Clayton Anderson

Summary

Not Dead Yet – Clayton Anderson (May 5, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this engaging episode of Not Dead Yet, hosts Ben Sasse and Chris Stirewalt welcome astronaut and professor Clayton Anderson. They discuss the human drive to explore, the challenges and realities of space travel, the culture and bureaucracy of NASA, and the personal journey of a kid from small-town Nebraska to orbiting Earth for 167 days. Themes of vocation, perseverance, faith, and the future of human space exploration run throughout, with plenty of humor, insight, and memorable stories.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Clayton Anderson’s Space Journey

• Origins and Dream

  • Anderson grew up in Ashland, Nebraska, and was inspired by Apollo 8 at age 9 (12:17), later dreaming of becoming an astronaut—even entering a parade as a Mercury astronaut at age 6.
  • His pathway to NASA began with a lucky connection: a college guidance counselor who hunted with a NASA employee (13:23).

• Persistence and Grit

  • Applied to the astronaut program 15 times over 15 years, rejected 14 times, before finally being selected (16:08).
  • “Applying is easy, getting selected is hard. And so those 15 years, I became a better applicant with each year, even though I didn’t necessarily know it.” (19:29, Anderson)

• NASA Intern to ISS Astronaut

  • Anderson started as an intern in 1981, became a full-time engineer, then shifted careers within NASA before his selection.
  • He underscores the importance of both technical and soft skills – quick thinking, teamwork, resilience, and problem-solving (22:52).

---

2. The Space Program: Past, Present, and Future

• Condensed History (Sputnik to Artemis)

  • Sputnik’s launch spurred the U.S. space program.
  • U.S. followed with Mercury (first humans in space), Gemini (proving moon travel was possible), and Apollo (moon landing).
  • Soviets shifted to building space stations; the U.S. focused on the Space Shuttle and then the International Space Station (06:18).

• Purpose of Exploration

  • Anderson: “It’s never about your destination, it’s about what you learn along the way.” (08:44)
  • Human spaceflight is essential not just for discovery, but for developing tech and knowledge that benefit all.

• Why Send People?

  • “A robot can be neither amazed nor amused. So I think they have to work in tandem… but you do as much as you can with a robot to protect human frailty.” (45:42, Anderson)
  • It’s about human curiosity and spirit: “That’s what drives us as humans…there’s something better. I want to find what it is.” (49:10, Anderson)

---

3. NASA Culture, Astronaut Selection & Life in Space

• Selection Bias and Changing Demographics

  • Early days: mainly military pilots and PhDs; now more diverse backgrounds, including geologists, veterinarians, and engineers (17:05).
  • Says astronaut selection committees tend to pick people like themselves, potentially limiting diversity (17:32).
  • Advocates for farm kids and Midwesterners: “I believe farm kids make great engineers…” (18:05)

• Life On and Training For the ISS

  • Underwater training simulates spacewalks but, as Anderson notes, “Every time I went out the airlock hatch in that swimming pool, I could see the bottom.” (30:49)
  • First real spacewalk (July 23, 2007): “I was born to be here right now doing this.” (32:11)
  • Dealt with “impostor syndrome” until test results and experience proved he belonged (28:16).

• Dealing With Bureaucracy

  • NASA’s bureaucratic culture sometimes at odds with innovation and authenticity; Anderson admits to ruffling feathers when trying to improve training (32:14).

---

4. Wonder, Faith, and the “Overview Effect”

• The “Overview Effect”

  • Seeing Earth from orbit led Anderson to a greater sense of order, marvel, and faith: “None of this is random. This is all ordered, right? Supposed to be this way.” (35:00)
  • Wishes everyone could experience space and a third-world country to gain this perspective (36:05).

• Relationship of Science and Faith

  • Strongly rejects the false science/religion binary: “Math is poetry… every time we have an equation like that, it proves there’s a relationship that’s bigger than us.” (43:13)
  • Personal faith strengthened by witnessing Earth from space (41:13).

---

5. Human Challenges & Future Bottlenecks in Space

• Psychological and Technical Bottlenecks

  • Main barriers to deeper space travel: propulsion technology and human psychology.
    • “You need better propulsion…But we haven’t solved the psychological impact of all this.” (52:15)
    • Raises tough questions: long journeys, close quarters, relationships, and mental health (53:27).

