Joe Rogan Experience #1577 — Terry Virts Transcript

Transcript

0:00 the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day What does that feel like? Yeah, for sure. But it's pretty quick. Like when you land, as you can. They were trying to make you pass out from orthostatic intolerance. So I could do all And after 200 days in space, a week later, my balance score was better than it was before I launched, which I couldn't believe.

2:48 I had a better balance score. what kind of stuff do you have to do up there? He's the most ever time and space in one mission. the same underwear and shirt for weeks and you don't even notice. But if you have your exercise two it's like they stink and you only got one shirt every two weeks oh boy so those things And the first time I'd ever worn it was on a hunting trip.

5:33 and it's incredible stuff get there you need a you need a washing machine so did were you the one who figured that out you It was good. It's very soft. I make fun of the acronyms. And the really interesting thing about these machines is they're not attached to the wall of the station. the vibration from exercise They've got videos of the solar And if you're going up and down in the right frequency, it'll snap the station in half.

9:24 air runner? 20 seconds. it gets your, so instead of gravity the the bungee cord pulls you down into the machine they do so when you Yeah, sleeping was something that... Yeah, so it's on these spring devices. Hopefully it'll last another 20 or who knows how long, Yeah. You were here for two weeks? Yeah, it's less than half of this room. And I was out in like 10, 10 seconds.

13:00 In space, I was just flatline. So London time. You may be getting ready for a spacewalk, you know, every day was different, which I loved. Yeah. to launch your replacement crew until we know what the problem was. And so since you don't have a replacement crew, It was just like COVID. Like, it was time for something to work, and it did, thankfully. what I cook for myself as a bachelor. Really? Yeah. I mean, it was pretty good. It's not,

16:59 It's different, which is important. And the cosmonauts were sick of them, like another day of cat food. They'd have like boxes of these cans of fish. Unless you're born and raised in Russia, you can't be fluent. Yeah. You know, the accent, It's like the way of saying things and the accent. I wouldn't know what I was reading. But, yeah, I could read the words out loud. I would only know what half of them mean or a third. I wouldn't know what I was reading.

19:02 Wow. So I thought I was pretty good at languages. Like I'd have to say, I go to class for an hour and I'd learn one word. And I finally got over this hill. So it went from being really tough to like, I loved it and I needed it and I wanted more. And I just wanted to put my phone on Russian and I was always trying to just speak Russian. So it was this weird, like it went from like, probably like exercising, you know, when you first start running, it sucks. And then after a while, it's like, you get the endorphins and you want to run some more for me russian was the same thing now you obviously uh

20:56 after me um and you know when i was at edwards it was just when you watch the right stuff it's and to know that there's a high percentage of these things that you know he he was flying with only one arm that x1 on that first flight that went supersonic which Flew some World War II propeller airplanes. Absolutely. Like there was an F-104 that Chuck Yeager flew in the movie.

23:29 F-104s, yeah. Did you do that? Get a nickname out of that? It's this long metal tube, but it's got little wings on it. But it's a lot. This is the more expensive one. a couple for under 500 grand on There's an L39. Yeah. It's like what they do with like old muscle cars. T-38 don't matter. You're not doing that in space. But the mental skill of having situational

28:03 just because of the fact that it's Oh, wow. What it's like to get smashed down. Yeah, that's awesome. And over seven months in space, it never got old. around for a long time so you probably don't need to get as uptight about you know the day-to-day Yeah. and I've been traveling a lot the last couple of years, I kind of feel like I'm home no matter where I'm at,

31:44 around the sun. you do realize how weird it is that there are these tribal differences between us. and syria and lebanon are right there and there's turkey and greece and it's this little area and And the crazy thing is, if you ask most people, their position is they'll never be peace in the Middle East. we could get this right. But I think some it would benefit

34:43 They want to be the big dog. changes your your overall thoughts about being in space being being a part of humanity on this I did movies, but unless you see it with your eyes, you know, you can't imagine how awesome Yeah, but you're an astronaut. Oh, shit, I'm going to space. And if you want to go 500 miles an hour, you can spend 49 bucks on Southwest Airlines and go from Austin to Phoenix, right?

