Off-Nominal - 118 - Experienced Drunk Idiots

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Anthony is joined by Jonathan Vaughters, Founder and CEO of EF Education-EasyPost, and Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica, to talk about space and cycling, who knows in what amounts. Sorry, Jake.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 118 - Experienced Drunk Idiots (with Jonathan Vaughters and Eric Berger) - YouTubeWatch Tour de France: Unchained | Netflix Official SiteEnter the Slipstream (2023) - IMDbKerbal Space Program – Create and Manage Your Own Space ProgramManayunk Wall: The climb every American bike racer knew - VeloThe legend of the Manayunk WallFollow Jonathan VaughtersJonathan Vaughters (@Vaughters) / XHome | EF Education-EasyPostOne-Way Ticket: Nine Lives on Two Wheels: Vaughters, Jonathan: Amazon.com: BooksOpinion | How to Get Doping Out of Sports - The New York TimesFollow Eric BergerEric Berger (@SciGuySpace) / XEric Berger | Ars TechnicaFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Well, good morning, everybody. This is a different off-phenomal episode, but we got no Jake this week. Jake's off once again on vacation. He's taking some serious European-level time off this summer for Jake Robbins. But Eric Berger is here with me for a very different episode of a space podcast. How's it going, Eric? Awesome.

Super excited for today. And with us, we have the man, Jonathan Votter's, from Southern. Sweden, I think you said it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Down cell, well, technically Skona, which used to be part of Denmark, but now Sweden took it back, so it's Sweden now. I like how much history we're getting into on how many times that piece of land probably was taken over before we started writing down the history as well.

Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, Kattegat, actually, like, with all those Viking series, I'm in Kattegat. I'm literally like where all the Viking boats were launched and there's Viking graves all over the place around here. So that's where I am. I've never been huge into the Viking scene myself. I did see like a traveling exhibit of some Viking boat that came through Philadelphia someday. It was pretty sweet, but I feel like there wasn't a lot of stuff that they left behind. So there's less lure about Vikings. I just finished a book on the Anglo-Saxons. So I mean, I'm kind of up to speed on the Viking incursions

from there, Jonathan. It's good to know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Catholic, got um Eric what the hell are we doing with this show here how did we get here can you please explain how we ended up with a cycling legend on this space podcast yeah so I've been like a cycling fan for two decades and uh and our guest Jonathan um started a cycling team when did slipstream go to the pro tour Jonathan 2007 eight our eight our first year in the tour de France was 2008 yeah yeah yeah so like I was a fan of Lance Armstrong during the back in the days and then became very disillusioned by him and I was ready to give up a sport and then Jonathan brought a team into the professional cycling that

was clean and that was like their whole ethos was to try to not dope in an era when everyone was doping and so that really appealed to me and so I've been a fan for for a long time and a couple years ago I think he sent me a direct message on Twitter and said why are you following me? Absolutely. I love that. That's what everyone famous should do. Just in question all of their followers. Please explain how you ended up here.

And I said, well, I said, I explained to him that I was a fan of cycling and what he tried to do with his various team iterations. And by the way, Jonathan, I don't know where the jersey is, but I still have these gloves from like... Oh, man. From seven... Yeah, those are OG, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are, those are like the first generation. I miss the Argyle.

But anyway, he, Jonathan reached out because his son is, and I think we're going to talk about him, but is really in space. And just, he wanted to thank me for liftoff. And so we just started talking a little bit. And one thing led to another. And here we are today to talk about space and cycling. And we're going to see what happens. Yeah. Jonathan's got some analogies that I've at least heard the intro on.

So I'm very curious to pick your brain. Did you bring anything fun to drink? It's more of a drinking time over in your part of the world. I'm more of a drinking time. Well, this is a good time to drink, too. You know, I have an open bottle of wine from breakfast. But now I look like an underperformer out here. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I can go get that. I could go get that open bottle of wine. We got in, you know, really, really, really late last night due to the hurricane. I can't describe it any other way. Not really, but almost. There's this like Swedish hurricane, which sounds just bizarre that hit last night. And we were trying to get from the train station

back over to the coastal town. And anyway, we got in super late. And there's an open bottle of one. Exactly, exactly. I needed a really good breakfast. Yeah, that's the end of that story. Eric, I assume you're with me on just drinking coffee or something. It's 10 a.m.

And I had a dentist appointment this morning, so it's just water. It's very boring. We're starting off on a great foot. Yeah, sorry, I couldn't join you guys with normal cocktail hour. Listen, the Europeans love, every once in a while we do these morning shows for the European time zone. It works out better than our normal time slot. And it just so happens that we also have content that is particularly tilted in that direction.

So this makes more sense overall. It is a Monday morning. I've never done a Monday morning podcast before. So this will be fun. You're not allowed to buy alcohol in Sweden before 11 a.m. There's not, like, you cannot even, like, it's just like a government, no, you can't buy alcohol before 11 a.m. Well, I do live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which has... Oh, yeah, that's right.

You got some of that going on, too. It's, we're the first to settle the river coast here, so maybe that's a holdover for them. Yeah, we had that, plus the Quakers that really set us on a weird path. So, yeah. So I can get into some of those analogies if you want. Yeah, I want to hear, no, just before that, though, because you're dropping Viking knowledge out here. I'll look that to the cycling stuff later. What I think we should do is talk about space so that the space people stick around so much to fall in love with you and realize that you're awesome.

So, number one, you just came in here five minutes in the show dropping Viking spacecraft references. So I'm just trying to dial in on like, are you a space nerd just randomly? Did you fall in love with it somewhere long? Are you just kind of generally curious about space, more history, modern day? What's your tilt here? Well, I mean, you know, I've always been, whatever, someone who's interested in aeronautics and space and exploration. I'm a pilot, twin engine, or multi-engine, I should say, not twin-engine,

rated pilot. And, you know, physics have always interested me. But I'll say the space part of it, it's really, It really has a lot to do with my son, who is really focused on space, is an astrophotography nut. But how all that started out, and this is where it's really funny, is that he and I, when he was, I don't know, eight years old, right around there, maybe a little or maybe 10, we loaded or started playing kerbal. and I thought, oh, this is a great way to like teach my son engineering in a fun way and teach him, you know, whatever orbital trajectory mathematics. So I thought I, but here's why I did not know what orbital trajectory mathematics were that time because we're like, okay, well, what's the objective of this thing? I don't know.

It's to go to the mun, right? The MUN, the moon. So I don't know how many of it you play kerbal out there, but Kerbal is awesome. So we start building these rockets. And I figure, well, what's the best way to get to the moon is just to point the rocket directly at the moon and see if you get there. So, like, you know, of course you build a rocket. And it doesn't even come close to getting out of the atmosphere because you go straight toward the moon. So then you're like, okay, well, let's build a bigger rocket.