• On Mars (and Beyond)

  • Going to Mars: six to nine months each way, with lengthy delay before a return window opens—making it a years-long commitment (55:19).
  • “Either you have to build Earth when you get there or you have to take Earth with you.” (54:50)

---

6. Humor, Trivia, and Humanity in Orbit

• A Goofball in Space
  • Known on the ISS for trivia, music dedications, and jokes.
  • “Part of my goal was I wanted to share it with America… so they knew I was acknowledging their contribution to my career.” (38:15)
  • Management wasn’t always amused: “Mission control in Houston—they’re pretty tighty whitey.” (39:35)

---

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Perseverance:
  • “Applying is easy. Getting selected is hard.” (19:29, Anderson)
• On Belonging:
  • “That was the day when I believed I belonged… could stand up with all these jet jockeys and PhDs.” (28:17, Anderson)
• On Spacewalks:
  • “I was born to be here right now doing this.” (32:11, Anderson)
• On the Overview Effect & Faith:
  • “All I could think of was: none of this is random. This is all ordered, right?” (35:00, Anderson)
• On Explorers’ Spirit:
  • “That’s the human spirit that says, hey, there’s something better. I want to find out what it is.” (49:10, Anderson)
• On Human Exploration:
  • “It’s not where we’re going. It’s what we learn along the way.” (46:04, Anderson)

---

Important Timestamps

• 05:39 – Anderson’s plain-English history of the U.S. space program
• 12:17 – Childhood inspirations and first astronaut dreams
• 16:08 – Rejected 14 times; finally selected for astronaut class
• 19:29 – Perseverance and what applicants can control
• 22:52 – Discussing crucial astronaut skills (hard and soft)
• 30:49 – Training underwater vs. the reality of spacewalks
• 32:11 – “Born to be here right now” – first spacewalk
• 35:00 – The overview effect and its impact on faith/worldview
• 38:15 – Bringing levity and connection to the ISS
• 41:13 – Science, faith, and seeing order in the universe
• 45:42 – The value (and limits) of human vs. robotic exploration
• 52:15 – Major bottlenecks: Propulsion and psychological resilience

---

Tone & Style

• The conversation is open, friendly, and at times irreverently Midwestern.
• Anderson’s humility, gratitude, and humor shine throughout.
• The hosts blend genuine awe with playful banter and philosophical reflection—never shying away from both the big existential issues and the human minutiae of life in space.

---

Conclusion

This episode offers an entertaining and insightful look at the “grit, gratitude, and joy” at the heart of Clayton Anderson’s improbable journey to space. Through his stories and perspective, listeners gain a renewed sense of wonder, the value of perseverance, and the urgent importance of staying curious and striving forward—as individuals and as a society.

---

Notable Quotes for Inspiration

• "I was born to be here right now doing this." (32:11, Anderson)
• "It's never about your destination, it's about what you learn along the way." (08:44, Anderson)
• "Math is poetry." (43:13, Anderson)

---

For further reflection:
Consider Anderson’s prescription: if everyone could see Earth from above and spend time in a third-world country, how might it change our collective perspective on what matters most?

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Hi, I'm Ben Sass.

[B]

And I'm Chris Direwald.

[A]

And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but only some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.

[B]

However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to

[A]

live a good life, one with meaning, love and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.

[B]

Ben Sass, I. It's not that I don't care about space. I get it. I understand about space travel and all that jazz. But I do really like Clayton Anderson. I genuinely. I've interviewed him before on television around the Artemis 2 mission. And you can't not like this person. He is a just a. He is. He is a. A consummate delight. Are you a space dork?

[A]

I am not. I. I kind of. I often joke if you have three lives or nine lives, what jobs you would have taken. And I would have definitely pursued my dream of being a football coach and I would have been an architect and whatever else I've never had on my list astronaut. But I feel like kind of like you. I feel like a little bit. Eat your vegetables. I should understand space a little more. And Clayton is a really good way in because he's such a fascinating human. Great American story. I don't know all the particular facts. You're always, as the excellent journalist that you are more precise on the way. We're going to summarize and introduce him here momentarily. But 100 and he spent like half a year of his life in space. I think at some point he did the sixth or seventh spacewalk and he led the global historical count of spacewalks or something. But he's anti bureaucratic in an organization that usually advances bureaucrats first. So he's a guy who gets in trouble. So I feel like he's a character out of a movie.