37:51 25 times, 30 times faster or more. So that's like, well, Gravity sucks. so chemical propulsion, happen anytime soon, for sure. Yeah. So is there any other propulsion methods that are on the table that you're trying to figure out? So it is possible to come back. It's a lower thrust level, so it's not as much force pushing you. Because what I've been reading about Mars and the idea of terraforming and colonizing is that the people that go there are there forever.

41:22 So that was my favorite part of his speech, was coming back earth yeah not just let him die up there i mean i would love to go to mars but i'd The problem with colonizing planets, and you mentioned terraforming. books written about it, people talk about it. Really? The reality is the lack of that magnetic I mean, I think honestly, I don't think they know yet.

43:31 So it never had an atmosphere? But man, I'm just a fighter pilot. When you turn the lights off in the cupola on the space station and you let If there's life once, there should be life a billion times. flight thinking from not religiously, but from a scientific point water. So I came out of my spaceflight thinking, but I think if there are, and you have all these biological forces that are competing.

46:20 trying to innovate and competing with all these other forces it seems like problems and and and difficulties present themselves and these Yeah. I made a short... I did a short film this year called Cosmic Perspective. the whole universe wouldn't exist. But some people believe that the universe started with the Big Bang, Right. In the cosmic background radiation, there's this microwave anisotropy.

49:25 big rip where it just keeps on expanding, accelerating, and like even electrons can't, And you'd like look around and go, wow, what's going on? And an extension of that, again, man, I'm just a fighter pilot. And so she uses this kind of cheeky, funny example of, you know, your brain could just suddenly create itself out of nothing. Exactly. Do you understand that?

52:01 You and me both, man. when they're talking about quantum weirdness, and entanglements, other organism some immense organism that's in a universe that's impossible like all these blood vessels coming out. And I remember thinking, there's all these patterns but it's another thing now with the advent of CGI technology, But that these patterns, if the universe really is a part of an atom that's in a being.

55:11 It's not even close. And so what these artists have done is as they zoom in, the Mandelbrot set repeats itself over and over and over and over again. I was a math major in college and I learned about fractals, This is another reason why it makes me weird about a mushroom yeah yeah like if you go on a super trip like a real trip where You can't just keep on going infinitely smaller, just like you can't go infinitely bigger because the universe is a smallest particle. You can't just keep on going infinitely smaller.

56:59 Were you a Christian before you were an astronaut and a fighter pilot? In the 1600s, the Catholic Church used to kill people if they said the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. It's not a cosmology textbook. It's two pages out of a thousand-page book that actually describes. it all the um the the interesting thing about these people that live 5,000 years ago that have this perception of things beginning

59:10 I know. What does it really mean, days right there's a metaphor I mean, it was actually what physicists it took them thousands of Like, too much of it is applicable. But there's so much weirdness. That's pretty good wisdom. like there's some sort of a creator that's responsible for all of this um or a creation until the eyeball's working and can detect things. blood clotting how does you can't gradually get blood

1:02:35 I mean, how many millions of years is that? but a complete inability to recognize the scale of time. millions and millions of years of evolution until an eyeball pops up i think it's just such an incredible span of time and these changes that take place It is. And then one day he decided, you know what? it contracts or are there infinite universes and each one of them has a lifespan and then there's

1:05:30 We need to have an open mind and learn how stuff happened. but certain groups preach tolerance. Right. Criticizing Christianity is like a free token. You can learn a lot about human beings and the way they use ethics and morals in their life Yeah. Absolutely. good. and then you get crazy fundamentalist pastors or radical imams and all these different people

