Latest / Core Memory / The Google Engineer Who Set The Skydiving Record At 58 - EP 83 Alan Eustace

Transcript

The Google Engineer Who Set The Skydiving Record At 58 - EP 83 Alan Eustace · Core Memory

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there's a man.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there's a man who chooses to skydive from space
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: and hurl himself 135,890 feet towards the ground.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we're speaking to that man today.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: He's Alan Eustace.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: He did indeed set the skydive freefall record in 2014.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: You probably think Felix Bumgartner, the Red Bull guy, holds that record.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's Alan.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: And he is a fascinating man.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: He...
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: He is a computer scientist.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: He used to work at Digital Equipment Corporation,
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: which was the hottest computer hardware company in the world once upon a time.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then he went to Google,
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: where I believe he was around employee number 50 and helped build much of
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: the infrastructure that the internet runs on today.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: In all those senses, he is already...
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: A remarkable man,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: but somewhere around,
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was 2011, 2012,
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: he decided,
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Alan was a skydiver,
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: he was a pilot,
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: he decided,
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: he thought he could break the free fall record and do it from the edge of space.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he, along with the team,
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: engineered his own system to go up in a balloon and then drop himself from space.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike Felix,
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: who did this with Red Bull,
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And all the live streaming and all of that, Alan sought really no attention.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: He just wanted to do this himself.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: He is a brilliant, humble, fascinating man.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: This conversation is, I think, one of the best we've ever done.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to enjoy this.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: You'll hear the whole story of the skydive.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then we get into some computing history where Alan thinks, AI is going.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: He's seen the computing revolution.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: He's seen the internet revolution.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's a wonderful, thoughtful person to talk about all this.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then now Alan is exploring the ocean.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Some people are just better than others and do wonderful, wonderful things.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Alan is such a man.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Please leave us a review or a like or anything, wherever you listen to this podcast.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: It really helps us out.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: It helps more people find the show and wonderful conversations like this with Alan Eustace.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I had to chase Alan for many months to make this happen.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't be more thrilled that it did happen.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I am Ashley Vance.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is Core Memory.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Off to the edge of space we go.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Alan, I've been stalking you for months.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: You're a guest that I've desperately wanted to have on here.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: I just, I find your life so fascinating.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much for making time for me.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: I know you're very busy.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: You're welcome.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Congratulations on getting through all the armor.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: I did it.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I did it.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's many places we could go.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Your career spans things I'm so fascinated by.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up reporting as a cub reporter on the Unix wars between Sun and IBM
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: and Compaq and HP,
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: and you worked at DEC.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: By the time I came along,
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think Compaq had already sucked DEC up,
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: but I was familiar with Alpha and Vax and all the history on that.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then you get to Google and It's kind of like my favorite time of Google
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: when it was,
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: it reminded me a bit of almost like Sun Microsystems,
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: which was my favorite company to cover,
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: just really getting into computer science and advancing
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: where data centers were heading.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then you go into...
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: A huge passion of mine,
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: which is obviously this jump that you did in 2014 from space and all the history
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: that led up to that.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and then now I think you're into eVTOLs and all this other stuff I've been to.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: So...
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: And, uh, underwater exploration.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Using autonomous vehicles.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was going to start us with, with the jump because it's just such a unique thing.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Are you,
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: are you able,
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: if we get there,
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: are you able to talk about some of the work that you you're doing today on
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: the underwater vehicles?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know if it was like stealthy or secret.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, um, okay, well, let's do it.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do it.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: We were, we were chatting a little before we started.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up covering,
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: there was a company called Worldview that made these stratospheric balloons.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: So they would take things way up basically to the edge of, of space.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And, and I got into this company, I got to go see a launch.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's these two co-founders of the company,
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Tabor McCallum and Jane Pointer,
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: who I got to know actually when I was doing reporting on the earliest days
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: of SpaceX,
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: because they had kind of teamed up with Elon to see They could put a greenhouse
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: on Mars and grow a plant on Mars.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: But they were always into space.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: They were always into pushing the edge of what's possible.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so they were doing these balloons.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: You're working at Google at the time.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then somewhere along the way,
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: you have a desire to see if you could go up in one of these balloons,
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: which we're going to get into.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then just as a result of doing all this reporting, I got so into the history of...
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: of what we did to humans to, to see what
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: the, the early days were, uh, uh, crazy.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's just, just amazing.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: The only difference between what you said is that I called Jane and Tabor weren't
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: into balloons until I called them.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: I see.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: The way it actually worked is,
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: I had spent like a lot of time, like I, I made my first skydive in 1975 and, uh,
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: And any skydiver will ask, first thing they'll ask is like, what's the highest skydive?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the first thing that leads to you is Joe Kittinger.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: And Joe Kittinger was like an amazing human being.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: And what they tried to attempt in that group was at the edges of what people can endure.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like famous,
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know, Stapp,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: he straps himself into a rocket sled,
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: propels himself He doesn't even want other people to do these experiments.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: He wants to do them on himself.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, can I set people up with a little context on this?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, go right ahead.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so like mid-1950s, We're starting to get planes that are going faster and faster.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: The U.S. government knows we're probably going to send people into space.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, well, what can the human body endure?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you go that fast in a plane, do you just disintegrate?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what happens?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't it remind you of the earliest balloon flight where they took a dunk or something?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Put it up like, I don't know what's going to happen.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see what
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: happens to you.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so, so there's this guy, John Paul Stapp.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: He's a, he's born in Brazil.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: He grows up in Texas.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: He's a medical doctor.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they're sort of like, Hey, Why don't you see what humans can endure?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one of the wildest stories I've ever run across.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's a great book called The Pre-Astronauts by a guy named Craig Ryan.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then Craig goes deep on all this stuff.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: He also writes a biography on John Paul Stapp.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: I forget the name of that book.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Sonic wins.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, Sonic wins.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's this amazing history.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: This guy, I always laugh because Stapp was, he's incredible.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so like you mentioned,
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: he goes out and it's either New Mexico or Arizona and builds this sled track.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's going like 700, 800 miles an hour on a sled.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then he'll just jar it.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: To a stop to see if people's eyes are coming out of their sockets, they're cracking their ribs.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the point was by understanding human physiology and what can you do to protect it?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it was this yin and yang thing.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like for instance,
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: in the early days of flying,
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: they didn't protect the pilot at all because the assumption was
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: that every time you crash, you die.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: So let's not worry about that.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: But Stapp was proving that the human body could endure an enormous amount
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: of G-forces and survive.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so they turned that into cockpits and setups and seatbelts
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: and restrained systems that were state-of-the-art.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: After all of that,
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: in the later part of his career,
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: he was responsible for trying to get seatbelts into cars for the same reason.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: And this idea of what the human body is capable of doing
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: in every different positions has had like a dramatic effect on that.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: He basically invents the seatbelt.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: You could argue he might've saved more lives than just about any,
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you count penicillin
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: or sites would be hard to track this.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think airbag was also traced to him.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, the early days.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: So he's, he, he's just amazing.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so I,
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Kittinger led me to that,
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: like the fact that I had read about Kittinger and the history, like,
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: the other people that had tried,
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: stratospheric skydives or the people came after him and,
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: and the failures and like,
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: So for me,
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: it was like,
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: as an engineering problem, it's like, how do all these pieces fit together?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he did it,
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: it was 1960,
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: it was like,
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: it was in the wildest,
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: amazing time of engineering,
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: like Concord and SR-71 and,
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: you know, all these amazing things were happening in that period of time.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was just fascinated by it and loved it.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, so when I,
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: later on, when, uh,
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Red Bull is trying to do their attempt,
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: which had a giant capsule and all this stuff.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I had what I thought was like a simple idea, which is, why do you need a capsule?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you've already got a space suit on.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why do you need that?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, why transition from one environment to the other?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: And Nick Pintanata, he was trying to break Joe's record.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: And he couldn't disconnect from the oxygen system.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, he had already undone his seatbelt.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: So he tries to disconnect from the oxygen system and can't do it.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he's struggling to do it.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden,
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: he realizes he's going to have to parachute down from this high altitude,
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: release himself,
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: round parachute,
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: swinging back and forth, holding onto a seat as hard as he possibly can.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, why do you need to make those transitions?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because those transitions are where the problem comes.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: Complexity, yeah.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the same thing when Felix left in the Red Bull Stratus thing,
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: he only had like 10 minutes of oxygen.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like he had to figure out a way to cut away a reserve parachute
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: if it actually came out ahead of time.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: So my idea was, well, let's just take a tandem parachute, tandem set up.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Let's not put a passenger on the front and skydive.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just put a couple oxygen tanks and let's go up and do it tomorrow.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: So that shows how naive I was.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: But so then I did an enormous amount of research and, you know, you can't do that.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: You need to have a space suit.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the system itself, I mean, you know, the basics were there.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it will create,
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: make a much lighter weight system, which means you need a much smaller balloon.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I had done the paper study on it,
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: you know, a Google Doc, you know, that actually
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: described everything.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Can I ask you about that?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so Kittinger in 1960, he sets this record as something like 108,000 feet.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of a little bit debatable.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's around 105,000.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: 105.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: 104 and change.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and he's part of this Project Man High.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: He's working with Stapp.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Stapp had done all the...
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: A bunch of horizontal stuff we were talking about on the sled.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's like, okay, well now let's see what happens when you go real high.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: So they send up Kittinger to the,
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: you know, in the edge of space, just a bit below the Karman line.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then all these years pass.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's 1960.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then Felix... Well,
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: let me tell you one other thing that's
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: interesting about
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: the Joe Kittinger thing is...
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: People don't realize there were three jumps.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't just one jump.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: It was three jumps.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: And on the second jump, Kittinger is going up.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he's trying, he, the way it was set up is with a timer.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: So a drogue parachute would come out with a timer.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he was testing at the time,
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: not just the suit and all this kind of stuff,
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: but he was also testing parachute deployment systems.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason is,
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: is because now, like, as you said, jet fighters were getting up over 100,000 feet.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: And he wanted to test systems that would keep people alive in injections from that.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so they were developing this parachute system called the Beaupont system,
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was called, at the same time.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: So they were innovating in a huge number of areas.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so Joe is in this chair.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: He tries to get out of his chair at, I don't know, 90,000 feet, 100,000 feet, whatever it was.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: He tries to get out, and he can't get out.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because the expansion coefficients were different.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: So it was colder up there, and therefore it was cooler, and the system would not let him out.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: So he's struggling to get out of this thing,
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: and it was just a little square box that he was kind of in.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: So he struggles to get out, and inadvertently during that struggle he sets off this timer.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: So now his drogue parachute is going to come out super fast.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: So he actually launches himself off this platform.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: The drogue, instead of waiting 15 seconds for him to speed out, comes up immediately.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: It wraps around his neck, worst possible.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's a possible place for it to be.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: He goes into a spin,
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: wakes up because they happen to have invented the automatic activation device
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: that skydivers now use routinely.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: But back then it was an incredibly rare thing.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the parachute opened itself.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: He wakes up under a parachute.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Lands and then goes back and does it again.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: To set the record.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: So what a hero.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: In the pre-astronauts book leading up to that, I mean, the things he endured are insane.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like you mentioned, I mean,
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: we didn't know so much of this stuff about the temperatures,
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: what was going to happen.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: So he's got a rectal thermometer in the whole time.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's...
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Times when they install the machine that's supposed to produce his oxygen,
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think they put it in upside down.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: So now it's just like pumping CO2 into his
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: capsule.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: His glove failed on the last jump.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so it depressurizes his hands.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: So his hand swells up to the size of whatever the inside of the glove was.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't report it to the doctors
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: because they're afraid they'll abort this mission you think is so important.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's this part.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: What a guy.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's this part where...
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: I laugh because it almost seems like the army is,
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: the army is like, you guys go find out what can happen.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then it almost seems like staff takes it way more seriously than they were anticipating.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And people's hands are swelling, their eyes are coming out of their socket.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like, maybe, maybe we should dial this guy back a little.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is, this is.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Staff went blind
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: on one of the tests.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, literally he had blood in his eyes and they weren't sure whether he'd regain his sight.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: And he knew that was a possibility.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: He's a doctor.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he went through with it anyway, and he regained his sight.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a different era of understanding.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: And you see,
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: when you see that as a pre-astronaut thing,
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: all of a sudden you get to see, like, how did the Apollo program happen?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, how is it possible with that technology in those days to do things?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: And part of it is that they just had this kind of can-do,
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: nothing will stop me,
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Pull it together,
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: like their risk profile,
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: their vision and their risk were so much different than what we have today.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why it was possible.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, it wouldn't have been possible.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: All right, what do we do at Core Memory?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: We cover innovative,
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: fast-moving,
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: forward-thinking companies,
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: which is why Core Memory is sponsored by Brex,
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: because Brex is the intelligent finance platform for many of these companies.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: 30,000 companies from startups to the world's largest corporations rely
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: on Brex's technology for their finances.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: They've got smart corporate cards,
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: high yield business banking and expense automation tools that are fantastic.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: I hate doing my expenses and Brex's AIs and software run right
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: through those expenses, figure out where we're spending money.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And take care of so much stuff for you so you don't have to waste your time on it yourself.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Go to brex.com slash Core Memory to learn more and just, you know, get with the program.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get going.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get out of this archaic finance software and move toward the future.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Core Memory and Brex.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's this history, like you mentioned, you've been skydiving since 1975.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think you fly all kinds of things.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I didn't start that until I got out of here.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I was a late learner to flying.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, so now I've flown a lot of things.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: So you're into all this stuff.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then if Felix went in 2012,
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: what was the year that you first started thinking about doing this?
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was 2011.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you're just sitting at home one day and you're like,
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, why don't I try to break the record?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think I was reading about their effort because they were pretty open about it
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: because it was for publicity, right?
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: And to Red Bull and Bland.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: It was by far the largest event, like live stream event that had ever happened.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it was wonderful engineering.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: My friend, Art Thompson, Handle the engineering side.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was amazing.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: I have nothing but respect for that team and what they did and stuff like that.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm looking from the outside and saying, that's not how I would do it.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's just not how I would do it.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: I would do it this other way.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: I always tell people, I don't pick problems.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Problems pick me.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then I just can't let them go.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just kept working on it, working on it, working on it.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's too bad that we don't have the era of Like, you know, deep mind and stuff like that.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Because it would save me a lot of trouble going through all this,
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: you know, all the, you know, like, what size balloon do I need?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Do I have an oxygen system that's big enough?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: What happens to the body when it gets up?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's all these questions.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I worked for, you know, just a little bit, you know, at a time.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: But it took me,
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: probably six months to get to the point where I said, You know, I think
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: this closes.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think this will work.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Did you tell your wife you were doing this in
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: the studio?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: But she was like, oh, I think of all these weird ideas all the time.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: And she didn't take it seriously enough, which was a problem.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Later on, she told me, I shouldn't let you get that far down the road.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I didn't think it was going to be successful because once you start things,
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: once the ball's rolling...
