The Joe Rogan Experience - #1577 - Terry Virts

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Terry W. Virts is a retired astronaut, International Space Station Commander, test pilot, and colonel in the United States Air Force. Virts spent over 213 days in space over the course of his career with NASA. His new book How to Astronaut: An Insider's Guide to Leaving Planet Earth is now available.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day terry joe thanks for doing this man thanks for having me on this is awesome um you spent 200 days in space in a row i did uh my first flight was two weeks my second flight was 200 days in space in a row. I did. My first flight was two weeks. My second flight was 200 days. That's insane. Yeah.

What does that feel like? The two weeks was not enough. I got back to Earth, and I was like, man, that was awesome. I need to go do this again. And after 200 days, it was awesome. But it was like, all right, I checked the box and, you know, I've done everything. I was a shuttle pilot, you know, station commander. I did spacewalks. So I had a chance. I feel like I had a chance to do everything. I made an IMAX movie while I was up there. I feel like I had a chance to do, you know, everything I wanted to do. When you did two weeks, is there a recovery period when you return after two weeks?

Yeah, for sure. But it's pretty quick. Like when you land, I was super dizzy and I felt like everything was heavy. I was the last guy out of the shuttle because I was a pilot and they came in, all right, time to get out of Virch. And I grabbed my helmet and I was like, be careful. This thing weighs 500 pounds. And that night I was just like, I wanted someone next to me. I didn't fall over, but I felt like I was going to. But after a day or two, I was fine. But after the long duration flight, it was like, that first day sucked. I could do everything. I could walk around and they make you do this torture where you have to get on your stomach and do, it was like burpees, you know, get up as fast

as you can. They were trying to make you pass out from orthostatic intolerance. So I could do all that stuff. I just hated it. And then the second day was a little bit better. First day was like a couple of bottles of wine. The second day was like a bottle of wine. The third day was like a glass or two. And by a week later, they make you do this balance test where they put you in this big box. You can't see anything. And then they move the box and you're like, Whoa. And they have force sensors on your feet where if your feet are doing this, you know, you have bad balance. And if your feet go and recover, you're good. So I did my balance test before flight and after flight.

And after 200 days in space, a week later, my balance score was better than it was before I launched, which I couldn't believe. But I tell you that story just to say that, you know human body is amazing it can adapt pretty quickly that's great so what is the like from the time you land after 200 days and then when you're a hundred percent how much time is that so they there's some rule about driving cars like they don't want you driving cars for a couple weeks and the doctors got to sign off before you drive. But like I said, after a week I was,

I had a better balance score. And after a week I did 20 pull-ups at the gym. I was not a hundred percent, but I was like 90%. Now is this because of exercises that they prescribe while you're in space? Absolutely. Yeah. What kind of,

what kind of stuff do you have to do up there? So they give you two and a half hours a day. The Russians learned on Mir that your bone density, it's like a linear progression down. About 1.5% a month, you lose bone density. 1.5% a month? And it's a straight line. It doesn't bottom out. And they had a guy up there for 440 days.

He's the most ever time and space in one mission. So to combat that we exercise and they found that like pounding, uh, resistive exercise is what helps your bones and your muscles. So we have a weightlifting machine. It's kind of like a Bowflex and a treadmill and a bike. And I was religious about those things. I did them every day, except for my three spacewalk days. And we had this really big emergency where other than those four days, I exercise every day. And are you sweating up there? You sweat a lot when you exercise. Just doing this, you don't sweat at all. You could wear

the same underwear and shirt for weeks and you don't even notice. But if you have your exercise shirt after a day, it's like drenched and stinky, like a stinky Under Armour shirt. Because there's no circulation of air like there's not as much well just like if you go to the gym and you get after it for an hour you're going to be sweating so it's the same thing in space but on on norm even if you just walk around throughout the day you know you're you can tell you got to wash your clothes but in space you don't like for some reason you don't you just don't stink on normal are they giving you like merino wool clothes to wear or something so we had under armor shirts okay and after a day or

two it's like they stink and you only got one shirt every two weeks oh boy so those things they were ripe after a couple days so i did this experiment with wool clothes like you said it was like a new zealand company i forgot the name of it and I was kind of worried because I would didn't want to I thought an itch you know wool stuff so I wore this thing every day for a month got completely drenched sweaty every day for a month in it and it did not stink at all like you know was amazing it's amazing it blew me away there's a company called first light my friend Steve Rinell is one of the owners of it. It's a hunting company. And most of their clothing, particularly all their base layers and stuff, is all made out of merino wool.

And the first time I'd ever worn it was on a hunting trip. You realize when you go hunting, one of the big problems is it's freezing cold out. But you're hiking with a lot of gear, so you sweat. And then you have to sit down and you freeze your ass off but you don't with merino wool when merino wool is wet it still keeps you warm and so these guys started making hunting gear out of it

and it's incredible stuff because it really doesn't smell, it's so bizarre I sweated, drenching sweat every day for a month and I did that twice and it didn't smell at all, it blew me away it's weird, I guess it's organic i mean the fibers from the wool and just yeah for whatever reason it just shakes i don't know what scientific analysis they've ever done on it but they can't really seem to do that with synthetics they try it with synthetics but they can't quite

get there you need a you need a washing machine so did were you the one who figured that out you brought that stuff with you well i mean it was like a formal experiment you the one who figured that out? You brought that stuff with you? Well, I mean, it was like a formal experiment. You know, NASA said that I was working on mice and doing astronomy and testing out new wool fabric. It was just one of the 250 experiments I did. But it was a good one to do because I didn't stink for a couple months, which was nice. That's crazy that even in space, merino wool is the way to go. That's nuts. Yeah. I was really worried. I was afraid it was going to be itchy, but I got XXL. I wanted it loose. I didn't want wool rubbing on me, but it worked.

It was good. It doesn't itch. No. You think of it as being that coarse wool that your grandfather wore that makes you scratchy. Right. But no. They get it down to where it feels like cotton.

It's very soft. They got it figured out, man. That stuff was awesome. So when you're using these machines, they're all resistance band machines? Is that what it is? Yeah. So in my book, I have a whole,

I make fun of the acronyms. It's ARED, which is the NASA acronym for workout machine. So it uses vacuum. There's like tubes, like a cylinder. So instead of compressing the air for your force, you're pulling against a vacuum. And you can get the ARAID machine is 600 pounds. So you can, I can't bench or squat 600 pounds, but you can put it on there. So you could hurt yourself.

And the really interesting thing about these machines is they're not attached to the wall of the station. They're on like springs and moving devices. They're called vibration isolation system. Because if it was attached, think about like running on a treadmill. That's a lot of pounding, you know, 200 pounds pounding. And the Earth doesn't really move that much when you do it on Earth. But in space, there's nothing supporting the space station. So even though it's a million pounds,

the vibration from exercise would actually start to... You'd knock it out of orbit? Not out of orbit. You'd break it apart, actually. What, really? They told us in a couple minutes of that it'll snap it in half. Yeah, because the whole thing starts to bend and flex, and if you're doing it in resonance, it's really dangerous.

They've got videos of the solar rays, and these things are big. They don't fit in a football field. There are hundreds of feet and they start moving. And if the astronaut forgets to, if they leave the, if they forget to use the vibration system correctly, um, the station starts flexing and Houston, there's some guy that monitors and like the alarm goes off and they call you up, stop doing what're doing whoa it kind of blew me away at it it's a million pound massive spaceship but still there's nothing stopping it there's nothing like supporting it there's no like frame no it's just floating so even the exercise of you running on a treadmill or you doing squats there's a lot of if you're pushing 400 pounds this way something's pushing 400 pounds that way right so um and if you're going up pounds this way, something's pushing 400 pounds that way, right?

And if you're going up and down in the right frequency, it'll snap the station in half. So in this IMAX movie, I made A Beautiful Planet, you can see there's a scene of me running on the treadmill and my crewmate Samantha doing weightlifting. And the machines are just going up and down. I mean, they're moving a lot. When you you're running on a treadmill how are you locked into place yeah do you have a belt no it's a shoulder pad thing so there's you wear like shoulder pads and there are these bungee cords that hold you down because otherwise you'd take one step and you go shooting off there it is yeah there you go there's and one of those self propelling treadmills like they're an

air runner? Yeah, there's two ways. So you can do the electric version, which is what we normally do. And on Sundays, I would do this like four-minute sprint crazy workout where you have to push it yourself. And that thing just kicks your ass. I mean, it's so hard to push on the treadmill. It was supposed to be 20 seconds of sprint, 10 second rest,

20 seconds. But I was usually like 10 seconds of sprint, 20 seconds of rest. Cause four minutes of that, I would put one song on. And by the end of the song, I was wiped out, but it's a good,

it gets your, uh, your Achilles and your calf, your lower muscles get to work out there. And it works. It just like on earth. Cause you, cause you're getting pushed down

so instead of gravity the the bungee cord pulls you down into the machine they do so when you first start off all this equipment's hard to use and it's it takes some coordination so you start off with like probably 100 pounds of weight or something and i worked my way up to i think it was like 130 140 pounds so it's not 100 of your pounds. So it's not a hundred percent of your weight. Um, but it's, you know, 60 or 70%. And, uh, it's, and you have to like, get used to it because there's all this force up here. So you're unstable. So if you lean back a little bit, it'll, it'll snap you, you know, pull you off the treadmill. So there's a whole skill with getting used to doing it. How long does it take you to get used to just sleeping in space?

Yeah, sleeping was something that... There you go. Yeah, there you go. That's the treadmill. See how it's moving and bouncing up and down? You can see those bungee cords. That is an old video, but you get the idea. And the moving and bouncing is all just to prevent it from fucking up the space station.

Yeah, so it's on these spring devices. If that was attached to the station, the station would be doing that. You can imagine the hatches, right? They're attached. Yeah, they just start snapping. And if they're doing this, there's constant force on them. Wow. For something, you know, it's 20 years old now.

Hopefully it'll last another 20 or who knows how long, but you don't want that metal fatigue to happen. So you're, you're living up there for 200 days. How, like when you, the first night you fall asleep, like sleeping in space.

Yeah. Are you just floating above the bed? Are you like, do you strap yourself down? So I was worried about this. Cause like I've never slept in space before on my first mission. And that first sleep at all. No, no, no, no, no. I slept like a baby. I was worried that I wouldn't, I've never slept in space before on my first mission. You didn't sleep at all? No, no, no, no.

You were here for two weeks? No, I slept like a baby. I was worried that I wouldn't. I didn't know. Oh, so this is the first time. My first mission. Yeah. On the shuttle, there's six of us in the mid-deck, which is, like, a third of the size of this room.

Yeah, it's less than half of this room. And there's six people. There's six of us. So, like, I'll take the wall and you get the ceiling and everybody grabs their own thing you got a sleeping bag that you clip to the wall i slept on the wall i slept on the starboard that was my place um and you go in you put your blinders on because if somebody opens a window or something you don't want to get woken up and as soon as you put your blinders on you don't know up or down is completely gone and you're just floating.

And I was out in like 10, 10 seconds. So the the sleeping was not a problem at all. They had before there was Fitbits and Apple watches. We had this NASA thing that would measure like your motion. Apple watches, we had this NASA thing that would measure like your motion. And on earth, before we launched, we had to wear it for a month or something. And they measured your sleep patterns. And then in space, they measured your sleep patterns. So on earth, I would be like, you know, roll around and fit fits here and there.

In space, I was just flatline. I was out probably because I was so exhausted because in, you know, on the shuttle flights, especially, man, it was work, work, work, work, work from the minute you wake up, you're just running and, uh, not literally running, but you know, you're busy doing things. Yeah. Yeah. Like what is a typical day? So on the space station flight, so my 200 day long duration flight, uh, the day starts about seven 30 in the morning, So my 200 day long duration flight, uh, the day starts about seven 30 in the morning, which is GMT.

So London time. Um, and we would start off with like a conference call. So we, everybody would get around a microphone and we'd call Houston and Moscow and Huntsville, Alabama, which they do the payloads, um, Europe and Japan. So we kind of go through all the different communication centers around the world, mission control centers. And, uh, Hey, today you're doing this experiment, grab this piece of equipment, or this thing got canceled. We're going to do something else, whatever. They'd have the daily thing. And then you get going and you got experiments, you got two and a half hours of exercise. You got to fix, you know, broken shit. Um, there might be a SpaceX cargo ship coming up with stuff.

You may be getting ready for a spacewalk, you know, every day was different, which I loved. Um, and then at the end of the day, you had another call about seven o'clock at night. And it was the same thing. You go around, Hey, when I use this piece of equipment, it was serial number 1,002 and you, and tomorrow I'll be ready for this. And every day it was the same thing. It's Groundhog Day. Wow. Yeah. When you know you have to be committed to something for like 200 days, does it start to feel prison-like where you're kind of counting down the days you can get back to Earth?

Yeah. Or are you still enjoying it? I enjoyed it the whole time. It was supposed to be 169 days. And then we had – there was three rockets that blew up back to back to back, an American one, the Russian one, and then another American one. When the Russian one blew up, it was in the middle of my mission. And they, the progress cargo ship uses the same rocket as the people, as the Soyuz rocket, it's the same rocket. So the Russian said, hey, we don't want

to launch your replacement crew until we know what the problem was. And so since you don't have a replacement crew, you guys are going to stay longer. So we got kind of stuck in space, you know, and we didn't know how long we were going to be there. And we were kind of getting low on supplies since that was the second cargo ship that had blown up. Jesus. So, you know, and it was all about attitude.

It was just like COVID. It was like all of a sudden you're stuck and you're low on supplies. It was a similar, like when COVID happened, I'm like, this is like when I was in space and we got stuck there. Do they have an emergency supply of food for you guys up there? There, there was enough, um, food that we were good. The NASA guy, there's a ground team that manages, you know, they want to have margin on oxygen and water and food and everything. Yeah. And they handled three failures back to back to back and used up all the margin, and they kept the full crew there. But there was no more margin.

Like, it was time for something to work, and it did, thankfully. Oh, God, imagine if it didn't, if three more back to back to back. Yeah, if four would have happened, we would have probably had to start bringing guys back and, like, just leave a skeleton crew up there. But thankfully that didn't happen, And the, thanks to the guys in Houston, they, in Moscow and everywhere, they, they had managed the backup food that was, uh. What are you eating up there? It wasn't bad. I actually liked it. You know, it's better than

what I cook for myself as a bachelor. Really? Yeah. I mean, it was pretty good. It's not, it's, it's like, uh, MREs that the military guys eat, you know, the green bags of food. The NASA food is basically MREs. So you just rip it open and stick a spoon in and eat it. You can warm it up if you want, or just eat it straight. There's dehydrated food in these plastic containers. It's like crunchy meat or vegetables or fruits or anything you can dehydrate. You stick it in the machine, dial in how many milliliters, push a button in it. Ten minutes later, it's food. Wow. The Russians have similar kind of – it's a different system but similar. And the Russian food was great. I loved it. Is it better than the American food?

It's different, which is important. Over 200 days, you don't want to eat the same thing every day. The Russians have great borscht. Their soup is awesome. Mashed potatoes were great. And the fish was really good. We didn't have any fish. So they have these little cat food cans of fish.

And the cosmonauts were sick of them, like another day of cat food. But I loved them because I was never getting fish. And there was a few things that we didn't like that they loved. So I started this bag of uneaten food. So whatever we didn't like that they loved. So I started this bag of like uneaten food. So whatever we didn't like, we put in there. And about once a week, those guys, the Russians would come down and raid our, they would eat everything that we didn't like. And we would go down there and eat.

They'd have like boxes of these cans of fish. And I, we loved them. Do you speak Russian? No. Yeah. Really? How, like completely fluent? That's impossible.

Unless you're born and raised in Russia, you can't be fluent. Really? Yeah. It's such a crazy line. French is pretty easy. Spanish is pretty easy. Russian is not. I can have a conversation, but it's after da, it's obvious that I'm not Russian.

Yeah. It's that complicated that you have to be born and raised there. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You know, you can't, they have these things called cases. It's just the way the grammar works that we don't have.

You know, the accent, the letters you can figure out. Everybody's like, oh, they're different letters. That took, lesson one was a couple hours and then I had the letters figured out. That's not hard.

It's like the way of saying things and the accent. And, yeah, it's impossible to be perfectly fluent. Like, you can't tell the difference. Can you read it and write it, though? Yeah. So you could read, like, war and peace in Russian. I could read the words out loud. I would only know what half of them mean.

I wouldn't know what I was reading. But, yeah, I could read the words out loud. I would only know what half of them mean or a third. I wouldn't know what I was reading. But yeah, I could. We used to watch, in class, we'd watch Russian TV programs. So in like an hour class, I'd get through five minutes of the show. Because it'd be like, all right, stop. What did he say? Okay, that's it. And so that's how I try to learn colloquial modern Russian.

Wow. But I love languages. It's funny. When you get to NASA, you think you're good at something, right? They, the astronauts are usually pretty good at something before you get there.

So I thought I was pretty good at languages. I lived in Finland and I did an exchange in France and, and, uh, Russian just kicked my ass. And it was like years of just torture. And my, I felt like my brain was Teflon.

Like I'd have to say, I go to class for an hour and I'd learn one word. It was just really painful. That's interesting because it's an advantage for them because they can learn English pretty well. If you can learn Russian, that's why they're so smart. Russians are so smart and educated. They have to speak Russian. So I think it is an advantage for them. But it was like years.