1:09:35 you know, religion starts, religion starts out as a good thing. And then it turned over time, The NFL's not real. They're where we're going to be in 3020. Whatever it is. your certain worldview, That's hard. and the principle is just don't be married to your opinions right and don't don't defend them No. has gotten much better over the last 50 or 100 years. Yeah, we tend to concentrate on things

1:13:01 Like America and Europe was developed is the most behind of all the continents, but all the trends are moving in the right direction Yeah, I'm hoping that we come out of this, that this is a bad wave that we're on. understanding the mental pitfalls that exist, just the natural inclination that human beings have to be tribal and that know, by race, by religion, by country, whatever it is, we're, you know, old people tend to be

1:15:58 and that's where they get monetized. Like in Star Wars, it's just World War II battles, big armies shooting each other. That's not the problem. The problem is they take over Those things are smart, right? And the things that attract, like my friend Ari, Those are just the things that you're gravitating towards. the way people work is if we're like, if we get this emotional response, then we'll do more and

1:18:32 Well, go to someone who's a a hardcore trumper right everything is news backs sky news australia bright barred shit it's all Most people are not radical left. A few people are and we should have a party for them. that promotes extreme right-wing candidates know ideas the then other people start thinking like well that that's what the right is or that's

1:21:15 No, he's not. progressive democratic candidate ever the best president ever but you're but it's going to be two different things is going to talk against it, bonkers we're saying you're 100 right we do need a third party and not just like libertarian or not ross perot we need like a real a real one yeah like one that And it's so insane. goddamn space station and look down from the sky and have a perspective that's different yeah just

1:24:13 He was a Naval Academy grad. I was in grammar school or whatever school I was in. It's way better in every way. nautical miles per hour and so the whole world everybody uses metric but airplanes are always in because so one degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles so every minute is a nautical mile so if And it's one twelfth of this and it's one eighth of...

1:26:54 Like, whatever. and and four pence yeah and they put stuff in the boot and the bonnet you know that's interesting Like, when Meghan and Prince whatever his name is, Harry, is that what it is? love it yeah i love the royals yeah well they love british culture british people love british talked to people directly He's a very believable guy But in talking to the other people that he worked with, those things would appear every couple of weeks.

1:29:32 But other guys had heard stories about it. No. There's a YouTube video of me Because clearly the other 10 cameras Well, I've seen ones where they're talking about people in the space station where they say that the space station is all green screen. So how is NASA covering up 300,000 people? hurling around earth and they realized that it was one of those old boosters yeah which is pretty

1:32:17 There's so many pieces of shit up there. and Cape Canaveral Now, like something that we could actually use to wage war in space? or the Army has its own space command. So it kind of didn't make sense to have all these space guys You don't need a million of them, Really? When did they blow this up? Unfortunately, our Indian friends did the same exact thing last year. They're

1:35:39 eight kilometers a second. It's going right they're gonna right diverge um so it's there are people trying to think of it there's really already have so much mess up there right and then there's also satellites that are eventually gonna The debris that that could cause could make access to low Earth orbit not possible for centuries or thousands And there's no government organization regulating it.

1:38:54 The movie Gravity was based on that premise, the Kessler syndrome, Oh, yeah. Yeah. Aliens must be like, I bet it's probably really difficult When I did my spacewalks on the outside of the station, you see lots of little divots like the size of this, you know, And I'm like, there's nothing I can do about it. is that a glass hole is it like a paint it says it looks like it hit the window yeah

1:42:09 than that i guess wow yeah yeah fuck that it's kinetic energy one half mv squared right that's So we really need a global cooperation to let everybody agree to not, you know, ruin Earth orbit. And when it came back, it was like somebody shot a.22 through it. weird um not that i can tell you about oh no, no, not that you can tell me about. I mean, filmed it.

1:44:25 yeah there's something hit the window on the outside yeah it's the impact debris from a piece Yeah. but it's basically a single layer of carbon, lighter which is pretty important for anything in life but especially space The problem is actually getting it into these products. what, what applications could you do with that? Go back up there. So is that, what is it?