And then you build a bigger rocket. And then it's like, finally you're building this thing that has like, you know, 600 boosters on the side. It's just, and just, but it barely gets off the ground because it weighs so much and you can't control it. And there's all kinds of analogies with that with bike racing is that bike races, you can, you can, bike races can be really powerful. Like, you can imagine a guy who's, like, really good in the gym that can squat like a thousand pounds. But unfortunately, in bike racing, that dude's muscles are so big. He's not, he's not going anywhere on a bike.

Like, he's not moving. So, anyway, after we had failed at producing the world's largest rocket to just go straight up out of the atmosphere, we, you know, started looking up stuff on, you know, on the Google, figuring out, wait a minute, oh, I see, we have to go sideways. That's how this works. And, you know, this is like good stuff for, you know, for a little boy to learn, like, oh, okay, we got to go sideways. And then actually the gravity, like, slings us off.

And, you know, we, so he and I just kind of learned all this stuff together. and together we eventually landed on the moon. At that point in time, you know, he was way better than his dad at any of this stuff. And so he, to figure out how to get back from the moon to, because at first,

you know, we probably left thousands of dead corpses on moon. We just kept landing there and no idea how to get back. So then, uh, he finally figured out how, how to, how to get us back.

He did that, he did that on his own because I had, you know, I had a day job. that I had to attend to. I'm, like, really lucky that I did not, because of my age, discovered Kerbel until I had a lucrative job, because I would have done nothing if I discovered Kerbal at the age he was.

Like, that sucked me in hard, and I was mostly full-grown adult by the time that I discovered Kerbal. But I do love that you, you, I don't know if I've heard a better, like, five-minute description of the learning curve of Kerbal and how closely related it is to, like, the learning curve of humans of, like, What if we tried this? Nah, that didn't work at all. Like, maybe we should look up some other stuff first.

All right, let's attach more on this side and see if that works. Nah, that didn't work either. That is why that game is so brilliant. That's amazing. What's the name of the Scottish guy that had the YouTube channel? Scott Manley. Yes, Scott Manley. That's right.

Scott Manley, yeah. We listen to a lot of Scott Manley. Like, ah, okay, I see what we're supposed to do now. Like, ah, I get that, you know. And I mean, you couldn't, like, that stuff, there's no way that they teach that as well to 12-year-olds in any school in the world. I mean, basically, that probably was the best math learning platform possible or physics learning platform.

There's a fantastic XKCD comic that I feel like I should probably show here, which is this chart about learning orbital mechanics and where you get your high school physics, your physics degree, job at NASA, and then Curval Space Program. And it's just like, I don't know. I feel like I've had that chart verified to me by several people in the industry. So good. Yeah, exactly. Like, oh, now I can work for NASA.

Shit. Yeah. That is the great thing about aerospace engineering is that, or, you know, rocket science is that you can actually go out and build these pretty easily in your backyard and try things out and fail. And as long as you don't kill yourself, you can kind of keep going. keep going again. And so it is nice and that it's a, you do learn by hands on and also you can do hands on experiments. Like if you want to be a particle physicist, you can't really build an accelerator in your backyard, but you could find a field and launch a rocket.

The CERN program game that they're going to spin off of Curbel. Yeah, that'll be a whole different thing. Wait, Eric, is this a sign that you are like the former generation of space nerd as well and you have not played Curbel and you've only launched model rockets? I have played a very limited amount of curbel, and I was largely unsuccessful. That's exactly. You need to put on that at the SEC comic talk to lots of rocket scientists. Yeah, yeah. Because that's kind of where I got my education.

I asked lots of dumb questions along the way about this stuff. That's why we just diagnosed the issues with policy and money. Less so the, like, the ISP of any particular engine. Yes, the policy I understand the physics, not so much. Wait, so you were not at all into space and then Curbel got you into space? No, no, no, no, no. I mean, I, listen, I launched Estes Rockets when I was a kid, and, you know, of course, I wanted to be an astronaut, like any good kid of my generation. I mean, now I feel like that's not as true, which is almost kind of sad.

Like, now kids are like, no, I want to be a YouTube star, right? Like that's the ultimate goal of humanity now. But anyway, when I was a child, back in the dark ages, we used to dream about being astronauts. And, you know, we would go to the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian and think it was like the coolest thing that we ever got to do. And no, I mean, I think ultimately the dream of exploration is, I mean, it's the biggest dream that, you know, that human consciousness. can have. And, you know, again, Charlie always sort of, when you guys are talking about finance and policy and the politics surrounding space, you know, it's funny hearing a very purest standpoint on that in that he's just like, I don't even understand why this is a debate. Like this is, this is,

this is the future of humanity. And, and, you know, whether we like it or not, we're going to have to move outward. And he's like, that's, that's what the history of humanity is, and, and he's, that's what the history of humanity has been so far in exploring the entire earth, and that's what it'll continue to be. And he's like, the more that we try to slow that down and sort of spend, spend money on, you know, frilly little other projects, the, you know, basically the, the less we're, we're being honest with who we are as a species. Yeah, I agree with, I agree totally with Charlie on that. And I think that's probably the most exciting thing for me about this commercial space era that we've entered into over the last 10 to 15 years is that it was never really the interests of governments to do that.

They very much wanted to keep space kind of the province of government activities. So that's military space. That's some civil space. But it's really, if we're going to go out there, it will be led, I think, by the private sector. And we're seeing meaningful progress in that led by space. but certainly with other actors as well that are coming along. And so that's, you know, I was, I was, I've always been interested in space, but, you know, the space shuttle program was great, but it was pretty boring and it was kind of beat down,

certainly beat down my interest in this for a long time and then sort of seeing what has happened in the last, as I see, decade or so, it's really ignited kind of a passionate interest in me in space. Yeah, I mean, it's entrepreneurial. It's space explanation. I led my favorite say, you know, we were, we were sponsored by Tesla for a little bit. And during that sponsorship, you know, and this is earlier, this is before Elon Musk was quite as famous as he is now. You know, he wasn't, I wouldn't say he was personally involved with his sponsorship, but, you know, he's kind of kicking around the edges and was sort of interested in professional cycling.

They don't, you know, unfortunately, we still haven't figured out how to make that sponsorship work because the cars don't quite have the range we need for, when you have a car loaded with all the bike racks and everything else. But anyway, I just, you know, the amount of respect I have for a guy who, you know, went initially with some, you know, some cash that he got from, you know, from selling stock of PayPal and trying to buy a bunch of, if I, correct me if I'm wrong, right? He went and tried to buy a bunch of like Russian ICBMs and like basically. the oligarchs were like trying to charge him too much and so he's he's like well fine if you won't let me have your missiles which by the way like we really should have supported him and buying those missiles

because maybe things would be different like we might be in a better spot now if he'd bought a lot of those missiles anyway in 2023 you rolling out the theory of Elon must should have bought all the Russian IFCBMs like I don't know if I could find a more 2023 crazy theory than that to put out on the But I mean, yeah, okay, so anyway, he fails because they want to, they want to charge him too much. I mean, surprise, surprise that the Russian oligarch mafia wanted to charge you too much for their rockets. But anyway. And to be clear, you mean what it would have averted is Elon having enough money to buy Twitter? Is that what you mean by this?