[B]

The. As a West Virginian, you know, the Chuck Yeager model of. Of this iconoclastic kind of were. You need a certain amount of disruptive energy and disagreeability to do something hard. And then inside a system that punishes those things, it creates some tension. And that's I guess what NASA is here to do. Well put.

[A]

And Artemis was our hook. And we thought about having some of those folks on were like, no, no, no, let's bring this guy on because he'll be blunter. He's not trying to be politic to get the next mission.

[B]

And you're a relentless Homer. You are a.

[C]

Your.

[B]

Your standing for Nebraska is egregious and even more outrageous. Than my West Virginian.

[A]

I mean, I don't think many people understand that Tom Osborne went to Hastings College. I mean, I know everybody.

[B]

No, no one understands that because no

[A]

one knows that Tom Osborne, when he retired in 1997, after the season, I think he finished 62 and three in his last five years, three national championships, one national championship on a missed field goal against Florida State in the last second, he was like 252 and 27. I'm making up the numbers. His average record was over 10 wins a year and like 1.8 losses per year. Nobody's ever done anything like this. But he played at Hastings College, and that's Clayton Anderson's alma mater as well. Okay, we got to get going.

[C]

I'm sorry.

[B]

There you have it. Okay. Clayton Anderson is currently a professor of aerospace engineering at Iowa State, but he holds his place in history. 167 days in space on the International Space Station. 38 hours and 28 minutes spread out over six spacewalks. He began in 1983 as an engineer at the Johnson Space center in Houston, 1998 astronaut candidate, 2007, his initial mission, and went up again on a shorter trip in 2010. And he carries his message to the world of plan, train and fly as he speaks to people around the country. So he's a good one to listen to.

[A]

Let's do it. Clayton, what a delight. Thank you for making time for us. We've already introduced you, so we'll roll at speed here. Once upon a time, Chris Stirewalt and I kicked this podcast idea around. And by once upon a time, I mean like a seven year period of him being right and me being wrong that we needed to start. And I kept thinking we needed to refine something on the idea. And I let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Enough for a long. When we finally pulled the trigger that we were going to do this before sickness intervened a little bit, we were rolling forward and we had officially named it and this was called Quick Study, borrowing from both the CS Lewis and the Einstein quote slash aphorism that you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to a sixth grader. And so Quick Study, you are the perfect. We're glad to have you now. But you would have been the perfect guest during Artemis as well on Quick Study. So can we, can we start there?

[B]

There?

[A]

Would you talk to a smart, attentive, but completely ignorant 11 year old and explain the history of the space program over the last hundred years? What were our first ideas? What were Our first aspirations. What was happening in the 60s and even into the early 70s that united us? And then why did the space program disappear for a long time? How did you become one of the most accomplished people in the history of orbit and spacewalks, etc. And what's happening now? Beginning to end. Give us a few minutes on what's the space program? Where did it come from and where are we now?

[C]

Well, it started with Sputnik, right? A Russian satellite that was a little ball that didn't do anything except beep. And the Russians launched it and that spurred the United States to figure out, how the hell do we do this? And so then we began to create our own program and they kind of paralleled each other for quite some time with Mercury sending astronauts into space. Can we even do this? And then it came to Gemini. Can we do this such that we can prove we can go to the moon? And then Apollo came, which was the time that we actually went to the moon and Russia and America diverged kind of in there. When, when we got to the moon and we were successful and planted the flag, they said, oh, we're not going to do that anymore. We're going to build space stations. So they went off and their focus became on keeping humans in space for long duration while we continued to do the Apollo thing until the funds were cut because of, you know, United States budgets and the Vietnam War and, and all that craziness. And we began to turn our ideas to something called the space shuttle, which was a cargo carrying capability. The idea was, let's build a truck and let's take stuff up into space and put things together and build really cool stuff and, and live there. Well, that went on for 30 some years until we decided at that point that we don't want to do the shuttle anymore. We want to finish the space station because we need the space shuttle to build the space station. And then once the station is done, let's move on and go to the moon or on to Mars, which everybody believes that Mars is that dream destination right where everybody wants to go except me. And so all of that became, I don't know, kind of a measuring stick of how we performed. And for the most part we led. And I'm a big believer that the United States should always be the preeminent space faring nation in the entire world. Always. I will die on that hill. Because as we lead and as we do things and learn, it's never about your destination, it's about what you learn along the way. And So I don't care if we go to the moon. I don't care if we go to Mars or to an asteroid or to the space station. As long as we're going somewhere, we're going to build the technology and we're going to be able to bring that back so that every human on the Earth can potentially reap its benefits. So is that kind of where you want me to go for now? Or that is. That is great.