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's really hard to stop it.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: And she would definitely have liked to stop it if she could.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, so I worked out all the numbers and stuff like that.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then I wanted to find out whether I was on track or not on track.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I called Pierre Diamandis from XPRIZE.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he was a friend, somebody who had come through Google a few times.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: I met him, very broad man.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of background.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I asked him, who's the person that I can talk to to see if this thing works?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, I'd call Tabor McCallum.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so he made the introduction.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, I don't think Tabor would have been taking the call.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I call them.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: I work through what I'm doing, why I think the thing's happening.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, what do you think, Tabor?
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is this possible?
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: And his company,
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Paragon,
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: builds environmental systems for toxic environments and space environmental systems.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: So they're the one company in the world That actually has all the pieces
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: with all the space suit companies and stuff.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, not only do I think it's possible, but I would love to do this project.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then Tabor and Jane, they had done biosphere and, and, and all these different things.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then, um, yeah, like, I mean,
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: essentially the, the,
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Very deep part of the origin story of SpaceX because Elon had made some PayPal money
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: and he was trying to see what NASA was doing on Mars and it turned out to be not
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: a lot.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so Elon thought, well,
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: to get people interested in Mars again,
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: I want to send a greenhouse up to Mars, have it be...
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he wanted to livestream a plant growing from Mars just to get people to kind
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: of be like, oh, this is a thing.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: We should think about terraforming this planet and exploring Mars.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so he recruits Paragon to help out with this project,
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: which obviously... Wow, I didn't
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: even know that story.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's really cool.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: What ends up happening is then Elon starts looking into...
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how would you get it there?
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: How much would the rocket be?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so he starts digging into the rocket business and then he decides, oh, well,
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: cause he goes to,
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: cause he's starting to go to Russia,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: um, to try to buy a Soyuz essentially for this mission.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he's,
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: he doesn't like dealing with the Russians and he's looking at what's available in
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: the U S he sees it's all extremely expensive.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so this, that's how SpaceX begins.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Then he just decides to, to go do rockets and, uh, and now here we are.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you dig into this,
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: and I don't want to be crass or anything,
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: you know, you were an early employee at Google.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you did well financially,
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: but I would think the sticker price on this would be like tens of millions
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: of dollars.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do you start to think about that part at all of like,
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: God, does this even make sense to... Well,
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: it kind of goes to like...
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: Extreme optimism, you know?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, I think this is like not that hard.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's not gonna take long.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's not gonna take very many people.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like, and you know, this is like a common theme around here.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's like people way underestimate like how hard something is.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and that's what I did.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I just underestimated it.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it was gonna take a year and I thought it was pretty straightforward
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: to get all the pieces together.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it turned out, And,
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: maybe we could have thrown something together in a year,
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: but not with the level of safety that I required,
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: my wife required, my family required, and also that Paragon required, too.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so everything just took longer.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we were actually prepared to do it at the two-year mark.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: We were getting closer and closer until we did the first airplane jump.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And a space suit and all that kind of stuff.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: And like everything went wrong.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, not fatally wrong kind of thing,
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: but like all the little things of trying to put a complete system together,
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: all the little pieces didn't hold together.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so I ended up not being able to steer.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't depressurize the suit.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: I landed in the middle of a desert.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: My team had to come get me.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was a low moment of the whole thing.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that required an entire year of redesign.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: To fix, okay.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: To fix, not just to fix what was broken,
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: but to rethink some of the core decisions that we made and see if they made sense
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: in light of the current, what we'd learned in this jump.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so then after that, it went super fast.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: We did five airplane jumps and fixed all the problems.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, those jumps were almost perfect, except it took a little while to figure out how to fly.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: That was my problem.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: What you do in skydiving and what you do in a spacesuit are exactly the opposite.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to totally unlearn something that you learn in skydiving and relearn this new thing.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: But once we figured that out,
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: and that was the safety divers that actually looked at the video
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: and figured out what you needed to do to control this.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so once we got that done, we actually did three...
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Three balloon flights in like under a month.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: In New Mexico?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: In Roswell, New Mexico.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, and we had four dates.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: One of them, we had a problem with one of the systems to bring the balloon down.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so we had to cancel that one.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: But four opportunities, three of them worked inside a month, which I think
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: it might be a record.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you're paying for like a team of how many people?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: So if you, I don't tell anybody how much it costs.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, but I was talking to a team that's not trying to do that,
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: break that correctly, but another one.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I said,
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: if you want to figure out the cost of something,
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: the way you do it,
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: like first you forget,
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: people are always fascinated about what's the cost of a spacesuit or something like
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: that.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: Forget cost of the spacesuit.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Just figure out how many people are going to be there the day of the event.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like there's, There's the people, obviously, that are the medical team.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's the spacesuit people.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's the people that transport you to the thing.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's the people that do the balloons.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: There's people that interact with the FAA.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's the people that are And then figure out how much training over how long and
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: where they're going to do it, which is all in Roswell, New Mexico, far from home.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then you look at all the little pieces and all the tests you have to do.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: And you start adding up all the salaries.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then you get a number.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that's where people miss is that every engineering endeavor is about people.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: And people are expensive.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have a upper limit of where you would have capped things off?
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, yes and no.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: But I looked at it differently, which is I looked at like, like.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Is this test necessary?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like, do we have to do this?
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we ran like 250 tests.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we ran a lot of tests.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, not all of them involved me, but like the strength of different materials.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we had a test to try to find when the failures of nylon would happen and at what speeds.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like, we put like giant rockets made of concrete that we dropped out of airplanes
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: and they whistled down and then we At 200 feet,
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: throw out a parachute and see what's going to happen to these materials.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I mean, they're very strong materials.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: And we managed to several times just get them to totally,
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: you know, like disintegrate because of the forces that are involved.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: So to learn, and it's impossible to learn these things other way.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: One of the rocket's missile, it's not rocket, it's propelled.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a gravity thing.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: But it hit, and the team found where it hit.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: and they walked over and they knew it was where the thing,
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: there was no sign of actually any part of the rocket,
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: but they knew where it was because there was a small depression.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: And when they put their hand there, it was hot.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: And they dug down and found a fin and sent it to me.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's how much force was involved.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: So these tests, I mean, just think about what you have to do to ensure safety.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, another example is spins.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like we were really worried about spins.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: We thought a drogue would solve a spin.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: We took the,
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: we took a dummy up to,
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: you know, 120,000 feet, dropped it, spun, I mean, 170 RPM or something like that.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, no, that's not going to do it.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Bad news, yeah.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: We got to go back.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, the Red Bull team was actually really helpful.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Luke Aikens was incredible.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: He actually, they had a backup emergency parachute system that Felix never used.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: I came close to needing to use it,
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: but so I went and we went and talked to him and he told us the secret,
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: which was like the smallest little change.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: it was changing attachment point of a drogue from like right,
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know, like on your butt to above your neck.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: You just move that attachment point and you go from 100,
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: it would probably be 220 revolutions per minute from that altitude.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: Down to like seven.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Incredible things you learn along the way.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you're reading about Felix is going to make this,
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Kittenger's record has been there since 1960.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: You're reading that the Red Bull team is going to try to break this.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: You think you have a different approach.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: They are doing this, you know, it's Red Bull.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: They're doing this massive media campaign around all this stuff.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's presumably,
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: well, he's going to try to break the record and then they have a head start on you.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like 10 years.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was a long head start.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then,
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: and so part of your motivation is clearly you think there's a different way
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: to do this.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then is part of your motivation, well, I'm going to beat the record that Felix sets to.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the main thing for me was, I just thought there was a better way to do it.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: And in some sense...
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't, like, I actually thought we were going to beat Red Bull to it because we had a year.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: They did in 2012.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: We started the project in 2011.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so I actually thought we had a chance of beating them to it.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: But, of course, they beat us.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: And not only did they get there first,
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: but they, like,
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: they went to 128,000 feet,
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: which is, like, Red Bull, like, Kittinger's record is 104,000.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: You have to beat a record by 5% for the FAI.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: So they didn't have to go that high.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: But they did, which was impressive.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was just impressive.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, the ace in the hole that we had that they didn't have is we were a lot lighter.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like they weighed 3,200 pounds and we weighed 600 pounds or something like that.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so even though we were much later,
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: our system's max height was way higher than they could have.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we actually beat the record.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: They used 128,
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: let's see,
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: what was the, they used a 28 million cubic foot balloon to get to 128,000.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: And because of the way our system is designed to lightweight,
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: we use an 11 million cubic foot balloon to get 7,000 feet higher.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we had a technical advantage.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: All right, pod friends.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: I am here to tell you about Send, Cut, Send.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: They are a manufacturing phenomenon.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you're working on your own car or you're a giant automotive company,
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: a rocket maker,
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: if you need metal cut machines, Or bent, you're going to Send, Cut, Send.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: They'll do it for you right, and they will do it for you fast.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Go to sendcutsend.com slash Core Memory for a 15% discount on whatever you're trying to make.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: We love Send, Cut, Send.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Go visit them today.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then you choose not to do really...
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're like doing this in secret and you're not making a TV spectacle out of this.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you just wanted to do this just for you.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: I, you know.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's no live stream.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: No, we had, they had like 700 reporters.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: We had one reporter.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Markoff?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the story for people.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: John's a dear friend of mine and here it is.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: New York Times.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is a printout.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: It looks better in the paper.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is October 24th.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: 2014, parachutist, record fall, over 25 miles in 15 minutes.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And John Markov's, you know, probably the best tech reporter.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I loved Markov.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: I just felt like he's one of the few people that I think really understands tech
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: at Sinovac.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost,
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: he understands the tech,
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: but he also understands people and understands importance of things.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I just thought he'd be a beautiful person to be able to tell the story.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Great choice.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: But the funny part is.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: You should have picked me, but John's okay.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: The funny part about the whole thing is, is John, like they won't let me pay for anything.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: New York Times won't let me pay.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: So he gets one trip.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: To Roswell to watch a launch.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the first one that we had, he decides not to come.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know whether that's why, but he had some kind of conflict.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that one, we had a failure.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't actually get the launch.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: So he comes to the second one and that one's successful.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then he writes this one article.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: But part of it is, it's an engineering story.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: I really just wanted to share it.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: We worked three years together.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: We loved each other.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: We were a band of brothers and sisters that kind of came together to pull off this thing.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: And they're the people I want.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I had a few family members and stuff there.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: But that's the group that I wanted to share with.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to share with a million people.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Also, there's pressures that come from having a lot of people watching.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: like maybe a launch on a day that you probably shouldn't launch or something like
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: that.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, it wasn't what it was about.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: And also,
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: you know, I just,
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: I won't, if you,
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: like the jump happened, I came back, we flew helicopters back, it was really nice.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: there's,
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: there's
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: like 40 people that are
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: standing there and we could,
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: we could all hug together.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: We could celebrate together.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: We went to dinner together at the Mexican restaurant, which by the way is an interesting thing.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: So we're at this,
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: we're celebrating this Mexican restaurant and we're all eating tacos,
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: drinking margaritas, having a great time.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I get a text from my sister, Barb, and she lives in Alamont Springs, Florida.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: And she goes, you'll never guess who I'm standing next to.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I have no idea.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, She goes, Colonel Joe Kittinger.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, prove it.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so she basically sends me a picture of her and Joe together.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, she talked to the bartender, said her brother broke this record.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the bartender says, you want to meet the guy who broke that record in 1960.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is just a coincidence?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: Total coincidence.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: Walked up and she said to Joe, hey, my brother just broke your record.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like, no introduction or anything.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: And, um,
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: so Joe and her hit it off and, um,
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: and he said,
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: please, could you take a picture of my business card and send it to Alan?
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to talk to him.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so of course the next day I'm like,
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: like shaking as I call, you know, like the Joe Kinninger.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, uh, and, uh, so I call him and he is like the perfect gentleman.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, congratulatory on all this.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then he starts hitting me with technical questions.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like, they're the perfect questions asked in the exact order.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he's in what, his 80s?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he was in his 80s.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, it was like the coolest technical discussion.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: So then he goes away.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: We say, oh, we'll get together sometime.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, it's like, you know, the song, he said, we'll get together.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, you know, it'll never happen kind of thing, the Harry Chapin song.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, so then my mom calls me and my mom says, hey, do you mind if I invite Joe?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: She's not Joe Kitty or Joe over to Christmas dinner.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, sure, mom, you can invite him.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, what are the chances?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is Joe Ginear.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so the next time,
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: the first time I met Joe Ginear in person was when I walk into my mom's house
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: and there's Joe and Sherry sitting in the room.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: This is crazy.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: What are the odds?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is insane.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, oh my God.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, amazing guy.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: And for the duration of his life, he and I were very close.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: We spent a lot of time together at many, many events.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: And God, I just love that guy.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: He's great.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't seem like you're the kind of person this would annoy,
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: but if you go to some random person on the street,
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: you're like, do you remember that guy that jumped from the edge of space?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: They'll be like, oh, the Red Bull guy, you know, because of all the spectacle attached to that.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, do you...
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: Does that bother you?
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know that.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, it doesn't.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: It actually, it's kind of like, well, you're exactly right.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you go to somebody and says, who holds the world record?
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: Or you say, like,
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: I will never admit that I,
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'll admit it, but I'm never telling anybody, hi, I'm Alan Eustace.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the guy who holds the world record.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's just not me.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: But somebody else will say,
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: you know, it will introduce me and say, you know, Alan holds this world record.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, Every single time they'll say, I watched that on live stream.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: That was the most exciting moment.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I have to say, no, sorry, that wasn't me.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: But they're right.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was the most exciting moment in a day.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I still, here's a funny thing.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: That comes up in my feed all the time.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what I want.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: My YouTube feed, I don't know.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: His jump.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: His jump comes up in my feed.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, anyway, kind of crazy, but.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: Remind me how old you were when you did it?