That's the one you're worried about, right? Yeah, yeah. So, but anyway, I wish you would have spent that money on SpaceX. But I'm sure he's spending plenty of money on SpaceX. Anyway, but so, yeah, and then he basically has to just turn it into its own entrepreneurial venture building. It's in engineering its own stuff, which ultimately is way better than the Russian, you know, rusty Russian missiles would have been in the first place. So actually, you know, maybe we don't want, because you can imagine what those things would be doing now if we kept trying to fire those off, you know, and they're reentering the atmosphere here and there and everywhere. it might not be quite as clean and pretty as SpaceX.

It would look like your Kerb will career in the early days. Yeah, exactly. The entrepreneurial side, I'm actually, I was interested to ask you if that's something that you follow as well, because so I'm a nube cycling fan. This is how Eric and I discovered that, I discovered that Eric was a cycling fan, was that I had a son in August 2020

and got home from the hospital on paternity leave and the COVID-delayed tour de France was on. So I was like, oh, this is great. It's like a travel show plus sports. I like sports. This will be great. And I got sucked in super hard and just like totally fell in love with it. And then have now watched, you know, the Netflix series, Eric said he wanted to club because that was just absolutely fantastic.

And I felt like I recommend that to all my friends to say like, this is why I fell in love with the sport. I also watched the documentary that they shot in that 2020 Tour de France of EF enter the slip stream. And felt like your. part of that series, right, was about being close to the edge of, I don't know if this whole thing's going to stay together for three more weeks. We've got to figure out a way out of this. Like, that's where most space companies are at the moment is, I don't know if we're going to make it one more quarter. Literally, there are like five different companies that I think Eric and I could list off of. We're not sure there will be another earnings call for this company. And that's the error we're in now is just trying to figure out what is the actual product here. How do you make money? What can you partner with, do what? And I feel like that probably computes to your brain really well and what you've done so far.

Isn't it that you go and mine the asteroid that has, you know, one trillion dollars of various precious metals on it? And you just go and you find the next Todd Apogatra, right? Like that's what you do. Yeah, yeah, no, no. No, that's, I mean, that's it. But that's it is that, you know, professional cycling along with, probably a lot of space exploration doesn't really have like a true sustainable, you know, blue chip business model,

i.e., the NFL, right? The NFL is like the easiest thing. I mean, it's obviously a massive entity that I'm sure is difficult to manage, but it's a very easy to understand business model, right? The, you know, your media outlets pay the NFL a ton of money to have the rights to broadcast those games. and that money is distributed to all of the teams. Okay, there you go. Like, that's, I mean, that's square one.

Now, all of those teams can go out and try to sell their own sponsorships and their ticket sales and merchandising and all that. But all of that, ticket sales and merchandising and sponsorship, is all frosting. The base of the cake is just this massive, you know, check that comes, come hell or high water from the media rights of being able to broadcast the games. Well, cycling has this. system where all the races are owned by one entity and they sell the broadcast rights. Well,

the teams, we don't get anything from those broadcast rights, like absolutely zero. So where I just said, you know, all this other stuff like merchandising and sponsorship and he is the frosting, right? Well, we literally exist only on frosting. And so, yeah, exactly. We got no stake. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, selling sponsorship, to the tune of, you know, the average team nowadays is about $30 million per year, and the largest team in the world are over $50 million per year. I mean, that's, you know, sponsorship is a, is a, is a, is a, it's a tough game. I mean, getting somebody to write $15, $20 million check is, I mean, at a minimum,

just to, just to have the foundation of the team, that's a, you know, that's a hard, hard, hard thing to, I mean, it's like, it's fundraising for a startup. It's fundraising $30 million for a startup every year. And you, there's no like, well, someday I'm going to turn your $30 million into like, you know, 500 million. It's like, no, no, I'm going to turn your $30 million into a team that wins races and gets you as a brand a lot of exposure on Netflix, on worldwide media. You know, huge, I mean, the audiences of the Tour de France television and live are massive. I mean, it's sort of dwarfs most other sporting events. But you are only selling the exposure.

It's not that you're not selling like this eventual rate of return, which I can imagine that a lot of space exploration companies would be in the same. I mean, they are selling, you know, they're selling a very distant dream. Yeah. And, you know, you mentioned the $1 trillion asteroid. The problem with that is you've got to spend $10 billion up front. before you have a chance to even bring some of that back. And so it's a huge speculative upfront investment that, again, may or may or may not pay off.

I'm curious, you mentioned Unchained and Netflix. Is that helping with the sponsorship? Either is that growing the pie of the Tour de France and visibility, or was your participation on that helpful? I'm just curious. I know you've got a multi-year deal with EF, but, but. How are things in that regard? So it definitely has grown in the audience. We've noticed, you know, across the boards, social media.

I mean, just at the Tour de France this year, there were a lot of new fans, which was like a really good thing. You could tell, like, there were a lot of people that really didn't know that much about cycling that showed up roadside of the Tour de France and were like, okay, I'm here. What's up with this? And, you know, again, really good, not always so good that they didn't know that you, you know, can't just run out in front of the motorcycles. I mean, that's like a problem all the time at the Tour de France, but most of the time you have these sort of like experienced drunk idiots at the Tour de France that run out in front of the motorcycles and the riders.

But they're like, you know, they've been drunk for 20 years at the Tour de France. And like, they know how to run in front of a bike rider, you know, with no pants on and cheer for them and, you know, not crash the rider, right? So now these newbie cycling fans that are, which are a lot of them from the Netflix, series, they're showing up going, okay, I also want to be drunk and have no pants on and run next to a professional bike rider. And they're causing some problems. So, I mean, not to discourage them. We love new fans, but just to say, you know, maybe learn from the more experienced veterans of watching the sport. Sounds a lot like the state of watching a rocket launch in my

estimation, Eric. You've probably only been at the media site for the rocket launch you've seen recently. But if you remember, I was the one sitting on the beach in Florida waiting for Artemis 1 and you were jealous that I was just sitting on a beach rather than waiting for it to be delayed. But I feel like the, you know, the popularity of going to see rocket launches much higher now with SpaceX doing interesting stuff. The crowd much different than the shuttle era because it's like weirder and scrappier. So I do feel like we don't run in front of the rockets, but, you know, it's a little different. I got to visit, I got to watch. the Starship launch basically from a beach right alongside you know maybe 10,000 other

people in South Texas and it was definitely you could tell that a lot of people were there because of the SpaceX Elon Musk or a seeing this rocket that had not seen a launch before so it's it's definitely growing the audience and I think that's you know to bring this back to space a little bit one thing SpaceX has done is really rejuvenate interest and optimism in what we can accomplish in space. And Elon, for his fault and everything like that, has definitely raised the aspirations of what humans can do in space and should do and accelerated the timeline.