[A]

Breakdown? Yes, thank you. And break down a tiny little bit more maybe 10 years ago to 2 years ago to today, to the menu of choices about two years from now. When you say the Mars point, for example, everybody wants to go to Mars. Why do they want to go? Why are you skeptical? And I hear your Saban process point on having a destination get you moving, but the destination is less important than the showing up for lifting tomorrow.

[C]

Yeah. So the 10 years, the last 10 years have been essentially based for Americans in the International Space Station. Can we put humans into space and let them live there and be successful? And what can we learn over that time? Because nobody really knows how the human body adapts to microgravity or adapts to outer space over long periods of time. You know, we sent Mercury and Gemini and Apollo guys, and they went to the moon and they dusted around on the surface of the moon, but it was all short periods. And so the human body's pretty amazing and can deal with anything for short periods. But now if you're going to go live on the Moon or you're going to go live on Mars, we're talking a lot longer for a human body. And we're talking about things like potential reproduction down the road, all those crazy things. And so the space station was that building block. And so now imagine this. Take the space station and move it to the moon. And we want to have a space station on the moon where astronauts go repeatedly over time back and forth to that destination, just like we're doing with the space station today. And it's. That's the only way, in my belief, that you can prove to yourself that you can live and work there successfully because of the infrastructure that's required for you to be able to do that. So now that space station on the moon becomes our training bed for a space station on Mars. And so as all those things begin to build up and we begin to develop the technology to prove that we can do those things, hope, I'm hopeful that we'll have better propulsion that gets us to Mars quicker. So we don't have to worry about this six to nine month journey. And all those things should couple together. And they do. As long as you have money and you have people that can figure this stuff out. Okay.

[B]

I have a lot of questions about. I think you spent 167 days at the space station. I, I have questions about that. I have questions about the jokes that you told mission control. I have, I have many questions, but I, I need to start. Ashland, Nebraska, is a place that I know only as a place on the road between what, Omaha and Lincoln. But it's not a big place. Tell, Give me, give me your story. What's. How do you go from a small town in Nebraska? Did you always want to be an astronaut? And then you're going to tell us about how you go from an engineer in Houston to going into space. So were you, Were you a kid who wanted to be an astronaut?

[C]

Yes. My first recollection was Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve in 1968. I was nine years old. And we watched the astronauts go behind the moon for the first time in human history, just like they did with Artemis 2. And my mother would tell you that I was six years old and that we would discuss me becoming an astronaut. So much so that in Ashland, every July, they do stir up, stir up trouble, stir up fun, stir up excitement. And we had a kitty parade back then. And at age 6, my costume. My mother took a hat box and she cut a hole for me to put on my head. And she cut a slot for my eyes. She put a pipe cleaner on the top with a styrofoam ball so I could talk to aliens. And she wrapped all of that in aluminum foil. And I marched in this parade as a Mercury astronaut. And I lost. I did not win because a little girl in a blue gingham dress with a picnic basket on her arm and a live puppy inside the basket.

[B]

You're not going to beat a puppy. You're not going to be the puppy.

[C]

We claimed cheating. We were going to, you know, file to the, to the Nebraska Supreme Court, but we never got that far.

[B]

Totally.