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: 58.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: 58.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: I say this next part with all due respect.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, you're thinking it's a daredevil type feat.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: You're thinking of Chuck Yeager kind of thing.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, here you are, you're a computer scientist, three degrees.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're working at Google in the data center stuff.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't be the immediate picture of the person who's going to set
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: the world skydiving record.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it was funny because there was a website or something.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: It came out right after the job and it did a head to head comparison with me and Felix.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like he was like young and attractive, you know, like a daredevil.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: And he did all these face jobs in here.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: And like, I run an engineering organization, you know, I graduate.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like we could not have more different backgrounds, uh, than, uh, uh, than we did in that.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: But, um, But,
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: for me, it's like people say, oh, that's just such a daring, you know, thing.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, no, that's, you know, it's exactly the opposite.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: it's like grain engineering takes things that appear to be
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how I approach these things.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: There was a guy,
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: Eric Roberts,
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: who worked at the Systems Research Center at DEC.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I one time asked him about the Diablo.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: He's a juggler, a big juggler.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: He taught me a lot of juggling-related things.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, do you ever do the Diablo?
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, no, that's not what I like to do.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I asked him why.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, well, that's a trick that looks easy, but it's actually quite difficult.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, I like the opposite.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: Things that are actually easy, but appear to be quite difficult.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you look at the effort, the whole thing was, how do you take out risk?
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: And behind the scenes, the Red Bull team was doing the same thing.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like they were pulling out all these risks so that something looks dangerous was simple.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: But for me,
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: that's really the key is that, like,
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: I could not come up with a,
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: one of the things my wife made me do,
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: she had a long list of things she made me do before the jump.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: But one of them was to do a video for each of my kids in case something went wrong.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so I did.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: I made a video of each of those.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: But what was interesting is, like, there was, you know, I could not...
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine what could go wrong.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's possible that there's something we didn't think of,
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: like an unknown unknown,
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: but every single thing that we knew about, we had mitigated.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: We had multiple redundant systems that save us.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, the surprise, if we missed something, would have been just so large.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so it wasn't a daredevil, exactly.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the risk, we had done such a good job of, like, eliminating risk.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I'm, like, big on actuarial tables.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, you know, at this, at my age right now, I'm not at 58.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what the numbers are at 58.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, there's a 2% chance of me dying this year.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like, I mean, that's just fact.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, maybe I'm a little better shape, maybe a little worse shape than the average person.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: But...
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: But so there's always risk, right?
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no way.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I looked at this thing and it's like one in a million.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like the chances of something happening.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: So for me,
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: the cool engineering was how do you take something which appears to be dangerous
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: and turn it into something which is very, safe.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: Almost like magic or something.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: So many people have had to make a video like that.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: How long?
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: Relatively short.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, she had like 10 or 12 things that she made me do.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: I love my wife.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: One of the overwhelming themes of the list itself was,
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to clean up the mess that you just created for me.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: So you're going to have to do it.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like an example is I had to write my will.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of fine.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, trust, all that kind of stuff.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: But then I had to write my, I wrote my own obituary, which was short, pretty sweet, honestly.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: He was a really smart guy until the end where things didn't go so well.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote a check to Patrick Passat, who was at the CFO at Google at the time.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, I hope you haven't got to cash it.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: But that was the amount to basically do the whole funeral arrangements.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: And he said he's never been so happy to return a check uncashed, you know.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, she,
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: like the process of taking a body and moving it from New Mexico to,
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: California if something went wrong or something,
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: just those kind of things,
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: which for most people,
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think, I mean,
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: what you want,
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: it was for me to think twice about the whole project,
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: but For me, it was kind of just a checklist, went through each of them.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: it does make you think.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I know you've had to do this a million times,
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure, to at least your friends and people around you.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: But going through the experience, I re-watched the video this morning.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the...
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: There are a bunch of parts that struck me,
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: but you're in,
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: you're in this suit and when it's on the ground,
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it just looks incredibly unwieldy.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: You're kind of like on your, like a turtle, you know, like that's been turned over on its shell.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great description.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now I think about it.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: Before you get to take off,
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: it looked,
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: it looked kind of uncomfortable,
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: but you're throwing up, you know, thumbs up sign and.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you seem to be talking, like you seem pretty relaxed about the whole thing.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then, then you kind of shoot up.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so what's like,
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: as you're going up and again, you've gone through, you've done all these tests.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: You have some sense of what this is going to be like.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure you're just kind of running through checklists in your head
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: and they're,
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: they're running through checklists in the comms,
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: but is it, um, Is it relaxing going up?
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: Is it exhilarating?
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: What was that?
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: Are you at all having a second thought?
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the one test that I think was the most...
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: The airplane test,
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: like the first airplane test, there was a lot of stress associated with that.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we had never done it before.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's the first time that a spacesuit had ever been kind of out in the wild.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: The first time I had been around a spacesuit that I didn't have,
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: two SpaceX Spacesuit techs like standing right next to me with hook knives ready
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: to cut me out in any moment.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a little bit of stress associated with that.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then obviously when the jump went wrong in a bunch of different ways,
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: you know, there was a little stress there, but I was mostly relaxed about that.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in some sense,
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: I remember the days in the early days of skydiving,
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: you had round reserves, which we call them pointable, not steerable.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: You can point them in any direction, but you were going to go wherever the wind went.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that was kind of the situation here.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to I was under a canopy.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: I was going down slowly.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have control over the canopy.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: We were going to land in the desert,
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: but we were in a place where you could pretty much land anywhere.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: So for me,
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: that piece wasn't...
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then we got more and more comfortable and confident with the plane jumps.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: We fixed some of the problems of the first one, all the problems of the first one.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: But then the first balloon jump is where the whole system has to work.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: So we had done independent unmanned balloon jumps,
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: but now we take me and we put me underneath a balloon and we actually do
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: a real launch.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of funny.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's only like 60,000 feet.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Which in some ways to me seemed really low,
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: but I called my friend, you know, Scott, who had helped me on a lot of projects.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: I said, well, we just finished the first one, it was only 60,000 feet.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: He shakes me, he goes, Alan, he goes, only 60,000 feet?
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're like in the,
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: top five people ever,
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: and the number of people that have been in a spacesuit above 60,000 feet
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: on their own and done a skydive is like almost zero.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so...
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, he had to shake me out of it.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: But that was the jump where – that was the launch and the jump that I thought had
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: the most risk because there were – and then every time we added something
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: that added additional risk but we thought we had it covered, we were very careful.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like the first one was – There's a zone in which you cannot open a parachute.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: You're going too fast.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: So at the beginning,
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: you can't open a parachute because you're going too slow,
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: although our drug system made it possible to get the drug out very quickly.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: But then there's an area where you're just going too fast.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: The parachute, if it was to open, would cause either damage to you or the parachute.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a zone.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so by going at 60,000 feet, we reduce that zone.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like we made it pretty small.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was only like 16 seconds or something like that before we got out of that zone.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so at that point,
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: there were 16 seconds you couldn't open the parachute,
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: but the whole rest of the time you could.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so then the next jump, and that jump went really, really well.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: Everything was like perfect on it.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the next one was 105,000 feet.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that was mostly to get us in the range of Joe's record,
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: and we might have even beaten it slightly there.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: But that was subsonic.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: So long delay, but subsonic.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then, sorry about that.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a long delay, but it was all subsonic.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then the last one was where supersonic came in.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was all about how to control yourself when you're going supersonic.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: So you'd broken the sound barrier before the final jump?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: The final jump was the only one that went supersonic.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so the previous one was long delay, subsonic.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the last one was very long,
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: not even that much longer, cause you're going so fast, but then super soft.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you,
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: so when you finally end up doing it,
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: how long are you, How many minutes are you doing the rise up to your final?
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that long.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's two hours and seven minutes.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: No, but I mean,
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: when you're doing the float up to the edge of space on that final jump,
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, isn't that like 12 minutes or something?
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: From the ground, when we launch, The balloons are really interesting.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: They go up at about a thousand feet per minute, maybe a little more.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you launch and they don't like airplanes kind of taper off,
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: you know, they struggle with less.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: Not a balloon.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: Balloon starts at twelve hundred feet per minute, ends at twelve hundred feet per minute.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: The only reason it stops is the balloon fills up and it starts venting gas out of
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: the bottom, basically, which keeps it from exploding, which is a good thing.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: But 1,200 feet per minute the whole way.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: So when you launch...
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know exactly when you're going to get to float altitude.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: Matter of fact, I kept asking, like, when are we going to get there?
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like,
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: a child in the back of a,
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know, station wagon, you know, when are we going to get there?
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually, they bought me a watch, you know, that long story about the watch.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, so two hours and seven minutes on the way.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then on the way up, totally relaxed.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: So you're just for two hours and you're going up eventually to 25 miles.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so you're just there thinking about the world.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just relaxing.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I have done so much emergency prep on the previous ones.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I did on this one too.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: If I start turning right and if I can't control it, what do I do?
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: If this thing's.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: If that, you know, do this.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: If that doesn't work, then do this.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: If that doesn't work, do this.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like, like I had all that.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: I had grilled that so many times in all the previous ones that I spent a little bit
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: of time on it.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: And also then if I open,
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: you know, when I open, if there's a malfunction, what am I going to do about it?
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what handles do I choose and what order?
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so I went over all of that like so many times.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: So in the final job, it was actually like super relaxing.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like I was as close to sleeping as I could possibly get.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because the more relaxed you are, the less oxygen you use that actually.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: it was funny because on the previous one,
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: the heart rate monitor worked, but on this one, the heart rate monitor failed.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so we'll never know what my heart rate was,
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: but I'd be super surprised if it was more like 70 or something like that.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was, it was a very, very,
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: and I tell people it's like Google Earth in reverse,
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: it's like you just,
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: you start,
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: you start by seeing pebbles on the ground and then you start seeing small rocks
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: and you start seeing,
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: you've got people and later see cars and then you see cities and then you see,
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: you know, towns and then you see states.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, it's like a, it's like this amazing, It's a gradual thing.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember one time I was saying, people asked me on the last one, could you pay attention?
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: Could you see the Gulf of Mexico?
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: Could you see the Rocky Mountains?
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: Could you see this other thing?
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: I remember one of them, I said, no, I can't see the Rocky Mountains.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then I went and looked, and I could see the Rocky Mountains.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: They just didn't look like mountains.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: They looked like tiny little bumps down there kind of thing.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's the Gulf of America now.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry about that.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up in Florida, right?
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: I swam there a lot of times.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: So you're going up and then when you,
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_00: is everything,
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: first of all,
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: so the suit is giving you oxygen and then temperature control, any other like giant?
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the temperature control is an interesting one because yeah,
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: the suit is basically providing everything that I need,
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: but there's so many nuances of it.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like one thing that's interesting about spacesuits is I blew the spacesuit up from inside.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like I breathe in and then I breathe out.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what expands the spacesuit.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea of the pressure inside the spacesuit is not like...
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_01: I always thought it was like putting air in your tires or something like that.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: No, actually it starts out like...
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like, around you,
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_01: and then slowly you blow it up,
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: and then when it reaches the pressure at which it's destined to operate,
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: it has a dual suit controller, which basically vents at that point.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, then it just starts venting,
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: so it stays at exactly the right pressure, but it's, you know, it's like a...
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: But the suit,
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: it was interesting because we thought we were going to be really cold
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: because it was like super cold.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's like minus 120 degrees or something like that.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: So we built an entire system to keep me warm.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a heater and it's got these tubes that go in and around me
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: and they come back to the heater and pumps and all this kind of stuff.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: And we tested that by buying a giant walk-in freezer and then attaching it to
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_01: a Liquid nitrogen tank and putting fans in the air.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: We got these cool videos of all that.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: That test, we ran like five times.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: It failed like the first four times for like lots of reasons.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then I go up and I get through,
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: the heaters are on and I get through like 60,000 feet and I'm starting to get
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: a little warm.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so I turn off the heaters.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: And they stayed off the entire rest of the time.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: Never.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: We never used it again.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, why?
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: What happened?
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it turned out we just massively over-designed the system because
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_01: when you get up high,
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: the temperature is measured by the movement of molecules, right?
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: So the molecules are moving really, really slowly up there.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: But there are so few of them that they don't conduct any heat.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: So those two balance each other off.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: So when I'm up high, I'm generating some amount of heat because I'm alive.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that is balanced by the fact that none of that can actually conduct away from me.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so we just totally over-designed that.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: So even though we built all these great heating systems in it, I almost didn't use them.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay, okay.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you got up,
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: To where you wanted to be, was everything automated for the release point?
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or you're kind of like, oh, I want it.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny you mention it,
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: because on the very first time, the 50,000 or 60,000 foot temp, we went up.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: We had not even talked about the actual release.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like, there's three ways to release.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's, well, there's two different ways to release.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, three different ways to release.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: Two of them are from the ground and one is a big handle that I can pull.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so, but we didn't talk about,
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: and we knew that the ground was going to do the release because that allows me
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: to get in the perfect position before the release.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we had already set that up,
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm up there and,
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm talking to Sebastian,
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: who basically is the mission control flight director for this.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: And he's saying, you know, are you ready?
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, could I at least get a countdown?
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because we hadn't even talked about it.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm up at 60,000 feet asking for a, you know, could I get a countdown?
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, oh yeah, sure.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so anyway, I think we counted down from five or something like that.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then we did the release.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it was one of those items that we just kind of forgot about, the actual countdown.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the final jump,
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: it was interesting because we had a downward facing camera from the balloon.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: Which would show me the entire time.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the process for actually working the mic is hard.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: Space suits are horrible.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: They've got all these bearings,
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: and so in order to just grab this glass or something like that,
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: you have to go this way, this way, and get used to it.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: But the process for using the push to talk switch was painful.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: We decided never to use the push to talk switch.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so every time they would say,
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: they would give me some information,
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: I would move my leg and the downward facing camera would see it.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the acknowledgement.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_01: But then the last thing is pilot ready for release.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: That has to be oral.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so I moved it,
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: moved it up there and then I pushed the push to talk switch and it goes beep,
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: which is a sign that didn't make a connection.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, shoot.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so anyway, so I go and do it again, beep.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then, so anyway, on the fourth time, it actually did make the beep.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, pilot ready for release.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then they did the countdown.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, but yeah, yeah.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_01: Then nothing that you think is absolutely, totally simple turns out to be perfectly simple.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: Was there a time limit on how long you could hang out up there once you, you got to?