1:48:30 times stronger than steel there you go i missed a zero and you can also tires are made of something would be doing it's been like the prompt the promise of tomorrow for the last 15 years and It's so strange. It was awesome. The limiting factor is the tires. That's a dangerous. Right, no. Randy Probst, race car driver. 60 miles an hour in 1.9 seconds.

1:50:57 Yeah. Right? Bro, get the fuck out of here. push out the back to make you go forward right you're on the the right thing because it's the Richard Branson has Virgin Orbit. They did it in 2004 for their first test flight. They did things where the space shuttle was on top of a plane. Yeah. Yeah. There is definitely a risk. You need to have that part.

1:54:53 a row that just blew up people would be freaking out and want pulled off the road right i know um We lost two out of 135 shuttles. I teach this course at Harvard Business School, and we talk about Challenger and Columbia, the case studies. And they just kind of barreled full speed ahead. And you can get, you know, engineers going right out of college. And there's a lot of really great things about the private space. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, a guy named Tim Ellis at Relativity, who's amazing,

1:57:52 you got all these different companies that are trying to compete against each So the fear of that Soviet flag on the moon forced Apollo 8 to go around the moon. which kind of sped up the moon landing Well, you could do anything you want with enough money, right? They could conceivably have a base on the moon where astronauts could go there, visit, do their stuff, and then come back

2:00:00 tourism. That would be pretty cool. I probably would have stuck around at NASA. What is this, Four years from now? uh, you know, you know, on the edge. You can't make some crazy goal. That's never going to happen. If it's all about fighting each other and stuff, then we're going to be cavemen again. But is this where private enterprise comes into play in terms of space travel?

2:02:39 what is the feeling about the future of space travel? Are people divided? Are people optimistic? Or do they or should we do a gateway? I expected you to have like a gang of stories. No, it's me. We're not sure what it is. the fastest thing humans have ever launched, Like there probably isn't enough chemical propellant on Earth to launch something that fast that would take thousands of generations would be huge. Like there's never, there probably isn't enough chemical propellant on earth to launch something

2:05:24 It's a Chinese novel by Xixian Liu. It's probably the most famous book on earth they invent this thing where we send a signal to jupiter and jupiter is a big amplifier right a second. Yeah. Well, that was also the place where they were. I would imagine if they were concerned with these silly territorial monkeys with nuclear weapons, manhattan project when they started detonating nuclear bombs that's when the uptick of interest

2:09:22 millions of years advanced of earth and then all of a sudden you get this signature that purpose-built nuclear bombs are being dropped on cities. weapons are probably a bigger threat, I guess. I had a telescope as a kid. You can see planets? is Mercury. like well that's like a i think that's probably the minerals it looks like a it looks like a moon

2:11:52 So we show up. I'm like shit and I had flown into So then I got, my buddy and I, fly in it a second time wow yeah so is the idea that you'd be snooping around and you would find smiling like we got sent home from Red Flag. That stuff takes thousands of years to go away. But the the size of these things is if someone detonates a bomb under the ground and it leaves these divots

2:14:36 This was a long time ago, but I just remember seeing these types of divots in the Nevada desert. And you got to, there you go. There's restricted areas in a lot of places just because they're doing military stuff. places because area 51 was super secret for a long time but now everybody knows about area 51 Do guys ask questions like that? That's the problem.

2:16:42 I understand the distrust of government. And you know, And they find out some information that, you know, some country is trying to do something. defense or someone where they have to read it does yeah my first the first book i wrote for who's writing these books, like these intense books about a Navy SEAL He doesn't just put black lines? He just out redacted who doesn't just put a black line he'll just put

2:19:17 you don't want to put your fellow seals or whatever people that who knows who The first book, I wrote it in two weeks. emergencies in a space shuttle? How do you do medical training, that stuff. But other stuff It depends on what orbit you're at. That would be an amazing beginning to the moon. Now there's like human biology there. So if they contaminated that with a body, that could be a real issue.