And I finally got over this hill. So it went from being really tough to like, I loved it and I needed it and I wanted more. And I just wanted to put my phone on Russian and I was always trying to just speak Russian. So it was this weird, like it went from like, probably like exercising, you know, when you first start running, it sucks. And then after a while, it's like, you get the endorphins and you want to run some more for me russian was the same thing now you obviously uh flying into space wasn't your first flights right you flew jets yeah you you you were a test pilot as well right right which is that's got to be nerve-wracking because yeah it's um you know what and by the way you know uh shout out to chuck yeager you know my my hero and just passed away um the right stuff was i it's what motivated me to be an astronaut i read that book as i in high school and it kind of i didn't know anything my no one in my family had ever been an astronaut or a pilot and so that right stuff book showed me how to be an astronaut and it was a lot about chuck yeager so um those guys were gangsters they were and you know one of my goals in life was to not have a street or an elementary school on an air force base named

after me um and you know when i was at edwards it was just when you watch the right stuff it's this old 1950s when you die is that when they name it after you? Yeah, exactly. Okay, that's what I figured. They call it buying the farm, yeah. Yeah, so that was one of my goals, and thankfully that didn't happen. But when he was doing it back then, I mean when – It was every week, yeah. Those guys were so savage to be able to do that

and to know that there's a high percentage of these things that you're testing that are likely to fail and yeah you're breaking the speed of sound yeah it's crazy in the right stuff by the way on my first flight my commander zambo george zamka and i we watched the right stuff the night before launch we like went in the room and we sat down and put in the dvd and i flew the dvd and i wanted to give it to tom wolf and unfortunately he passed away too but uh yeah the the odds in the 60s and 70s and 40s and 50s were not we're not good and there's a scene in the right stuff i don't know if you remember like jaeger's out riding his horse and he falls off of it and breaks his arm so his engineer like does this thing puts a broom handle and just to let he couldn't close the cockpit so um

you know he he was flying with only one arm that x1 on that first flight that went supersonic which is jesus christ yeah big a big pair for sure too big for this big brass big brass ones yeah yeah that's so crazy yeah and what what kind of stuff did you fly? So I was in the F-16 test squadron, so all different versions of the F-16. But during test pilot school, it was really cool. We got to fly all different types of airplanes. So I flew a MiG-15, or old Russian Korean War MiG, and like a F-80, T-33. So the two planes that were fighting each other in Korean War, I got to fly both of them, which was cool.

Flew some World War II propeller airplanes. I got checked out in the Eagle to do this high G test in the F-15. Can someone buy an old fighter jet that doesn't have weapons on it? Absolutely. Like a person who's a pilot can go and buy one, fly around in it.

Absolutely. Yeah, there's a whole market for this stuff. Really? Yeah, and a lot, so some of the jets we flew, the Air Force didn Absolutely. Yeah. There's a whole market for this stuff. Really? Yeah. And a lot. So some of the jets we flew, the air force didn't own them. It's these rich doctors and stuff owned.

Like there was an F-104 that Chuck Yeager flew in the movie. And this guy would bring the F-104 out and a couple of test pilot students would get to fly one, do flight once. And then we would give him a ride in one of our F-16s or T-38s as payment. How long could those things go without running out of gas? Not long. Half an hour?

F-104s, yeah. So I directed a film last year where we set a record flying around the planet. And we used an F-104 as our chase plane because we were going really fast and we needed something fast to film us. But they could only pick us up about 15 minutes out because they were out of gas. Wow. So it wasn't like they could fly for hours film us. But they could only pick us up about 15 minutes out because they were out of gas. So it wasn't like they could fly for hours filming us. We only got filming on the last 15 minutes of the flight. The wildest thing to me is refueling in air.

Did you do that? Oh, yeah, for years in the F-16. That seems so nuts. Yeah. It's not easy because the plane drill is sensitive, and you don't want to get too crazy because you'll break the boom and get a nickname out of that. So, yeah, it's a –

Get a nickname out of that? You'll get a call sign. Like if you go up and you break the tanker, your buddies will give you a call sign afterwards um for doing something stupid so you but by breaking the boom you mean breaking the arm yeah there's this long connects the yeah this long metal gas tube you're talking to morons help me out so yeah you pull it's a it's a tanker right it's a it's a kc-135 or a boeing you pull up underneath of it and there's a guy in the boeing that's flying this boom.

It's this long metal tube, but it's got little wings on it. So he flies it up, down, left, and right. And you're supposed to be just rock steady. And he inserts it into your plane? He'll put it in, yep. Whereas the Navy system, it's probe and drogue, so there's this big basket, and they fly up and they put it in the basket.

But it's a lot. You don't get as much gas with the big tube system that the Air Force has. You can pump the gas a lot quicker, so you can get more airplanes on and off the tanker. There it is. That's an F-4. 1959, you can buy it for $3 million. That's a bargain. You probably negotiate it down a little bit.

This is the more expensive one. a couple for under 500 grand on here yeah I would think that those that's you know that only about 255 grand yeah yeah wow it's a nap l39 there's a t30 I flew one of those at test pot school 210 grand hey yeah really well the problem is not a line the purchase price the problems that make the maintenance. The L39 is the most popular one. Dying in it. Yeah, there's that. You can buy a Harrier around.

There's an L39. How much has the technology changed in something from 1992 versus 2020? The technology is all in the avionics. I mean, jets jets you got a the compressor the combustion and the turbine has been the same since the 1940s jet engines um suck bang blow i think is the how we learned it at test pilot school it's the same technology but the avionics and the stealth or what's the new thing this is inside the 92 when we were just looking at. Oh, so it looks like they upgraded the system. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's obviously an aftermarket system. Yeah. So the F-35 is a new fighter that we have. So that's like a fighter plane rest. There's an iPad. I didn't realize that. It's a resto mod.

It's like what they do with like old muscle cars. Exactly. Wow. So what I was going to get at was that you you'd obviously been high above the earth and flying in fighter jets how much of a difference in perspective is it being a fighter jet pilot to being in actual space there's a lot of really important similarities in fact i think the the best training that we do as astronauts is in jets. NASA has T-38s, which you could probably buy some of those on the civilian market. It's a supersonic trainer. And the stick and rudder skills of how to land a

T-38 don't matter. You're not doing that in space. But the mental skill of having situational awareness and being able to stay ahead of the jet. You know, you're flying at 300 knots or 500 knots. So things are happening fast and you're out of gas as soon as you take off and there's bad, there's Texas thunderstorms. And so that being able to think under pressure, um, and it's not a simulator. If you're in a simulator and you crash the shuttle, you hit pause and then you go to lunch, but t-38 there's no pause button so it really helps astronauts especially those who were not fighter pilots in the previous life just get used to working 38 is what is it it's not a simulator it's a jet it's a just a jet they have them here in san antonio so what you're saying is that flying this jet prepares you for space travel

just because of the fact that it's difficult to do and because the principles apply yeah there's an asset t-38 that's tennis that's in Mississippi that's the rocket test stand yeah we looking piece of equipment it's amazing it's really cool and so when you're flying a jet it's just like flying in a spaceship. Like things are happening fast. You have to anticipate a couple moves in front of the jet. You have to, you know, stay calm when something bad happens. I flew with the Blue Angels once.

Oh, wow. In FAA team. Yeah, that's awesome. Wild. Yeah. It's wild. Yeah, that's awesome. The feeling of G-force, you need to experience that just to understand.

What it's like to get smashed down. Just get smushed and see your consciousness closing. Yeah. It's pretty wild. They taught you the G-maneuver where you squeeze your legs and your stomach. Hook, hook, hook, all that kind of shit. Exactly. Yeah, it's pretty wild.

Yeah, that's awesome. But how much difference is it perspective-wise when you're in space and you're looking down on the Earth? Like that has got to be the ultimate mindfuck. It's amazing. So this is what I'm trying to do in life. Like a couple books I've written, some films I've done. Seeing the Earth, I remember early in my first flight, it was like, okay, I'm in outer space and there's my planet over there. It was this profound thought that, wow, I'm not on the planet anymore.

And over seven months in space, it never got old. It was always like, man, Earth is beautiful. It is this incredible planet. And so we could talk for hours about this. planet. And so there's so we could talk for hours about this. But I think for me, the biggest perspective change was, I'm less of a black and white person now. Like, before I went into space, I knew right and wrong. And a lot of when you're young, you kind of, you're black and white, as you get older, you get wiser. And seeing the planets, seeing the planet, it's like, yeah, this thing's been around for a long time and it's going to be

around for a long time so you probably don't need to get as uptight about you know the day-to-day stress of life and um it's uh it just kind of put things in perspective like don't get too excited about the kardashians or whatever the latest political tweet was or whatever um like you know things are going to go on for a long time. And so that it helps put that in perspective in a big way. It's interesting that an actual physical perspective change, just being, just being in a different place where you're looking down on it from a different vantage point. Yeah. All the astronauts seem to say that.

Yeah. It has this profound shift in how you think of earth and how you think of humanity in general. Yeah. You know, one of the interesting things I've been traveling since I was a kid, I did some exchange, uh, programs in Finland and France and in the air force, I lived all around the world. And whenever I would go to France or Korea or wherever, it was like, all right, I'm in Korea. And then I get back to the States. I'm like, all right, I'm back, back home in America or whatever. And now when I travel and I've been traveling a'm like, all right, I'm back home in America or whatever. And now when I travel,

and I've been traveling a lot the last couple of years, I don't ever, I always feel like I'm home. Like it was weird. One time I landed in the Middle East and I remember thinking, I didn't think anything. And that really struck me because it used to always be such a big deal wherever I landed.

I kind of feel like I'm home no matter where I'm at, which is interesting. And that's from the space travel. It is. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It wasn't conscious. I didn't like expect it or whatever. I just realized that, hey, I don't ever, I don't ever feel like I'm not at home. And my, my crewmate, Samantha said something really profound. She said, um, like you see earth and you can tell it's going

around the sun. You can actually see the motion sometimes if you're watching stars and stuff. And it's like we're on this spaceship together, so we ought to be crewmates and not just passengers. Yeah. We all ought to kind of take care of the planet and ourselves, each other and stuff. Do you find that most of the or many of the astronauts share this similar perspective shift that once you go up,

you do realize how weird it is that there are these tribal differences between us. Yeah. You're like, what the hell are we doing? I got a story about that. But to be honest, we're probably not the best communicators of emotion. You know, like, you know, we're not necessarily all touchy feely people. But some of my close friends that we talk about this, there's a very, there's a very similar perspective of, you know, we're all here on the, on the planet together. I was on my first flight on the shuttle and it was the fifth. I remember it was the fifth night there. And I looked out, we were going on the Mediterranean at night and you could see there's this like U shape where there's Egypt and the Nile, there's Israel and Syria and Lebanon are right there could see there's this like u-shape where there's egypt and the nile there's israel

and syria and lebanon are right there and there's turkey and greece and it's this little area and israel is this little thing that's surrounded by jordan and lebanon you know they're all like right there and i remember thinking like guys what's the problem man you're you're you're literally living together on a postage stamp on this big planet. And it wasn't anything about Israel or the Middle East specifically. It was more like, why can we not get along? There's humans. We're all down here. Yeah.

And the crazy thing is, if you ask most people, their position is they'll never be peace in the Middle East. So. Which is crazy. One of the things, after my flight, they'd sent us to Congress and we talked to congressmen and senators. And I got to talk at the white house a couple of years ago at the national space council. And my message to them is always the same. It's always, you know, to, for a space program, it's not about the rocket science. It's about the political science. Like we got to figure out politics to get things working well. And whenever I go to the American Congress, they're always like, you're right. It's exactly right. If it wasn't for those other fuckers on the other side,

we could get this right. Republicans and Democrats all said that they all totally agreed with me and it was always the other guy's fault. There's definitely a problem that is going to be tough to overcome. How much benefit would there be in getting those people in space? Yeah, you know, people talk about that. If only that leaders could go into space and I think for some of them it would make an impact and. And some of them, they wouldn't care. I mean, there's this, well, the goal of politics and power is just to keep yourself in power and get more stuff for yourself. And, you know, throughout human history, it's not normally, you know, altruistic democracies, the way we run ourselves. So, which we need to move in that direction because that's the way life gets better.

But I think some it would benefit and some it wouldn't. The thing is like, no one really wants the job that is balanced and healthy and intelligent and has a good perspective for humanity. The people that want the job, they want to be the king poobah.

They want to be the big dog. It's just a weird kind of person that wants that job in the first place it's uh people are like why don't you run for office and and i always say well do you have give me a fork you have a fork because i want to stick that in my eye because that would be more fun than you know you try and do something nice and you're just getting non-stop hate mail and yeah yeah it's a rough girlfriends from high school testifying before congress this thing that happened 30 years ago yeah exactly it's um it's fascinating to me how many of the astronauts do have this incredibly profound experience again just from the physical act of being above earth looking down on it where this perspective shift just kind of

changes your your overall thoughts about being in space being being a part of humanity on this organic spaceship in the universe rather than being like locked down in chicago right there's clouds above you so i don't even think about space you know dude stuck in traffic on your way to work every day same grind every you get stuck in this narrow-minded perspective almost every astronaut who discusses this says that it was a profound life-changing moment to look at earth from above yeah it was and you know i can like close my if i'm in one of those shitty situations, you just close your eyes and it's like, right now the sun is rising somewhere. That's the most beautiful thing. You can't imagine it. You know, I try, I took a lot of pictures,

I did movies, but unless you see it with your eyes, you know, you can't imagine how awesome it is. So that takes the edge off the traffic you're having to wait on. And, um, it does help. But the, the thing is like taking that experience and sharing it with as many people as possible when do you think that's going to be commercially available where where people are going to be able to go up there and like regular folks so people always are like when can regular folks go into space and i always say well clearly regular people haven't been in a space i mean i well i don't know who am I. Like some middle class guy from Maryland.

Yeah, but you're an astronaut. I wasn't born an astronaut. I understand, but you worked really hard to get to the position where they decided to put you in space. Right. What I want to talk about is like Mike, the UPS driver. Right. When can he go into space? Yeah, like his wife buys him a ticket.

Oh, shit, I'm going to space. Well, if he can save up a couple hundred thousand dollars, I think next year. That's a little problematic. When is it going to be like two grand? Yeah. That may never happen. It's a question of energy, right? It's one half MV squared.

And if you want to go 500 miles an hour, you can spend 49 bucks on Southwest Airlines and go from Austin to Phoenix, right? Right. You can spend 49 bucks on Southwest Airlines and go from Austin to Phoenix, right? Right. But you got to go 5,000 miles an hour to do a nice suborbital flight. And you got to go 17,000 miles an hour to go in orbit around the Earth. And it's MV squared, so the velocity is squared. So if you're going to double your speed, it's four times the energy, which is also roughly cost. It's not exactly cost, but, and if you're going to go, so from 500 to 17,000 is 30 times,

25 times, 30 times faster or more. So that's like, well, that's a lot more expensive to get into space. They're right now the way they've been doing, I mean, they're getting better at it, but it's really burning fuel, burning fuel with a propulsion engine that shoots you into space. When there's something that's better than that, that's when things can change pretty dramatically. Gravity sucks, man. When you get back from space, you're like, shit, man, this is heavy.

Gravity sucks. It's funny. If Earth were just a little bit bigger, we could never leave it. Like physics would not allow you to leave it because of the rocket equation. This Russian guy, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 100 years ago figured out that how fast you can go in a rocket is directly related to how fast your propellant goes out the back. So the faster you shoot your propellant out the back, the faster you can go forward, which makes sense. And when you burn a fuel and an oxidizer,

so chemical propulsion, you can only get it going so fast. You can't shoot stuff out the speed of light. You can't burn diesel. There's like a limit to how fast you can go. So if Earth were just a little bit bigger and gravity were just a little bit heavier, no one would ever be able to leave the planet, unless they figured out some other transportation system that physics says is probably not going to

happen anytime soon, for sure. Yeah. So is there any other propulsion methods that are on the table that you're trying to figure out? What are they? So I got a chapter in the book about how to get to Mars. So you can use normal chemical rocket, and it's a three-year trip to Mars. It's six to nine months to get there. By that time, Earth and Mars have gone around the sun, so you've got to wait a year and a half, and then six to nine months to come back. So it's a three-year round trip.

So it is possible to come back. Yeah, on a three-year round trip, which is a lot of food and underwear and spare parts to bring with you. If you use electric propulsion, which a lot of satellites use electric propulsion. So instead of burning something and shooting it out the back, you take an ionized gas like xenon or helium or hydrogen or something. You make an electric charge. You have an electric plate, and positive and positive, it repels itself. So you shoot ionized gas out backwards. It goes a lot faster.

It's a lower thrust level, so it's not as much force pushing you. It's a lower thrust level, so it's not as much force pushing you. But because the propellant goes faster and you're just using a little bit of propellant, you can burn it continuously for six months. Let me ask you this. The people that go to Mars that can come back in a year and a half, is that because they never land on Mars? That would have something to do with it. If you land on Mars, you're fucked, right? If you landed and then took right off, that would help you save time.

Because what I've been reading about Mars and the idea of terraforming and colonizing is that the people that go there are there forever. Like Buzz Aldrin and other people, like Elon, I think, wants to go live on Mars. He belongs there. My favorite part of... He'll make it awesome. Yeah. No smoking dope today, by the way, please. My favorite part of John Kennedy's speech, we commit to achieving the goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.

So that was my favorite part of his speech, was coming back earth yeah not just let him die up there i mean i would love to go to mars but i'd also love to come back yeah no stay here bro yeah right i know the earth is good there's a lot of good things i just don't see how much different it's gonna maybe you've already been to space yeah i mean it'd probably be pretty fascinating for a little while and then you're like well i guess i just live on mars three years yeah i know and there's nothing you know it's kind of dry and desert yeah well i i think space travels in our future in terms of like uh going to other planets i just wonder like how long it'll take before that's a thing where we really do colonize other planets i mean you think that's a thousand years from now is it 500 years from now?