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: We had, we had enough extra oxygen to last for like two hours up there.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you didn't want to just kind of take it all in?
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, no.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first it's not super comfortable like up there,
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: like the suit is, I mean,
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: it was in a position that's actually,
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: you could fall asleep in,
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: I almost fell asleep many times,
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: but, uh, but, uh, um, So it's as comfortable as you can get.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: But for instance, there's no water.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: Long story about why we have no water.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: We tried a system with one of the backpacks kind of thing with the water that comes
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: in and you can suck on it.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_01: But when I fell over backward on the...
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: We tried to fall where we fall over backward on a mattress just
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: to see what would happen.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: That valve that holds that basically just exploded and I got this giant squirt
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: of water in the back of my throat and I thought I was going to drown.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was like, no, forget that.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't have any...
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: Any water for the whole thing.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: The view is beautiful.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: But you've been watching it, you know, change for two hours and seven minutes.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: Also, we're starting to drift over some places that were more congested.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like the area we were over was just perfect.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, literally, I landed, I don't know.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: 300 yards from a road.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: We have all these helicopters and chase helicopters and all this kind of stuff.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the truck was like the first thing to get to me.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, it was perfect place.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, we just decided to end it there.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't regret it.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, an extra,
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: given what I cared about,
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think getting close to our oxygen margins, you know, like, nah.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not worth it.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then, and then the fall takes about 15 minutes.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: No, no fall.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the fall part is super fast.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: Four minutes, 27 seconds.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it's super fast.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because you're going,
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know, Mach 1.22 on the ground, they heard a sonic boom, which is crazy.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: Super cool.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: I wish they had taped it.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I talked to Art Thompson at Red Bull, and they also heard a sonic boom.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: Most people didn't think it was possible for a human being to create a sonic boom
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: that was where you could hear it on the ground.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: But both their project and my project heard it.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: So you're like a human missile.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, it's cool.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's really cool that you could do that.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so, uh, uh, but yeah, it doesn't take that much time.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: And, uh,
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: most of the time on the free fall,
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just concentrating, you know, because, um, Felix had heading control problems.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he flipped over and didn't,
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_01: it was an inverted flats, man,
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: which isn't like a scary thing,
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: but for,
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: because he's a superhuman skydiver,
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: way better than me,
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: he managed to invert the thing, come down, you know, land safely.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: He, uh, After he's landing, I mean,
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_01: we call our,
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: it wasn't really a landing,
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: it was a crash,
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_01: like I'm in a 305 pound thing that doesn't bend except,
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know, in the knees, everything else is straight.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm not going to land, I'm going to crash.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: I saw you kind of flexed your knees right before you hit the ground.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was like,
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: you're going to just go, I mean, we,
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: before we had this elegant way I was supposed to turn around,
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: but, but it didn't work.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: And what we learned is I'm in an airbag, a giant airbag.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_01: I've got metal on both sides of me.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: I am the most protected that you've ever seen.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: I've got giant boots on.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_01: I got this helmet that you could hit with a baseball bat all day.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we think like, We didn't need to do any of that.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_01: You could just, I mean,
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: we did do as good a job as we can at flaring and stuff like that,
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: but it was going to be a crash.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so I tell people when I see the video,
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: it's like, here comes the landing or more appropriately called the crash.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: And in that one scene that you saw where I'm laying on the ground, like the turtle flipped over.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then the coolest part for me is I've got this giant piece of vegetation
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: over here on my left side, which I thought, oh yeah, that's perfect.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: The funny part about the whole thing is, though, that we hit a rock.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: We broke off this little piece of things.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: And when the suit is in the Smithsonian, the Air and Space Museum out at Dulles, and it's great.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: You should come visit.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: People visit it, and then they send me selfies of them with the spacesuit.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: But we asked him, do you want us to fix this little hole?
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, no, that's exactly what we want.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: We want it exactly as it lives.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: How many, I mean, how many times have you had to tell this deal?
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: Do you get tired of telling it?
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: It must be.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: I don't tell it too often right now.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was a pretty long
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: time ago.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, 2014.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: I just imagine you go to a dinner party and somebody's like, well, what do you do?
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you know, that's the guy that jumped.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: That would never come out from me.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: My wife will occasionally tell people about it, which,
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: in some ways it wasn't her favorite event of life in some ways,
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_01: but she's got it on her phone.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: She's got the video on the phone, you know, so she'll show it to people.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: But no, I mean, it's...
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is just how you're wired.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you won't... You don't...
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's clear.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_00: You're not like a flashy, braggadocious kind of person.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: But you wouldn't even say now how much it costs because you just...
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's none of anybody's business or something.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I... Yeah.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: I just... You know, it costs what it costs.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like...
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_01: I was fortunate.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like, super fortunate that I got a chance...
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_01: To work in a company that was successful.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so the money, I had the money part.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you asked the question a while back, like at what moment did you decide to do it?
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember I was on a flight to Europe or something and visiting one of
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: the engineering offices there.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there was an in-flight magazine and it had a story of Red Bull and what it is.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: And this is after I had gone and done all the homework and
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I was just staring at it and say,
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know, like,
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: do I want to live the rest of my life saying I had this idea but never doing it?
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like, do I just want to put it in a drawer?
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_01: Which would have been the fiscally responsible thing to do is slide it in a drawer
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: and declare victory.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know, some miswiring of my brain or something.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: Said, no, I want to do it.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't want to just let it go.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to let a good idea go.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_01: I want to do something about it.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that took me on this path that turned out to be more expensive
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_01: than I thought it was going to be.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_01: It turned out to be harder than anything.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: But the value to me in terms of the team and what we accomplished and stuff like
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_01: that, it was worth everything.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: No,
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think I only harp on this because I'm such an aerospace junkie and I always love
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: to compare the...
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: Time cost of the initial plan versus the end plan, because it's usually like 10 to 100 hours.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, this is the weirdest part of it, or one of the weird parts.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_01: My wife guessed the total, like way ahead of time.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: From the very beginning.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: She goes, that's going to cost X.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, no, no, there's no way it's going to cost us.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: We got this whole team.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_01: We're doing all this good thing.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the end, she was right, which occasionally she reminds me of.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and you're saying, okay,
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: because I went to visit Taber and Jane to see one of these worldview launches
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: where they did a balloon and the idea was to do,
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they kind of had two parts of their business.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: One was to fly up cameras and sensors and things like that.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other goal was eventually to do tourism where you could hang out.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: At the edge of space and not have to go up in a rocket.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: You could go up nice and smooth and have a cocktail up there and maybe even
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_00: a bathroom and, and, and, you know, look down on the earth.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: But so you're saying this,
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_00: your mission is really what gave birth to that because they had
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: to build these balloons for you.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, so what happened was is that neither of us knew anything about balloons.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like we didn't know anything about balloons.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so we ended up.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_01: Looking through all the people that knew things about balloons.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_01: And we went to Danny Ball, who ran the NASA program.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_01: And we also met a guy named Julian Nod.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: And Julian was from Santa Barbara.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: He had been approached on these kind of projects for a long time, but always said no.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I spent some time with him.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so we started to learn about balloons and getting a balloon was actually one of
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_01: the hardest things.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't that balloons weren't available,
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_01: like Raven Aerostar was a maker of balloons,
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_01: had been making scientific balloons for a long time,
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_01: but they got out of manned balloons,
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: actually because of the death of Nick Piantonata,
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_01: because he had used one of their balloons.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then later they got out of hot air ballooning and all this kind of stuff for
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: the same reason.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so we didn't have a balloon supplier.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_01: Red Bull got around this problem by actually buying balloons
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_01: that Raven Air Star had told to somebody else and then buying it for them.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_01: But we didn't have that option.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so Julian introduced us to this group,
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_01: TIFR, Tata Institute of something, something research.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they built balloons in India.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and Julian was really good friends with this guy, Sri, there.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_01: And Sri ended up joining us on the project and helping in lots of different ways.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: But he, but that's how we got a balloon.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_01: But before that,
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_01: we actually tried,
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: can we use weather balloons and tied,
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: like 50 of them together,
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_01: which was a horrible idea,
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_01: by the way, even though it had been done historically by this guy, Delfus.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, we ended up getting the balloon from them.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: But the balloons they needed for worldview,
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: for the space tourism, because they were trying to lift up like a, 10,000 pounds.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was a big gondola capsule.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_01: There were no balloons that were available that would be able to do that.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: So they had to take on the challenge of making balloons, but that happened much later.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_00: But they got into all this as a result of this project.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_01: As a result of that project.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's where we both learned
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_00: about balloons.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then they started a new company after, which is doing space tourism.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Space Perspectives.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: But we still haven't got to this point where other people get to do this.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think we will?
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think it should work.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's nothing technically that makes it so that it's not possible.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I would have loved it because I really do think the idea of,
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, balloons are the most amazing form of travel.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_01: Gas balloons in particular, they are silent and they are beautiful.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a few places you can fly gas balloons everywhere.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: Occasionally in the United States.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_01: In Europe, it's much more pervasive.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_01: They have hydrogen balloons they fly in.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_01: I still think of all the types of flying.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_01: Flying a gas balloon is one of the most special.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_00: I went in a Zeppelin in Germany, and it really is such a different experience to a plane.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like you said,
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: it's very quiet,
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_00: and you can open the window and stick your head out, and the ascent is very gentle.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't really, you've flown all these different crafts.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't really appreciated how it's a completely different experience
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_00: and there's something just awesome about it.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's really magical.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like when I needed to get a gas balloon license, it's not really called a gas balloon license.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's a lighter than air license without an airborne heater restriction,
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_01: which is what hotter balloons are.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I went to Germany to do that.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: This guy, Willie Imers, who's a famous balloonist, has a place where you can go.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you launch the way that you used to launch.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_01: You launch by,
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_01: sandbags,
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: basically, that you drop out sand and you go up, you know, to a thousand feet.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then you,
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_01: it's kind of a long story,
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_01: but you get the balloon into this position where just the tiny,
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_01: like you take a little trowel.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you take a little bit of sand and you throw it out and that balloon climbs.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: You are in such amazing equilibrium.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the balloons fly pressure altitudes.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you have like small hills and things like that,
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_01: the balloon will automatically fly them all.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_01: And you can hear every single sound on the ground.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like we were flying overnight and there was a party going on and we were flying.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't probably even know we were flying over at a thousand feet.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_01: And they were having this conversation in the backyard.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: We could hear every word.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_01: It was like, it's just so special.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, so,
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_01: so I think there will be a time,
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_01: space perspectives kind of ran out of money at an inconvenient time,
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_01: which was too bad because they're,
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_01: Their vehicle was actually coming along really, really well at that time.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I still think that dream's still alive.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_01: And there's nothing technically that prevents it from happening.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_01: But like anything else,
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_01: it's more expensive and you need to find the right investors for the right period
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_01: of time.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_01: And tolerate it, yeah.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I would have loved it.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_00: Would have saved me a lot of money.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_00: Did you, um, again,
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry,
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you've had to answer this question,
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_00: but I mean, you, did this experience change you at all?
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I, you know,
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_01: they talk about the overview effect and looking at the earth and looking
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_01: at many different ways.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_01: For me, that wasn't what, you know, I think it changed me in the sense that, um,
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't as much change me.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of reaffirm the core belief that great engineering matters and that teams
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_01: of people can accomplish amazing things
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_01: and that being a part of something like
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_01: that is really worthy.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_01: People will tell me, well, Why'd you have to do that?
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Why didn't you just buy a ticket on Virgin Galactic or something?
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, you don't get it.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_01: You just don't get it.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's like that, the process and the work at which, and the learning.
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why do you do things?
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, because I learn so much.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, when do you get a chance to be in the same room interacting on
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_01: a very important topic with Flight surgeons and balloon people
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_01: and environmental engineers and, you know, like spacesuit designers.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like immersing yourself in that environment with those people
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_01: that you would never come in contact in a normal world.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then sharing something that's so personal that if I saw any of them today,
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_01: it would be like time is like Not going by.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, how do you describe
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_00: that feeling?
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's, it's, uh, I mean,
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_00: my only comparable ish experience is just when I work on these books for many years
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_00: or a movie, by the time it comes out, it's, it really is the process.
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's like the fun part.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And for me getting to.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Inhabit these other people's lives to get this knowledge from them and then all
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_00: the hard work that goes into it.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then on the movies, like a team that you're working with.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_00: by the time they end product, I mean, he's like, you want to see it and it's great.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_01: To have it out.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think there's a moment, like when we did the movie, so we put together a movie.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_01: This was Jane and Tabor's idea,
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_01: which is,
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_01: let's document it and let's have people videoing things
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: so we can remember what it was like.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so we ended up hiring Jerry Kolber and Tex and they came and they actually,
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_01: on a very small budget,
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_01: like there are two of them and one film guy, you know, kind of thing.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_01: They put together the whole thing and...
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And they made a movie and we debuted at Tribeca, which is like a great venue.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I will say the moment,
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_01: the really interesting thing was the first time somebody who has no knowledge of
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_01: the project sees what happened.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you get to like see the reaction and feel the reaction and feel the audience and things.
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, Jerry made the thing way more melodramatic than it really was.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_01: But...
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_01: But still, it was special because, you know, that story wouldn't have been told.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that story would have gone away.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And now,
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_01: even at a 10-year anniversary,
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_01: one of the things we did was go back and watch the movie.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, wow.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_00: No, I can imagine.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's extraordinary.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're nuts.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was fun.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Did Larry and Sergey go to the actual lodge?
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_01: They hated the idea, by the way, you know, because they didn't, they cared about me.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like they didn't want anything to happen to me.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_01: And, uh, uh, but they were happy for me.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_01: To see Sergey's airship?
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_01: I did.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_01: I actually got a ride in the airship.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_00: You did?
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like one of the specialists of the special.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_01: I am so grateful.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I followed the project.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_01: I've helped them in little ways for a long period of time.
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a brilliant, brilliant...
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_01: it's like I feel like that technology has languished for so long and that way
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_01: of travel is so special and I'm just so grateful for...
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_01: That Sergey and that team brought back,
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_01: you know, um, and extended what that technology is capable of in that way.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_01: And, uh, I must say, I, I had goose pimples like the entire time.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_00: So cool.
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I followed it for years.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Al Weston's a dear friend of mine.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so he, you know, he was the original, um, project.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And, uh, what a character.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I like him a lot.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was extraordinary to watch them build that thing.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, And yeah, amazing.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Will you indulge me a little bit more just to ask a couple questions away from this?