So it is very helpful. And so I think that that kind of growth has been a very positive takeaway from all this. For sure, especially when you look at the fact that there are all these startups trying a bunch of different ideas. And half of them I think are bad ideas too. But I'd rather a ton of people be trying interesting stuff because if I knew what was going to work, I would not be just running a podcast talking about space and cycling on the Internet right now. Yeah, there's two. There's a couple of major things about that.

First of all, for a long time, although I think this is changing quickly now, it was possible to go out to the VC community venture capital and get money for your startup idea and say, we're going to be the SpaceX. of this, we're going to be the SpaceX of that, and there was money to be had for that. And that really, again, was a function of the fact that the private valuation of SpaceX went to $200 billion, you know, in a matter of years. And the other thing is, too, there's this now, this amazing diaspora of former SpaceX employees in Southern California elsewhere, working in space stuff, but also energy in all these different areas.

And so it's just, it's this mindset, really, of you can change. the world if you challenge pre-conceived notions. It is possible. And some of these will fail, obviously, but some of them are going to succeed. And so it's just, it's when you get new energy and ideas and an attitude, it can really raise, raise an industry. All right. Can you out some of the space nerds in the pro peloton? Have you discovered anyone? Or are you the weird space nerd? Some of the space nerds are, no, I was going to say, like, I think I might be pretty alone on that one. No, I can, no, I'm sorry.

I mean, I would out them if I could, but. The only previous space crossover I can ever recall was the cycling podcast a couple years ago where Daniel Freebie was talking about, was it Pavl Civikov's training regimen or someone. And he very famously said in his offseason, he had bicycled the same number of kilometers that it would take to ride to the moon. And it's, of course, what, 200,000 kilometers to the moon? So he was off by, like, a factor of 100.

I think it's like 400,000, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, he was way off. It was like, it was like 4,000 kilometers or 40,000. Yeah, so obviously not, not really. He went to the moon. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the money.

He had to do a correction the next week saying, well, we were wrong. And the host kind of gave him some crap about that for a few weeks afterward. but that's not the only space reference. All right. So your solo, your solo is a space nerd. Have any, has anyone discovered your space nerd in this? Well, and then questioned you greatly about it. Well, probably.

I mean, well, probably in that, so in a lot of presentations that I do to, when we're talking about new investors, new sponsors, the, because one of the, because one of the. basic things I get asked all the time is how do tactics and strategies work in cycling? Most people, your average Joe thinks bike race is like a triathlon or a marathon, right? Where it's just like the fastest guy wins, period. Point A, point B, fastest guy runs. And so like, what do you mean strategy?

Like your pacing strategy? Or I'm like, no, no, there's a real game going on here. And so then I'm always asked to explain how cycling strategy works, right? And one of the big analogies I use, because, you know, in cycling, well, to explain to your audience a little bit, when you're in the draft of other riders, you're saving somewhere between like 30 and 80 percent energy, okay? So, and you have a team of eight riders in the Tour de France. The idea being is that one of those riders is going to win at the end of the day. So you're like, okay, well, how do you utilize eight riders? And first people are like, well, wait a minute, that's really unfair.

What about the other seven guys? And I'm like, well, you know, that is the way team tactics works. And it doesn't work like a football team, and it doesn't work like a soccer team or a baseball team. It works like a rocket. Cycling tactics work like a rocket in that since you've got this great energy savings when you're in the draft, you basically have to operate the team like you would in stages, a staged rocket, right? You've got three or four guys that are the base stage. They're getting the thing off the ground.

They're doing the real grunt work. for the first two-thirds of the race. And literally, and then people always get so sad when they hear this, but literally at a certain point in the race, they kind of split off and basically just fall into the ocean. They are, they may, you know, depending on the, yeah, exactly, no, but, I mean, they are expendable. Like, they may or may not be able to finish the race.

If this is a Tour de France, of course, they sort of limp their way home so they can start the next day. You know, one day race, a lot of times they'll just use everything and basically pull over and stop. And there's great examples of this in the Tour de France. You see where guys riding a hard tempo and mountain stations, when they pull off, they just stop. I mean, like, they can't even move.

So then you've got sort of like your next two or three guys, and that's sort of second stage. These are guys who maybe could contend for the race on their own physically. Like they're physically very, very strong riders. But psychologically, they're maybe not people that deal well with high amounts of pressure, so they just want to kind of do their work and get out of the way. And so they're the next stage. They bring the race all the way to, you know, 95% of the way done, right?

And then you sort of got your last guy who the last 5% of the race tries to guide in the one who can actually, you know, win the race. And it operates just like a rocket, and that you're splitting off different groups or different stages as the race goes on. And so I always, when I do these presentations, I draw a big rocket. I draw an enormous rocket. And people at the end of it, they're like, oh, now I get it. You know, so this rocket analogy works wonderfully well. So that probably outs me a little bit as a space nerd. It's like, it's so funny because if you were to explain this to me, I'd be like, no one would get that.

You're working on like two niche venn diagrams here. But apparently rockets, everyone's into the idea because of, I guess, what, Saturn 5 is so well. in everyone's mind. Yeah, I mean, everyone, everyone gets that rockets operate on stages. You know, everyone's seen the two booster rockets on the space shuttle split off, right? Well, not everybody, but I mean, a lot of people have. It's a cultural, yeah. I mean, that's, there's everyone, there's something starts to target with that on it for, you know, millions a year.

So people are very in tune with that culturally. And I don't know what the next space shuttle, like, what's the next spaceship that will reach the aura of the space shuttle in terms of pop culture, you know. Falcon 9, my friend. It probably is, yeah. But it doesn't look the same as iconic. You know what I'm saying? Hey, hey. You can draw it and we'll go, that's a rocket,

but you would draw a space shuttle, and they would say it's a space shuttle, is my point. So Jonathan is Walt Van Arthen a single stage to orbit rocket? Yeah, I think that's a no. No, I mean, not really, because, you know, but you, well, no. He's at least refuelable. He can do orbital refilling, at least.

I mean, there are certain. races he definitely tries to do that and that's also that's sort of like the the beauty and the and the fault of walt van art is that that um your answer to question is almost um if you know sometimes if he if he had if he had to race some races when he was younger as a slightly less strong human being he would actually be you know sort of much more effective since he He wouldn't always be trying to be a single stage to orbit rocket. Yeah, I mean, no rider can be that. No rider can be a single stage all the way to orbit rocket.

It's just impossible in bike racing. You have to have somebody to deflect some of that workload. But he's as close as it gets, that's for sure. What I love about cycling and have really just come to appreciate after watching a lot over the last two decades is the complexity. And that's the problem with cycling, right? It's really difficult to get into because there's lots of people doing weird things that you don't really understand why they're doing them.