The problem with colonizing planets, and you mentioned terraforming. So if you've got a small telescope, you can see the polar ice caps on Mars. You can see water on Mars from your backyard in Texas. The problem is, let's say you went up there and you melted all that water and you made an atmosphere. It would blow away really quickly because there's no magnetic field. See, the reason we have an atmosphere on Earth is because we have this magnetic field that protects us from the solar wind and from radiation. That's why we're alive today is because we have this magnetic field. Mars doesn't have that. So you can never terraform Mars, even though there's

books written about it, people talk about it. Really? The reality is the lack of that magnetic field means that no atmosphere, that's why there's no no Mars used to have an atmosphere and it's gone. What happened to Mars? They think it got hit, right? That's a good question. That's why we're sending probes and stuff there. It had the ultimate climate change.

I mean, it used to have like wet oceans and now it's the driest desert, you know, on earth is not as dry as Mars is. And what are the competing theories? They think one of them is an impact, right? Something hit it. Yeah.

I think honestly, I don't think they know yet. You know, there's, there's asteroids and stuff hit it. The lack of a magnetic field means that for sure the atmosphere is going to get blown away. Like they believe at one point in time it had a magnetic field? I don't think. I don't know. I don't think so.

So it never had an atmosphere? It could have cooled. As the planet cooled down, maybe you have to have iron spinning in the planet. The reason we have it is because the iron in the middle of Earth spins, and that's what creates the magnetic field. So as the planet cools, maybe the iron stops. But, man, I'm just a fighter pilot. I don't know. You got to bring in some scientists. and that's what creates the magnetic field. So as the planet cools, maybe the iron stops.

But man, I'm just a fighter pilot. I don't know. You got to bring in some scientists. What are your thoughts on extraterrestrial life? So that's a good question. I wrote a chapter about that too. So here's what I think. There's so many planets out there.

When you turn the lights off in the cupola on the space station and you let your eyes adjust, just like the stars are bright, you know, deep at night and deep in the heart of Texas. There's so many billions of stars. Like it makes, it makes what you see from earth dwarfs in comparison. There's so many billions of stars and we have these planet hunters that find planets around stars. So there's, there's a lot of planets out there. You'd think there would be life.

If there's life once, there should be life a billion times. But the other thing, Joe, I got to do a lot of experiments on my body. I did ultrasound on my brain and my eye and my heart and stuff on mice and plants. And I just don't think life just happens on its own. It's so complicated. Like, if you got this bottle of water here, if you had a pile of plastic for a billion years, it would never make a bottle of water. Like somebody had to make the water, right? So I, and life is infinitely more complicated than a bottle of water. So in my, I came out of my space

flight thinking from not religiously, but from a scientific point water. So I came out of my spaceflight thinking, not religiously, but from a scientific point of view, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. Like the universe is just too, the physics behind the weak electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force and how our bodies are made, it just points to design. So you'd think there would be aliens,

but I think if there are, somebody had to have something to do with somehow getting them started. Does it point to design in like the idea of intelligent design or does it point to a way that the universe is structured that encourages complexity and constant change? Right. And that these things and constant change. Right. And that these things adapt and change and shift,

and you have all these biological forces that are competing. Like, if you think about life on Earth, you have all these various biological forces that are competing for dominance, right? There's animals that are eating animals, animals that are taking over resources, and then you've got this one animal that figures out how to manipulate matter and how to manipulate environments and how to use its opposing thumbs and use its brain and the brain grows larger right you see like this process that this but this process all has to do with trying to adapt

trying to innovate and competing with all these other forces it seems like problems and and and difficulties present themselves and these organisms either make their way through these problems and come out on the other end adapted to them and better or they don't yeah this is this is the weirdness of life right and this is why 90% of all species that have ever existed are gone. I think it's more than 90. Yeah, they couldn't adapt. But in our minds, we instantly like to go to the simplest possible explanation, the simplest possible explanation being that there's some sort of a creator.

Yeah. Well, I don't think so. I'm just, I want to talk science, not religion. I'm a Christian, but I don't want to talk religion, but just, I don't know how it happened. It's not a simplistic, somebody just went poof and everything happened. Obviously there's, you know, things evolve and there's science behind it, which is the fun part of living is learning how stuff works and learning the science behind it. But like just at the end of the day, I think somebody had to set things in motion with a point of view.

I made a short... Here's the question. Yeah. Who set them in motion? Right. Ultimately, there had to have been somebody that... Before the Big Bang, right? I wrote a...

I did a short film this year called Cosmic Perspective. I want to turn it into a series. And I talk about how in the beginning of time, there were perfect imperfections. So when the Big Bang happened, if it was like perfectly uniform, the universe would just be this giant balloon, right? But the way it wasn't mass at the time, it was just energy. The way it was like started was a little bit imperfect. And that's why you have stars and galaxies and galaxy clusters and everything. So, and if it was a little bit off,

the whole universe wouldn't exist. Right. So it's just things point to that or yeah. What is your perspective on the big bang? Do you, there's a lot of people's views vary depending upon like what, what the most recent theories are. Yeah.

But some people believe that the universe started with the Big Bang, and some people believe that it's always existed, and it's a continuing cycle of Big Bangs, endless expansion, and then ultimately contraction, and then it starts all over again. And that there's infinite numbers of Big Bangs that are occurring through multiverses, various universes all over the world, all over the cosmos.

Right. So I'm reading this book right now called The End of Everything by a friend of mine. Katie Mack wrote it. It's about the end of the universe. And it's really cool. It talks about exactly what you're saying. So there was a big bang. You can see it, actually.

In the cosmic background radiation, there's this microwave anisotropy. It's like everything's not uniform, and you can see that. It's like two or three degrees Kelvin. It's really cold. So the question is, does it explode, and then does it shrink? The big crunch, you know, does it come back? They think there's a stuff called dark energy, so does it continue expanding? She calls it heat decay, or this other one's the

big rip where it just keeps on expanding, accelerating, and like even electrons can't, everything just disintegrates into nothing. And no one knows what's going to happen. But the really cool thing I was just reading the chapter about, as it expands super fast, I forgot the name of it, Boltzmann's brain or something. There's some weird thing where because of quantum physics, which is completely not understandable. If you say you understand quantum mechanics, you don't. Things can just randomly appear. So if the universe is going to be around for trillions of years, like in theory, at some point, two trillion years from now, Joe Rogan could just suddenly create itself out of nothing in the universe.

And you'd like look around and go, wow, what's going on? And then you disappear instantly because of quantum mechanics. So it's a really. Yeah. Explain that again. So the theory is you could have an entire universe just because of quantum mechanics, which is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, right? You can't know position and velocity. You can only know one or the other.

And an extension of that, again, man, I'm just a fighter pilot. I'm not a physicist. But things can just suddenly appear somewhere. And so given enough time, even though it's highly unlikely, this water bottle could create itself out of nothing just because of physics, quantum mechanics. I remember my teacher at the Air Force Academy used the example of all of the electrons and protons and stuff could suddenly move themselves and you could just fall through the floor. Now, the odds of that happening, it ain't going to happen for a trillion years, But these weird things can happen.

And so she uses this kind of cheeky, funny example of, you know, your brain could just suddenly create itself out of nothing. And given enough time, the probability would be that. So some people say the whole universe is just this temporary thing that created itself. But I don't know. It's very disconcerting when you hear them talk about quantum mechanics. You know what? I figured relativity out. You start very disconcerting when you hear them talk about quantum mechanics. That is, you know what? I figured relativity out. Because you start going, wait, what?

Exactly. Two things can exist simultaneously in different places. And one of them could be in motion, the other one could be still, and they're the same thing. Yeah. And they appear and disappear and what? And now there's quantum computers. Yeah, that's weird. Yeah.

Do you understand that? No. I don't think. No. I spoke at a conference and I followed the quantum computing guy. So it's cool stuff. I've had guys like Sean Carroll try to explain it to me on the podcast. It just goes in one of my chimp ears and out the other.

You and me both, man. Like I said, I'm a fan. I love it. It's cool to learn about it. It does make things seem a lot more mystical than just the standard sort of Newtonian physics perspective of life and gravity and matter and carbon-based life forms. When you start getting into just listening to what they're talking about,

when they're talking about quantum weirdness, and entanglements, and things in superposition, you're like, wait, what is the world made of? Right. Like, when you get down to the smallest possible measurement of life, the smallest things that you can measure, the world becomes magic. Yeah. On the smallest scale, and also on the biggest scale right well that's the weirdest part about the universe is that i'm inclined especially as i get older and i think about things more to think that everything is kind of fractal and what the universe is probably is it's probably a part of some

other organism some immense organism that's in a universe that's impossible for us to comprehend right vastness of it when you know there's a thing they just did recently where they mapped out the human they're talking about human brain cells and the universe and they were talking about human brain cells and the universe. And they were talking about the way the universe functions and the universe functions, the way it looks, like if you do a scan of the universe, like it looks far too similar to a human brain cell. This is a talk I want to do, Joe. So I saw these patterns from space. There's this one picture of a river in Indonesia I took. It looks like arteries,

like all these blood vessels coming out. And I remember thinking, there's all these patterns that repeat. The seashells, there's these spiral elliptical seashells, and then there's hurricanes. And then there's galaxies. And these patterns repeat from the microscopic to the macroscopic. It's really cool. It's amazing. And I don't understand them all, but they, in images, they, they're really cool. Have you ever seen videos on fractals where they show you things like the Mandelbrot set and how the, the, the closer you get to these fractals, the same sort of pattern repeats itself over and over and over again. And when people, it is one thing to comprehend it if someone's explaining it to you in a lecture,

but it's another thing now with the advent of CGI technology, you can see these fractals be repeated over and over and over again. And the Mandelbrot set is a particularly interesting one because it's so beautiful and weird. And each part of that, as they go deeper, see if you can find a video on it, because it's pretty badass. Mandelbrot set fractal demonstration. I know it's on YouTube.

But that these patterns, if the universe really is a part of an atom that's in a being. Right. Or a part of a cell that's in a being that exists. And, you know, the idea of infinity, too. Right. We think of the universe as being massive. It's 14 billion, like, that's not infinite. Right.

It's not even close. Right. 14 billion years is like nothing. No, it's not infinite. No. At all. So this is the Mandelbrot set, right? Oh, cool.

And so what these artists have done is as they zoom in, the Mandelbrot set repeats itself over and over and over and over again. And it just, it becomes the same exact thing at the lowest possible levels of, of, of comprehension or of illustration. They keep getting closer and closer to it. That's amazing. That's cool. I needed that.

I was a math major in college and I learned about fractals, but they didn't have videos back then. I needed this video to see it math major in college, and I learned about fractals, but they didn't have videos back then. I needed this video to see it. Well, this would blow you away, right? Because it shows it to you in a way that appeals to the brain. Right. And it's so hard for us to comprehend or to try to illustrate it ourself. This is the kind of shit that you see when you're on psychedelic drugs, too.

This is another reason why it makes me weird about a mushroom yeah yeah like if you go on a super trip like a real trip where you can't come back for four or five hours this is the kind of shit that you'll see and it makes you wonder like are you looking at the the very fabric of the cosmos itself? So I think there's a theory, string theory is kind of popular for small stuff, what electrons are made out of in the smallest subatomic level. And if I remember right, 10 to the minus 33rd meters, which is pretty small, but I think that's as small as you can get. Like there is a smallest particle.

You can't just keep on going infinitely smaller, just like you can't go infinitely bigger because the universe is a smallest particle. You can't just keep on going infinitely smaller. Just like you can't go infinitely bigger because the universe is only so big. So it is bounded. That can't happen forever, which is pretty well. Allegedly. Allegedly. But, you know, right. But, you know, 10 years from now, everything we think we know is going to be disproven.

Were you a Christian before you were an astronaut and a fighter pilot? I was, yeah. When I was a kid, I kind of made that decision on my own. So, yeah. Is there pushback against that at all in science and in dealing with these experiments that you're dealing with? Yeah. And being someone who's in space? Right. So I think some people take religion and try and torture science to fit their view of religion.

In the 1600s, the Catholic Church used to kill people if they said the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. And that's not at all what Christianity or the Bible says. It says very little about it. There's like a page or two in Genesis that basically says there was a beginning. First there was light, and then there was stars, then there was a planet, and then it had basic life and then more advanced life. Like if you read the Genesis creation story, it describes what happened. It describes it in the language of 5,000 years ago. Right.

It's not a cosmology textbook. It's two pages out of a thousand-page book that actually describes. So Einstein didn't believe that at all. He believed that the universe, the steady-state universe, and he eventually said it was the worst mistake of his life. But he didn't think there was a Big Bang. He thought everything just was forever. So in some ways, ironically, it kind of says what it is. some ways ironically um it kind of says what it is but from my perspective i just want to learn the science behind stuff and i don't get i don't think it conflicts with religion at all i mean i think just learning about stuff points to somebody really smart who's had something to do with making

it all the um the the interesting thing about these people that live 5,000 years ago that have this perception of things beginning and then the universe existing. They talk about God making the universe in six days. I think when we're talking about things like that and you're getting translations that are thousands and thousands of years old and no one even speaks those languages anymore. Like ancient Hebrew, which is the original language that the Bible was written in. Right. Good luck reading that.

I know. How many people can even read that? Right. And here's the thing. Six days in what inertial reference frame? Because six days for you was different than six days for me on the space station. Because that was a chapter in my book about relativity. I actually aged less than you did.

What does it really mean, days right there's a metaphor yeah it's expressions like you know the expression like when suicide bombers would uh believe they're going to get 72 virgins and right that's not really what it means but it means that 72 is just like a million like if a kid says how many how many pieces of candy you're gonna get i'm gonna get a million They don't really mean a million, right? Just that it's a it's a metaphor for it's a it's a phrase right for an enormous number, right? And it lets you know that it just lets you know that the universe was created in some orderly fashion. Yeah First there was light. Yeah, god said let there be light and there's the big bang was light

I mean, it was actually what physicists it took them thousands of years to figure out that that's what happened first it would be so fascinating to sit down if there was a way where you could do like Google Translate on people who live 5,000 years ago yes a time machine sit down with the very people who were trying to figure out how to write this stuff down yeah and that this is important information to pass on to other people. Like, how do you know this? Where are you getting this from?

Like, too much of it is applicable. Right. Like, they knew too much about human. Obviously, there's a lot of shit in there that's clearly been put in there by men. Yeah. Things like condoning slavery. Right. Treating women like second-class citizens.

But there's so much weirdness. There's so much knowledge in. But there's so much weirdness. There's so much knowledge in there. They had so much of an understanding of human nature and how to get along peacefully with each other. What are the principles of harmony? What are the rules that you can have to have a society function in a beautiful way. Well, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Yeah.

That's pretty good wisdom. Right. For people that were literally tooth and claw 5,000 years ago. That summarizes life. Know that piece of wisdom and live your life that way. You're going to be in pretty good shape. Everybody would be in pretty good shape if everybody lived by that. life that way you're gonna be in pretty good shape everybody would be pretty good shape if everybody lived by that do your do you feel without defining it as god or whatever you feel

like there's some sort of a creator that's responsible for all of this um or a creation force or something i do and and you know there's a religious aspect but i'm just going back to the scientific aspect like like an eyeball. How does an eyeball evolve? Because in theory, the cosmic ray hits the tadpole, and one guy, it gets mutated. But if you only have half of an eyeball, that's not going to help you out evolutionary. You're going to die, right? You kind of need the whole thing. Otherwise, all the intermediate steps are just you're in worse shape than your buddy

until the eyeball's working and can detect things. blood clotting how does you can't gradually get blood let's just start with the eyeball yeah you know there's parallel versions of the eyeball though that evolved in very different ways um in in in similar functions that you can see things using light but like the octopus right octopus. The octopus and human beings. Like, if you follow evolution and you go back to when a human being and an octopus had a common ancestor. Right.

I mean, how many millions of years is that? That would have been a long time ago. Long-ass time ago. But learning that stuff, I think, is cool. It doesn't threaten my... For me as a Christian, that doesn't threaten me i just want to learn about it i understand but i think that people want to simplify things and look at it in terms of that there's a creator that that's the reason why these eyeballs work the way they work and i think part of our problem is an inability to to not just to be able to comprehend it,

but a complete inability to recognize the scale of time. You can say it. You can say four and a half billion years ago, the earth was created, but that doesn't mean anything. It goes in there and it barely, you know the number. I know the right zeros to write down on a piece of paper. I can say the name four billion or eight billion or whatever whatever you know enormous number you want to talk about i don't think our brains can comprehend it yeah so when you're talking about

millions and millions of years of evolution until an eyeball pops up i think it's just such an incredible span of time and these changes that take place there there's shifts and natural selection and random mutations and adaptations and all these things are it's just so complex and it takes so long it's like we're you know the ant on the table can't understand the ceiling yeah and like we're ants on a two-dimensional plane. I think there's so much more. I don't want to pretend like I know anything because there's probably so much stuff that I haven't even scratched the surface of understanding. Yeah. Which is pretty cool, but it's fun to try and learn as much as we can about how stuff works.

It is. I just, I worry when people want to simplify it in terms of thinking of there's a person or there's a thing who created it. Because my take is always like, okay, who created the person? Who created the thing? Was God always just hanging around? He was bored. Right.

And then one day he decided, you know what? I'm tired of being bored. I'm going to make the whole universe. And then, or has there always been something? Has there always been something forever? Was there, even before the big bang was there what you talked about before where there's this insane expansion of things to the point where everything dissolves and disappears right and then somehow another on the other side

it contracts or are there infinite universes and each one of them has a lifespan and then there's just a constant cycle of new universes being birthed out of big bangs right like the thing we were talking about before the boltzman brain or whatever it was like that that's the besides the joe rogan getting reincarnated the whole universe could get reincarnated and so but that's the fun whenever you you mentioned simplify like i think man and religion tries to simplify things and and then it turns into ideology. And ideology is like the root of all evil. I think we need science.