[C]

And so that was my, Was my recollection of wanting to be an astronaut. Of course, you know, my life carried on until I got to government class as a senior in high school and I had to give a presentation. And my topic was NASA. And, you know, I did some silly stuff and gave a quiz to my classmates. They knew nothing about NASA, but I still had that dream. I went off to Hastings College to play football and basketball and do all those things. And astronauting was, you know, kind of pushed to the side. But then a guidance counselor at Hastings College went pheasant hunting with a NASA Johnson Space center employee from 1961, Hastings College graduating class. And he came to Nebraska to hunt pheasants every fall. And now he's stomping through the cornfields with the guidance counselor. And he said, hey, what do you do? I'm from NASA. Oh, you are? Well, what do you do at NASA? I do this and that and the other thing. He says, we have a student here at Hastings, he loves NASA, he wants to be an astronaut. Oh, he does? Well, does he know we have an internship program? So through all that, I applied to be an intern in 1981 and was selected from 480 applicants. I was one of 40. I took my first trip to the Johnson Space Center. I spent the whole summer there. And I hated it. I absolutely hated it. I hated it. The, the guys, you know, so sometimes when you take an intern, a kid, and you put him in an internship, the people that are he, that they're interning with don't know what to do with you, right? NASA says, hey, here's an intern. Oh my God, what do we do? And so they had no idea how to keep me busy. And they would give me menial tasks to do and it didn't take me very long to do it. And I would turn it back into him. Said, hey, I'm done. They'd look at me like, he's done already. Well, it wasn't that hard. And so I had a difficult time. It was so bad, I was so bored that I worked differential equations problems from my college diffie Q book just to keep from passing out at my desk. But the second summer I was an intern, I asked if I could be moved to an area that worked on trajectory design. And they said yes. They accommodated me. And I had studied some of that in graduate school then at Iowa State. And so I was much more happy that summer. So much so that those guys offered me employment full time, but I turned them down. I wanted to complete my master's degree and graduate. And fortunately for me, the government was still able to hire at that time. And so I got that job at the Johnson Space center. And I started in 1983.

[B]

And you went to Iowa State for your masters, right?

[C]

For my master's in Arrow, yeah. And that led to a 15 year engineering career at the Johnson Space center. During which every year of those 15 years I applied to be an astronaut and was rejected 14 times until how

[B]

typical Is that of the engineers that people are. Are really want to be astronauts and they're working as engineers, or is how.

[A]

Of the.

[B]

Of the. I don't know what the Artemis crew is like, but of a typical crew. Where. Where are. Where do astronauts come from?

[C]

Well, in this day and age, they come from all over America. And they. And we also have the ability to now bring in internationals from Canada's space Agency, Japan's, the European Space Agency, even Russia. Right. We're. We're all a global conglomerate of sorts, but Americans are picked by NASA.

[A]

What kind of disciplines are most represented?

[C]

Do you switch like you did? Do people get it used to be fighter pilots and helicopter jockeys and PhDs. Right? Because those are the best among us rocket scientists. Yes. But then in the early shuttle program, they needed more astronauts, and so that's when they began to open it up more PhDs. They looked more specifically, can they find a doctor? Can they find a geologist? If we ever go to the moon

[A]

again, can we find.

[C]

You know. And they hired a veterinarian. They hired chemists, they hired. What was that other guy? Astrophysicists, Right. They hired everybody. Even me, an engineer. And so they began to broaden the hemisphere of who got selected. But my problem with all that was always that astronauts pick people like them. Right? So if you go to Caltech, you're looking for Caltech people. If you go to mit, you're looking for MIT people. Purdue.

[A]

Right.

[C]

And so I was never on the selection committee, not one time in my 15 years as an astronaut was I asked to be on the selection team. And, yeah, I would have looked for Midwesterners, right? Maybe not Hastings, maybe not Iowa State, but people from the Midwest. Because I believe that farm kids and kids like that make great engineers, because they're out in the field in the middle of nowhere, solving problems with whatever they have on hand. And I think that's a huge asset for an astronaut.

[B]

So, first of all, Nebraska is not the Midwest. Nebraska is the Plains. The Midwest starts in the whole episode.

[A]

We're gonna do a whole episode.

[B]

Let's be clear about what the Midwest is.

[C]

Okay? The great.

[B]

If I'm making the movie, if I'm making the movies, I've got you, a young man doing differential equations, dreaming of going to the stars, and that you're applying and you're applying and you're applying, and you want to break into the program and you're denied 14 times by time, 14, have you. Are you saying I'm giving up? Like, but I'm still Throwing these suckers in there. What, like what's. Talk about the motivation and talk about how you keep reaching for something that the world is telling you you're not going to do.