But most everything happens for a reason and just the tactics and what Jonathan was describing about how, well, why is this rider doing that or why is this team there and what's happening? It's fascinating because there is, as I say, there is a reason for almost everything that's happening. And it's just so beautiful to watch those tactics play out in real time and to see decisions being made in real time under the press pressure and stress of all that. And so it's just, it is, it is, in my opinion, the most beautiful sport because it's complex and people are just pushing themselves. I just have tremendous respect for the risks that cyclists take. Jonathan very

famously describes a crash is jumping out of your car and your underwear at 40 or 50 miles per hour. But also, I mean, you look at the bodies of these cyclists after a grand tour and what they have subjected themselves to in terms of physical pain. And it's just, I mean, I'm just in awe of cyclists and cycling. You didn't even mention the just epic environment that it is, like climbing the most beautiful landscapes in the world and no matter where you are like god that would be an amazing trip to go take you don't notice any of that when you're racing it i can tell you that much like that is you notice none of that which is really sad but it's a funny thing in that i didn't actually i i hated france until after i finished racing a bike like when i

finish racing a bike, then like three or four years later, I go back to France as a team manager where I can actually go out to eat at a restaurant as opposed to like eating, you know, athlete gruel. And, you know, and just sort of saw that. And I was like, whoa, France is great. You know, I'd like, all these years, people have been telling me how great France is. I'm like, oh, God, there's a place you never want to go to France. I mean, it's the armpit of the world.

and lo and behold, it's actually pretty great. It's just, it's not great if you're racing the Tour de France. I could totally understand that having just looked at the guys that are racing it and what they're doing at any given moment. I mean, what Eric was saying about being enthralled with, like, strategy intactness and whatnot, is he can attest to the amount of times I would text him and be like, can you explain to the nub over here, like, what's going on with this thing? And there's only like one time when you're like, I don't know,

let's see, something's going on here that I can't figure out either. but mostly I'm like oh okay now I'm I'm starting to put it together but it is I anyone watching there are people in the chat that are loving the cycling talk the people that have not connected with this yet seriously the Netflix doc I feel like there are parts that cycling fans will quibble about but specifically regarding wow van art but the the uh I feel like the things that it displays are the reason I fell in love with it of like the grandeur of it And if you're into sport at all, like the sports side of it as well is just, it's a totally different kind of thing than what you're used to if you're into like American team sports. And this is just such, it seems like I wanted to ask Jonathan about this.

This seems to me as like an outsider to be by far the most dynamic, exciting era of watching, of cycling, racing at least since 2000. I mean, because you had, obviously, you had the dominance of Lance and then the SkyTrain with. Chris Frum, and then now there's just a multiplicity of winners, and you've got people like Pugachar who's going for all kinds of different races, and you've got Wout and Matthew Vanderpull, who are just incredible, interesting racers. And I'm just wondering, do you think that this is like the best era of cycling in the modern era? And if so, why is that, why are we seeing it now? You know, boy, it's a really good question, because I've heard, you know, I've heard for years, you know, this is the best year, this is the best year, that was the best year.

And, you know, and I can, I have very fond memories of how the races unfolded back in like the mid-80s, right? Even though back then we weren't able to watch, at least in the U.S., you couldn't watch them on live TV every day. So you could, it's almost like the storytelling of the journalists was, was a lot more to do with what you were seeing or seeing in your mind than what, you were actually seeing on the television. I don't, you know, I think, um, one, there's a greater understanding. Uh, I think, you know, cycling is attracting more and more and more fans every single year. So there's a greater understanding of what's going on.

And I think this is actually a great parallel to space and space exploration as well, is that, um, when there's, when there's sort of this simplistic like, oh, we landed a man on the moon understanding of it, then that attracts a certain kind of fan and a certain kind of, you know, that attracts a certain kind of person. But when you really start to get into people understanding a more in depth of what's going on in the process, like they're understanding the behind the scenes, they're understanding the training that goes into it, all of a sudden that depth. And the Netflix series really does give a lot of depth to what the riders go to and what, you know, this is the same thing with what astronauts go through in their training, so on and so forth. The more depth you give

something, the more exciting it gets. And so the other part that we're seeing right now is that the top level athletes are so much more optimized and they're all optimized. So the racing is becoming, and the equipment is optimized. I mean, you know, we were doing this sort of goofy wind tunnel test where we just took this bike from you know 2001 which okay that's a long time ago 20 years ago but you know you wouldn't think like the aerodynamic technology of a bike would be that different man is it different I mean it took it it was well the power output difference that it took to to keep the same speed on that bike was you know was basically and or no I want to say it was

like 18, 17, 18% higher. So which is, again, for a human being, you know, for a car or whatever to sort of bump things up 15 or 18% that's really difficult. But for a human being, you know, it's to overcome 18% more air resistance is on, it's an unbelievable feat. So what we're seeing now is, is that the science behind the athletes, from everything from nutrition to aerodynamics to, you know, the way they train to the, you know, the way they train, I, you know, we monitor all of the athletes training remotely via they basically download all

their data of power outputs into the pedals every single day, heart rate every single day, RPM, speed, temperature, all of that. The key one being power output. So, and so, so, we analyze that now that sounds you know that sounds like a pretty involved process of analyzing that when i'm recruiting athletes now i am getting their power output files our heart rate files from when they were 11 or 12 years old uh that have been maintained by private coaches their parents other support groups etc etc you know that that all of this is leading to the fact that the racing is just a lot faster and it's visibly faster and you can you can see how much quickly which which leads to you know more exciting racing I mean they're going the the rubber compounds on the tires are so much

stickier and better they go around the corners a lot faster than they used to be able to go out like when I see the speeds these guys go around the corners now I think woof in my era your tire would not have been able to handle that you would have slid right out into the barrier and done right now you know we're running like wider tires that you know the air pressure isn't in it it's not a tubular tire so it's not a closed system therefore like the road since it's an open system into the rest of the wheel the the it's able to absorb shock better meaning that you can one it sticks better and two creates less rolling resistance anyway on and on with all these technological stores they're going around the corners faster the the air resistance is is so much faster and if you ever get

chance, go ride a bike from like a racing bike from like 2003 and then go ride a racing bike from 2023. And one feels like brand new Ferrari and the other one feels like a Ford pickup truck. I'm going to have to have you send me one of the latter samples. I've got a real shit bike that I bought during the bike apocalypse when I was falling in low in cycling. And if you would like to compare me going up the hills and Mannyunk to what you were doing back of the day, I would look like a really shitty Ford pickup truck. So, maniank. I love that. I love that though. Maniac's great. But I love it also. Anyway, it's so fun. So that's the reason all of those things compounded are why you're getting super exciting racing right now. And in that it's just, it's a, it's this fun sport that is like, it's like cyborg sport, right? It's half human, half machine. And the machine part is getting faster and faster and faster. And the human part is getting faster and faster and faster. How much do you talk to people that are on like the engineering side of the equipment and all?