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's okay.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
• 1:15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Just because, again, you did so much stuff I'm fascinated by.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, when I first started out as a reporter, and I mean, it was amazing.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was 22 and knew nothing about tech,
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_00: and I had to learn all this stuff on the fly, and I got thrown into covering stuff.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Solaris and True64 and Alpha and Spark and all these things.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it was such a cool time because I used to go to everybody's research labs
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_00: and all these companies were working on the,
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_00: they were making chips,
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_00: operating system, file system, storage system, networking, everything.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone was a computer science lab and it was exhilarating and I loved the competition.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Of it all that still goes on today, but it is definitely different.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I, I don't really get invited to people's labs hardly ever.
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Google might be one of the rare exceptions that still has something close to this.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, I was just kind of, I was curious.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, have you, does this ring bells?
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Do you feel like the valleys, I mean, maybe,
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_00: probably didn't make sense for everybody to be spending billions
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_00: of dollars making their own chicks at some point,
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_00: obviously at some point, but, um, Yeah.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, does the,
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_00: does the Valley have like a little bit of a different feel to you in that regard or,
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_00: or all that stuff matured and we're just working on different problems now?
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, uh, I mean, uh, I mean, it was a, it was a really interesting time.
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I,
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I grew up in like,
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_01: the best possible time,
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_01: you know, like,
• 1:16:37
  SPEAKER_01: like the,
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: when I was going to college,
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_01: you know, uh,
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_01: you know, um,
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_01: the VLSI revolution had just started and the idea
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_01: that anybody could build their own VLSI chip and there were rules to be able
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_01: to do it and then you could have it fabbed and get back and you could run it.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_01: that was when,
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_01: the MIPS chip and the RISC chip were coming on and And before it was something
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_01: that was only relegated to, you know, very large companies.
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then that spurred a whole round of innovation in architectural ideas
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_01: and software ideas and hardware ideas.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then,
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_01: Xerox PARC comes along and,
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_01: they build the first,
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_01: bitmap display and,
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_01: the first, you know, printers that can, you know, and, you know, use of a mouse.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, you know, I mean, there was...
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Ethernet, I think Ethernet.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Ethernet, yeah.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_01: No, David Boggs, I work with at Ural.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_01: He was one of the co-inventors with Robert Matikoff.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah,
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_01: it was just like, and,
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_01: ARPANET was starting,
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_01: and NSF had a network, and,
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_01: you know, I mean,
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_01: it was just,
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_01: it was just like before you were isolated,
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_01: and now you're connected to this larger world.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was an amazing time, and...
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a new time where everybody felt like they could now do anything.
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a book by, I think it's Tracy Kidder, Soul of a New Machine.
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_01: I might have that wrong.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a book about a small team building a processor or building a computer.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it was awesome.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_00: I have that book sitting right over there.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it still gives me goose pimples right here.
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like crazy, like this idea that you could do things far and above what you do.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're able to do before and expanded the horizon of ideas that could be realized.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_01: And and so I loved it.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know,
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_01: I look now and,
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_01: there's another set of places where our tool set and our ability has now allowed us
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_01: to expand the horizon of what we are capable of doing.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that has like profound implications on like The way we work and other things.
• 1:18:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like the valley is different in some sense.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_01: But in some ways,
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_01: this idea that
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_01: we have a new set of tools and a new set of ideas,
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_01: and we are now capable of expanding the horizons.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_01: And if we do, it will have dramatic impacts on us and society and things like that.
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And The key for me, I mean,
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_01: this is a longer,
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_01: more philosophical discussion,
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_01: but fundamentally, we are about to build or encounter a smarter society.
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like the IQ of society is about to, I mean, it's been going up, no doubt about it.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_01: But we're about to make a step function change in our intellectual capacity.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And how we choose to use that is really the fundamental thing.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And if we work on the same set of narrow little problems, then,
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_01: all hell will break loose, all the jobs will go away, all this kind of stuff.
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_01: But if we,
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_01: as a society,
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_01: expand the frontier of what we're going to attempt,
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_01: like we're going to cure cancer,
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_01: we're going to solve transportation problems,
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_01: we're going to do farming a lot better,
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_01: we're going to be faster and more efficient,
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_01: we're going to generate way more interesting companies,
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_01: we have the potential to take an innovation,
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_01: just like the LSI did,
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_01: and turn it into something which is Which is,
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_01: which everybody will, in the end, assume it was kind of always that way.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of like think in the back of my mind, it's like, like, do we want to go back?
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, after the tractor was invented, you know?
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's like how many people 20 years after the tractor said,
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know, I really thought we were better off without that tractor thing.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I really thought pick hose was the right way to go.
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And now history has proven me right.
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, why?
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, why?
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's because society moved on in a way that where the inventions existed.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Caused us to be able to feed more people,
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_01: to be able to lower prices,
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_01: to be able to farm larger tracts of land,
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_01: to be able to farm land that wasn't practical to farm,
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_01: like when the steam engine was invented.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Trains were invented.
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then we expanded the horizon.
• 1:21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like, now we're going to build trains that go all the way across the country, you know?
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like, can you, like, across the Rockies and across the, you know, the Sierra Nevada.
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to actually go on both.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like we expanded the vision of what What we could do as a country.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that expansion more than made up for the fact that
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_01: the technology had both allowed us, enabled us, but it made us much better.
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so I don't know.
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_01: For me, it's like almost impossible to leave that 25 years we'll go back and say,
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_01: man, I wish we were a dumber society.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think we really made a mistake by getting
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_00: so smart.
• 1:22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And let me ask you one more question along these fronts.
• 1:22:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you live through this...
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Explosion of computing power.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_00: These chips come along.
• 1:22:27
  SPEAKER_00: You help even push this forward.
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_00: All the stuff you're talking about.
• 1:22:31
  SPEAKER_00: VLSI.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_00: You're witnessing the birth of the,
• 1:22:36
  SPEAKER_00: not the birth, but the fulfillment of the microprocessor revolution.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_00: You watch then...
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_00: The internet go from these early days to this thing that takes over the world
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_00: and also unlocks human potential in new ways.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_00: We still have debates whether LLMs are sufficient to get to this,
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_00: whatever anyone wants to define as a super intelligence,
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_00: but clearly they're doing incredible things already.
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_00: So based on everything you're saying,
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just getting the sense you're very much,
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_00: you've seen enough of what we've done with AI in this moment in time to think we are
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_00: for sure on the cusp of this,
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_00: another revolution that is either comparable or bigger to what you've seen before.
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would definitely say that this is revolutionary technology
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_01: that can dramatically improve I mean,
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_01: here's another way to say it,
• 1:23:40
  SPEAKER_01: is that we have pushed our brains,
• 1:23:43
  SPEAKER_01: our kind of boring little brains,
• 1:23:49
  SPEAKER_01: past what I think anyone would expect us to be able to do.
• 1:23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you go back 300 years and you say your brains are capable of doing this,
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_01: people would say no way.
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we've done it because...
• 1:24:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because we've abstracted problems away,
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_01: we've worked really hard,
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_01: we've put a lot of things in place,
• 1:24:09
  SPEAKER_01: we've stood on the shoulders of giants,
• 1:24:12
  SPEAKER_01: we've moved the things forward in fits and starts,
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_01: we've designed machines that can now give us more information,
• 1:24:19
  SPEAKER_01: which can change our ideas,
• 1:24:20
  SPEAKER_01: and this flywheel has been able to allow us to proceed and We are so limited
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_01: by our own brain and the amount of complexity that we can understand.
• 1:24:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then we're super limited by our inability to communicate.
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like this conversation is the lowest bandwidth communication in the world.
• 1:24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And no disrespect, but, you know, it's like,
• 1:24:44
  SPEAKER_00: you know, it's, you know.
• 1:24:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit right.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_01: The bit right thing is super low,
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_01: you know, and,
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_01: and so we,
• 1:24:51
  SPEAKER_01: and therefore teams like can't get They can get large,
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_01: but the inefficiencies associated with it are so high.
• 1:25:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm proud of what we've managed to do with our brains,
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_01: but the idea that we can remove some of those limitations that we have and be able
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_01: to take on harder and harder problems because we are no longer limited.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_01: And also just the abstractions that we need to do to be able to get as far as we have.
• 1:25:28
  SPEAKER_01: In my world, maybe in your world, object-oriented programming is an example.
• 1:25:33
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we can describe objects and the interaction between objects,
• 1:25:38
  SPEAKER_01: and therefore we create a level of distraction between them.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_01: We do that all the time,
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_01: even on the fusion case,
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_01: where I'm on the board of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, trying to build...
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_01: Fusion power,
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_01: because power is one of the most important things in the world,
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_01: and we have to basically figure out a better way to provide firm power all the time.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_01: And fusion is like a lovely technology,
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_01: and it's an amazing team,
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_01: and they're doing great things, and they're going to prove it.
• 1:26:02
  SPEAKER_01: They're absolutely going to prove it.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's not going to be decades away.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to be in the next couple of years.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to have power plant scale fusion, and I'm...
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_01: So lucky to work with that team.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know,
• 1:26:15
  SPEAKER_01: solving,
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_01: kind of that level of problem,
• 1:26:21
  SPEAKER_01: even in that level,
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_01: there's an abstraction that they use to basically,
• 1:26:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_01: this building holds cryo,
• 1:26:26
  SPEAKER_01: this building holds RF, this building holds, you know, like energy density.
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_01: This one has fogomac.
• 1:26:31
  SPEAKER_01: So in every way,
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_01: we have to build abstractions around things to make them You know,
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_01: to make them worthwhile.
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just, and that shows our limitations.
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_01: But once we get past those limitations,
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_01: once we can think about much more complex things and complex solutions,
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_01: because, you know, when it comes down to the human body, it's pretty darn complex.
• 1:26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why haven't we solved the problem of the human body?
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_01: Why haven't we solved the problem of cancer, all these diseases?
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, it's because the human body is complex.
• 1:27:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even the atom, like, you know, like, bore in the atom, you think, oh, well, we're done.
• 1:27:06
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, We're not done.
• 1:27:09
  SPEAKER_01: The cosmos,
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_01: we have all these bigger and bigger telescopes giving us way more information
• 1:27:15
  SPEAKER_01: and we're asking more questions.
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_01: Every time we get a new tool,
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_01: we get to ask and sometimes answer new sets of questions Which expands the frontier
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_01: of what we're trying to do.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I just feel like, boy,
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_01: am I glad to have a power tool when I was working with sticks and rocks and stuff.
• 1:27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Has there...
• 1:27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Has the rate of recent progress felt arresting to you?
• 1:27:45
  SPEAKER_00: Does this feel different?
• 1:27:46
  SPEAKER_00: When we had Moore's Law, we were on this roughly 18-month cadence.
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_00: We could see computers doing more and more things.
• 1:27:54
  SPEAKER_00: When the consumer internet came along, you had this explosion of interest and hope about it.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Fiber optic cables were being laid everywhere.
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_00: All these data centers were getting built.
• 1:28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then you had this interim period where The infrastructure outstripped the demand,
• 1:28:12
  SPEAKER_00: and then eventually the demand exceeded people's wildest expectations,
• 1:28:16
  SPEAKER_00: but this took 10, 12 years, which is a relatively short amount of time.
• 1:28:20
  SPEAKER_01: People were right about the impact, but they were wrong about the time.
• 1:28:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think it is all of those things.
• 1:28:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I feel like, I mean, I am surprised.
• 1:28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first, I'm surprised that language was the thing that came first.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it came right down.
• 1:28:55
  SPEAKER_01: I thought language would be the last thing.
• 1:28:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:28:57
  SPEAKER_01: I thought,
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:28:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, you know, I thought there were much easier problems out there.
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought language is very complex.
• 1:29:07
  SPEAKER_01: But what was interesting,
• 1:29:09
  SPEAKER_01: and so the whole LLM thing came as a complete surprise,
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_01: not because the technology didn't exist,
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_01: but because I just thought language was so complex.
• 1:29:18
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, if I'm smart, I should have, like, figured it out earlier.
• 1:29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because in the early days of Google,
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_01: I remember we had a research project around machine translation,
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_01: like language to language translation.
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's a guy named Franz Ock at a company called ISI.
• 1:29:34
  SPEAKER_01: They did this blue score test where they could,
• 1:29:38
  SPEAKER_01: where they'd get a set of translations to make on, like, Monday.
• 1:29:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then by Friday, they had to basically turn in their translations.
• 1:29:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was all done by machine.
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_01: Franz Och and his little computer basically had the best translation in
• 1:29:57
  SPEAKER_01: the world using a set of techniques that kind of were related to machine learning,
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_01: more probability based.
• 1:30:03
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, he was the expert.
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so my team said, I mean,
• 1:30:07
  SPEAKER_01: I asked my team, as I always do, is there anything I can do to make you go faster?
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, yeah, you need to hire Franz Och.
• 1:30:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I tried to hire him and he says no and he says no and he says no.
• 1:30:16
  SPEAKER_01: And eventually I flew down to L.A.
• 1:30:19
  SPEAKER_01: And met him at the old, you know, the restaurant right by the airport.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so I met him.
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_01: And in the first time in Google's history, to my knowledge, maybe it happened before.
• 1:30:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I actually made him an offer without an interview, like never done before.
• 1:30:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so I made him an offer.
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, look, we really want you.
• 1:30:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he came.
• 1:30:37
  SPEAKER_01: He eventually said yes, thankfully.
• 1:30:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he came up and was building a system.
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then I connect him with Jeff Dean, who's,
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_01: like world famous,
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:30:48
  SPEAKER_01: one of the, if not the best computer scientists at both Google and the world.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_01: And they together took a process that took five days to do a print translation
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_01: and turned it into seconds.
• 1:31:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then we shipped it.
• 1:31:05
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden, now...
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_01: You were not limited by a single language in what you were able to access.
• 1:31:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so this idea that language is more predictable and that,
• 1:31:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in the end, the whole key is that you're able to predict what's coming next.
• 1:31:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:31:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the key.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I still think LLMs are wonderful,
• 1:31:33
  SPEAKER_01: but I think The other side of,
• 1:31:36
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_01: the whole AGI debate and trying to figure out like how systems work and how we learn
• 1:31:42
  SPEAKER_01: and learning and reinforcement learning and being able to iterate things
• 1:31:47
  SPEAKER_01: and stuff like that.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_01: More like humans learn.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's like the difference between Alpha and AlphaGo.
