is something that certainly can be trained in. And I think, What was it going to say along those lines?

I think team experiences are things that kind of entrain that kind of perspective. When you've overcome challenges with the team and you realize that your impact on the rest of the team is very significant. If you have a dour face, if you have a negative perspective on it, you're going to drag the whole team down. Whereas if the glass is three quarters of the way full, hey, we're going to get through this. We just need to brainstorm a little bit more. We're going to keep going. That, I think, carries the day. And so, you know, I've been a part of a lot of team pursuits, you know, athletics and

otherwise. And I think that's probably where I picked it up. Yeah. So talking about that in teams, you know, part of being, you know, coachable at some level is also being, you know, being a good leader, I think, kind of goes hand in hand. So you can't be a good leader if you're not a good follower. I don't want to, you know, say it in a negative sense.

But you talk about some setbacks that you had after Mount Everest. And we'll get back to that in just a bit. But talk about the setbacks that you faced and the position of leadership that you were put in in the Knowles program and other things that you engaged with that really kind of crystallized your character to make you even more suitable, in my opinion. But I think you're more humble than I would be on your behalf. If I were you, I'd be a whole lot less humble. But that's just me. So, yeah, how do you take those in stride?

those, because these are the highest performance type A individuals in the world, you know, besides some of my colleagues in the university. But how did you handle that criticism and how did you use it as fuel to improve? Yeah. Well, there is a section in my book where I really got a serious smackdown, and I deserved it, quite honestly. And it's hard when you're around other really high-achieving folks you want to be on your best at all times. And it hurts doubly so when you feel like you've let your teammates down. And so this is an expedition part of the National Outdoor Leadership School or Knowles where our shuttle crews would get together before a flight and, you know, go out into the wilderness

for about 10 days, exchange leadership duties day to day and learn about each other, each other's strengths and weaknesses, leadership styles, followership skills, those kinds of things. I probably had the most experience on expeditions, the most navigation, you know, kind of wilderness navigation skills. And I was in a hurry. I was hungry. One of my many weaknesses is that when I get hangary, you know, better feed me quick or, you know, I get very, I never verbally get unpleasant, but I just don't want to talk, you know.

And so I was in a hurry to get where we wanted to go. and in any event, I made some leadership mistakes, poor communication, and I got really dressed down by my spatial commander in front of people whom I was going to be co-leading for the next year and a half. And it was really the most humbling, you know, experience perhaps of my life, certainly in the top 10. And so you grow from that. And so it certainly shaped my leadership skills every day since that point. And one of the many kind of leadership lessons that I've learned is every person, whether they're the youngest new on the team or the most senior person on your squad or unit or whatever, may have the situation awareness that will save the day. And so you really need to draw out the very best of your multidisciplinary teams.

And so I've been much more an active listener or trying to be as a leader than I ever have before. Yeah, I interviewed a very famous Navy commander by the name of David Marque, who wrote a book called Turn the Ship Around. It's become a classic in leadership. And his second book was called, you know, this is a guy commanded a $1.4 billion nuclear submarine. Marine and his newest book is called Leadership is Language. And it's all about like these mental traps and hacks that high performance individuals like him and you, I'm like I'm going to include myself in there. But we use these hacks and it's really kind of a shortcut.

Sometimes it's beneficial to us. We'll say like everybody good to go, right? And he actually uses the example of the Columbia loss where, you know, they went around the room and everyone's like, all right, you know, we're good to go, right? And when you ask that question, there's an implicit bias of authority that I have to agree. And it's become kind of rooted out of the NASA culture a lot more, but it was certainly pervasive. And then those really high stakes situations, I think that's where I want to learn leadership lessons from. And hopefully if you can handle that in a situation like trying to summit Everest or being in space when a micrometeorite comes whizzing by, then you could probably handle it in the boardroom when you're trying to roll.

out, you know, version 3.7 of an app. So we have another question from one of our Clubhouse listeners, and I want to remind people we're on Clubhouse, but we're also on YouTube, as usual. I'm not giving up YouTube. I love my YouTube audience. Worked hard to build them. And we have a guest by the name of BF Peterson. So I'm going to call BF to the stage.