Because I'm curious the like it's the same nerdy engineers that work at a lot of different kinds of companies. And I'd be curious if you feel like there are, it's either one way or the other, right? There's more people being sucked into the engineering side of cycling or getting like brain drained out to other industries as other things look more exciting and less exciting. And I don't know how much exposure you have to that side of it. But I'm curious about that. Yeah. I mean, I talked to him a fair amount. The people, the engineers that are in the bike industry, I mean, they want to be in the bike industry, right?

I mean, I don't, I mean, they, they have a passion for the sport, especially, you know, especially the guys that are working on fluid dynamics on the bike and the bike designs. I mean, they, they want to be there. They're speed freaks, right? They're, you know, they're not speed freaks in the way a Formula One engineer would be or a rocket, a rocket scientist might be. But they, they're speed freaks. They're trying to figure out how.

you know, this limited power resource, which is the human engine, how do you get that to, you know, to go a lot faster, right? And so they're, I mean, they're very, very, very, very passionate people and very competitive. I mean, they hate it when somebody comes out with a faster bike. Like somebody shows lower drag numbers in the wind tunnel. I mean, it is, like, there is serious jealousy going on of whoever's thrown out the lowest drag numbers. Yeah, with a rocket, you know, it is all about the efficiency of the engines, of the mass, the rocket. I mean, there's only so much you can do with aerodynamics on a rocket, and that's kind of been perfected, you know, 50 years ago. But the whole, the mass, and I know the cycling's different because you obviously have a mass limit on bikes.

But in terms of materials and performance the engines and all that, it's just, it is all about. eking out those tiny percentages because they matter so much because if 95% your rocket is fuel, then that other 5% has to be super efficient. It's the same way with the bikes, obviously. I mean, you see technical innovations every year. And if you're sort of outside the sport, you're thinking, well, it's just a bike. Like, how hard is it to make a bike? But it is for remarkable the engineering that goes into modern race bikes.

I'm just always curious about how the engineering talent shifts between industries, because so many people I know that have burned out of SpaceX. I'm like, when we wonder what they're working on now. And it's a lot of times related industries, it's a lot of times totally. I would love to get some get some more SpaceX engineers involved in cycling. That sounds like a great idea. Honestly, like, yeah. I mean, I can, I'll text you after this and let you know what the things that you would need to offer instead of the people that have burned out of SpaceX, what they would say.

And then you could figure out if you could support that. But it's definitely a thing. You see a lot of people going, oh, you go into it and you're like, I know how this work style is going to be and I know what I'm in there for or moving to middle of nowhere, Texas to work on this thing. And then there's some people that are like, that's not my life anymore. And they work on something equally as cool, but it's a like, oh, I didn't really know that you would work at that kind of place. But it makes sense that they need similar skill sets. And now they're applying not only their skill set directly, but like the way that their brain thinks about problems is also interesting to watch that take on. like Eric said, a lot of energy startups are taken in these people now, too.

Space was very uncool around the turn of the century. Like around 2000, back then I was starting out as a reporter at the Houston Chronicle. I remember writing sort of stories about the fact that the really youngest and brightest people were going into biotechnology. They were going into internet startups. They were going into financial engineering. It's exactly where I got sucked into not space because it was boring as hell when I was in high school. And then now that, again, sort of the SpaceX effect on the industry and NASA's Artemis program and other things around the world,

that is changing. Like aerospace engineering is growing as a field again. And I think that's really healthy for the future of the industry. Can I ask about Ben Healy, Jonathan? What is his, what is his trajectory? Yeah, space fans log off. We got eight minutes left and we're going all cycling. He's 22 and he came out of nowhere this year. And, and, and, you know, he's, and, and, you know, I mean, he looks to me when I watch him riding, I'm looking, he looks like he's in his late 30s and like sort of hunched over the bike, like really struggling. But like he just powers away from everybody else. I mean, it's, where did you find this kid? And what do you think he's, you know, I know you assigned him to an extension, which I was super thrilled to see. He's like,

what's his future? What'd you? Well, Ben is an example of great, great aerodynamic efficiency and low body mass. So Ben's not, I mean, he's, he's like the opposite of Matthew Vanderpoll, right? Like Matthew Vanderpull is this massive power output, sometimes knows how to use it. You know, like sometimes gets a little bit misdirected, just this huge engine. You know, he's a massive rocket, right?

Whereas Ben is fundamentally not an enormous engine, but is very lightweight. And then if you look, he's incredibly aerodynamic, low drag on the bike, on the road bike. So what Ben has mastered the craft of doing, he's also very, very smart. And he has, and I don't know what the parallel here is with space, but what he has is his power output doesn't decline over time, i.e., like, hour one of a race, his power output is, you know, 100%, right?

And then hour six of the race, you know, 150 miles later, it's still, it's 100 minus 1 maybe, whereas most people go from 100 to 100 minus 15. And so Ben doesn't decline. And those factors, the lightweight, the incredible aerodynamics, and the fact that he doesn't have declining power, and that he's really, really sharp. Even though I know, he looks like a guy you'd buy weed from on the corner. But like, he's not.

He's a very, very, very intelligent person. He knows how to read a race. and he basically if he gets just 15 seconds in front of the group, like he did a couple times in the Gero and a couple times this year, he just gets this tiny little gap and you think, oh, well, the guy behind him would be able to close that gap up. But here's this guy producing like next-to-nothing drag who is just steady, steady Eddie and he's not, you know,

he's not getting tired as the race gets older. They just can't get him back. You know, once he's got that little gap, they just can't get him back. So, you know, people say, well, what's his future? I don't know exactly. I don't, you know, I don't, it's not that I sit around thinking, okay, well, Ben Healy can win the Tour de France, you know, nine times. I don't think that's necessarily his future.

But what I do know is what he's good at, he is damn good at, in that he basically, if you give him an inch, i.e. give him just a little gap, he can win any bike race in the world because he goes up the hills well because of the lightweight. He goes down the hills well because of the airs well because of the air. aerodynamics. He doesn't fatigue. He's just, it's very, like, no matter. Like, the other teams are basically, they're using their booster rockets and everything. They're just, they're peeling guys off left and right, trying to pull him back. And they just can't get him back because he's

so efficient. So his, I don't know, his future is to win a lot of races, but in, in sort of a pretty unique way. It did seem like he was the second or third best Ardennes rider this year. Yeah. And like out of the blue. And yeah, that stage went in the Jiro was amazing when like I remember listening to the announcer saying, well, I think it's too early. They're going to bring him back. And I'm thinking, well, if you watch the races a month ago, you're thinking maybe he's not going. No, no. And he just kept getting further and further and further away.