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_01: it's like I feel like there's steps that still need to be taken to be able to get to
• 1:31:59
  SPEAKER_01: the point where we close these loops.
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that there's some limitation right now on the amount of training data that's there.
• 1:32:07
  SPEAKER_01: And training on generated data might not be as good as training on original data.
• 1:32:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so I don't know.
• 1:32:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a little bit disappointed that so much effort is going into the LLM side and not
• 1:32:25
  SPEAKER_01: on some of the other things that I think could,
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_01: like, I don't think cancer is going to be solved by an LLM.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like that's a pretty big and important problem.
• 1:32:36
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, I'm thrilled.
• 1:32:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if I had my druthers,
• 1:32:42
  SPEAKER_01: I would push out some of the other frontiers probably as fast or faster than
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_01: the LLM side.
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, that's just me.
• 1:32:51
  SPEAKER_00: You would know far more about this than me.
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's my gut instinct just from having covered different waves of technology and
• 1:32:58
  SPEAKER_00: then just where people are putting...
• 1:33:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we need five trillion dollar companies trying to copy each other.
• 1:33:06
  SPEAKER_00: It would be good if maybe a couple of these went off and threw all that into other spots.
• 1:33:12
  SPEAKER_00: But there are many stuff.
• 1:33:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like materials.
• 1:33:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like materials is like a super exciting area.
• 1:33:17
  SPEAKER_01: We have the ability to build materials we've never seen before.
• 1:33:19
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like a great set of materials would allow us to do lots of interesting things.
• 1:33:24
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I could cite it.
• 1:33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't Claude Shannon in the 60s write this paper about the limitations of language?
• 1:33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:33:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, didn't he show that we think we have all this variety and choice
• 1:33:36
  SPEAKER_00: when we're picking our next word, but that in actual fact, it's much more limited?
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I guess whenever I have looked back at that paper, it just seems like, oh, I guess he...
• 1:33:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Claude Shannon sort of knew everything.
• 1:33:49
  SPEAKER_00: So...
• 1:33:49
  SPEAKER_00: It just felt like he had put some architecture that,
• 1:33:52
  SPEAKER_00: oh, maybe language could be solved if you had enough horsepower.
• 1:33:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of early people that had really,
• 1:33:58
  SPEAKER_01: really, I mean, look back, like Vanderbilt Bush had lots of really interesting...
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, those two,
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_00: Bush and Shannon,
• 1:34:06
  SPEAKER_00: and somebody's escaping me at this moment,
• 1:34:09
  SPEAKER_00: but sort of like this window into the way the universe operates to see the future.
• 1:34:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's incredible.
• 1:34:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's incredible.
• 1:34:21
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 1:34:21
  SPEAKER_01: like I was talking to somebody the other day, like,
• 1:34:23
  SPEAKER_01: what is it about, I mean, what is the biological, you know, mechanism of insight?
• 1:34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what is it that all of a sudden causes somebody to figure out something that,
• 1:34:33
  SPEAKER_01: you know, for entire human history, we've never figured out?
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then to be able to predict it, you know, decades before, you know, it actually can.
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_01: And some of the things are just just hard,
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_01: you know, and they take a lot of work like the basics for fusion.
• 1:34:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was a.
• 1:34:52
  SPEAKER_01: The Lawson Criteria was basically invented in 1958 or something like that,
• 1:34:57
  SPEAKER_01: that basically told you exactly what conditions you need to make fusion power.
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_01: But it's taken a pretty long time to basically be able to recreate those conditions,
• 1:35:09
  SPEAKER_01: even though we know exactly what they are.
• 1:35:12
  SPEAKER_00: So in its heyday, DEC was almost like the open AI or the Google of its time.
• 1:35:19
  SPEAKER_00: Super sexy.
• 1:35:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think they peaked the moment I joined.
• 1:35:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't take complete responsibility for the demise of that, but yeah, it was a peak.
• 1:35:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's an interesting story in technology and companies.
• 1:35:37
  SPEAKER_01: They built the VAX and the PDP-11, and the VAX was by far the best mini-computer of its time.
• 1:35:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they sold them like hotcakes.
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean...
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they actually had their own operating system, VMS, that went into it.
• 1:35:52
  SPEAKER_01: But there was this interesting moment where people would buy their machines,
• 1:35:57
  SPEAKER_01: but they would strip out every single piece of the software on that machine,
• 1:36:01
  SPEAKER_01: and they would load on it Unix onto that machine.
• 1:36:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that probably should have been a wake-up call for them.
• 1:36:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to University of Central Florida.
• 1:36:13
  SPEAKER_01: It was called Florida Technological University at the time.
• 1:36:17
  SPEAKER_01: The Unix people could only use the machine at night.
• 1:36:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like the machine was used during the day by the VMS people.
• 1:36:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then every night at like 9 p.m., we would go in and there was these giant hard drives.
• 1:36:30
  SPEAKER_01: And you'd spin down the hard drive and you'd pull out the platter and you'd put it
• 1:36:35
  SPEAKER_01: over the side and you'd put the new platter in and it was Unix.
• 1:36:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it would run Unix until 9 a.m. the next morning.
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of us would work basically all night because that's the only time we had access to...
• 1:36:46
  SPEAKER_01: To the operating system on which all of the interesting innovations in VLSI were being built.
• 1:36:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so, but yeah, they were great.
• 1:36:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a wonderful company.
• 1:36:56
  SPEAKER_01: But they also, you know, their money was in VMS and not in TCP IP.
• 1:37:01
  SPEAKER_01: And they had DeckNet at the time.
• 1:37:03
  SPEAKER_01: And they kind of missed where the technology was going.
• 1:37:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then they were very early in building your own chips.
• 1:37:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like, You know, like Microvax, Alpha, all this kind of stuff.
• 1:37:15
  SPEAKER_01: They even built some of the very first low power ARM chips were done there.
• 1:37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, the strong ARM processor.
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, I forgot about that, yeah.
• 1:37:23
  SPEAKER_01: Which is sold to Intel.
• 1:37:25
  SPEAKER_01: And had Intel actually followed up on low-power processors, it would have changed everything.
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_01: But they killed that project,
• 1:37:32
  SPEAKER_01: basically, because they wanted one architecture and one CPU and stuff like that.
• 1:37:36
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at many of their problems, it dates back to whatever that decision.
• 1:37:41
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know who made that decision.
• 1:37:42
  SPEAKER_01: But at DAC, it's the same thing.
• 1:37:44
  SPEAKER_01: Inside a deck,
• 1:37:45
  SPEAKER_01: I remember a set of meetings that we were in and,
• 1:37:48
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:37:48
  SPEAKER_01: should you choose the big mainframes or the mini computers or the micro computers?
• 1:37:54
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a lot of internal debate.
• 1:37:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually, I was actually in a high level kind of executive review of the three.
• 1:38:02
  SPEAKER_01: They all used roughly the same technology.
• 1:38:04
  SPEAKER_01: They all cost about the same amount of money.
• 1:38:07
  SPEAKER_01: But on this one, on the microprocessors, we made almost nothing.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Mini computers, we made something.
• 1:38:12
  SPEAKER_01: And on the big computers, we made a lot.
• 1:38:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so we decided to chase IBM instead of chasing, like, the mini computer people.
• 1:38:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a mistake.
• 1:38:25
  SPEAKER_01: That was the moment.
• 1:38:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like...
• 1:38:29
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe that wouldn't have been a great business.
• 1:38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we needed a different company to be able to pursue low margin businesses like that.
• 1:38:40
  SPEAKER_01: But it was sad.
• 1:38:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then Compact ends up acquiring DEC, which is like the upstart.
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't even build their own chips and stuff.
• 1:38:50
  SPEAKER_01: And they acquired us not for the technology.
• 1:38:51
  SPEAKER_01: They acquired us for like Like our professional
• 1:38:54
  SPEAKER_00: services organization,
• 1:38:56
  SPEAKER_00: which is even
• 1:38:57
  SPEAKER_01: more like a dagger to the heart.
• 1:38:59
  SPEAKER_01: Get into the data center.
• 1:39:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, man.
• 1:39:01
  SPEAKER_00: The people were great, though.
• 1:39:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what I was, I mean, the talent that comes out of there.
• 1:39:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Jeff Dean, who I mentioned.
• 1:39:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 1:39:11
  SPEAKER_01: Chuck Seitz.
• 1:39:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Microsoft, you know, their whole...
• 1:39:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, operating system.
• 1:39:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:39:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just like the number of like amazing people,
• 1:39:23
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:39:23
  SPEAKER_01: Jim Keller,
• 1:39:24
  SPEAKER_01: Pete Bannon,
• 1:39:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know, I mean,
• 1:39:25
  SPEAKER_01: it's like, like,
• 1:39:26
  SPEAKER_01: it's like a who's who's list of all these people that were incredible talent
• 1:39:30
  SPEAKER_01: and they went on to,
• 1:39:32
  SPEAKER_00: To do amazing things.
• 1:39:33
  SPEAKER_00: Google, Microsoft, Intel, building all these new architectures.
• 1:39:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then Sun is in many ways the inheritor of this.
• 1:39:41
  SPEAKER_00: They're the next deck in a lot of, you could argue, you know, the next hot new thing.
• 1:39:46
  SPEAKER_00: And they've taken the, we've got mainframe, we've got minicomputer, now we're at a workstation.
• 1:39:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then I was just so curious.
• 1:39:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, right as you're joining Google...
• 1:39:58
  SPEAKER_00: Sun is about to be hit by many of the forces that you just described,
• 1:40:03
  SPEAKER_00: which is Sun's making its own version of Unix, its own chips.
• 1:40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, now this Finnish kid creates a Linux kernel and,
• 1:40:12
  SPEAKER_00: and you can put it on Intel's chips and it turns out it's quite powerful and does
• 1:40:17
  SPEAKER_00: a lot.
• 1:40:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then Google More than any company on earth recognizes the power of this
• 1:40:23
  SPEAKER_00: to go build data centers that are much cheaper,
• 1:40:26
  SPEAKER_00: these enormous clusters, instead of having these high-priced Unix machines.
• 1:40:31
  SPEAKER_00: Was there any part of you in your heart as you're doing some of the work
• 1:40:35
  SPEAKER_00: to make this happen that you felt some sadness for the era of computing you were
• 1:40:40
  SPEAKER_00: about to put out of business?
• 1:40:43
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:40:45
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:40:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the thing about Google, which was special, is...
• 1:40:51
  SPEAKER_01: We had a lot of super smart people.
• 1:40:53
  SPEAKER_01: They understood a lot about how the pieces went together.
• 1:40:58
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing that the previous era had created a set of tools that provided
• 1:41:08
  SPEAKER_01: the framework for what we were trying to do.
• 1:41:10
  SPEAKER_01: And search itself was...
• 1:41:17
  SPEAKER_01: Was interestingly partitionable,
• 1:41:21
  SPEAKER_01: like these,
• 1:41:22
  SPEAKER_01: the indexes with basically,
• 1:41:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:41:25
  SPEAKER_01: arrays of words,
• 1:41:27
  SPEAKER_01: basically, or arrays of references to words in all these different documents.
• 1:41:32
  SPEAKER_01: That was actually pretty easy to parallelize, not simple to parallelize, but it was easier.
• 1:41:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so all the innovations of the past, like, you know, Linux and
• 1:41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Fast networking, other kinds of stuff.
• 1:41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Those were all the pieces that needed to be put together,
• 1:41:50
  SPEAKER_01: like disk drives and stuff like that and large memory systems and other things.
• 1:41:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so what Google did was start to do a vertical integration because,
• 1:42:02
  SPEAKER_01: and they didn't have to invent everything.
• 1:42:04
  SPEAKER_01: All the pieces,
• 1:42:06
  SPEAKER_01: like the puzzle pieces were on the table and all they had
• 1:42:09
  SPEAKER_01: to do was fit it together correctly.
• 1:42:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then they would expose the holes in the system, like networking was a huge hole.
• 1:42:18
  SPEAKER_01: You could have Ethernet, which is great, and it got you up to some point.
• 1:42:21
  SPEAKER_01: But we needed a lot more networking than that.
• 1:42:24
  SPEAKER_01: And all the things would network lots of computers together at high bandwidth.
• 1:42:27
  SPEAKER_01: Those were prohibitively expensive.
• 1:42:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we made the investments in people.
• 1:42:32
  SPEAKER_01: To be able to take and build commodity networks at much higher performance or
• 1:42:38
  SPEAKER_01: to spur that effort with different people.
• 1:42:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so I feel like we took the best of all the worlds and put it together in a way
• 1:42:47
  SPEAKER_01: that we could control the whole ecosystem.
• 1:42:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that allowed us to move problems around.
• 1:42:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like maybe you couldn't solve this problem here,
• 1:42:57
  SPEAKER_01: but maybe there was a software solution,
• 1:42:59
  SPEAKER_01: or maybe there was an operating solution,
• 1:43:00
  SPEAKER_01: or maybe there was some hardware solution that would get you there.
• 1:43:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so by controlling a whole stack, Then you got to do things that you couldn't do before.
• 1:43:14
  SPEAKER_01: And also by parallelism,
• 1:43:16
  SPEAKER_01: both at the rack level,
• 1:43:17
  SPEAKER_01: at the data center level and other things,
• 1:43:19
  SPEAKER_01: you didn't have to worry about some of the problems that you,
• 1:43:22
  SPEAKER_01: like
• 1:43:29
  SPEAKER_01: tandem computers, basically.
• 1:43:30
  SPEAKER_01: They were building triply redundant computers,
• 1:43:33
  SPEAKER_01: three computers that would basically execute in parallel and
• 1:43:36
  SPEAKER_01: then you compare results.
• 1:43:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that was a very expensive solution.
• 1:43:41
  SPEAKER_01: In our case,
• 1:43:41
  SPEAKER_01: we just had,
• 1:43:42
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:43:42
  SPEAKER_01: things and racks and you could run the same thing on a different rack
• 1:43:45
  SPEAKER_01: and you could compare the two at the end and not have to build any special hardware
• 1:43:50
  SPEAKER_01: but still get the same advantages of that.
• 1:43:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, if a system went down, you didn't care.
• 1:43:58
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't have to build a big UPS thing out in the back
• 1:44:01
  SPEAKER_01: that would keep all these computers running.
• 1:44:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one rack would die, the other one would take over.