We need to have an open mind and learn how stuff happened. Because once humans get involved, they tend to, they use it as a way to control people. Well, that's also why people get weirded out when someone discusses Christianity. Because it's not good. Why people get weirded out when someone discusses Christianity, because it's an ideology. And people worry that, especially a person who's a person of science, who works in science, who's religious as well, that you might have these little roadblocks that you put up where you won't look past your religion or your ideology to try to get a more nuanced perspective of a very, very complex issue. Right. And so you have to have an open mind as a scientist. But that also comes back to a bigger problem, not just science,

but certain groups preach tolerance. We have to be tolerant of each other as long as you believe, as long as you're ideologically pure from their view of things. Yeah. So there's very little tolerance for open discussion of anything today, right? Right, yeah. Cancel culture, whatever you want to call it. Well, it's also they're cowards.

Right. Because there's some religions that are horribly repressive, and they'll never criticize them at all. Right. Because they're scared of being labeled Islamophobic or labeled, you know, whatever, figure out the religion, whatever religion it is that you're discussing. People are worried about that, but they're never worried about criticizing Christianity. Right.

Criticizing Christianity is like a free token. It's encouraged, right? Yeah, it's encouraged. Right. But criticizing other religions, you know, then you're racist. Right. It's very strange. Like, it really is. It's an odd thing because I think there's genuine beauty in most religions.

You can learn a lot about human beings and the way they use ethics and morals in their life and what they've learned from their religion. When you watch the Muslims gather around Mecca and go around the circle, you don't think there's something kind of beautiful about that, amazing about that. They all peacefully get there. They all dress the same, and they all, like, move around this thing and show respect. Obviously, it's doing something for them. It has this profound effect on them.

Yeah. I've got a lot of friends who are Arabs. I spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I love them. They're awesome. There are some factions that say we've got to go blow ourselves up, and that's obviously wrong. There are some factions of Christianity that are like that too, right? 100%.

Absolutely. In America, right? And I guarantee you, if we were being invaded and attacked by Muslims all the time, there'd probably be some radical fundamentalist Christians that would want to do the same thing that some Muslim sects have done. Yeah, so getting into the—there's good and bad that come from religion. When it's used by people to keep themselves in power and repress other people, that's really bad. Yeah. And when it's used to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, that's really

good. You know, don't lie, cheat, or, you know, don't kill other people. Don't steal. Those are good ways to run society. I think some of the problems are the same problems that we were talking about earlier when we were talking about politicians. The problem is a person then takes control of the reins, and then their ego gets involved, and then they want to impose their rules and their structure on other people,

and then you get crazy fundamentalist pastors or radical imams and all these different people that are in control of the texts or in control of the leadership. When you see someone, whether it's Joel Osteen on stage in front of thousands and thousands of people leading them in this, like, is that really Christianity anymore? Or is that a cult of personality? That's like a guy. It's a cult of personality. There's a song called That's Not Jesus, and it talks about that. And it's whenever it comes down to God says you should do this or else, right. Then you end up with the crusades. Then you end up with suicide. Then you end up with the crazy inquisition. And that's, uh, you just described why we need term limits,

you know, religion starts, religion starts out as a good thing. And then it turned over time, you know, guys go to Washington, they're going to make the world better. And after 30 years there, they're corrupt. And so it and after 30 years there they're corrupt and so it's fun i just thought of that but it's true you know the same problem with religion happens in politics well the real shift of religion would take place if we were in contact with extraterrestrials that would be a crazy shit to see how people react right and what what would be the adjustment. How would they treat this? If there was undeniable proof of extraterrestrial life that's visiting Earth and then everyone knows it, it's real, it's as real as the NFL. It's real.

The NFL's not real. I heard it's real. Jamie's been to a game. It's all filmed in a studio in New Mexico. But if there was something along those lines that would be interesting to see uh how people adjust to the idea that not only is their life out there besides us that our our origin story is not unique and there's there's origin stories of countless planets yeah all throughout, and they're ahead of us. They're not just where we are right now in 2020.

They're where we're going to be in 3020. Right. Or even— 30,000. Yeah. Yeah. Who knows? Right.

Whatever it is. 30 million. So what you're describing is, like, super hard to take what you thought you believed and change your beliefs. Right. It's really hard to go. You think everything's one way you're thinking, you know, you have a certain ideology,

your certain worldview, and then to go, you know what? That was, that was not right. That was fucked up. I got to switch. Yeah.

That's hard. That's really hard for people to, I think in America with the, everything's been happening politically. Some people are going, I used to think this way, but maybe that was wrong. I try to encourage switching your mind as much as possible it's hard to do man it is but people have a hard time you can do it by like it has to be a principle

and the principle is just don't be married to your opinions right and don't don't defend them if they're wrong because you are you you are not your opinions and if you attach yourself to your opinions and you're married to those opinions and you have to defend them if you know they're not correct you lose respect for yourself and it becomes very bad that you get you get you put on blinders you get locked in and next thing you know you're joel olstein on stage in front of 20 or lindsey graham or you know other people that they used to say one thing. There's a book called Factfulness. Have you ever read that?

No. By Hans Rosling. Highly, highly, highly. You need to read it. Bill Gates recommended it about a year ago, and it's amazing. It's 10 reasons why the world is better than what you think it is. But the point of the book is don't your opinion, don't hold onto an opinion because you believe it, have opinions that are grounded in facts. And the point of the book is most people think the world's going down the tubes, everything is getting worse, there's war and famine. And the reality is most of human life

has gotten much better over the last 50 or 100 years. Yeah, we tend to concentrate on things that are dangerous, right? So we tend to concentrate on the problems we have, whether it's crime or violence or whatever it is. We think this is what we need to think about. This is the only thing there is. But there's so much that's good in the world that wasn't good before. Extreme poverty. It used to be the West and the rest, right?

Like America and Europe was developed and everybody else was developing now it's not like that man I travel around the world it's the center's KFC everywhere the buildings in Dubai the buildings and so probably not I don't think we're spreading our disease to everybody but um the point is the world has developed yeah and the people living in extreme poverty that percentage has really shrunk because of free market economies and liberal democracies in the last 50 years plus. These things have really transformed the world. And even Africa

is the most behind of all the continents, but all the trends are moving in the right direction there. Like the birth rates coming down, literacy rates going up, women, a lot of it comes down to how women are treated and places where women are treated better, all the metrics are better, the whole economy gets a lot better. So anyway, a lot of things in the world have gotten better. Hopefully we can continue that trend. And hopefully this current, this is kind of my mission, this current divisive universe we live in, hopefully that doesn't reverse it. Because if it does, it'll suck for life on Earth. And we need to keep things moving in the right direction.

Yeah, I'm hoping that we come out of this, that this is a bad wave that we're on. And we're going to come out on the other end and recognize that there's real value in community and in getting along with each other and coming to agreements and real danger and divisiveness and real danger and divisiveness and being completely locked into these tribal beliefs like red versus blue. But how do we come out of it? Young people. Young people growing up with a better perspective, listening to people that have gone through more in life and kind of understanding where the pitfalls lie,

understanding the mental pitfalls that exist, just the natural inclination that human beings have to be tribal and that these when you're blaming everything on the republicans or blaming everything in the democrats or blaming everything on you know whoever it is that's in power there's a lot to be said about being a human being in 2020 where it's pretty fucking amazing yeah even during the pandemic it's pretty amazing oh yeah and we need to accentuate the good stuff and concentrate on the good stuff well the things that we have in common are far more than the things that we have dispute over you see that from space but i have a lot of hope in young you know in america young people are not nearly as tribal as we were, you

know, by race, by religion, by country, whatever it is, we're, you know, old people tend to be very tribal and young people, they're happy to have someone from a different race friends, and they don't care what your religion is. And the high schoolers and college kids that I know have a, I think a pretty good attitude, We just need to make sure, you know, between the media, the things that they see, you know, AI, and I don't know where that's going, but that is a force that does not necessarily unite us. The incentives are to divide us and make you angry,

and that's where they get monetized. Do you worry about that in terms of, like, AI, like, in terms of algorithms for social media, which is, that's a big premise of the movie, The Social Dilemma. That's an amazing movie. It's amazing. I worry about it a lot. So Jim Cameron made these amazing films, Terminator, right? Where AI, whatever, the robots come to life and they fight us like a World War II scene.

Like in Star Wars, it's just World War II battles, big armies shooting each other. That's not the problem. The problem is they take over our lives. You've talked about this before. Those algorithms are not there to make sure that we all live in harmony and improve our lives. They're there to make sure they get more eyeballs and more revenue for advertisers and that kind of stuff. And the way to do that is by encouraging hate and anger and, oh my God, I can't believe they did that. And you click on the next one. Look at this, this guy's such a moron. And that's the kind of thing that generates a quick buck. It's not what improves our political system and our society. Yeah. It's really just, that's what people gravitate towards, unfortunately.

Those things are smart, right? They've figured out how humans work. But they're not trying to divide us. Like the misconception is that they're devising these algorithms to make sure that people fight. No, people like to fight. Right. They like to argue with each other about stuff.

And the things that attract, like my friend Ari, I've talked about this too many times. I apologize to people who have already heard it. But my friend Ari did an experiment where he only looked up puppies on YouTube and then all YouTube wanted to recommend to him was puppies just constant puppy videos so it's not necessarily that YouTube's trying to divide you right by showing you all these uh you know discussions on abortion or free will or philosophy or Antifa. Right, immigration, whatever.

Those are just the things that you're gravitating towards. Right. And it recognizes you're gravitating towards. If you shifted that and only started looking up self-improvement and exercise and diet, nutrition, that's all they would recommend to you then. Right. And it's artificial intelligence, right? So it it learns and it learns what works for you. And it, its goal is not to be evil. Its goal is just to make money because that's who programmed it. And unfortunately,

the way people work is if we're like, if we get this emotional response, then we'll do more and more of it and it figures that out. So the algorithms are like, it's a re well, they talk about the echo chamber. It's a self reinforcing, you know, self licking ice cream cone where it just, unfortunately it's taking us in a really bad direction. Right?

Well, that's why people like Trump supporters are absolutely 100% convinced that he won this election. There's been a massive fraud. Right. And Democrats are 100% convinced that he's delusional and there's no evidence whatsoever of voter fraud and if you look at a person who is a democrat who goes on youtube all the time you look at their youtube feed it's everything reinforcing those ideas cnn and msnbc and if you

go to someone who's a a hardcore trumper right everything is news backs sky news australia bright barred shit it's all stuff that's reinforcing the idea there's massive voter fraud so dangerous two different worlds it's so dangerous it's weird and i'm you know i'm a radical moderate i don't think i think we have to have a third party i think that we have three decades of data points that show that the two-party system doesn't work. I mean, they can't even pass a budget, right? And I was a math major. So there's this thing called a bell curve, right? Most everything in life is in the middle of the fat part of the curve. There's some extreme on the right, some extreme on the left. If you look at the batting average of catchers or how many people are in a Whole Foods or the average temperature in July. Everything's a bell curve. Right. And I think politics, most people are not radical. Right.

Most people are not radical left. A few people are and we should have a party for them. But most people want to have a job. They know we need some taxes. They don't want too much taxes. Yeah. We got to have police quit shooting people. They believe in reasonably moderate stuff. And the political system, you talk about the algorithms in social media, the political system has the same thing. The primary system, the way you do gerrymandering, all of this is a self-reinforcing mechanism

that promotes extreme right-wing candidates that are batshit crazy or AOC, right? And most people are not AOC and they're not QAnon. Most people are like, they just want their kids to have a good school and they want to have a good job. The problem is when people who are moderate Democrats and they support radical leftist ideas, or when people are moderate republicans but they support radical right you

know ideas the then other people start thinking like well that that's what the right is or that's what the left is and then they become more polarized right when when the people in their own party don't call out the ridiculous people on the fringes. Right. Like then those people define you. The most radical people in your party define your party. Exactly. That's because that's what the Republicans are saying. Oh, my God. Joe Biden's crazy socialist. We're going to be the Soviet Union.

No, he's not. He's the most normal guy in America. He's a wolf in sheep's clothing. This is what he's going to do. He's going to bring in a bunch of hardcore bankers and hedge fund people. And they're all going to run economic policy. They're all going to do he's going to bring in a bunch of hardcore bankers and hedge fund people and and they're all going to run economic policy they're all going to run they're going to be dealing with all the special interest groups and then they're going to have all these other people that are on that are talking all this left-wing woke shit and everyone's going to go see this is the most

progressive democratic candidate ever the best president ever but you're but it's going to be two different things going on simultaneously, and they're not going to call it out. All the same things they called out about the Trump administration, there's going to be a few people, like the really radical guys like Jimmy Dore that's got balls,

is going to talk against it, but there's going to be a tremendous amount of people that just go along with it because they don't want to be called out for not supporting the party. Well, they'll get a primary, right? The worst thing for a incumbent is to get primaried as a verb because of the system we have that's so perverted like you have to be as right as possible to win your primary yeah or you have to be as left socialist in san francisco right and god it's

bonkers we're saying you're 100 right we do need a third party and not just like libertarian or not ross perot we need like a real a real one yeah like one that everybody gets behind and goes hey this is this makes sense a radical centrist that's yeah that's me that's most people i think i think that's most people and if you had that then like sometimes the best thing would be if they got 40% of the vote. So then like some things they'd have to partner with the Republicans to get this through, or some things they have to partner with the Democrats to get that thing through. And then they'd actually have to make a deal to get stuff done. Whereas now, you know, Supreme Court justices used to be approved 90 to zero, not too long ago. And now, you know, you can't pass the Pledge of Allegiance and it's 51 to 49, you know, the partisanship.

And it's so insane. And like Putin doesn't have to do that much. He just has to watch us destroy from within. You know, his goal is to, of course, he wants America weakened. China wants America weakened. They're not trying to strengthen us. And they kind of just need to let us go do our own thing because we're doing it to ourselves well you know in their defense we want china weekend and we want russia weekend too it's it's a fucked up world and everybody needs to go to the

goddamn space station and look down from the sky and have a perspective that's different yeah just look at it that way how many world leaders have ever gone into space like that none of them uh well we just had mark kelly was my colleague astronaut he got elected into the senate so he's not a president something senator yeah um you know there's a few former astronauts that john glenn ran for president but he didn't make it um it's pretty it's pretty rare most politicians are politicians they're not they didn't have a useful career before they they were lawyers and they just kind of came up through the political ranks. But something like that. Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer.

He was a Naval Academy grad. So he was like, he wasn't an astronaut, but he was at least technically trained. He understood basic stuff. He also saw a UFO. He tried to put us on the metric system and lost elections. I remember that. I was in grammar school or whatever school I was in. basic stuff. He also saw a UFO. He tried to put us on the metric system and lost elections. I remember that. Yeah.

I was in grammar school or whatever school I was in. Yeah. And they tried to force soccer on us and the metric system. You got to fight the battles that are worth fighting. Those things will get you not elected. Well, the metric system was interesting because I was like, wow, this makes so much more sense than inches. Everything's in denominations of 10. The whole world uses it.

It's way better in every way. It's just Americans don't like it. Well, we could have learned that. That's not that goddamn hard. I'm writing a kid's book right now, and I think I'm going to do it all in metrics. Really? Just to get them used to kilometers and meters and kilograms. Well, muscle cars you have to keep in miles per hour. don't give a fuck what anybody says and airplanes you need in knots

nautical miles per hour and so the whole world everybody uses metric but airplanes are always in feet like their altitude is feet and uh because otherwise you got to do it by 300 meters which is weird and and knots yeah um meters versus yards like in the military when they're ranging targets and they're assessing like distance do they use meters i think they do because most soldiers talk in meters when you talk to them about stuff so for a fighter pilot the runway visibility range was in meters um or statute miles which it depended on the thing you were reading what's a statute mile a mile well this is what you see on interstate 10 is statute miles as opposed to a nautical mile oh what's the difference 15 so not nautical mile

because so one degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles so every minute is a nautical mile so if you're looking at a map you can just go there, there's five minutes, there's five miles. So it's a really convenient way to measure distance. That does make sense. It's just different than statute. The Brits, man. My buddy, British guy, was trying to explain money. And they've got like farthings and shillings and pence.

And it's one twelfth of this and it's one eighth of... I don't know how... That's an old system man i know well they also have fucking stone and they drive on the left side of the road ten stone i know ten stone like what is that i'll be back in a fortnight yeah oh that's but they do measure themselves in stones yeah oh when i used to do the ufc commentary in england i would do the weigh-in because i do the commentary for the weigh-in. Right. And so they would give me, you know, 155 pounds. And then I'll say, you know, like, 11 stone.

Like, whatever. I don't know. Was a stone 13 pounds? I don't know. I don't know. 14? 14 pounds. So if someone was fighting at 145 pounds it'd be like 10 stone five pounds

and and four pence yeah and they put stuff in the boot and the bonnet you know that's interesting too yeah the boot and the bonnet instead of the trunk and the hood yeah yeah it's uh i love them yeah oh i love them over there yeah but it. But it is interesting that their country and their system is so old. Right. Like, they still have the goddamn king and queen, but they don't mean anything anymore. Right. They have the prince and they have the queen, and they treat them like royalty. Yeah.