I mean, the entire time. No, he's, he is a super impressive guy. And it's funny because people say, well, you know, bike races are, we don't do rain cancellations or snow cancellations or any other cancellations. It's like like the race goes no matter what the weather is. And most people don't really particularly like riding in, you know, freezing cold rain with howling winds, right? Ben loves that. Ben, he wakes up and, you know, he's just one of those guys that's like, yeah, this is great

because, you know, I can go around the corners faster when they're wet because everyone else is scared. And, you know, when it's raining out 30, 40% of the field are demoralized. And he's like, I just, I gain morale. knowing that everyone else is demoralized. So he's an interesting guy. Are we going to talk about Nielsen Palace at all? Because

Sure, we can talk about it. So my son, having grown up in the era of me falling in love at cycling, now every morning asks me if the bike guys are on when we're eating breakfast and I'll either put them on or not. And he often looks at the TV and says, go Nielsen. So he is definitely a member of the Nielsen Palace fan club.

And he's been putting in some work. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Nielsen is really, his popularity in the U.S. has gone through the roof. Actually, his popularity in France and through cycling in general has really, really gone through the roof. I mean, you could not, he's the nicest guy I'll ever meet. He is the most polite person you'll ever meet. He has that killer edge that he knows how to win races and he knows how to beat people to the line. But like, he does not show his teeth unless he's in competition. competition. He is the, you know, he's the first person to take his dishes to the dishwasher.

I mean, he's, he's that guy. And, you know, yeah, this year the Tour de France, he had a, he had a great run in the PolkaDard jersey. Unfortunately, he caught just a little cold. And this goes to show you these tiny little things. I mean, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't the flu, but didn't have a fever or anything else. He just caught this little cold, uh, toward the end of the Tour de France. And it was just enough that like his legs just didn't have the same pop they did in the first week. And so he wasn't able to defend, you know, the polka dot jersey. You can see he bounced right back.

You know, I mean, yesterday in the World Championships, he was right up there in it until the very end. So, I mean, I expect him to win a few more races before the year is over. But he'll, you know, he will win a couple stages of the Tour de France and maybe someday that polka dot jersey before his career is over. You know, it's funny. You mentioned the World Championships. and cornering, and I was watching Bettya

go around those corners in Scotland yesterday. I was like, wow, he's really good at that. Yeah. Yeah, you had to be good at it. On that course, there's no of not being good at going around the corners and having good tires. No, Betiel was letting it all hang out there. No, it was impressive ride by him.

Yeah, for sure. You know, one thing that I loved about the polka-dot jersey mania this year. Have you ever paid attention to the Pocodot Jersey competition? For those of you don't understand, the polka dot jersey competition is the simplest competition in all of bike racing, because it's the king of the mountain competition, meaning they're putting a finish line on the top of every single mountain, and the first one to get to the top of the mountain gets X number of points, and second place gets X number of points, and third and fourth and fifth, and so on, and the guy with the most points wins the King of the Mountain competition. Simple, simple as. But I've never,

My, I've never seen anyone really, the media focus on the King of the Mountains competition like they did this year. Like this year it was like, whoa, this is a big deal. Okay, oh, this guy got five points. Ah, this guy got, which is great. That, again, this goes into this, like, in-depth knowledge of what's actually going on in the race as opposed to just sort of, I feel like, you know, when Lance was winning the Tour de France, everyone was like, go Lance.

I mean, I remember doing this race, the tour of Georgia years ago, which Lance was in, a smaller team. And I remember driving past this lady, you know, I was in the caravan following the race. and I heard her say, I wish they would get rid of all the other riders so that Lance could just ride by himself so I could tell which one he was. And to me, that was like the classic cycling

of like the early 2000s, right? It wasn't, it weren't cycling fans. There were Lance fans. But like now you've got people who are like trying to do, you know, with their calculators out doing the King of the Mountains competition, which is much more interesting. I think ASOs fixed it

so that there's less of a chance that the top GC rider wins it. And also I think, I think the fact that you clearly had several people going for it this year, as opposed to just sort of the best Frenchman sort of trying to win it. I think that really, you know. Yeah, there were fun personalities, too. It was like the Italian guy who throws his glasses all the time and the nice American kid. And like, there were fun of people in it.

But, you know, we've been able to ignore the white jersey competition for like three or four years. So it's like, because we can. It's never been relevant in my fandom. So if I'm a good modern cycling fan, barometer. Yeah. Jonathan, if people are either cycling fans or not cycling fans, what would you like to plug so that they know what's going on? Maybe what would you recommend to have them fall in love with the sport? Any particular stuff that you'd like to get out there?

Oh, boy. I mean, well, I think the Netflix series is a great place to start. It's worldwide, like the sixth or seventh most downloaded series that Netflix has going right now. So, I mean, it's doing really, really, really well. So definitely it's Tour de France unchanged. Download that, check it out. That's a good sort of tutorial of the sport. Then after that, if you fall in love with that, then, boy, I mean, it's Alice in Wonderland.

It's going way down the hole. And it's a sport that is very complex, very nuanced, and takes a lot of time to learn. and I would just say, don't be discouraged by the fact that you don't understand all the details and that it seems a little obtuse initially. It's chess on wheels. It's human performance chess. And it just takes a long time to understand all the intricacies of it. But once you do, once you actually get to that inflection point where you do get what's going on,

it's unmatched for, you know, its human drama. how hard these athletes are. I mean, these guys, the amount of work they put in is unbelievable. Like, these are not spoiled professional athletes that are going and partying after the game. I mean, these guys, when the race is over, it's like, you know, they're basically pouring fuel down their bodies and, like, taking a nap. Beer, you're there on rest day, you know. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Okay, there's that big controversy with that.

But like, but they are, they live like monks. I mean, they live, and not the kind of monks that make wine and drink wine. Like they're, they're, I mean, they, they live this just incredibly focused lifestyle. They're, you know, they're all riding, you know, 20 some on thousand miles training and racing per year. Their lives completely, the lives of themselves, their families completely revolve around their training because, you know, people say, you know, oh my buddy he trained for a marathon that took six months you know how long do you have to train to race the tour de france i'm like oh like 15 years and it's true you you really it's it is it's a lifelong pursuit of this you know singular excellence and you have an all of these guys not the

guys winning every single guy who is racing even present at the tour de fronds has basically dedicated every minute of his life to this sport since they were 11 12 years old and um you know, it's, I don't know, to me it's impressive to watch because it's, it is, you're dealing with that last infanticinally small percentage of what a human is capable of physically and psychologically. Yeah, there's so many times where I'm like, ah, humans aren't supposed to work like that. That's a weird, that's a weird human right there that's doing that. But that's, I guess, to a certain extent, that's the top level of anything, you know. It's the bicycle that allows that, you know, most other sports, running, weightlifting, any other sport,

right, like if you worked as much, you did as much physical, like literally in kilojoules work as cyclists do, your knees would rip apart or whatever because you can't handle, you know, the pounding, right? But cycling, because it's that smooth action of peddling, it actually enables you to work more and more and more and more, which is, so it's like we don't, you know, we don't typically see things, I mean, sometimes we'll see knee injuries and whatever, and definitely when guys crash, we see all kinds of injuries. But we see a lot of, but we see a lot of, things like their liver enzymes are starting to fall apart because there's so much free radical load in their body from so much work. You know, you don't see that a whole lot in other sports