And if he's there, we can take it. If not, we can come back. We have other people there. My friend Miguel is out there in Clubhouse. if he wants to take a stab and get and step up to the stage. Again, this is a new experiment for me. But as Dr. Scott opens his book, he says, everything is possible until proven impossible.

And I think that's really fitting, especially the name of this podcast, is Into the Impossible, which is a line from Arthur C. Clark, along with his many contributions, including 2001 of Space Odyssey, which I'm sure you've seen or maybe you avoid it. Do you watch movies where people, you know, come to grips?

I love sci-fi. Even the really bad renditions of space like Armageddon and, you know, things of that nature. I'll watch them all. Oh, that's great. Okay. So while we're waiting for another question to come up, I want to talk about something that you mentioned in the book. You talk about, you know, this notion of kind of adversarial leadership in a sense that, like, you all go around the room and say like what did he do wrong what did scott do wrong what did you know like

you kind of use the red team approach from the military where there's adversarial but it's meant obviously in good nature yeah so um so uh going through that and then you know after going through that i was actually um interviewed by a Nobel Prize winner yesterday for my own podcast don't ask questions about that it's kind of weird but i wrote a book about the Nobel Prize and uh and specifically the flaws in the Nobel Prize and he's one of the character characters in the book and he read the book unlike my wife but but anyway i'm not gonna i'm not gonna hold her to that i just dedicated it to her no big deal uh sarah if you're out there but um but in reality you know he said well what's wrong with because i make the point that the Nobel Prize can only be

won by three people at most and that was never really the design of Alfred Nobel so when he was I was hanging out with him he left his Nobel Prize so he's not going to get that back that that's mine forever. But he said, like, his complaint against my book is that I kind of, you know, downplayed competition or I talked about the negative aspects of competition. And one of the examples I use, you actually mention it in the book. It's the plaque that was carried by the Apollo 11 astronauts to land on the moon surface. Still there, we hope. And that says, we came in peace for the benefit of all mankind, signed by one Richard M. Nixon. And I point out that the Nobel Prize, has a thing on its back or its golden plaque that Barry, this Nobel laureate who interviewed me,

he agrees with it. In other words, it says the Nobel Prize should be given out to those who cause the greatest benefit to mankind. And I said, Barry, if indeed the Apollo missions were about benefiting mankind instead of about competition, why have we not been back? Why have we not been back in over 50? This will be the 53rd year, right? Fifty second year in July. So what is it about competition. Does it have a place in a culture of excellence like NASA where, you know, might even be within the astronaut core themselves? It's a zero-sum game. You know, if you go on the shuttle, that's one, you know, fewer slot for me. So I guess the long-winded way of asking, is competition a good thing or can it be toxic? Competition certainly can be toxic, but I think it needs to be used

with the right amplification, it can't get to the level of toxicity. And I think NASA has always done a very good job of that. You know, if you're, I'll just talk about the context of, you know, crew selection, for example, it wasn't the same people flying over and over again. There was a rotation and, hey, we need a spacewalker on this flight. We need a robotics person. We need a commander and a pilot. And so there was an orderly fashion in which you would rotate back up and get a chance to fly again.

But I do think that competition is what fuels our economy and I think our innovation. If you look at, I think the wonderful competition that's happening in commercial human spaceflight right now between SpaceX, Blue Origin, you know, there are other vendors, of course, Boeing and Lockheed. there's Axiom space and these other space companies that will be taking people to the edge of space and beyond. And I think that's really good. It forces companies to be more competitive, to drive the prices down to make it available for all of us. You know, Elon Musk has probably already reduced the cost to orbit by a factor of 10.

if we can get it 100 or 1,000 times, you know, less expensive than the space shuttle, then all of us will become astronauts. You'll fly from San Diego to Heathrow in 45 minutes in, you know, kind of a suborbital ballistic, you know, kind of craft. And my luggage will get there three days later. Yeah, well. But I'll take it. I'll take it.