• 1:44:06
  SPEAKER_01: One board would die, the rest of the rack would take over.
• 1:44:08
  SPEAKER_01: And in the end, if one data center died, another data center would take over.
• 1:44:14
  SPEAKER_01: So building in simple commodity systems that can kind of punch above their weight
• 1:44:25
  SPEAKER_01: and solve bigger problems, that was super interesting to me.
• 1:44:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like
• 1:44:34
  SPEAKER_01: it was the next generation And,
• 1:44:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:44:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know why the other, I think it's an overwhelming, an overreaching question.
• 1:44:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was like,
• 1:44:47
  SPEAKER_01: why don't big companies,
• 1:44:51
  SPEAKER_01: like they have all the resources,
• 1:44:53
  SPEAKER_01: they see everything that's going on,
• 1:44:55
  SPEAKER_01: they have very talented people,
• 1:44:58
  SPEAKER_01: but somehow the inertia Keeps them from reinventing themselves.
• 1:45:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't, you know, I don't know why.
• 1:45:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's books written about this, but still nobody ever... Yeah, exactly.
• 1:45:11
  SPEAKER_01: We still seem to be repeating the same problems, you know?
• 1:45:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, it doesn't go away.
• 1:45:16
  SPEAKER_00: The stuff you're talking about with Intel,
• 1:45:18
  SPEAKER_00: I remember going year after year after year to their labs and they would show me
• 1:45:23
  SPEAKER_00: a smartphone and they...
• 1:45:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like way before the iPhone came out,
• 1:45:28
  SPEAKER_00: it was essentially,
• 1:45:29
  SPEAKER_00: it was like a shitty iPhone, but it was an iPhone and they knew what was coming.
• 1:45:33
  SPEAKER_00: They did the same thing with Microsoft and it was just,
• 1:45:37
  SPEAKER_00: could not swing the organization to make that kind of like priority one
• 1:45:42
  SPEAKER_00: for what would be next.
• 1:45:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then you end up-
• 1:45:56
  SPEAKER_00: That NVIDIA would be worth this much more than Intel.
• 1:46:00
  SPEAKER_00: Intel was like,
• 1:46:02
  SPEAKER_00: there was a long time where even when Intel made a mistake,
• 1:46:05
  SPEAKER_00: they just turned the fab up and obliterate what would come.
• 1:46:11
  SPEAKER_00: The thought that like ARM and NVIDIA would be worth more than Intel was like unfathomable.
• 1:46:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, no, it's just, it's hard to see, you know, it's hard to, Kind of understand.
• 1:46:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even at the time, there was Intel and there was AMD, right?
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_01: And they were both making chips and systems and stuff.
• 1:46:31
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we obviously knew people.
• 1:46:33
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 1:46:35
  SPEAKER_01: for our data centers,
• 1:46:36
  SPEAKER_01: we would build an AMD system and we would build an Intel system.
• 1:46:40
  SPEAKER_01: And we would compare them.
• 1:46:43
  SPEAKER_01: And even in the cases where AMD wasn't good, we would give them a lot of feedback.
• 1:46:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like, here's where you're failing.
• 1:46:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is where it's not working, you know, well.
• 1:46:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because we always wanted two systems.
• 1:46:55
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't want to basically have one system that would always basically go with.
• 1:47:01
  SPEAKER_01: And we made a promise to AMD that says,
• 1:47:03
  SPEAKER_01: look, if you do this and you are the best solution, we will buy you.
• 1:47:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we did.
• 1:47:09
  SPEAKER_01: We worked back and forth over a long period of time.
• 1:47:11
  SPEAKER_01: And supporting an ecosystem that was friendly to innovation was like
• 1:47:18
  SPEAKER_01: a super important part of Of what made us successful is preserving optionality
• 1:47:27
  SPEAKER_01: over time.
• 1:47:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so you look at,
• 1:47:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know, NVIDIA,
• 1:47:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know,
• 1:47:35
  SPEAKER_01: they didn't know that their GPUs were going to be good for AI.
• 1:47:39
  SPEAKER_01: They had no clue, you know, these kids up in Toronto or Montreal, AlexNet, you know, Alex and...
• 1:47:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know,
• 1:47:46
  SPEAKER_01: as part of the acquisition that we did of, uh,
• 1:47:49
  SPEAKER_01: which Jeff Hinton and Elia and Alex,
• 1:47:51
  SPEAKER_01: uh, brought in, but that was the first time I heard.
• 1:47:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, Hey,
• 1:47:54
  SPEAKER_01: we figured out how to use GPUs and then we can make things,
• 1:47:58
  SPEAKER_01: we can make it go a lot faster.
• 1:47:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if I was smart at that moment, I would have gone a year.
• 1:48:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I do okay with Google, but it's like, um,
• 1:48:09
  SPEAKER_01: But even, you know, in that situation, you didn't realize that it had just flipped.
• 1:48:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I talk about this in Fusion a lot,
• 1:48:15
  SPEAKER_01: which is that technology doesn't go from like impossible
• 1:48:21
  SPEAKER_01: to maybe slightly impossible to,
• 1:48:23
  SPEAKER_01: okay, mostly impossible, but maybe there's a few things to...
• 1:48:27
  SPEAKER_01: Neutral to slight possibility of things like that.
• 1:48:32
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't do that.
• 1:48:33
  SPEAKER_01: It goes from impossible to inevitable and happens in a heartbeat.
• 1:48:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a very, very fast flip.
• 1:48:41
  SPEAKER_01: And most people don't recognize it when it happens.
• 1:48:45
  SPEAKER_01: And in that moment, NVIDIA went from impossible to inevitable.
• 1:48:52
  SPEAKER_01: Fusion, same thing.
• 1:48:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right now, I don't think the world's seen it, Fusion has gone from impossible to inevitable.
• 1:48:59
  SPEAKER_01: And we're about to show that.
• 1:49:02
  SPEAKER_01: But it's interesting how quickly the world changes and how quickly the world reacts
• 1:49:07
  SPEAKER_01: to the changes that have been put in place.
• 1:49:10
  SPEAKER_00: In 2008, I wrote the first time anything outside of a trade publication.
• 1:49:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was at the New York Times mentioning a GPGPU and having Jensen...
• 1:49:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it was mostly for scientific workloads at the time.
• 1:49:24
  SPEAKER_00: But he does, you know, he starts talking about it.
• 1:49:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:49:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think we can,
• 1:49:29
  SPEAKER_00: these chips will be useful for new types of computing and intelligence.
• 1:49:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not allowed to invest in tech stocks.
• 1:49:38
  SPEAKER_01: That would have been a very good time.
• 1:49:39
  SPEAKER_00: That would have been a good time for you.
• 1:49:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think NVIDIA was still...
• 1:49:43
  SPEAKER_00: Basically from year to year going between near death experience and,
• 1:49:48
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:49:48
  SPEAKER_00: based on whatever,
• 1:49:49
  SPEAKER_00: however, what new gaming console had come out, how their fortunes were doing.
• 1:49:55
  SPEAKER_01: Bill Daly, who's one of the chief scientists, good friend of mine.
• 1:49:58
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, he's been along with the whole ride.
• 1:50:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like,
• 1:50:02
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:50:03
  SPEAKER_01: you talk about companies and it's like,
• 1:50:04
  SPEAKER_01: you know, they were an overnight sensation, but they're not an overnight sensation.
• 1:50:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's a long period of time with really, really hard work by really smart people.
• 1:50:13
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 1:50:15
  SPEAKER_01: I always tell people,
• 1:50:16
  SPEAKER_01: it's like, you can't make a wave, but you can see a wave coming.
• 1:50:19
  SPEAKER_01: And if you do everything right, you can catch a wave.
• 1:50:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's how technology works.
• 1:50:28
  SPEAKER_01: A wave's coming.
• 1:50:29
  SPEAKER_01: Might already be here.
• 1:50:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I think it is.
• 1:50:31
  SPEAKER_00: Some people are on it.
• 1:50:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm going to regret doing this because I'm going to point out to you
• 1:50:36
  SPEAKER_00: that I've already gone past the amount of time that I told you about.
• 1:50:42
  SPEAKER_00: I will talk to you forever.
• 1:50:43
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want to talk fusion and what you're working on now or do you want to...
• 1:50:50
  SPEAKER_01: I can give you a quick- Because I've
• 1:50:51
  SPEAKER_00: been to Helion and then I've talked
• 1:50:54
  SPEAKER_00: to my- I've got friends at Commonwealth and they don't care for Helion.
• 1:50:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then I keep getting invites from Commonwealth to come see- Yeah,
• 1:51:02
  SPEAKER_00: you should definitely go see.
• 1:51:03
  SPEAKER_01: A hundred percent chance you should go see.
• 1:51:06
  SPEAKER_01: It is an incredibly impressive facility they put together.
• 1:51:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, people don't realize that the scale at which fusion is happening right now
• 1:51:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's all based on a very simple thing.
• 1:51:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Dennis White told me the story.
• 1:51:20
  SPEAKER_01: He was walking down the hall.
• 1:51:22
  SPEAKER_01: He runs into another professor, shows him a material, very thin, stainless.
• 1:51:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a cassette tape kind of thing.
• 1:51:30
  SPEAKER_01: But on that material, they've deposited the items to make a high-temperature superconductor.
• 1:51:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it's called a Rebco process.
• 1:51:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so what was interesting about it is that material...
• 1:51:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is a high temperature super inductor
• 1:51:44
  SPEAKER_01: that doesn't lose its high temperature superconductivity in the presence of
• 1:51:50
  SPEAKER_01: a strong magnetic field.
• 1:51:52
  SPEAKER_01: So this was kind of the breakthrough.
• 1:51:54
  SPEAKER_01: Dennis looks at that and said,
• 1:51:56
  SPEAKER_01: if you could use that material, then you could build stronger magnets.
• 1:52:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the power out of a fusion reactor goes up by the third or fourth power of
• 1:52:04
  SPEAKER_01: the magnetic field strength.
• 1:52:05
  SPEAKER_01: So if you could build a magnet that's twice as powerful,
• 1:52:11
  SPEAKER_01: You could absolutely, totally build fusion machines that generate more energy.
• 1:52:17
  SPEAKER_01: And or you can also shrink machines.
• 1:52:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so the combination of being able to shrink the machine
• 1:52:23
  SPEAKER_01: and still maintain its high power output, that was the key.
• 1:52:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so the first thing they had to do is prove they could make magnets of
• 1:52:29
  SPEAKER_01: that scale, which is like, you know, almost as big as this room.
• 1:52:33
  SPEAKER_01: So they did that in 2021,
• 1:52:35
  SPEAKER_01: raised another round to be able to build, you know, the first fusion machine.
• 1:52:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that's, it's going like, Really, really well.
• 1:52:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, really well.
• 1:52:43
  SPEAKER_01: So you should definitely go visit.
• 1:52:44
  SPEAKER_01: I strongly recommend it.
• 1:52:46
  SPEAKER_01: It is the coolest tour that you'll ever take.
• 1:52:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:52:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you should definitely.
• 1:52:51
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:52:52
  SPEAKER_00: I will do it.
• 1:52:53
  SPEAKER_00: When I was reporting on Helion and then just having some back and forth
• 1:52:57
  SPEAKER_00: with Commonwealth and then reaching out to other friends,
• 1:53:00
  SPEAKER_00: still seems like, I mean,
• 1:53:02
  SPEAKER_00: then I'd talk to other very smart people and they're just like,
• 1:53:04
  SPEAKER_00: ah, no, we've been promised this many times before.
• 1:53:07
  SPEAKER_00: Show me One system that makes any, you know, an iota of more power than it consumes.
• 1:53:14
  SPEAKER_00: And, but you're, you're, so you've seen enough.
• 1:53:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's, I mean, you know, it's kind of like a weird moment.
• 1:53:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you're,
• 1:53:22
  SPEAKER_01: so I'm there at the beginning,
• 1:53:23
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:53:24
  SPEAKER_01: like the beginning of the company before there was a company and,
• 1:53:27
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm standing in a room and they're,
• 1:53:29
  SPEAKER_01: they're cooling this magnet down and, uh, and.
• 1:53:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like the magnets themselves,
• 1:53:35
  SPEAKER_01: like the toroidal field magnet is the coolest magnet you've ever seen.
• 1:53:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's like,
• 1:53:42
  SPEAKER_01: it's called a non-insulating magnet, which is the weirdest thing.
• 1:53:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like one of the things about these really strong magnetic fields is
• 1:53:51
  SPEAKER_01: that they're really, I mean, the structural elements
• 1:53:58
  SPEAKER_01: The constraints on the magnet are really high.
• 1:54:00
  SPEAKER_01: This thing can't bend.
• 1:54:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's got to stay really strong.
• 1:54:03
  SPEAKER_01: So they came up with this idea, which is the coolest idea.
• 1:54:06
  SPEAKER_01: They take a sheet of steel.
• 1:54:07
  SPEAKER_01: They basically carve in these circles around it,
• 1:54:11
  SPEAKER_01: and they put the superconductor in it,
• 1:54:13
  SPEAKER_01: flow solder,
• 1:54:13
  SPEAKER_01: do all that kind of stuff,
• 1:54:14
  SPEAKER_01: stack a bunch of these things down,
• 1:54:16
  SPEAKER_01: and then they turn this thing on,
• 1:54:17
  SPEAKER_01: and they put the smallest magnet current they can across it,
• 1:54:20
  SPEAKER_01: which, of course, goes right across the steel.
• 1:54:22
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't even bother to even touch the superconductors.
• 1:54:25
  SPEAKER_01: But then they start cooling it down.
• 1:54:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the moment it gets to the critical temperature, then the electrons find this new path.
• 1:54:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so the entire magnet is made out of non-insulating material and generates,
• 1:54:39
  SPEAKER_01: you know, like over 20 Tesla, which is like unbelievable amounts of power.
• 1:54:44
  SPEAKER_01: And now they're slot,
• 1:54:45
  SPEAKER_01: they manufacture all the magnets, they're slotting it in, the vacuum vessel's there.
• 1:54:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's like The coolest time.
• 1:54:51
  SPEAKER_01: So go visit.
• 1:54:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that, that part's in Virginia, right?
• 1:54:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, no, no, it's in the, uh, the, this, there's two machines.
• 1:54:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's a spark machine,
• 1:54:58
  SPEAKER_01: which is basically,
• 1:55:00
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:55:00
  SPEAKER_01: it's like 13 of the, or 10 of the 13 systems you need to make a power plant.