where basically like the free radical load is just so high that, you know, that your organs are having trouble keeping up with it. I mean, it's a, it's impressive what they do. Sometimes a little scary, but it is impressive what they do. we haven't even plugged the team so i feel like you should probably plug the team and what y'all are up to where to follow along as well yeah exactly oh look at that oh we got ah look at that uh we we pulled up our our news for the day um so yeah the team the team name is eF education easy post um and the two major sponsors in that name um eF education is the world's largest private education company. Specializing in educational travel is like their biggest business, but also

language learning, check them out. EF.com. EasyPost is basically a shipping API which optimizes shipping for sort of if you're if you're not Amazon, then EasyPost is a great place to go to to save a lot of money in your company's shipping process. So and then Canadale is our bike sponsor. I'll give them a plug. A bunch of very nerdy engineers working at Canndale, which have produced great bikes for us year after year. So they're also an awesome partner to have. And we have a whole slew of other partners that I could go on and on about. And it is the longest running professional cycling team ever in American, not only American, but non-Western European history, like outside of your core cycling countries, i.e., you know, France,

Italy, Spain. It's the longest running professional cycling team ever, which goes to show you more of how difficult it is to keep these things off the ground, because if there are any potential sponsors out there listening, Elon, if you're out there, buddy, come back, man, we want you. We promise we can make the Teslas go the entire race distance. We promise. We'll figure it out. Together, you and I, we'll figure it out. Sometimes do car changes. Sometimes do car changes. Yeah, exactly. You know, we, our rocket fuel is, is partnership money, and we provide incredible ROI on exposure. We will get your name everywhere and anywhere in the world with basically the largest audience of any sporting event in the world in the Tour de France. I love the hope you have that people that have a million dollar checks are listening to this show.

Oh, you never know, man. I really enjoy that. I feel like that's the great way to start the week for me over here. is that you believe in me that much. Hey, I mean, you got to start somewhere, right? You never know. Sponsorships come from bizarre places, so I'm always, I always got the sales pitch ready to go. Love it.

Eric, you got anything going on that people should know about? I would just say that we are near the end of the cycling season this year. We're not there yet, but there is one sort of big event left, and that's the Tour of Spain, the Vest España. And what's great about that this year, like a lot of years, is that most of the best general classification riders are already going to be there outside of Poca Char, I think. And so it's like, it's really a stacked field. And the parkour in Spain is excellent. So it's a good place to start.

And it starts, I guess, in a little less than two weeks. And so Richard Carapause will be there. Is that right, Jonathan? Yeah, he'll be there. He won't quite be 100% of his of itself because that injury that he is sustained in the day. one of the tour de France has taken a while to get back from. But he'll be there. But it's whether or not he's competitive or not it remains to be seen.

Okay. Well, certainly something to look forward to. I'm working on a bunch of different things, Anthony. One of the things I'm trying to get to the bottom of is whether China's 2030 date for a lunar landing is really real. And sort of working on the politics of that, because I think that's interesting. Wait, I want to know the answer to that. Is it really real or not? 2030.

I don't think they're going to get there in 2030. But I'm going to go out and do some reporting to try to back that. that up. I just think they have funding issues just like NASA does, but the whole system is completely non-transparent, so it's very difficult to, um, to, to, to, they might do it. I mean, they could do what Charlie and I did that they get there and then they just can't get home. Just leaving there. If I was going to put a top list on who might be interested in that kind of architecture. I'm not sure what the power rankings are there, but. CNSA might be interested in that. Yeah. But you know my theory, Eric, they're just going to waste all their money on a low Earth orbit space station and then have none left

over the moon. Yeah, we'll see. It's almost like we've been there before. I mean, the magic, the magic of Apollo really is that we brought the people back, because we can get to them. We get to Mars, but how do we bring people back? So anyway, lots of stuff. But if you're interested in cycling, watch the tour of Spain. It's coming up in a couple weeks to be, it's always crazy in Spain. That's what they say. This is a weird double off-nomeral episode week on Thursday. Speaking of the Apollo era, I don't know if you know this guy, Eric. but Paul Fiel, who is an artist, he was an artist in residence at NASA during the Apollo program

and has done all sorts of interesting art. We've been talking to him for years. He was at one of the meetups in D.C. that we did around IAC. We're finally convinced him to come on the show and talk about stuff that he's done in his career. He also was on the team that was restoring the lunar module that's in the Smithsonian, so he's been inside that real lunar module and so I'm sure he'll have some fun stories to tell.

Thursday we'll have him on, and Jake will be back from his sabbatical, which I just keep giving a crab. He's really not been gone that long. But anyway, Jonathan, thanks so much for hanging out with us. Eric, thanks for doing this with me. And if any of the space fans made it to the end, please tweet at us and let us know when you finish the Netflix series. Because that's required homework.

Sorry if I've bored anyone out there on the cycling stuff. This is Eric and I's show today. So this is what we wanted. Okay, all right, all right. Fair enough. I'm just like, oh, man, I didn't. talking of about space. No, you definitely did.

What I want to know is, so, Charlie and I really want to go watch a rocket launch, and the way we want to do it was to, like, fly the little airplane out there, right? And, uh, I mean, these things, it doesn't seem like they go off on schedule

very often, because it, you know, Charlie's idea is like, yeah, we just sort of like, you know, circle around in the small single engine aircraft, like waiting for the rocket to just shoot right by us. And, and I, is, is this a realistic plan or is this a really bad plan? Or am I going to get my license taken away is what I'm asking? So it's a realistic plan. People do this. And I can, I'm happy to put you in touch with someone

offline who does photography and can sort of help you plan out, sort of where and when and how to do it. But rocket launches, particularly the Falcon 9, have become so routine that, you know, weather is really the main reason that they scrub. And so you can be pretty confident in a launch happening. And if it doesn't happen one day, almost certainly will happen the next day. You just got to make sure you stay out of the particular airspace areas. But people do go up all the time. Cycling executive cancels rocket launch is the headline waiting to be written. She don't want to be shot down by the Space Force. But yeah, I think it's realistic. Absolutely. Okay. All right. Do that one in Florida, but the next time SpaceX is ready to launch Starship,

come hang out on the beach in Texas with us. Because I want to go down there. It's going to be great. So we can crash at Eric's place. So it'll be great. I ride the hills of Houston together, which I know Eric is a big fan of. You know what? Nielsen, Nielsen bought a house in Houston. So I don't know where in Houston, but just so you know, Nielsen Palace is going to be your neighbor.

Somewhere within three hours of you, Eric. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he's lucky he's racing in from April to September because then the offseason's great. So don't blame him. Exactly. All right, everybody.

thanks so much and we'll see you next week. Bye. All right. Thank you.