You can buy new clothes when you get there. I've had to do that a lot. even on a nonstop flight from San Diego to Oakland. So, you know, I don't know how you lose the luggage on a nonstop flight that's 48 minutes long. But anyway, nothing against Southwest Airlines. I'm not bitter at all. Those were not designer underwear, despite whoever stole them. They're in for a rude awakening.

Okay, so we do have a question. BF is back. Let's see, BF, are you there? And are you prepared to chat with a live NASA astronaut? Okay, let me tune you up. Hold on one second. Go for it, BF. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. And thank you, Brian, for this forum.

I just kind of wanted to know you touched on it briefly in terms of teams, the interaction between civilian component. I guess you could call it the whole thing is a civilian component, but NASA has this deep military history as well in relevance. sorry I'm at the gym a little out of breath. But how do you see those, these people are going to be embarking on the greatest journey in the history of the world interacting with each other? I know you touched on it briefly, briefly, Ed interactions when you got hangary. But how do you see them working together, the scientists, the engineers, the roboticists, the pilots, the doctors?

And also, with that, is there any role that you think would be good to add, poet, artist? Do they bring any value to a situation like that? Thank you very much. Thank you, Bill. Thank you so much. That's a wonderful question. And first off, I would say, you know, for these expedition class-type missions, you know, I think you're talking about, you know, lunar outpost, Mars outpost, those kinds of long-duration missions that are ahead of us.

as part of Project Artemis and things like that. What happens is a coalescence of, you know, there's a sense of mission that's shared between every crew member from the commander on down to the most junior person. And by and large, there's just a great camaraderie and a sense of purpose and self-startedness. part of it I think is owing to the selection process you know they they select people who have done well on teams in the past whether it's in my background I worked in emergency medicine so you know working in medicine you've got to be part of a high functioning team or a really bad things are going to happen so that was kind of and I'd been a part of other expedition so I had that kind of

skill set military operators bring you know that kind of culture is a well. And it all comes together when you start training together and working together. So it's a very natural sort of a thing. But I am really excited about the future. First, I think, you know, thinking about suborbital spaceflight, you know, Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, very soon will be flying, you know, artists and poets and writers and photographers, creative thinkers, even just up into the suborbital realm, it's going to be a life-changing kind of epiphany for those creatives. And certainly as we start to establish communities on the moon and on Mars, we need the full diversity, the full strength of our society to be

present. And so my only kind of immersion into kind of a second culture. And I think, Brian, you can probably speak to this more than I could. I think you've wintered over at South Pole Station. No, no, I'm not, I'm not that insane, but some of my best friends have me. Yeah, well, you know that culture, you well, but there are about 44 souls who spend the entire winter off the grid. I mean, they have very limited internet connectivity. There's no way in or out for seven to nine months. And they become their own little society. And so having some diversity in that culture is really important. So they do have artists and other types of creatives. And I think it's going to be essential as humanity goes beyond. You know, when we wanted

to get somebody to winter over for the Bicep 2 experiment, we put out a job ad and we said, you know, you make $80,000 for the winter and all you have to do is work one night. And we got a lot of people. you know, surprising. We have another question from a listener on Clubhouse. And again, we're monitoring YouTube. Again, this is The Into the Impossible Podcast. I'm your fearful host during pandemic podcasts in the name of Brian Keating. And we have Dr. Scott Farisinski, who has been to space more times than I have children,

or, you know, about as many times. And Spacewalk, certainly more than that. And we have a guest on the stage in Clubhouse by the name of a month. Mustack, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Tell us, how do you pronounce your name, Mustak? Mustak. Nice to meet you. Just my thought, Scott. In terms of the voyage that we're thinking of in terms of what, such a technological vision. Is this my very good friend, Mustak Patel, from the UK by any chance that I met at Davos?