Like, when Meghan and Prince whatever his name is, Harry, is that what it is? He gets kicked out of the royal family. Everybody's like, aghast. Oh. Kicked out of the royal family. Getting more aghast oh kicked out of the royal family getting more hits than justin bieber probably on twitter yeah but it's just like royals right you guys have you still have the ancestors of the people who suppressed your ancestors you hold at high value like that's so bizarre i know it's that it's a very uniquely modern but yet bizarrely antiquated culture they

love it yeah i love the royals yeah well they love british culture british people love british culture yeah it's really fascinating i love it too that's pretty fun i'm kind of i'm still pissed about the burning the white house thing burning the white house in 1812 you know dolly madison had to like roll up the picture of george washington yeah but the brits came here they burned down our white house you're still upset about that yeah i don't know i'm holding the grudge let that go bro those those guys aren't even alive anymore i mean talk to my therapist get back to aliens yeah everybody's favorite do you know anybody's seen seen anything? You know, I have not

talked to people directly The weirdest thing, honestly, are those Navy videos that came out a few years ago Commander Fravor? Yeah Those things are just bizarre I talked to him Yeah, okay, was he on the show? Yeah

He's a very believable guy in the way he describes it He's not very believable guy in the way he describes it. Yeah. He's not crazy Area 51 guy. He's a fighter pilot. And he's had one experience. Right. That's it. Yeah.

But in talking to the other people that he worked with, those things would appear every couple of weeks. Yeah. They would find them and see them. They'd see them on radar. They'd track them. they would find them and see them. They'd see them on radar. They'd track them. Yeah. So I was, by that point, I was not, I was at NASA. I wasn't flying F-16, so I never heard about it.

But other guys had heard stories about it. And, you know, there's, you can look at the radar tapes and you can look at the HUD, the infrared HUD heads-up display, you know, the view out the front of the airplane. So you can see them and they're going up and down pretty fast. And, you know, so I don't know what it was um i don't know why an alien would fly to earth and then hide in the ocean and tease an f-18 and then never be seen again that's kind of weird but something weird was happening it wasn't it wasn't lightning it wasn't a cloud it wasn't you know a special i don't know what it was but it's definitely but you never got a chance to see anything when you were up there?

No. There's a YouTube video of me hiding in a UFO because this UFO came. I'm doing my spacewalk, and there's a flash of light or something, and then I just move my hand in front of it. And there's a guy, 10-minute commentary about... And there, Terry Virch just is blocking it. There's a UFO out there, and he... Oh, no.

Because clearly the other 10 cameras won't see it. The only camera that sees it is right here. So it's a UFO out there. Oh, no. Because clearly the other 10 cameras won't see it. The only camera that sees it is right here. So it's a conspiracy theory guy? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's total conspiracy theory. Oh, that's hilarious.

Well, I've seen ones where they're talking about people in the space station where they say that the space station is all green screen. And you can see there's a glitch in the video quality. Right. So they say, like, here you see there's an error and he's not even holding the hammer anymore you know like have you seen any of those videos i have heard those yeah i haven't watched them but i've heard about them we're on wires like sandra bullock and gravity yes um yeah yeah you know here's the thing people say excuse me um do we didn't land on the moon you know you can't see any stars well so, so Bill Clinton couldn't cover up Monica Lewinsky.

So how is NASA covering up 300,000 people? They convinced them all to never say a word for 50 years. Like, of course you can't cover anything up today because somebody's going to get a video of it. I think you could cover things up in the 60s a lot easier than you can cover things up today yeah but we got we got we got um satellites that are taking pictures of the apollo 11 lander and you can see the boot prints where they walked around and you know so um you can see in fact we just found one of the old boosters was up in space and it kind of came back to earth and the science astronomers just found junk they were just they just found old uh space stuff from rocket launches that they were trying to figure out what this object was that was uh

hurling around earth and they realized that it was one of those old boosters yeah which is pretty wild that we're like throwing giant metal tubes off into space, letting them float around out there. Deep space is fine, but I think one of the biggest problems humanity has is debris in lower-earth orbit. Well, have you ever seen a map of all the debris? Oh, yeah. It's just horrifying.

There's so many pieces of shit up there. Yeah, it's just a big, fat crayon of stuff. The Space Force tracks tens of thousands of these things. Space Force. Space Force. There's tens of, the Air Force, well, the Space Force tracks tens of thousands of these things. Space Force. Space Force. That's a new thing. Patrick Air Force Base

and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station just got renamed yesterday, I think. They're Patrick Space Force Base and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Now, when they say Space Force, what structure is there? Are there generals in the Space Force? Yeah. Is there fighter jets that can go into space? No, no, no. I was going to say that are in development,

like something that we could actually use to wage war in space? So we've had a Space Force for 50 years. I mean, the budget the military has is much bigger than NASA's budget, right? So we've been flying satellites in space. GPS is an air force program. There's spy satellites, there's communication satellites, there's weather, there's offensive capabilities and defensive capabilities. We've had that for years. The problem was it was organized in the Air Force working for a pilot who never did anything space in his whole career, or in the Navy. The Navy has its own little space command,

or the Army has its own space command. So it kind of didn't make sense to have all these space guys that are launching rockets and not flying satellites working for infantrymen, right, or a boat driver. So they kind of just organized it all together. So they didn't, like, create stormtroopers or X-wing fighters. They just, it was more of a reorganization thing. Personally, I think we need a cyber force also because those guys are super important.

You don't need a million of them, but you need, you know, tens of thousands of computer nerds that know how to do computer stuff. Um, cause it's really important. And there's no, today they're working for an infantry man and a boat driver and a pilot. And I think they need their own organization too. Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense, but this space force thing, how do they plan on expanding this? Like it just was named space force for the last couple of years, right? Right. And the idea is that we need to concentrate on the possibility that there will be military action that takes place in space. So when I was commander of the station, I had to maneuver the space station to avoid debris that the Chinese created back in 2007.

Really? So the Chinese military launched an anti-satellite weapon. They just wanted to show us that, hey, America, we can do this. They blew up a satellite a couple hundred miles up. And this debris is still there today. They're still maneuvering the station a couple times a year to avoid it. And so there is military action already in space. When did they do this?

When did they blow this up? 2007. Did anybody tell them, hey, assholes, if you do this? Well, no, they didn't ask. And to be honest, I think the general that did it probably got a life sentence or something. I think the Chinese were embarrassed about it because they realized what a disaster it was. Because all these satellites are now having to maneuver. The space station is having to maneuver to avoid the debris.

Unfortunately, our Indian friends did the same exact thing last year. They're beating their chest, look what we can do, and they blew up a satellite in low Earth orbit and created debris. So countries need to not do that shit, because this debris doesn't go away. Is there a way to catch it? No. Well, yeah, there is. It's going

eight kilometers a second. It's going five miles a second. So you could launch a rocket go up and and pick up this piece of metal that got blown up and you could grab it with a robotic arm and bring it back to earth there's 10 000 other pieces oh jesus that are going eight kilometers a second in other directions so then you need to launch another rocket to go pick up the other one what about like a net like a big net that you like scoop it all up it's going eight kilometers a second so it's got to be a strong net yeah um and they're they don't stay within a couple feet of each other

right they're gonna right diverge um so it's there are people trying to think of it there's really smart you know silicon valley tech if you could figure it out you could make a lot of money does anybody have any sort of viable plan um i've heard about some gel concepts where you just kind of move the thing and it gets stuck in it like a fly, not a fly net, but sort of like fly paper. Something like that. Yeah, that's how NASA did a mission years ago, Stardust, where they flew this gel through a comet's tail and all the particles got stuck in the gel. Going really fast, but particles got stuck in the gel going really fast but it got stuck and then it came back to earth and they dug through the gel and picked out these little dust particles wow so there's things you can do but the best thing to do is just don't create the mess yeah but we

already have so much mess up there right and then there's also satellites that are eventually gonna go dark so the russians had a satellite that died maybe 10 years ago, and it ran into an Iridium satellite, which is a satellite telephone satellite. So when you do sat phones, it goes through Iridium, one of the systems. Anyway, it exploded, made a bunch of mess. We got to maneuver the space station a couple of times a year to avoid that debris. So if you actually had a shooting war where some country said, you know what, America depends on, our military is dependent on satellites and we want to blind them. We want to poke them in the eye. It's a lot cheaper to build an anti-satellite weapon than it is a massive space infrastructure. So let's just shoot down their satellites.

The debris that that could cause could make access to low Earth orbit not possible for centuries or thousands of years. And these super constellations of these little satellites, SpaceX is launching one, Airbus is launching one, Starlink, they want to launch tens of thousands of small satellites that'll provide broadband, which is great for these African countries. They don't have broadband. It's an amazing thing if you could get it. The problem is there's tens of thousands of satellites flying around. And if 10% of them break, there's thousands of satellites flying around uncontrolled. So the risk to debris is pretty profound.

And there's no government organization regulating it. There's no FAA or Coast Guard or anything like that for space that regulates it what's the thought process behind it that eventually will figure out how to get it down and fix it I think the thought process is this guy up let's launch him and make money from it as soon as possible I think that's that's the thought process figure it out the rest cross that bridge when we come to it I mean I've talked to people top levels the US government they think it's a huge problem other you know PhDs CEOs you know U.S. government. They think it's a huge problem. Other PhDs, CEOs, I think it's a problem that not a lot of people are talking about. Yeah, it sounds terrifying.

The movie Gravity was based on that premise, the Kessler syndrome, where one satellite makes a cloud, and that hits 10 satellites, and that makes a bigger cloud, and it's this cascading effect. Hopefully it doesn't happen, but if it did, it would make a mess that's not clean-up-able. that hits 10 satellites and that makes a bigger cloud and this is cascading effect hopefully it doesn't happen but if it did it would make a mess that's not clean upable you know like we pollute a river we pollute a river you can stop polluting it you can clean it up within years or decades it'll clean up eventually but when you pollute space you know you may have to wait thousands of years for the stuff to decay we'll have have to call upon the aliens. Time lapse of space debris from 57 to 2015, it says.

Oh, yeah. Oh, God. I love this. I've seen this before. We're still in the 70s. Look at that. We're still in the 70s. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Now we're going off to geosynchronous orbit where there's all that stuff around the equators, all the communication satellites. And that's just 2015. Yeah. That's insane. Yeah. We're so gross.

Aliens must be like, these assholes. That's why they're not coming. They don't want to fly through that mess. Right. To get back to Earth. Like, legitimately, right? Yeah.

I bet it's probably really difficult to get through all that crap. You have to, you know, we used to have shuttle launch. We were waiting until the last second to launch a shuttle to see if there was going to be a, we call it a conjunction, when two pieces come together in orbit to make sure that wasn't going to happen. And it's a tough problem.

When I did my spacewalks on the outside of the station, you see lots of little divots like the size of this, you know, little divots like the size of this you know just little things where a piece of paint or a nut or a bolt or something hit it going eight kilometers a second a nut or a bolt from some satellite in the 70s something that you're right i mean it there's a certain point it's going to just go through it but a chip of paint would actually leave a dent yeah right i don't know what's like a pink um do you ever hear like i what i heard was like popping and creaking from the state when it gets hot and cold it expands and shrinks and expands and shrinks and but the first i remember my first flight i went into the european module the columbus module and all i was sleeping there and all night long it was just pop. And sometimes in my sleeping quarters, I'd hear this.

And I'm like, there's nothing I can do about it. There's no need to worry. Has anybody died up there? Not on the space station. That's amazing. Yeah, I wrote a chapter about what to do if, you know, what do you do with a body if your crewmate died? But thank God that hasn't happened. But, you you know we're humans and we don't last forever and uh what is this jamie oh

is that a glass hole is it like a paint it says it looks like it hit the window yeah wow flick of paint created that smashed window the windows the windows um are full of little holes that you you're like whoa i remember one morning we woke up and i saw that and i remember i had to take a picture and send it back that one this isn't it's like a test i think is what i said this is the damage that a half ounce of space debris can do it click on that so i can see the full yeah that that's what the that's what the little craters look like there's gravity so this must be right after gravity yeah yeah look at that that's what the craters look like yeah they're smaller

than that i guess wow yeah yeah fuck that it's kinetic energy one half mv squared right that's just a big v it's an insane impact so that's if we want to have commercial travel, space travel, they're going to have to sort that out. So the suborbital flights, it's not an issue because they go up to 100 kilometers and come right back down. They're not morbid. But yeah, for all space travel for the future, we need to manage debris smarter. And it has to be in a way that it can't just be America because every country can launch stuff. And it has to be in a way that it can't just be America because every country can launch stuff. Right.

So we really need a global cooperation to let everybody agree to not, you know, ruin Earth orbit. And if someone goes up there and gets hit with debris and then their spaceship blows up up there. Yeah. Then we're triple fucked, right? The shuttle actually had had these big payload bay doors, right? The things would open up. The radiators were there. And you had to have the radiators or it would overheat and die.

And when it came back, it was like somebody shot a.22 through it. There was this perfect hole that went right through the radiator. But luckily, it didn't hit the line where the fluid would have leaked out. But everybody went, holy shit, man. We got lucky on that one. Literally, it was the size of a.22 bullet hole god yeah so you're there for 200 days going i hope nothing hits because there's nothing you can do about it so i hate to keep harping on this uh alien thing but that's all i'm fascinated by when it comes to space travel you you never talked to anybody that saw anything

weird um not that i can tell you about oh no, no, not that you can tell me about. I'm joking. Yeah. I don't believe you're joking. Did you ever like, I mean, you're up there, you're seeing so many stars and so many,

I mean, you're, you're, you have this insane view of the universe as you were describing. Right. I think I would have just stared out the window all day. I would love to have, you know,

filmed it. I did as much as I could. The problem is it was all in my spare time. Cause they give you this. How much spare time do you get? Not a lot. all day I would love to have you know filmed it I did as much as I could the problem is it was all in my spare time because they give you this how much spare time do you get not a lot I mean maybe a couple hours at night but I would have a pocket full of little CF cards for my camera mm-hmm so once I had dinner I would always try anybody there I am in the cupola taking pictures Wow it was my favorite thing to do so and you see those little dots on the window

yeah there's something hit the window on the outside yeah it's the impact debris from a piece of paint or something wow yeah on the outside um a lot of paint flying around up there something something small but um so at night time is when i would download all the images i'd taken or i'd run down and try and take another picture or something like that. Because the day was just full of normal work. You got to work to earn your paycheck. But I was taking pictures whenever I could. Now, what has changed in terms of the materials that they use to construct these things?

Yeah. Because I know you wanted to talk about graphene. Yeah, graphene's amazing. Yeah. So I think it has some potential maybe radiation shielding or debris shielding because graphene, I don't know if you know much about it, but... A little bit. I've learned in the last couple of years helping a couple startups with it,

but it's basically a single layer of carbon, and it's in these hexagon, like six carbons bond together and another six and another six. And so it's like 20 times stronger than steel, more conductive electrically than copper. So you can make some amazing things out of graphene, nanotubes. The potential is massive, right? This stuff was only discovered in like 2004, I think. The guys won the Nobel or the prize for discovering this. But it's really hard to work with because it's so thin. It's hard and expensive to make. It's difficult to do stuff with it. But I think for space travel, because in space, everything's about mass and weight it's tens of thousands of dollars a pound to launch stuff so you can make stuff stronger and

lighter which is pretty important for anything in life but especially space travel and this how long has this existed for they discovered it in 2004 the Russian guy and a British guy in the UK and I think they were working with graphite so just pencil at a piece of and a British guy in the UK. And I think they were working with graphite. So just pencil lead, a piece of rock they pulled out of the ground. And the story goes that they were trying to shine it or grind it down and they were having a hard time. So a guy took a piece of tape and he's like, that's a really thin layer of carbon. So just like scotch tape pulled off this single layer of carbon atom that was this amazingly strong material. And there's a lot of promise there.

The problem is actually getting it into these products. Interesting. You can put it in like concrete or asphalt and it's, you know, 10% stronger cures, 10% quicker, which in construction is massive. The Rome airport just paved a taxiway with graphene infused asphalt, which is pretty cool. So imagine if you didn't look in, in, in Austin, there's not a lot of potholes, but imagine if you had roads without potholes, you know, how much money could the local government save and how many tires would be saved from that? There's a, if you could 3d print materials that were, that weren't just like bendable plastic, but were super steel, you know,

what, what applications could you do with that? Probably a lot of different things. And it would be incredibly light too. If you could do, yeah. If you could do plastic bags that were biodegradable or 50% less plastic because they were stronger. I know someone who's working on that who's actually demonstrated it. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Go back up there. Look at this. BAC debuts first ever graphene constructed vehicle. Look at that fucking car. Holy shit. You can also use it in tires. That's carbon fiber. That's carbon fiber.

So is that, what is it? Carbon fiber. You can infuse graphene into the carbon fiber. Yeah. Wow. So strength and lightweight qualities that surpass that of carbon fiber make graphene the potential game changer in the car world. According to a BAC press release, graphene is made of sheets of carbon that are just one atom thick and significantly lighter than standard carbon fiber it's also stronger than carbon fiber meaning that it can bring weight reductions around 20 percent while being 200

times stronger than steel there you go i missed a zero and you can also tires are made of something called carbon black which is just awful it's just nasty uh so if you can replace that with graphene or some percentage of it and goododyear has done that they've actually made I think they've got some bike tires for sale just like don't tires need to be sticky so they need to be soft like how are you going to do that with graphene you'd have if you you'd have to do it you need strength in a lot of it but the the where the rubber meets the road needs to be sticky so that would have to remain rubber you'd have to you know the they got a lot of smart phds doing this stuff but figuring out how to integrate it is not easy if it was everybody

would be doing it's been like the prompt the promise of tomorrow for the last 15 years and but i think some some folks are actually making materials and and products with it which is pretty amazing it is amazing when you think of the potential for innovation, whether it's graphene or different clean energy sources. I'm sure you've been in an electric car and you've driven one of those. They're preposterously fast. The acceleration is awesome. Yeah.

It's so strange. They're so superior. Right. I was driving my buddy's Ferrari. He's got a 488 like this. It's awesome. It's awesome. I got to drive a LaFerrari once.

It was awesome. A Tesla just buries it. 2.5, 0 to 60, whatever it is. Yeah, I have a Model S. It's insane. It's insanity. It's crazy, yeah. It's hard to believe.