[A]

Great question.

[C]

Applying is easy. Getting selected is hard. And so those 15 years, I became a better applicant with each year, even though I didn't necessarily know it. Right. Today's astronaut, they all fly airplanes, they all jump out of airplanes, they all climbed a mountain. They all are scuba certified. Right. It's almost like you should take those. Those things out of the mix because most people that want to be an astronaut that are serious do all that stuff. For me, I tried to do things that I wanted to do because I wanted to do them, and I enjoyed what I was doing.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

For example, my wife and I got scuba certified on the same weekend at the same time because we wanted to go scuba diving. Would it help me be an astronaut? Yeah, sure. I'm sure it were. It certainly wouldn't hurt me. But at that time, part of it was money. Do I want to invest in taking flying lessons and, you know, all that kind of stuff based on the odds that I might never get selected. And so my focus was on my career path. Right. Work, put your head down, keep coloring. Do the job you're given to the best of your ability, and let that separate you from the masses. And I don't know if that was successful until I think it was my 13th year of applications. An email came across my desk and said, hey, we need somebody from mission operations to run the emergency operations center at the Johnson Space Center. Is anybody interested? Well, Dumb Clay said, oh, yeah, I'm interested. And I hit return, and the next thing I knew, I had the job. I was the only one that sent a reply. And that turned out to be the best thing that I could have ever possibly done to help enhance my astronaut application. I became the lead of a center that worried about hurricanes, terroristic threats, bomb threats, medical emergencies, fire and. And nature emergencies like hurricanes, all that stuff. And my job was amazingly fun. I didn't know anything about it. I learned on the fly, but the idea was to bring teams together, bring people and communities together. And even the folks inside the fence at NASA didn't even talk to each other about that sort of stuff. And in mission Operations, your mantra is to plan for it, train for it, and execute it. And so I took that philosophy and explained it to all these people in the security branch and the fire branch and the health and medical branch. Hey, we got to plan, train, and execute and we started to do simulations which blew people out of the water because they'd never seen anybody simulate a bad day before. So it was a blast. And that gave me exposure to the management team and to the astronaut leaders of that community who then when I finally got my interview in year 15, I was able to bullet them enough to, to get in.

[A]

What are the hard skills that are needed as an astronaut? I mean, I mean, maybe I'm interested in both hard and soft skills, EQ and iq, but you say the, you know, the farm kid fixing a tractor when you just have to get, you have to get the rest of harvest done and it's dark and whatever. But like, walk us through the particulars of what you're looking for. When an astronaut's being hired, they look for educational excellence.

[C]

They look for innovations, innovative thinkers, things like that. But I think sometimes a lot of astronauts are way overqualified, right? I mean, we have guys that were fighter pilots and then became doctors and then were Navy SEALs. I mean, wow, I, I could have never done that. But the fact that, that they're so talented and they're so qualified, you bring them into the astronaut world and hey, let's face it, if I can make it, anybody can do it. And it was those hard skills are quick thinking, quick learner. I don't know if that's a hard skill. Maybe that's a soft skill. But being able to work with tools, being able to think yourself out of a problem by yourself or with your astronaut buddy on a spacewalk, you know, so seeing the big picture and not getting focused on a microcosm, that is not necessary or not important. You have to be in physically fit. That's a hard skill, right? You should be in shape. That's not always true with every astronaut. You know, these guys that fly jets had quick reaction and sometimes you need quick reaction, but a lot of times you need that ability to step back and look at it for a second and then come back in and figure out what you're going to do. You have to be above average intelligence. You don't have to be a genius, no way. But you have to be smart enough to understand the concepts they taught you in school and then how they apply to a rocket equation or how they apply to a software program or the jets that fire the thrusters in a rendezvous trajectory to get from point A to point B. But a lot of times astronauts are way overqualified.