There's a planted question. No further questions. Well, great to hear your voice, my friend. Well, it's great question. Thank you, Ms. Nox. There are many things, actually, that we need to develop. We can certainly visit Mars even with the technology that we have today, but I think in order to really successfully exploit, live, colonize on Mars for a long period of time, we need to continue to develop really essential technologies. One of the things I already spoke to, which is radiation protection,

And one of the concepts is to actually build habitats in lava tubes underneath the crust of the planet to protect from the cancer and other kind of sequelae from the radiation environment. It's a high dust environment, so developing robust technologies that can allow people to get in and out of that external environment safely without inhaling lots of dust and maybe causing the equivalent of Asbury. vestosis and lung cancers. Growing plants and living off of the land is going to be very important. Can we extract water from maybe the slopes of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the known solar system, 25 miles tall, five times taller than Mount Everest? Can we extract water to grow plants, to drink water, to generate oxygen? Can we develop technologies that will us to get to Mars a lot quicker than stupid chemical rockets that we're using now. So this is probably more in your line of work, Brian, but plasma physics has allowed us to develop plasma ion engines

that would allow us to continuously accelerate to Mars, getting there in perhaps 70 days, as opposed to seven to nine months. So minimizing the exposure that we have on that transit to get to the red planet and and thus limiting our exposure to radiation as well. So lots of cool problems for technologists to work on. What I see when I look at your career and your book, the stuff that you're doing now, which we'll turn to, is kind of this principle that one of my friends, a good friend James Altutcher, is kind of an influencer to me, a very famous podcaster and just a brilliant guy. He talks about it, we'll call it idea dating. He actually calls it idea sex. But basically, let's say you have n ideas, you know, then you can form actually n squared over two, you know, roughly n squared

over two pairs of ideas. So that's kind of the network effect that Facebook and other things are based on that things grow, you know, geometrically. They grow as the power of the size of the network. So I see you as somebody who's into mountain climbing, has done skiing, has done scuba diving has done obviously aviation and space medicine and and now you you kind of turn to this new direction with fluidity technology at fluidity. Tech to get a new way of getting into the pilotless vehicle so in terms of drones do you attribute that to like you know kind of fortune favors the prepared mind in that you have so many different interests you're so polymathematical or is it that better to go deep into one thing like when I'm an emergency physician,

that's all going to think about when I'm an astronaut, that's all going to think about, or is it better to be broad and have this network effect of what my friend calls IDSex? So what is more kind of promotional of being creative, being successful, being, you know, not being a dilettante like I'm often accused of? But, you know, how do you balance breath versus depth? Well, that's a great question, and I can't say that there's a one-size-fits-all answer. I just know that I'm more along the lines of IDSX and ADHD. I'm a generalist.

I enjoy learning as much as I can about every environment that I get exposed to. And one of the reasons I love being an astronaut is I was exposed to not just, I wasn't just a physician astronaut. I had to know quite a bit about oceanography, meteorology, planetary geology, combustion physics, astrophysics, plant biology. So I dabbled in all these different areas. It was fascinating. I was the surrogate principal investigator on the space shuttle or space station. And so for me, that was just incredible candy. And I absorbed a lot of it, not all of it.

And I'm not deep in many areas besides probably medical technologies, perhaps in aerospace. But I know a fair amount of a bunch of different areas. And that's in my toolkit so that when I see a problem as a product developer, I can call back upon that bit of knowledge. And I know just enough to be dangerous. So my happy space is being a generalist. But there's certainly super high achievers who are, you know, laser focused in one area. And that's their key to success as well. Yeah.