The limiting factor is the tires. The tires can't keep up with the motor. And he's going to come out with that Roadster that's going to be significantly faster, half a second to 60, faster than that car. Really? Yeah. 1.9. 1.9, 0 to 60. Humans can't control that.

That's a dangerous. So fast. That is a dangerous car. Well, even a Ferrari, right? You'd think just some regular asshole like me or you could just go and buy one of those. Yeah. You don't have to have like race car skills. Ferrari skills.

Right, no. You don't have to be Jeff Probst. Nope. You can just be some. Yeah. You can be, or Randy Probst, I should say. Jeff Probst is a survivor guy, right? Whoops.

Randy Probst, race car driver. Had a crewmate at the Air Force Academy. Yeah, there's the. That's the. That's a roadster. That's real. Oh my God, race car driver. That had a crewmate at the Air Force Academy. That's the roadster? That's real. Oh, my God. That's insane.

60 miles an hour in 1.9 seconds. 250 miles an hour top speed. 600 miles. Wow. Yeah. It's going to be the fastest thing on the road. I need one of those. Oh, you definitely do.

Yeah. I definitely need one of those. But it's vaporware right now. Right now it's vaporware. And he's really concentrating on the truck, the Cybertruck, before he puts this thing out. Yeah. Which really sucks. I think some people actually bought it in advance, too.

Right? A couple of years ago. Put a deposit down. I don't think it's deposits, son. Right? Reservation. There you go. $250.

Bro, get the fuck out of here. I think it was supposed to be delivered already now. Yes, it has big delays but the stock's at 600 bucks that's good it's an amazing vehicle that's for sure it's amazing i need one of those but is there ever going to be a time where something like that can be used for space travel or for rocket travel like do we need obviously with a car you're dealing with friction and traction on the ground with the tires you just need something to spin the tires but with a jet engine or with a rocket you need to something to

push out the back to make you go forward right you're on the the right thing because it's the first minute that's the hardest part of any space flight because there's gravity, you're not moving, there's air, the air is really thick here, you go up 100,000 feet, there's hardly any air. So that initial part is like half of the energy required to get into space. And so there are some air launched options where you go up on an airplane and you drop down and then launch up into space. Paul Allen from Microsoft had a company. Unfortunately, they just went out of business.

Richard Branson has Virgin Orbit. So Virgin Galactic is the $250,000. You launch from an airplane, go up for five minutes, and come straight back down. And it's a quarter million dollars? It's a quarter million dollars. They're doing that right now? No.

They did it in 2004 for their first test flight. And here it is 2020. Hopefully next year they're going to do it for real. But they have Origin Orbit where instead of people, they put a big satellite on there and launch it into space. And the idea is instead of having boosters for the first stage, you have an airliner for the first stage. for the first stage, you have an airliner for the first stage, and that gets you to 500 miles an hour and 30,000 feet, which is a lot of the requirement to get into space. Didn't they used to – they did that with the space shuttle, right?

They did things where the space shuttle was on top of a plane. Yeah. That was called SALT, Shuttle Approach and Landing Testing. That was like 1977, I think, where they put it on a 747, and then the 747 pushed and the shuttle pulled up and then it just came in the land but that was just glide that was a glider enterprise space shuttle enterprise um the test landing virgin galactic is launching a historic human space flight this week oh i did not even know that very cool this is by friday they're to try to get it up.

Yeah. Wow. So they're coming to the end of their test program, and I would not be surprised if they're launching paying customers next year. Ah! You have to be really brave. There is risk. To be one of the early adopters.

There is definitely a risk. Didn't Elon's thing blow up yesterday? Yeah. Rockets blow up sometimes. What the fuck is that? What the fuck does that mean? The launch was fine. That's the landing part.

You need to have that part. You can't just not have the landing part. We say, you know, if you can walk away, that's a good landing. If you can if you can walk away that's a good landing if you can use the airplane again that's a great landing so well he is that's the whole process that they want to be able to use these things over and over again right right now when you were talking about the three explosions that happened in a row when they were coming to relieve you guys or bring you supplies but how how often do these things blow up like what what's the average not that often three in a row seems like it was a bad year yeah if there's three teslas in

a row that just blew up people would be freaking out and want pulled off the road right i know um the rockets are pretty reliable so the atlas which has been around for years the atlas 5 has never had a failure so knock on wood um the soyuz has been around for 50 years and it's less than five percent failure so they've had a lot of successes with that percent's a lot it's a few percent have failed one percent is 100 launch would you get on an airplane if 99 times out of 100 you get to land no no of course not no five percent is way more it's a lot more that's a lot that's every 100 five people die five five five things blow up we lost two fuck out of here that's so that's a lot we lost two out of 135 shuttles That's a lot.

We lost two out of 135 shuttles. So that's more than 1%. Yeah. 98.5% or something. How much of that could have been prevented? 100%. Both of those were not technical. You could figure out what the technical problems were, but they were management problems. The Challenger was a management problem.

I teach this course at Harvard Business School, and we talk about Challenger and Columbia, the case studies. They were both. It was the same mistake in both cases. The manager – there was a problem with the shuttle that was talking to them. It was talking to them. They knew about it. They knew about it. And people below them were saying, hey, this is a problem. This is a problem.

And they just kind of barreled full speed ahead. How do you feel about private businesses getting into space travel as opposed to NASA? I think it's great. I think that in general, the government is just a giant bureaucracy. It's the self-licking ice cream cone. You're just trying to get jobs for congressional districts. And when you look at today's government programs, they just take decades and cost billions and often don't produce very much. Private companies, on the other hand, can't raise taxes, so they got to get their stuff flying as fast as they can. So there's this incentive to, you know, if you blow something up, fix it and launch again the next day. So that's really good.

And you can get, you know, engineers going right out of college. And there's a lot of really great things about the private space. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, a guy named Tim Ellis at Relativity, who's amazing, this young, he's probably 30 years old now, has this amazing rocket company. And I think he's raised over 100 million in VC funding. So that's the good side of it. The bad side of it is they do blow up sometimes, and they don't necessarily have 50 years of lessons you know we always say they're written in blood like if the rules are written in blood because somebody died and you had to come up with a new rule yeah so you have to balance like for satellites it's great for people you got to have some adult supervision to keep you know to keep the engineers with their hair on fire under control a little bit. Do you think that competition within private industry, like you got Jeff Bezos company, you got Elon Musk company, Virgin Galactic,

you got all these different companies that are trying to compete against each other. Do you think that that is going to push innovation further than just relying on what you're saying? These bureaucrats. Yeah. Without it, there is no innovation. I mean, without the Yankees, the Red Sox are going to suck. Right. So you have to have in fighting, in life in general, you got to have competition or you're not going to, you won't push yourself to that next level. Right. And the Russians were always our competition during the initial space race, right?

So the fear of that Soviet flag on the moon forced Apollo 8 to go around the moon. forced Apollo 8 to go around the moon. I don't know if you know the story. We were going to do this slow buildup project, and then Apollo 1 fire happened. That slowed everything down. The Soviets had this big N1 moon rocket, and NASA made the really ballsy decision to send Apollo 8 on a lap around the moon,

which kind of sped up the moon landing by one or two missions that enabled it to land in 1969. Had they not made that kind of gutsy call, Apollo 11 probably would not have happened in 69. So sometimes you got to take a chance. And they're talking about putting some sort of a base on the moon. How feasible is that?

Well, you could do anything you want with enough money, right? With enough time and money, you could do whatever you want. So if you had a president that was motivated and you got the Congress and the Senate and the House, you got everybody behind him. Right. The American public's behind him. Right. Spend that money. Let's do it.

They could conceivably have a base on the moon where astronauts could go there, visit, do their stuff, and then come back the same way you do at the space station? Yeah, you'd need a special lander, like the funny looking moon lander. But yeah, you could do that for sure. We did, look, in 61, the beginning of 1961, nobody had ever flown in space. Eight and a half years later, Buzz and Neil were on the moon. In eight and a half years in 1960s, there was no iPhones, there was no computers. That's how fast we did it in the 60s. So you could definitely, if you had the money and you had the vision and you knew what you were going to do, that kind of thing definitely could happen. Yeah. That would be the ultimate

tourism. That would be pretty cool. I probably would have stuck around at NASA. What is this, tourism. That would be pretty cool. I probably would have stuck around at NASA. What is this, Jamie? Just within the last day released a plan for the detailed plan for 2024 moon base camp. Wow, that sounds ambitious.

Four years from now? Well, that was political. That was for Trump's second term. He came up with that date. You think he's full of shit. We're not landing on the moon in 2024 for sure. Um, but,

uh, the good news, the good thing about having a deadline is that it lights a fire, right? Yeah. And anything, if you're going to the gym, you got to have some,

you know, some goal, compelling reason to get it done. If you don't, you know, you're just going to be lazy and not get it done. So the advantage of having a deadline there, I think the reason we landed by 1969 is we didn't have quite enough time to do it. And we were able to do it. If you make a crazy thing, then you're never going to get there. Like if I say, I want to run a marathon in three hours, that's never going to happen. But if I go, I want to run a marathon without running, I could probably get there. So you have to have goals that are probably more,

you know, on the edge. You can't make some crazy goal. That's never going to happen. Being a part of this whole space program and having spent so much time in the space station, do you ever like just daydream and think, what is it going to be like a thousand years from now? What is it going to be like 5,000 years from now? it going to be like five thousand years from now yeah absolutely um it's it's pretty cool so i like science fiction as a kid i liked arthur clark and isaac asimov and stuff um and these guys were you know they're that's what they had they had bases on mercury and venus and stuff um so you you wonder you know can we get there and i think, it all comes back to politics, Joe. If we can figure out how to be smart about how we live our lives on Earth, we can do amazingly great things.

If it's all about fighting each other and stuff, then we're going to be cavemen again. But is this where private enterprise comes into play in terms of space travel? Because privately-funded space travel is not as saddled down by politics 100 that's the hope that i have for our space program is in good old-fashioned american innovation um there's nowhere else like it china claims that they have a private space program but they're just copying the spacex dragon capsule and it's government funded. So, um, I think America of all of our faults, our innovation is pretty damn good. And that's the, that's where we have our competitive advantage over the rest of the world. And we don't want to use it to like beat them. We want to use it to lead the world in the right direction. Like what is amongst other astronauts,

what is the feeling about the future of space travel? Are people divided? Are people optimistic? Or do they have, is there sort of a universal view of what the future is going to look like? Most astronauts are just worried about their next flight. Like how do they get the next space flight? And today that just means space station. Right. So that's kind of the main thing that people are focused on. There are definitely some visionaries. We'd fly in our T-38s to the Kennedy Space Center or whatever. We'd have an hour to sit there and talk, and we would always talk about, should we go onto the moon or should we go to Mars

or should we do a gateway? We'd always debate these policies. And I think most astronauts would like to see some exploration. Low-Earth orbit's great, but we want to go to the moon. We want to go to Mars. That's the kind of stuff that we want to do in the long term. I'm very disappointed that you don't know more people that have seen UFOs. That's a bummer to me.

I expected you to have like a gang of stories. Now we've got to turn the microphone off. Really? No. I'll turn it off. I need to know. I've become more fascinated over the last few years, like three or four years. And then after the New York Times story three years ago, the front page of the New York Times, they're talking about the footage that these fighter jets have acquired.

No, it's me. New York Times, CNN had a thing. The Washington Post had a thing. This is not UFOs.com. This is legitimate. It was a legitimate thing. I know the guy at the Pentagon that was running that office to look into it. And they're like, yeah, that was crazy.

We're not sure what it is. Does that, when you're in space and you're looking out that window, is that ever on your mind? That there's something out there? Here's the problem. So we talked earlier, are there aliens or not? There probably are. But the problem is those planets are far, far, far away. So if we launch Voyager, the Voyager probes back in the 70s,

the fastest thing humans have ever launched, if we launch them towards Alpha Centauri or Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, it would take them like 60,000 years or something. It would, you know, they're never going to get there. And to think about building a spaceship, and that was just a little small thing the size of this table, to build a spaceship big enough to hold hundreds and thousands of generations would be huge.

Like there probably isn't enough chemical propellant on Earth to launch something that fast that would take thousands of generations would be huge. Like there's never, there probably isn't enough chemical propellant on earth to launch something that fast that would take thousands of years. So the ability to get to these other stars is, I don't think it's ever going to happen. It's going to be thousands of years in the future. Well, this is with our limited understanding. With our understanding, right. There's a, there's a novel called the three body problem.

It's a Chinese novel by Xixian Liu. It's probably the most famous book on earth because it's Chinese. It's really a good book. And it's about sending people to Proxima Centauri. And the other problem is the propulsion is one thing, but just knowing that there's aliens there or not, if they were sending out signals, you know, we've been sending, you're going out into space right now. So a thousand years from now, our conversation is going to end up at some star in the middle of the galaxy. The problem is it's competing with the sun and the sun is a lot louder than our transmitter here, right? And so the signal to noise ratio, you would never be able to tell that there's aliens there. In this three body problem,

they invent this thing where we send a signal to jupiter and jupiter is a big amplifier right it's like your electric guitar amplifier but the science fiction writer understood signal noise ratio and he knew that nobody would ever be able to hear our signal so the two problems are how do you know that there's aliens there because unless they're sending out a flashlight brighter than their star which would destroy their planet we're never going to hear them or know unless they're sending out a flashlight brighter than their star which would destroy their planet um we're never going to hear them or know that they're there and then even if we knew they're there how do you launch something that's so far away it would take a thousand generations of people to get there whatever fravor saw um there was a measurement of this object that went from 60 000000 feet above sea level to one in

a second. It was better than the Tesla Roadster. A little bit quicker. A little bit quicker. So maybe there is technology that we don't have. Yeah. We certainly don't have it yet. We don't have it yet.

Yeah. But if they have it. They got the advantage. Well, that's why they're here. Because they can do that. You know what's funny? Why do aliens go to Roswell, New Mexico? Have you ever been to Roswell?

Well, that was also the place where they were. That was right after the war. This was Roswell, New Mexico. That Air Force base, that was a big part of our military. had that was a big part of our our our military yeah and there was uh there was i it was explained by uh james fox and jacques valet the significance of roswell in terms of like the the military in 1947 when that a lot of the nuclear program was out there in new mexico is where we did the trinity site the first nuclear weapon well it's also that's where Los Alamos Air Force Base is in New Mexico as well. There's a lot of nuclear weapon work that's done out there.

I would imagine if they were concerned with these silly territorial monkeys with nuclear weapons, that's where they would go, to where the weapons are. To take out the nuclear weapons. Well, the weapons were at Barksdale Air Force Base and Minot Air Force Base. Well, they probably went to a lot of these different places. Supposedly, there's a documentary that's out called The Phenomenon that shows all the different instances that were reported on military bases, Freedom of Information Act requests that showed things that happened in different places. And they seem to have concentrated on areas where there was nuclear weapons and areas where there was testing facilities after the first atomic bombs were dropped so after the trinity project after the

manhattan project when they started detonating nuclear bombs that's when the uptick of interest alien activity which makes sense yeah like if you're if you're following chimps in the congo right and then some chimp figures out like listen if i take this this bamboo thing and pack it full of dynamite right and light a fuse like if some crazy chimp figures some wild shit out how to make guns start fire and they they lead a bomb right you know they make a bomb and blow something up we would be fascinated like we blow up bombs all the time it's no big deal but if someone else did it like some other kind of primate that would be one of the most important discoveries in anthropology ever right right that would generate our interest so i would imagine if you were an advanced being

millions of years advanced of earth and then all of a sudden you get this signature that purpose-built nuclear bombs are being dropped on cities. This is not like some sort of a crazy reaction that happened naturally. These crazy monkeys got together and they made a bomb. And then they dropped it out of an airplane. On each other yeah on other on other chimps and wiped out half a million people just like that yeah i would say they'd visit i see i always thought if i was going to travel across the galaxy like i would go to the bahamas or hawaii or you know aspen or something like why that's a nicer place to go but the

weapons are probably a bigger threat, I guess. But don't you think just flying above the Earth is probably about as beautiful as anything you're ever going to see on the surface level? Who gives a shit about Aspen when you can fly over the whole thing and look at it with the stars? The stars have to be the most beautiful thing you can see. Yeah.

I had a telescope as a kid. I know the basic constellations. I know my way around the sky. I could never pick out anything in space. There are so many stars. There are so many billions of stars. I couldn't pick out Orion or the Big Dipper or Sirius or any of that stuff. You can see planets, but I could never.

You can see planets? Yeah. Planets show up because they're so bright. Jupiter is this giant orange, you know, Mars is this red thing. You know, one of the planets that was really cool, most humans have never seen it, I don't think,

is Mercury. Because it's always right next to the sun, so if you live somewhere where there's buildings or trees, you're not going to see Mercury. It's only visible right at sunset or sunrise. And in space, I saw it all the time. It was really cool. It's like a planet you sunset or sunrise and in space i saw it all the time it was really cool it's like a planet you never see from earth but i saw it from space a lot um i went to there it is look at that motherfucker whoa yeah that's pretty well is that what it looks

like well that's like a i think that's probably the minerals it looks like a it looks like a moon it looks like the moon yeah why is it uh why is it depicted in that color view like that i'm guessing that's an infrared shot and that's probably like different cobalt and silicon and oh i see so it's showing all the different elements and how do they know that i think they're scientists they're smart you know the nuclear thing i was flying at nellis air force base which is where we do our big exercises, red flag and stuff. Area 51 is out there and it's called the box. There's this big square. You're not allowed to fly through the box.