• 1:55:05
  SPEAKER_01: And, um,
• 1:55:06
  SPEAKER_01: but all the ones that I think you want to retire a lot of risk in,
• 1:55:09
  SPEAKER_01: the other ones aren't that risky.
• 1:55:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, And so that's going to go into,
• 1:55:13
  SPEAKER_01: that's the one where we're going to show Q is greater than one.
• 1:55:16
  SPEAKER_01: Q, we're going to show Q is greater than like 10 or something like that.
• 1:55:20
  SPEAKER_01: But it's going to start with Q is greater than one.
• 1:55:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's what you'll, that's what you'll visit.
• 1:55:24
  SPEAKER_01: You'll get to walk through the room that eventually will be filled by neutrons
• 1:55:27
  SPEAKER_01: and would x-ray you and moment you walk through there or something.
• 1:55:30
  SPEAKER_01: But right now you can actually see and feel what the very first fusion plan is going to be like.
• 1:55:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then you spend most of your days working on Aqua Satellite, right?
• 1:55:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's true.
• 1:55:42
  SPEAKER_01: I have a little company that's like 13 people.
• 1:55:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's based on this premise.
• 1:55:51
  SPEAKER_01: Energy, I think, is one of the most important problems you can work on.
• 1:55:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:55:55
  SPEAKER_01: The fact we know nothing about the oceans is just really irritating to me.
• 1:56:00
  SPEAKER_01: And in 2017,
• 1:56:02
  SPEAKER_01: I did a search with a friend of mine who also worked on the Stratospheric Project
• 1:56:05
  SPEAKER_01: to try to find Amelia Earhart.
• 1:56:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so I funded and participated in that project.
• 1:56:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, wow.
• 1:56:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we didn't find Amelia Earhart,
• 1:56:13
  SPEAKER_01: which is the first thing that that group,
• 1:56:16
  SPEAKER_01: Relatively small group had ever tried to find that they didn't find.
• 1:56:19
  SPEAKER_00: So just where she, her crash.
• 1:56:21
  SPEAKER_01: Where the crash was and where the aircraft is.
• 1:56:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so we did that.
• 1:56:24
  SPEAKER_01: But I came back from that saying, wow, it's,
• 1:56:27
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:56:27
  SPEAKER_01: I've always heard that we,
• 1:56:28
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:56:29
  SPEAKER_01: we know more about the surface of the moon or Mars than we do about our own oceans.
• 1:56:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in that 2017 trip, I could tell you why.
• 1:56:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's because the cost of placing a sensor anywhere in the ocean is prohibitively expensive.
• 1:56:42
  SPEAKER_01: The ships are like 50 to $200,000 a day.
• 1:56:46
  SPEAKER_01: It takes 18 months to be able to even get a ship into the right place at the right time.
• 1:56:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, uh, it's like these ocean going vessels are just so expensive.
• 1:56:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so after that thing,
• 1:56:58
  SPEAKER_01: I came back and I said,
• 1:56:59
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:56:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to go do another one of these things
• 1:57:02
  SPEAKER_01: unless I can cover 10 times more air at one tenth the cost.
• 1:57:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I need to be able to get a factor of a hundred out of the cost of ocean exploration.
• 1:57:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, so anyways, I built a team, uh, and, uh, We've been at it.
• 1:57:15
  SPEAKER_01: We have vehicles that we're basically putting in the water all the time.
• 1:57:19
  SPEAKER_00: Is it in Florida or here?
• 1:57:21
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's here.
• 1:57:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 1:57:23
  SPEAKER_00: Liquid Robotics and Sail Drone tried to address the very problem you're talking
• 1:57:27
  SPEAKER_00: about by building— Both of those were at the surface.
• 1:57:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:57:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not as interested in the surface because I think all
• 1:57:34
  SPEAKER_01: the cool stuff is probably underneath the water, for me anyway.
• 1:57:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so the key is building vehicles.
• 1:57:44
  SPEAKER_01: First, they can go deep.
• 1:57:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right now,
• 1:57:47
  SPEAKER_01: we're limited to 500 meters,
• 1:57:49
  SPEAKER_01: but I think we'll get to 1,000, then 6,000, maybe 11,000 after that.
• 1:57:54
  SPEAKER_01: But you want a vehicle that can efficiently explore the ocean.
• 1:57:59
  SPEAKER_01: We're using cameras as our main sensor, and we have NVIDIA chips to do machine learning.
• 1:58:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we can actually,
• 1:58:08
  SPEAKER_01: as we're traveling underwater,
• 1:58:10
  SPEAKER_01: we can learn a lot about what we're actually seeing and
• 1:58:13
  SPEAKER_01: then make Navigation decisions and based on that.
• 1:58:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, don't you need light and then to travel?
• 1:58:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's electricity and the trick to get, Like the ship provides power.
• 1:58:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's the main thing it does to charge batteries, to put things in there.
• 1:58:30
  SPEAKER_01: And most of the vehicles, like the vehicle we used in Amelia Earhart search was a Remus 6000.
• 1:58:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a five to $8 million vehicle and it has a team of five that comes with it.
• 1:58:40
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a drone.
• 1:58:41
  SPEAKER_01: The Remus 6000 is a drone too.
• 1:58:44
  SPEAKER_01: Autonomous undersea vehicle is what they call it.
• 1:58:50
  SPEAKER_01: But ours is like this big, it's like this wide, weighs about 70 pounds.
• 1:58:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's autonomous, but it's also super smart.
• 1:58:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the trick is how,
• 1:59:05
  SPEAKER_01: to make the economics really change,
• 1:59:09
  SPEAKER_01: you have to keep it out there for a long time,
• 1:59:12
  SPEAKER_01: which means you've got to figure out a way to recharge it.
• 1:59:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so our mechanism recharging is actually to unfurl a solar array.
• 1:59:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you come up to the,
• 1:59:23
  SPEAKER_01: ideally what you do is you come up the surface,
• 1:59:25
  SPEAKER_01: you charge for eight hours, then you do science for 16.
• 1:59:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I see.
• 1:59:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then you'd go back and forth.
• 1:59:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's the goal that we have is to build those systems.
• 1:59:35
  SPEAKER_01: And we've had a vehicle in the water every week for the last two years.
• 1:59:39
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you go?
• 1:59:41
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes.
• 1:59:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like today, the team is down in Santa Cruz area.
• 1:59:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:59:45
  SPEAKER_01: But sometimes we're off Half Moon Bay.
• 1:59:47
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we're in Redwood City.
• 1:59:48
  SPEAKER_01: So doing tests in the bay because it's a little closer for us.
• 1:59:51
  SPEAKER_01: Should we come see?
• 1:59:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 1:59:53
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to.
• 1:59:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know.
• 1:59:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you don't know.
• 1:59:56
  SPEAKER_00: I make a video show where I travel around the world filming interesting science.
• 2:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, it's fun.
• 2:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's hard, though.
• 2:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: The ocean is hard.
• 2:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: But eventually, I mean,
• 2:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: the reason the company is called Aqua Satellite is
• 2:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because I feel like there should be constellations
• 2:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: of satellites continually exploring the ocean.
• 2:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
• 2:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
• 2:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because I've done a lot of reporting on sail drones.
• 2:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: So even though they're doing all these,
• 2:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: aren't they doing like LIDAR and all kinds of sensors going down?
• 2:00:24
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they don't do LIDAR.
• 2:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean,
• 2:00:26
  SPEAKER_00: it's not good enough to point sensors down from a craft that's on the top of
• 2:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: the water.
• 2:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: So...
• 2:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I love Sail Drone.
• 2:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think what they're doing is really cool and I love to look at robotics.
• 2:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm, I'm a huge fan of anybody who's basically doing interesting things in the ocean
• 2:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: and trying to build a business plan around it, which is like the hard part.
• 2:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but the, uh, um, But the surface is not as interesting to me.
• 2:00:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's hard.
• 2:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like the surface of the water is where all the wind and the waves and the sun and
• 2:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: the breaking waves and all this kind of stuff.
• 2:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like,
• 2:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: it's the hardest part of the puzzle in some sense and the least interesting to me.
• 2:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's like if I had a, let's say I had a terrain map, like a contour map of this area.
• 2:01:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like would I rather have a contour map or satellite map?
• 2:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, would I rather want to see what's actually there or would I rather just the contours?
• 2:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: And getting contours,
• 2:01:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a big thing, like multi-beam sonar has a lot of power to do it.
• 2:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: They're building huge sail drones that can do that kind of stuff.
• 2:01:32
  SPEAKER_01: And to a lot of people,
• 2:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: like people that are like caring about channels and stuff like that,
• 2:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: you know, there's a great business case for them to be able to do that.
• 2:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 2:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: there's people that are doing like really good work to finally figure out what
• 2:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: the actual terrain,
• 2:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: because the Because the bottom of the ocean right now,
• 2:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think for most of what you see on Google Maps,
• 2:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: for instance, on the ocean, it's one data point every square kilometer.
• 2:01:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like one depth average over one kilometer.
• 2:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: So that's not very good.
• 2:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I applaud anybody who's trying to solve that.
• 2:02:03
  SPEAKER_01: But the explorer side of me says...
• 2:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what I'm interested in.
• 2:02:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I want to find Amelia Earhart.
• 2:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: I want to find MH370.
• 2:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: I want to learn about all these creatures that,
• 2:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know, the 40% of them that we have eDNA from, but we don't know what they are.
• 2:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: I want to understand the migration patterns of whales.
• 2:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: I want to understand what, you know, these things eat.
• 2:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: I want to see, you know, like, that's the cool part to me.
• 2:02:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so for me, it's like, I'm happy they're working on those things.
• 2:02:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: But to me,
• 2:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: and maybe this, I mean,
• 2:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: this is a pretty darn hard problem,
• 2:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: honestly, to deal with pressure and all that kind of stuff.
• 2:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a hard problem, too, to deal with the surface.
• 2:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just, like, and also not that many people are doing it.
• 2:02:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like, it's like, like,
• 2:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: there's not,
• 2:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: like, a hundred companies out there that are trying to do what we're trying to do.
• 2:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so I don't know.
• 2:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: To me, I, like, like,
• 2:02:57
  SPEAKER_01: I have a little bit of resources and, like,
• 2:03:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'd rather apply them to something which is really hard, but is really impactful.
• 2:03:10
  SPEAKER_01: We had this case the other day, but you can recreate it.
• 2:03:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're standing on the Golden Bridge, you're looking out, and you ask, what's there?
• 2:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: What's underneath the Golden Gate Bridge?
• 2:03:23
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that anybody knows.
• 2:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure there's a bunch of sunken ships out there.
• 2:03:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's probably really cool marine life out there.
• 2:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: But the idea that we're standing there like,
• 2:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, how many people cross that bridge like every day?
• 2:03:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: Look out on that thing and like, I don't know whether they care, but I care.
• 2:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, oh my God, we have no idea what's there.
• 2:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe we, I mean,
• 2:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: the best thing we have is a contour map that's done by the,
• 2:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 2:03:53
  SPEAKER_01: that shows the geography,
• 2:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: you know, for sailors to make sure they don't run into rocks.
• 2:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's all we know.
• 2:03:59
  SPEAKER_01: Boy, it sure seems like we as a civilization are capable of learning about
• 2:04:05
  SPEAKER_01: the last unexplored place on Earth.
• 2:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: And let's spend some effort trying,
• 2:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: and maybe failing, but at least trying to solve that problem.
• 2:04:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, I love it.
• 2:04:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you're going to do the world's most impressive skydive,
• 2:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: and then you're going to find Atlantis.
• 2:04:21
  SPEAKER_00: That would be a good combination.
• 2:04:23
  SPEAKER_01: It would be a good combination.
• 2:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: Find Amelia, find MH370.
• 2:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, really, I mean, my goal, I mean, this is like a dream.
• 2:04:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's not really a goal.
• 2:04:34
  SPEAKER_01: You can't really call it a goal.
• 2:04:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I would love to have the very first satellite map of the bottom of the ocean.
• 2:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: It'd be amazing.
• 2:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then everything we want to learn about the ocean becomes a data problem.
• 2:04:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that would be like amazing.
• 2:04:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we are so far away from it.
• 2:04:55
  SPEAKER_01: But it's an interesting thing to be able to know the ocean the same way that we know land.
• 2:05:02
  SPEAKER_00: No, I love it.
• 2:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 2:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 2:05:06
  SPEAKER_00: Was all this as painful as you thought it might be or was this okay?
• 2:05:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, this whole series?
• 2:05:11
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's fine.
• 2:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't mind.
• 2:05:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's not, it's not that it was painful.
• 2:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that I didn't want to talk to you.
• 2:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: You're busy.
• 2:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's just, I'm so busy.
• 2:05:20
  SPEAKER_01: And like every moment,
• 2:05:21
  SPEAKER_01: like I am like,
• 2:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: I have like every single moment of every single day is just so filled.
• 2:05:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:05:28
  SPEAKER_01: And like right now I've got a,
• 2:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 2:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: like in my backyard,
• 2:05:31
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a,
• 2:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to figure out how these solars are where I react to waves
• 2:05:36
  SPEAKER_01: and long duration and stuff.
• 2:05:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm building a test in the backyard and,
• 2:05:40
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 2:05:40
  SPEAKER_01: my, um, My middle child and it was actually helping me program it last night.
• 2:05:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, and then I get this thing and then I need to run these tests and stuff like that.
• 2:05:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, I just don't have any time.
• 2:05:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the doer part of me definitely like overwhelms the talker part of me every single time.
• 2:06:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for your persistence.
• 2:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you for your time.
• 2:06:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you gave me extra.
• 2:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 2:06:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I've wanted to do this for so long.
• 2:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it was an honor.
• 2:06:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was a true honor for me.
• 2:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, honor for me as well.
• 2:06:15
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway.
• 2:06:15
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 2:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Alan.
• 2:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: Talk to you later.
• 2:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, man.
• 2:06:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me,
• 2:06:23
  SPEAKER_00: Ashley Vance, and or Kylie Robison, or both of us together.
• 2:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: It is produced by me and David Nicholson,
• 2:06:32
  SPEAKER_00: Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland,
• 2:06:35
  SPEAKER_00: and the show is edited always by the John Sortland.
• 2:06:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much to Brex and SendCutSend for all your support,
• 2:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching.
• 2:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: We love you.
• 2:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things.
• 2:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, and we'll see you again.