Very good. Okay. So next up, we have a very good friend of mine who makes some of the intro and outro music for the Into the Impossible podcast. It's none of the Miguel Tully. I'm going to play some of his music. Let's see if we can hear it in the background. I'm not sure. One of his dedicated tracks.

Yeah, here it comes up. This is one of Miguel's wonderful tracks that he made for me. And he's working on some space art. We're actually working. I did a podcast with Nicole Scott. Oh, great. He flew twice on the shuttle. And she's an inspiration to me, and she's a wonderful artist.

And I started to think, you know, some of the astronauts came back from the lunar surface, and they brought back on their spacesuit some lunar dust. And I guess they got to keep it. And one of them, it might have been Edgar Mitchell. I forget who it was. But he took the dirt, you know, on the space suit. grounded up and put it into his paintings. Alan Bean. It's Alan Bean, right.

Okay, great. Oh, 12. Yep. And so, but it turns out that it's a felony for someone like me to have a lunar rock. You actually had possession of a lunar rock collected by Neil Armstrong, I think. And you had it for a year. It was a little longer than they intended, right? Alone only. On loan, right, yeah.

But it turns out you can actually buy, you can buy actual fragments of the moon that were delivered, not by NASA astronauts, but by the United States Postal Service. You know, you can get them on eBay, basically, but they're meteorites. So they landed on the surface of Antarctica in some cases as your wife, right? That's what she got her start in. Was she at Case Western or was she at Arizona? She's at Arizona State. She's at Arizona State.

The School of Earth and Space Exploration here at SC. Very good. Yeah, I've got very good friends there at ASU. It's a phenomenal school. Anyway, Miguel and I are working on a project where we're hoping to mix in. I sent him some meteorites from Campo de Cello in Argentina and some. and some lunar material from the lunar surface that I got also on eBay, not from the Apollo.

Again, this is from a meteorite that fell in northwest Africa in 2011. Anyway, Miguel, it's a long introduction. I want to say hi to you and wish you blessings, my friend. Miguel is an Army vet, and he's a patriot, and he has an incredible supporter of the show. Miguel, you are live with Dr. Scott. Hey, Miguel. Hey, Dr. Keating. Good to see you on here.

It's great to be here. I had a question for Scott. Just wondering, what is the most cherished piece of memorabilia that you've required in your career, either from space or just from your career? Oh, gosh, that's a cool question. You know, like probably you and many other folks here, I've given talks for years and years. And it's rare that you get asked a question that you've never, ever been asked before. and that's one of them, Miguel.

So I applaud you for that. So I'll give you perhaps an answer that will surprise you, but it's probably the most worthless piece of material by weight or volume or however you'd want to quantify it. But it has incredible significance to me. On my last trip up into space, I had to working with a wonderful team of folks, repair a live solar panel.

And it was a pretty hairy thing to go out and do to work on a fully electrified solar panel out at the tip of the space station using procedures and tools that had never been conjured up before, using a robotic arm that had never been cobbled together in this way before.

And I was out there at the very tip of the space station, sewing this thing back together. When I came back from that trip, we're all elated that this repair had come together. had worked so flawlessly. It was really a triumph for the NASA team. One of the engineers who had worked, you know, through the night, it was like a, it was an Apollo 13 sort of an event where people were working around the clock, you know, on mockups,

hey, how can we repair the solar panel? And this guy, they were obviously eating lots of domino's pizza and drinking a lot of coffee. he cut two little oval pieces of cardboard, punctured a hole in both of those little tabs, tied a string between it, put a little piece of tape on it, and it was the very first prototype of the repair that we would be going out and doing three days hence. And we called this thing a cuff link. It was essentially a piece of wire about five feet in length with two pieces of aluminum shimstock that had been carefully cut to fit through the solar panel

to allow us to stitch the solar panel back together. But my prize possession is a Domino's Pizza Box. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify,

Google Player Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to imagination. wwwcd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the

University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director. Produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Volko.