So we show up. It's the first mission. I'm the flight lead and we're flying and I'm like watching my map and there's bandits trying to shoot me down. And I'm like trying to avoid going into the box because that's a no-no. Like you're not allowed to fly into the box what happens if you fly into the box well so I'm flying along and I'm like holy shit where there's giant divots it's like a golf ball hit a sand trap divots everywhere except for they're miles wide and I'm like I don't see that on my map what is this and then all of a sudden on the radio spooky flight turned south immediately and

I'm like shit and I had flown into the box and the, our squadron weapons officer who back then you had to like type in the coordinates manually and they would draw lines on your display where you were navigating. But it was some, some person typed a coordinate in, he typed the wrong coordinates in my, in my display. So I was flying, you know, in the wrong area. And that's where all the nuclear testing was done. All these big divots was from where we were dropping bombs, either underground or above ground in the 50s. Whoa.

So then I got, my buddy and I, we got a free plane ticket home the next day. They sent you home? They sent, you get sent home if you fly in the box. Because if you fly in the box, it's an accident once. If you fly in the box a second time, it's not an accident. And it's a lot worse for you if you do that so they they just take that option off the table they don't even they don't even let you fly there again because they don't want you to accidentally

fly in it a second time wow yeah so is the idea that you'd be snooping around and you would find some government secrets i wasn't snooping i was trying to avoid getting shot down by these bandits um but yeah they don't they don't want you to, they don't even mess with it. It's like, if you do it once, you get one get out of jail free card. So I had to fly back. We got a picture of us. We got a selfie in front of the base,

smiling like we got sent home from Red Flag. How wild is that though? You're flying over those places where they detonated those bombs. It was pretty cool, but I'm like, I wonder if there's any radiation here. You know, what's going on? Is there still? I'm sure there's some.

That stuff takes thousands of years to go away. But, I mean, is there some that's in the air as you're flying over it? Would that be? I don't think it's much. I mean, if Las Vegas isn't that far away, it's only. That might explain a lot. Why Vegas is Vegas. That might explain a lot Why the Vegas is Vegas that might explain a lot Yeah

But the the size of these things is if someone detonates a bomb under the ground and it leaves these divots Oh, yeah, you can see him for sure. Yeah, how big is it? um, I Mean I'm going 500 knots a couple. There you go. There are images of them. Maybe. I don't know if that's them or not. I was hoping you could say which ones. I don't.

This was a long time ago, but I just remember seeing these types of divots in the Nevada desert. Nuclear test site location from Google Earth. Look at that. There you go. Google Earth. Boom. Yeah. So, you know, it would go and then back down. Yeah. And you got to. There you go. Oh, my God. Google Earth. Boom. Yeah. So, you know, it would go, and then back down. Yeah.

And you got to, there you go. Yeah, you can see, when you're flying in an F-16 a couple hundred feet above the ground, you can definitely see those things. How many different places are you restricted from travel like that? Like Area 51. So, you can't fly around the White House. There's this, like, box around the White House that's bad if you fly in that. There's Adnelis Air Force Base.

There's restricted areas in a lot of places just because they're doing military stuff. But it's not like there's restricted areas and then there's the restricted areas. And the only ones I know of, that's the only one I know of is in Nevada. The other ones are all kind of they turn them while you're doing military training they're on and then if there's nobody flying they turn them off because the airliners want to save gas and fly through them so the airliners are constantly pushing the military to open up this space to let them fly through just to save gas so there's just a handful of them yeah there's not a lot there's not a lot of like super secret

places because area 51 was super secret for a long time but now everybody knows about area 51 it's like part of pop culture do you think there's some other areas that they have like area 51 area 50 but you don't you can't you can't talk about area 50 you can't i don't know i always laughed i'm like why is there it's like wd- 40. Right. Like, is there a WD 41? Like, is that, that's even better. That's a good question. I don't know. Is there that kind of questioning going on while you're in the military?

Do guys ask questions like that? We would laugh about it. I mean, to be honest, there's hundreds of thousands of guys in the military. So it's not like we're all, if let's say hypothetically, if there's the alien that is hidden in a, in a bunker, some bunker, right. They're not going to tell me about it. Like, why, why would they tell me about it? So that's the alien that is hidden in a bunker somewhere. Bunker, right. They're not going to tell me about it. Like, why would they tell me about it?

That's the problem. That would drive me nuts if I worked there. Right. I'd be like, I need to know. I need to be friends with the guy who knows. Well, that's the problem, right? But that kind of stuff is kind of the crazy stuff. But there is some need.

I understand the distrust of government. But, like, you've got gotta be able to have secrets. Well, you have to definitely do if there's other countries out there. Yeah. Right. There's countries that everybody doesn't have our best interest in mind. No.

And you know, I know there's, there's conspiracy theories and the government's doing this and that. I was in the air force for 30 years and people, the people are good people and they, you know, they're just trying to keep us safe. And they're not like super MIT PhDs with all this crazy stuff. They're just doing their going to work from nine to five, doing their job, trying to.

And they find out some information that, you know, some country is trying to do something. Those are secrets that we have to be able to keep, because when they get out, the people that learn those secrets get killed, right? If you release intel, if it's gathered from a satellite, that's bad because now they know what our satellite can do. If it's gathered from a person, that's really bad because you're putting people at risk when you release secrets to the world. Now, when you get out and you write a book, do you have to vet that book? Does that book have to go through department of

defense or someone where they have to read it does yeah my first the first book i wrote for national geographic i sent it to the um air force space command to look there but there's nothing secret in it all those pictures of earth and stories from being an astronaut um but other guys like i got a navy seal buddy uh a guy named clint emerson uh he I got a Navy SEAL buddy, um, a guy named Clint Emerson. Uh, he's got a, it's a hassle, you know, cause he's talking about stuff that does need to be vetted. So they do have a process for making sure you're not releasing classified stuff. Yeah. Jack Carr, the novelist who's a friend of mine has been on the podcast before Navy SEAL

who's writing these books, like these intense books about a Navy SEAL and all these adventures and different things. Like, he has to send all of his books in. Yeah. The SEALs are especially susceptible to that, because all their stuff is human, right? So in his books, it'll say redacted. He'll literally say, he'll type it out, redacted. He doesn't just put a black line?

He doesn't just put black lines? He just out redacted who doesn't just put a black line he'll just put black lines he just says redacted yeah so like all the different things where the name of the base was sensitive or the name of the the mission was sensitive yeah it's all redacted which kind of makes it more legit right because you know like this guy's talking about like actual real places and actual real missions and actual real, real things that have gone down. Right. But those are the stuff you want to know. But yeah. So they, yeah, there's definitely a, for guys like that, there's a whole process that you got to do it. Otherwise you're, you know,

you don't want to put your fellow seals or whatever people that who knows who they are, um, put them at risk. What was the feeling of like writing a book like what gave you the motivation to do that because it's yeah writing a book's a giant undertaking i you know if they had the award i would have won the least likely to write a book in high school man i sucked i never read any books in high school english class i got c's i was not a good english student and being in space you, seeing these amazing things, I just wanted to share the story with people. And so I came back.

The first book, I wrote it in two weeks. The publishers were just, they couldn't believe it. And then my second book, I wrote pretty quickly. I got interrupted by doing a movie. I got a chance to film a movie in the middle of it. But this How to Astronaut book that's out right now, I just wanted to share, I didn't want to write another memoir because there's a million astronaut memoirs. That story has been told. We don't need to tell it again. I wanted to talk about the cool aspects of spaceflight. Some of them you've thought about, flying jets, how do you do

emergencies in a space shuttle? How do you do medical training, that stuff. But other stuff you probably haven't thought about, um uh what do you do with a dead body have astronauts what do you do with a dead body well thankfully we haven't had to do it but there's a couple things you can do you can bring it back to earth you can put it in a one of these cargo ships and just have it burn up in the atmosphere um you can do a burial at sea where you kind of you know push it off and float away in space. Won't he become space debris? That's why you may not want to do that.

It depends on what orbit you're at. Or you put a parachute on him so that he'll decay within a few weeks. That would be a crazy scene in a Gravity-style movie. That would be a great scene. He slams into the space station some frozen dude that the Russians— Where did he come from? The Russians ejected him in the 1980s. That would be an amazing beginning.

That would be an amazing beginning to the moon. That's a great idea. Just see this frozen body coming at you like eight kilometers a second. Boom! Or if you're on the moon, you'd have to make the first cemetery, right? Yeah, first cemetery on the moon. Yeah. Yeah. Or if you're on the moon, you'd have to make the first cemetery, right? Yeah, first cemetery on the moon. Yeah. Or if you're on Mars.

Now there's like human biology there. Ooh, that's a problem, right? Might be. I would imagine it would be a giant problem. We do everything we can to not contaminate Mars, and it's called planetary defense. Well, we know there's no atmosphere on the moon, and Mars is a mess too, but it is possible that there's some sort of biological life in the crudest form on Mars, right? Yeah.

So if they contaminated that with a body, that could be a real issue. A thousand years from now, some astronauts go there and they would find life, but it came from this biological... Yeah, so that's why you don't want that to happen. I think there was one of the moon missions in the sixties, like a surveyor where they, the Apollo 12 landed and they got some parts that had been there for a couple of years and they brought it back and they still found bacteria if I remember right. Um, but there has been cases where you found bacteria that lived a long time in space

where you'd think the vacuum and the sun would have just destroyed it but it's it was still viable i guess well there's some life forms like tardigrades right those those little weird life is pretty tenacious yeah what are those that's what they're called right tardigrades those little bears i don't know you know i'm talking about no isn't that what they're called like at the bottom of the ocean or something? It's a very small, microscopic little animal that apparently can survive in space. Oh, wow. Yeah.

That's crazy. I had not heard of that. That's so funny. What are you laughing at? Huh? Okay. A crashed Israeli lunar lander spilled tardigrades on the moon. So that's a tardigrade, that little thing. That thing does not look like what you tardigrades on the moon. So that's a tardigrade, that little thing.

That thing does not look like what you want to meet on the moon. Yeah, and they can live up there. Wow. Yeah, they survive. Those little fuckers survive everything. That's insane. A few thousand. Oh, my God.

They call them water bears. That's crazy. That's nuts. Well, hopefully they're not there when we when the nasa guys go back yeah or they become something new see if something like that can survive yeah that's pretty well what is the before the crash site oh wow i think the engines shut that software problem or something and the engine shut down and how do they know that it had tardigrades did they bring them into space to see if they can survive it must have been one of their payloads

part of the part of the experiment that's crazy yeah they're supposed to be able to to survive in incredible environments yeah it's um it's kind of scary so we go through a lot of effort. Like you got to irradiate satellites and everybody's wearing their PPE just to make sure you don't get accidentally some Joe Rogan DNA going to Mars. Yeah, well, that's one of the theories about how life got here in the first place is panspermia, right?

The idea that asteroids and things carried all the building blocks of life. Yeah, like Prometheus. You remember that movie? Yes, yes. Where the alien like disintegrates himself asteroids and things carried all the building blocks of life yeah like prometheus you remember that movie yes yes where the alien like disintegrates himself into the water and that creates a very underrated movie prometheus yeah it was underrated i love the music the imagery was really good yeah it was cool the alien dudes were very weird looking they were all jacked he was like an alien race of bodybuilders Very strange The original Alien Yeah

How old were you when you saw that? Well I was 79 Yeah So I was probably 10, 12 Yeah 12-ish, yeah Yeah I was the same age

I saw that And it like Blew my mind Oh my god It's one of the greatest horror movies of all time It is It's so good There's a Russian version of that now

That's out Not a Russian version of it But their take on what would happen. It's called Sputnik I'm really good and it's all in subtitles right and it's out now. It's I'll watch it wild Alien suspense movie right it's the same sort of deal right where somebody gets contaminated, right? It's heavy. It was such a cool movie man you this thing that was scary you didn't see the alien yeah and you saw it at the end but it was like this things that you don't see i think are scarier well in that film for sure but the the special effects were pretty spectacular for what they had for 1979 yeah they were amazing but the thing about it is

you go to aliens which is the second one and now they're everywhere i didn't see them yeah and then they're also like they're stupid you could just shoot them right whereas alien one it's like it's really smart it's tracking people you know it knows how to sneak up on people an alien you were hunted yeah an alien too they're just shooting them bang bang bang they're killing a bunch of them is it world war ii II, but I didn't like Aliens. I liked Alien. Alien was just spectacular. Yeah.

It was so scary. It's also a movie where there's a female hero, and no one feels like they tried to force it down your throat. It wasn't political correct. No. She was amazing. Sigourney Weaver was spectacular. Ripley, I think.

Yeah, Ripley. You bought every second of that movie. Including the robot that sells people down the river. Ash. Yeah, that Ash. And his head was like sitting there. They blew his head off and he was still talking and green stuff. Yeah.

It was awesome. I was terrified. And Yafet Kodo. I just watched some old bond movie um and he was the villain in live and let die which was like the worst movie ever it was terrible yeah it was awful is that roger moore yeah it was his first it was his first one after when sean connery died i watched some james bond i'm like i don't remember i never saw this as a kid roger moore ones were kind of cheese they cheesy, but this one was the worst.

But Yafet Kodo was the bad guy, and he was, was he Parker in Alien? There it is. Roger Moore. Oh, yeah. There he is. That's him on the right. Those were cheeseball movies as opposed to like the Sean Connery movies. It was a different kind of bond.

You know, I watched Dr. No when Sean Connery died last month. It was a really good movie. I mean, for 1962, it was a good movie. Sean Connery was a beast. He was a beast. And then he had the forgettable ones. Like, what was the fucking guy's name? Really handsome fella.

Timothy, no. Timothy Dalton. Yeah. Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton. That one. Was Timothy Dalton Bond too? He was two or three movies, yeah. Really? I blocked that out.

He was like 89 or something. Pierce Brosnan was who I was thinking of. Those were like, they were made in the same factory that homogenizes milk. They took all the spice out of it. Daniel Craig's the best Bond.

He's the best. People don't like to think Craig's the best Bond. Daniel Craig's amazing. He's the best. He is hands down. People don't like to think he's the best because of Sean Connery. Fuck off. Daniel Craig's better. He's the best. I believe him. He's totally believable.

Sean Connery's a little overacting, but he was still great. But Daniel Craig's the best. Different era, different time. But in terms of looking at a guy and thinking he could be a fucking straight up killer, it's Daniel Craig. And he could be a fucking straight up killer. Yeah. It's Daniel Craig. And he's gone from 06 to 20. So he did almost 15 years of Bond.

Yeah. Which is, you got to be in shape, you know. I know, right? He's the best. He's the best. Yeah, look at all these. There's Timothy Dalton. How dare you?

Yeah. Pierce Brosnan. Get the fuck out of here. Who's that other dude? George Lazenby. What? He did one. Get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here who's that other dude george lazenby what he did one like get the fuck out of here get the fuck out of here and now who's gonna be bond i don't know i've heard some things gonna be a black chick there was a black guy non-binary trans woman no i don't know but he uh it's hard to

it's hard to beat daniel craig the only one didn't like, I just watched Quantum of Solace, and I did not like that movie. But all the other ones are spectacular. Well, they have a new one that they've been sitting on forever, and I just don't get it. Let it out. Come on, man. Make it streaming.

They want people to go to the movie theaters. They're not going to movie theaters anymore. I know. That shit's over. You've got to let it go. Then the theater loses hundreds of millions of dollars. Then the theater loses hundreds of millions of dollars, just like all the gyms, just like all the restaurants. Yeah. You got hit by COVID go. Then the theater loses hundreds of millions of dollars. Then the theater loses hundreds of millions of dollars. Just like all the gyms.

Just like all the restaurants. Yeah. You got hit by COVID. Yeah, I know. Release the fucking movie. Hey, I'm with you. But I'm not a shareholder. Yeah.

It just doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, they have Omega has released an official 007 watch. That's out. Yeah. The movie's out. Yeah. The movie's done. Yeah. Come on. Put it on iTunes.

Yeah, I know. Apple TV. Let me buy it. I don't know what they're going to do, but, man, it sucks to be a movie executive in 2020. Oh, well, cry me a river. Or exactly. It sucks to be a lot of people in 2020. Or a nurse or a school teacher that's what i'm

thinking yeah waitress yeah or someone owning a restaurant or a small business that got forced to close down absolutely yeah it's uh it's such a strange time such a strange time for for people yeah and i was looking forward to that movie so that may be one they just need to do something take one for the team release it yeah they're talking about releasing it in April, I think. Is that the... Online or it'll be in theaters. I think they're going to try to do it in theaters, but... Well, Tenet was in theaters and it didn't make...

The box office was terrible. I know. I know. Why would you risk your life to see them? They're not doing COVID tests at the theaters. Right. What are you doing? And the home... People got big TVs. Why would you risk your life to see them? They're not doing COVID tests at the theaters. What are you doing? And people got big TVs.

I don't even think you're really necessarily risking your life, but just the idea that you could be. I mean, how much more dangerous is it than going to a supermarket? Is Walgreens or Walmart less dangerous than sitting down in a movie theater? I don't know. I don't know. What has it been like for you this whole year? It was weird.

I was speaking a lot, corporate speaking. Still? Until March, and then it went from 100 to zero instantly. I've done a few things online. I did a thing for Google this morning, actually, but for the most part, that has come to an end. So I wrote a book, directed this short film, Cosmic Perspective. I'm trying to develop some of that. I've done a few things with startup companies, trying to help them as a tech advisor, which has been super cool. It's one of the things I want to do. So ironically, it's allowed me to,

my income went to zero, so that sucks, but it has given me some time to do some other things that I've wanted to do. Um, which, you know, you gotta, it is what it is. I can't control COVID. So all I can control is how I react to it. So. Yeah, that's a good perspective that, and that's the perspective that I think, um, a lot of, uh, intelligent adaptable people have used to realize like, Hey, this is what it is. And lucky to be healthy and alive, um, was, uh, adapt and move forward.