2:22:25 where you'd think the vacuum and the sun would have just destroyed it but it's it was still That's crazy. That thing does not look like what you want to meet on the moon. They call them water bears. part of the part of the experiment that's crazy yeah they're supposed to be able to to survive in The idea that asteroids and things How old were you when you saw that?

2:24:55 I saw that That's out you go to aliens which is the second one and now they're everywhere i didn't see them yeah It was so scary. Yeah, Ripley. It was awesome. But Yafet Kodo was the bad guy, and he was, was he Parker in Alien? You know, I watched Dr. No when Sean Connery died last month. Timothy, no. He was like He's the best. People don't like to think Craig's the best Bond. Daniel Craig's amazing. He's the best.

2:28:14 Sean Connery's a little overacting, but he was still great. Yeah. Yeah. it's hard to beat daniel craig the only one didn't like, I just watched Quantum of Solace, They want people to go to the movie theaters. Just like all the restaurants. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah, I know. thinking yeah waitress yeah or someone owning a restaurant or a small business that got forced

2:30:36 The box office was terrible. I don't even think you're really necessarily risking your life, I was speaking a lot, corporate speaking. my income went to zero, so that sucks, but it has given me some time to do some other things that I've wanted to do. Darwin has a great quote. Um, it's not the strongest that survive. It's those who are It's just not healthy. I was gone all the time. Um, there's, I've loved, like I got to know my

2:33:30 We were going to Russia and Japan So I just keep I stay on my American schedule and I don't try and learn how to wake up at eight in the morning. it's ibuprofen and antibiotics and Provigil was one of the things and Ambien. So you, you get like You know, my eyes were in the air force. They had good, So literally instead of waking up at 7 in the morning, we had to wake up at 7 at night kind of thing.

2:35:59 And they told me five hour energy. It just tells your brain that it's time to go to sleep, In space, the only time I ever did it was the night before my spacewalks. i don't know i just wanted to sleep and so i used that on those nights and i didn't have any problems so like they were all stuck in my outbox they didn't get sent but yeah you don't Well, talk to flight attendants.

2:38:31 And then you're in the airport? I used to take it when I traveled with NASA to work the next day and I had to get a night of sleep. And plus it's cool floating. And then I'd open my eyes and it would stop immediately because the brain got the visual signal. You know, if you slow down a little bit, your curve shrinks and that's how you come back. That's the sensation you have.

2:41:25 that's so weird i never thought of that before so rookie there's like i had to mentally kind of get So you're creeping your hands across the table for the people who just listen exactly and that's like that's about how fast stuff moves You're creating gravity right now. why when you get on one of those gravity planes when they plunge zero g yeah and zero g when people

2:43:37 you're falling and then you get the air supporting you. We do spacewalk training underwater in a pool The world's biggest pool. is what is it like what's the schedule like to prepare for something like that um so you go through askan training nasa likes to make you feel really How do you do all the science experiments? That's the typical thing, Cause it seems like they have a lot invested in you.

2:46:05 a couple years you know i don't want to break my arm or leg or anything um they had a rule you flight but you're just it was your decision to not ski. You're not going to go skiing. I'm not a big fan of rules To prepare you for something like this? but getting in and out of the suit takes roughly two hours. Anything that would get your forearm strength.

2:48:40 And they would just be like, all right, burpees. So it's almost like you're training for a fight. but you were asking about sleep. And then the Russians, one day I was floating through the middle and I heard this bird chirping and I stopped and I'm like, what was that? connected to the wall because i was in my own little thing so i was literally floating

2:51:13 It was my childhood dream, too. Just came out. I try to bring the experience of spaceflight, You know, and we hire scientists to be astronauts, Astro underscore Terry.