Darwin has a great quote. Um, it's not the strongest that survive. It's those who are most able to adapt. And the reality is life is different now. Like some businesses will come back, some won't. And you gotta be be, you got to kind of examine yourself and be brutally honest with yourself. Am I in something that's going to work, then I'll tough it out. Or am I not? And then I'll have to do other stuff, you know, so it's a tough, it's a hard thing to reinvent yourself. But I think some folks are going to have to do that if they're going to be successful in the future. Is this? Are you planning on once everything goes back to the way it was to continue the way you were doing things before with travel? And I hope not. I was traveling too much.

It's just not healthy. I was gone all the time. Um, there's, I've loved, like I got to know my house. I bought this new house, you know, last year and this year I'm like, Oh, this is nice being at home. So I, you know, I'm going to really try and minimize the amount of traveling I do in the future. Sometimes it's fun to go on a trip. I like traveling, but not as much. It was too, it was unhealthy before. Did you have strategies of how to minimize jet lag? Because you had the ultimate jet lag. Yeah, right. Well, going to space, but the two years of training for it.

We were going to Russia and Japan and Europe constantly. And I had to actually sleep shift because the training in Russia was nine to five. It wasn't. But when I travel now, I basically don't sleep shift because it's usually just for a couple of days.

So I just keep I stay on my American schedule and I don't try and learn how to wake up at eight in the morning. I just whatever I sleep when I'm tired. But if you're going to go somewhere for a few weeks, then you need to adapt. And that's sleep shifting is hard. So at NASA, Ambien was kind of the nuclear option to get you to sleep at night. So I would always, if I would go to Russia, I would take an Ambien. That would make sure I got at least one night of four or five or six hours of sleep. Because otherwise you're up all night. And then at eight in the morning, when it's time to work, you're falling asleep and that's not good. But before your first flight, they do this like medical testing where you have to go try, they give you a bag,

it's ibuprofen and antibiotics and Provigil was one of the things and Ambien. So you, you get like one of each. And when I went in there, they had a, the lady, I'll never forget. She had like a Provigil. And I said, well, don't, she was going to put it in like a, one of those Brown medicine things. And I was like, save the plastic. I don't, I'll just take it. And she looked at me, she's like, it's one o'clock in the afternoon. I'm like, yeah. She's like, well, this is provisional. I'm like, that stuff doesn't affect me. I take medicine at that, you know, whatever. So I took it. It was like two in the morning. I was laying in bed till I felt like wide awake.

You know, my eyes were in the air force. They had good, we called them go pills and no go pills to when you're flying across the ocean um and i i don't know what they were they just gave us medicine i took them but i know the pro vigil man that stuff i was like wide awake for like 14 hours so i've done new vigil i haven't done pro vigil but yeah it keeps you wide awake but it's not speedy which is weird right it's a weird kind of being awake. Your heart's not right. My heart wasn't racing or anything. It was just like I was wide awake. So they, you know, on my first flight, we had to do a 12-hour sleep shift.

So literally instead of waking up at 7 in the morning, we had to wake up at 7 at night kind of thing. And they put us in this room with like 1,000 lights because lights have a lot to do with your sleep cycle. That's why they have these night modes in your iPhones. with like a thousand lights, because lights have a lot to do with your sleep cycle. When you see blue, that's why you have these night modes in your iPhones. When you see blue light, your brain goes, oh, it's time, the sun's up, it's time to wake up. So, but I'm like, hey doc, look, I tried ProVigil, that's the nuclear option, is there anything else?

And they told me five hour energy. I mean, not to do a product endorsement, but I use those for my spacewalks and whatever. And it's not like some big wake you up thing. They just like kept me, they kept me alert, not as sleepy. And that, that's kind of what I used for not being sleepy. It's just a big dose of B vitamins. It's just a million grams of vitamin B. Yeah. Um, did you have strategies in terms of like, um, when you're traveling a lot, when you land, when you go to a place to try to get your body back on cycle? Melatonin was the one thing that changes your cycle. It doesn't help you go to sleep.

It just tells your brain that it's time to go to sleep, if that makes sense. Ambien knocks you out. I've never done that. If I'm not tired, I stay awake. Because I know too many people that have gotten addicted to sleeping pills. Right. You know the one, a better one than Ambien is Sonata.

In space, the only time I ever did it was the night before my spacewalks. I wanted to get some sleep. So I took a Sonata. Sonata, like, gets you to sleep, but it doesn't keep you asleep, and it's less dangerous. So that was the thing I used on the night before spacewalks. I didn't want to be, like, thinking through, you know, the night before spacewalks just to make i didn't want to be like we're thinking through you know the night before a fight is probably the same way

i don't know i just wanted to sleep and so i used that on those nights and i didn't have any problems and it doesn't there's no side effects and stuff ambien is you know psychedelic drug yeah it does some weird shit to you it does yeah yeah you don't here's the thing you don't want to do is ambient email so like if you if you take an email if you take an ambient the computer needs to be powered off in a different room because i did that a blanket i went to israel a long time ago and and i took ambient and then i woke up the next morning and i was like holy shit i looked on my laptop and there was all these emails in the outbox and I was like oh my god delete oh my god delete and I didn't go to sleep and thankfully the back in 2003 they didn't have Wi-Fi

so like they were all stuck in my outbox they didn't get sent but yeah you don't want to do ambient email no there's a lot of people that have done some really dumb shit on ambient it's yeah it's whatever it does to you Kevin James is a friend of mine you know King Queens Queens, he cooked a meal. Went to the store, bought food, cooked a meal, and then woke up in the morning and was ready to call the cops. Like, who fucking cooked in my house? Like, you forget everything. Yeah.

Well, talk to flight attendants. They've got good stories. The worst was I was going to Hong Kong a couple years ago, and I took my Ambien. I'm ready to go to bed. And then the plane broke. Oh, no. Yes. Oh, no.

And then you're in the airport? Yes, on Ambien. So you want to wait until you're airborne at 40,000 feet before you take your Ambien. How long does it take to kick in? Like 10 minutes. You can feel it coming on, too. How often do you take it? I haven How long does it take to kick in? Like 10 minutes. You can feel it coming on. How often do you take it? I haven't taken it for years.

I used to take it when I traveled with NASA because it would just get me... I knew a dude that I worked with who would take two every night. No, no, no. That's bad. That's what I said. That's bad. I would always take it on my first night in Europe or in Russia because I was going

to work the next day and I had to get a night of sleep. But yeah, and I never took it in space because if the alarm goes off and you're on ambient, that's not good. Well, it sounded like you had an easy time sleeping up there. I did. I didn't have any problem, man. I was always tired. Just from working hard. I think so.

And plus it's cool floating. I mean, when you're sleeping, you're floating, which is just amazing. And you, and you close your eyes and you don't know which way is up. And I had this weird thing where like I would close my eyes and I was pitching forward and I was doing, I was like rolling yet left and yawing right. It's for months. Whenever I closed my eyes, my brain, the neuro vestibular system, that was a signal that was going to my brain that I was doing this.

And then I'd open my eyes and it would stop immediately because the brain got the visual signal. And then after a few months, that stopped. Do you get a feeling like you're in motion when you're looking at the earth and it's very clear that you are, you're orbiting the earth? But do you have a feeling of motion? No. You have a feeling of falling. It feels like you're falling all the time because you're falling. That's what's happening, right? You're, there's still gravity. It's 90%. It's not as strong as here, but it's almost as strong as here, but you're going forward five miles a second. So as you fall towards the center of the earth, you're also moving forward. And that if you're at the exact right speed, that curve is the same shape as the earth and that's your orbit.

You know, if you slow down a little bit, your curve shrinks and that's how you come back. That's how you do your deer rip burn to come back to earth. You shrink your orbit a little bit at the right time. It hits the atmosphere at the right place to slow you down to land at the right spot. If you speed up, your orbit grows. If you go 25,000 miles an hour, not 17,000, you go to escape velocity, and that's how you get to the moon. So all you're doing, by changing your speed, you're shrinking or growing your orbit. But it feels like you're falling.

That's the sensation you have. Wow. It's like jumping off a diving board. You can get a second of falling. Or if you're in an airplane, if you've got a Cessna, you diving board you can get a second of falling or if you're in an airplane if you got a cessna you push forward you get a couple seconds but even though you're floating you still have this feeling of falling yes that's all the time and it never goes away until they turn gravity back on when you come back to earth and you hit the atmosphere that's the the next time you feel like you're not you know falling

that's so weird i never thought of that before so rookie there's like i had to mentally kind of get in my zen mode and don't don't flail because people flail when they fall i don't know why but we do and you have to not do that the first couple days because you could punch your crewmate you can hurt yourself because you really do think you feel like you're falling yeah is what it feels like wow i thought you just felt like there was no gravity you're just floating yeah the sensation is falling because that's exactly what's happening you are literally falling and moving forward so fast but you don't feel that motion in fact when you look at the earth It's moving like this is what it looks like. This is how fast it's moving which is kind of like in an airliner It's moving about that speed

So you're creeping your hands across the table for the people who just listen exactly and that's like that's about how fast stuff moves The problem is in in space. That's like a hundred miles right in an airliner. That's like one mile So I think people have a misconception of what's happening in orbit then because I think people think of orbit as being there's no gravity up there. No, there's lots of gravity. There's gravity everywhere in the universe.

You're creating gravity right now. Just from mass. And you're affecting Jupiter, right? You're pulling Jupiter a little bit towards this podcast. Not very much, but your gravity is going across the universe from your body it's not a lot gravity is pretty weak but the reason why things are floating in space is the same reason

why when you get on one of those gravity planes when they plunge zero g yeah and zero g when people are floating around well yeah it's because nothing's holding you are falling nothing's supporting you you're falling right yeah you go sky when you go skydiving you don't feel like you're falling because you hit 100 miles an hour of wind and it's pushing you yeah like you're supported by the wind if you were falling you would accelerate that's why base jumping is so cool because you actually accelerate for a couple seconds and then when you reach terminal velocity, you don't feel, the feeling is different because the air, the force from the air counteracts your weight. So it's like standing on the ground or something like that. But those first couple seconds, you get the butterflies and

you're falling and then you get the air supporting you. We do spacewalk training underwater in a pool and you're floating in the water, but the water is supporting you. So do spacewalk training underwater in a pool and you're floating in the water, but the water is supporting you. So your whole body's hanging in this suit. So you're not, you don't feel like you're falling cause you're not falling. You're. So is it a pool that's specifically designed for spacewalk training? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's different about the pool? It's big. They say it's the world's biggest and it has a little, a big.

The world's biggest pool. That's what they say. Yeah. It's pretty in houston is there videos of this pool yeah yeah and be great look up the nbl neutral buoyancy lab it's in houston so there's like a half of a space station and they used to have a space shuttle um they they build these like made for water modules that you can go crawl around and um it's super important i mean it's great training but you're not floating it's different so when you're preparing there it is there it is that's that's wild it's a whole base underwater yeah so those are when you're preparing for something like your mission when you stayed up there for 200 days right how much time in advance do you know about this and what

is what is it like what's the schedule like to prepare for something like that um so you go through askan training nasa likes to make you feel really important so you're an askan when you show up astronaut astronaut candidate um and then you hang around for years waiting to get assigned and then finally your turn comes you're going to space they assign you to a mission um and usually the training is somewhere between two and three years. You do spacewalk training to get ready. You learn about all the different – how do you handle emergencies on the American side? How do you handle them on the Russian side? How do you fly the robotic arm?

How do you do all the science experiments? There's just a lot of stuff to learn. You keep on learning Russian to get good at that. And so the training for your mission is about two years. And first of all, you're a backup. So there's some guys that are going to launch in front of you. So hopefully you don't have to fly, but if they get sick or something, you could fly. And then you wait around six months after they launch, then now you're a prime crew after you're a backup crew. And then six months later, you launch.

That's the typical thing, but sometimes it changes, but that's roughly what it is. So when you're doing this, is it, uh, do they confine your movements? Do they keep you from doing anything in specific?

Cause it seems like they have a lot invested in you. Yeah. If you're running around top gun, Tom Cruise style riding motorcycles and shit, it seems like. So I had like a self-imposed, I didn't go skiing. I didn't ski for

a couple years you know i don't want to break my arm or leg or anything um they had a rule you weren't allowed to fly uh you weren't allowed to do like air racing and there was this astronaut back in the 90s who said screw that and he went to the reno air races he was flying racing in there which is super dangerous and he i think he got knocked off his flight but then he came back and flew again then he was chief of the office so it didn't hurt him too bad but he got his pp slapped for that um so yeah there's there's there's certain things that you're not due but to be honest like you know i'm a colonel in the air force i'm an adult i can i know what i should do and shouldn't do so i kind of just took it easy for i didn't do any crazy stuff especially in the year before

flight but you're just it was your decision to not ski. It's not like they have like a list of things, like certain actors when they're like Keanu Reeves does a movie, they tell him not to ride motorcycles in his spare time. Right. Baseball players. There's a, he's got a sign.

You're not going to go skiing. Right. Um, so for me, I just did it self-imposed. I, there might've been a set of rules. I just don't remember it.

I'm not a big fan of rules But I also knew Don't you have to be a fan of rules to be an astronaut? You do You gotta obey most of them You reluctant rebel you Exactly Do they put you on a physical conditioning schedule

To prepare you for something like this? I would imagine the more conditioning you have The less you you're going to lose while you're up there. Absolutely. Plus spacewalking is brutal. That's a rough sport. I mean, that suit is pressurized at four pounds per square inch, which is 144 square inches per foot. So that's like 500 pounds per square foot. It's a lot of pressure to move that thing around. And you're in it for eight or nine hours. So just moving around in a spacewalk. So you do a spacewalk for eight or nine hours? You're supposed to be outside for six and a half,

but getting in and out of the suit takes roughly two hours. It's a lot of time you're in the spacesuit. Wow. And you move with your hands, and that glove is pressurized. So you're doing this, you know, forearm strength. Mine is nothing now, but we used to do kettlebells. Just we would do the elephant while you just walk around the gym carrying 40 pounds of kettlebells. Doing pull-ups is really good.

Anything that would get your forearm strength. Because that's the hardest thing to do is you're constantly squeezing and letting go. Wow. So, but is this like a, did they have a structured protocol to get you prepared for something like this? Yeah, they have, we call them get you prepared for something like this? Yeah, they have. We call them ACERS, Astronaut Strength and Conditioning. They're basically former NCAA football strength and conditioning guys that would come in, or gals, and help us. You'd go to the gym, dude, tell me what to do.

And they would just be like, all right, burpees. All right, go run this. We're squatting today. Whatever. They would just come up with the program. For me, that was good because otherwise I would just do the same thing every day and it wouldn't be that great. So having someone to crack the whip and tell you to do stuff was really good.

So it's almost like you're training for a fight. You're getting in condition. You're fighting against weightlessness. You are training for a fight, yeah. And the weightlessness is you falling. It feels like you're falling, yeah. One of thelessness is you falling. It feels like you're falling. Yeah. Well, you know, one of the coolest things about that, you feel like you're falling,

but you were asking about sleep. And so dreaming, when I was in space, I would dream about being in space. Like I remember in The Empire Strikes Back when there's the asteroids and there's like that scene, the worm comes out of the asteroid and stuff. I had that dream a lot. Like I'm just floating in space and there's rocks and it was just blah. It was completely nothing. It was black.

And then the Russians, one day I was floating through the middle and I heard this bird chirping and I stopped and I'm like, what was that? And I looked in node three on the exercise machine was Misha Kornienko, a Russian crewmate, amazing guy. He was a cop in Moscow before he was a cosmonaut. And, um, he was listening to this. I'm like, Misha, is there a bird in there? And he laughed. The Russian psychologist had sent him sounds from earth. So we got all these MP3 files of jungle noises and the waves at the beach and rain uh it was a glass clinking at a cafe and so it was like amazing the whole crew fell in love with this stuff um so i went to sleep for about a month i put my headset on plug it in the laptop and uh listen to rain and while i was listening and i would just sleep floating i did wasn't

connected to the wall because i was in my own little thing so i was literally floating um listening to rain and that month i would i dreamt of earth all my dreams were like running in a field or just being on earth and then i stopped i got tired of rain after a month and and then my dreams went back to like the blackness of space so my brain subconsciously knew somehow it triggered something wow yeah well consciously you knew you're in space so i'm assuming your subconscious your brain got the memo too right yeah wow that was pretty cool dude you've lived a cool life uh i mean it's just just the idea of doing the things you've done and to be able to come back and tell people about it that you've lived in a space station for 200 days. It's wild.

It was my childhood dream, too. I was very lucky in that I got to do what I dreamt about as a kid. Very cool. It was pretty awesome. Well, congratulations on everything, man. And your book, it's called How to Astronaut. Right. It was pretty awesome. Yeah. Well, congratulations on everything, man. And your book, it's called How to Astronaut. Right. It's available right now.

Just came out. Super excited about it. It's pretty cool. I tried to make it so it's not like for space nerds. It's for anybody. I use all the NASA acronyms and make fun of them. And I kind of try to talk in down-to-earth language. So men, women, old, young.

I try to bring the experience of spaceflight, some stuff you'd expect, some stuff you wouldn't. Well, the thing about astronauts is like to be the physical person that does that, you kind of got to be a little wild. It's a little bit different than just straight-up scientists. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

You know, and we hire scientists to be astronauts, but you're not just writing equations on a blackboard. You know, we, and we hire scientists to be astronauts, but they, you're not just writing equations on a blackboard. You're actually like, you're, you're doing shit. And if you don't do it right, you might die. So you have to have that like operational common sense, um, aspect to yourself. It's not just the hypothetical theoretical job for sure. Uh, tell people what your social media is. What is your Instagram? Astro Terry. Instagram is

Astro underscore Terry. Twitter, Instagram. I got a LinkedIn account. Astro Terry, hat astronaut. Thank you very much, Terry. Appreciate it, man. Thanks for having me on. It was really fun. This was awesome. Thank you. Bye, everybody.