[A]

How much emotional self regulation is there? Like I think about panic. A lot of people think they want to Be a doc and they want to be a surgeon. And then they're around a trauma surgery and they're like, holy crap, I've been on this path for a decade and now I'm in this place where there's blood spraying all over my shoes. And this is not an environment I want for regular work as an astronaut. You don't really get a shadow in an, in an, or in a trauma surgery setting. How much emotional worry did you have the first of 168 days in space? What have you spent?

[C]

Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll back away a little bit to before those 167 days in space as a brand new baby astronaut at the Johnson Space center. There were 32 of us in my astronaut class. Astronaut. There were PhDs in chemistry, there were jet jockeys that flew F14s, F18s, F15s, F16s, helicopter pilots, all these people. And I was intimidated as hell. We would go to events and we would learn and be in class. And we were the first class of astronauts that ever got given exams and we had to pass our exams and able to be qualified to fly. And so I'm sitting in this room. What year is that? 98. 1998.

[A]

I don't get it. Why were there not exams in 1968?

[C]

Well, I think my, I think I know the 1996 class 44 astronauts had a lot of issues. They had people that, that got in trouble, that, that maybe did some things that were not approved or appreciated by the masses. Were from West Virginia maybe, let's see, I'd have to look their states up, but I can do that. But yeah, they had issues, right? And so they were looking for ways to delineate, to separate, right. Segregate. What a great word that is. But they were trying to set apart astronauts to figure out who were the best and who were not. And when we did that, my first exam, I was sitting at the table and I was nervous, right? And they handed us the paper and they said, don't open it, it's a timed exam. And when they finally said, three, two, one, go, I started to look at the questions and I just went, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip. And I was done in five minutes. And I sat there and I thought, oh, I've dicked this up, this can't be right. And so I went back and I looked at my paper and I read each question again. I looked at my answers and I thought, I'm not changing anything. And so I closed My paper. And I looked around and there are other astronauts, you know, and they're doing like this and, and they're looking at the sky and they're twirling their pencils and they're tapping on the desk and I'm thinking, oh boy. And, and. But I didn't do anything. I turned my paper in, I was out of that room of 32 people. I was out of that room in less than 15 minutes.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

And so I walked into the other room, which by the way, they were videotaping us because there were rumors that astronauts would cheat on these exams. Don't get me started. So I go in the room and I watch for a few minutes all the other people taking the exams. And during that time, the five minutes I spent in the video room, nobody left the room. I'd been out of the room for 20 minutes and 31 people were still in there. And so I leave and I'm thinking, I've just killed my career. I'm going to go back to being a janitor. And all this was weighing on me pretty heavily until we came back a day or two later for the test results. And they took that test, they put it down in front of me, and when they said it was okay to look at my score, I opened it up and I had not missed a single question.

[B]

Nice.

[C]

And that was the day when I believed that I belonged. That a small town kid from Nebraska with a master degree who used to bail hay on the farms north of Ashland belonged in the astronaut corps and could stand up with all these jet jockeys and these helicopter pilots and these PhDs. And so that was a big time for me to then go to the career where I spent 167 days in space. I still had those places where I was uncertain of myself and my capability. But once I got to space and I proved again that I belonged to, then I kicked some butt, right? Because I was there for the first time for 152 days. Me, the only American in space with two Russian guys and we kicked ass on our five month mission.

[B]

So before, before you go to space, I want to ask you about the, in the. It looks like nine years before you get to go to space that you, you go into the program nine years first. Is it typical, is that typical of the experience that it's almost a decade

[A]

before you get to go?

[C]

It was back then because there were so many astronauts when the class of 96 had 44, class of 98 had 32. So there's 66 people and so I'm 68th or 66th in line. Right. And so that nine years was a long time. Plus you throw Columbia happened in there. So the ability to select and to launch on a regular basis was really stopped by Columbia. And a bunch of us never knew if we'd ever fly because we had to figure out what happened and solve that problem first. But I think part of my performance there helped me solidify that I was a decent candidate to go into space. And so that was right after that is when they said, hey, you need to go to Russia and start training.

[B]

And part of, part of what you did, though, just in answer to Ben's question about panic.

[C]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

I didn't, I didn't know this, or I guess I didn't fully understand it. It's a lot of underwater training.

[C]

Right.

[B]

You guys do a lot of underwater training where you can replicate an environment where you will die outside, but in a place that you can be recovered. And that was that. That was a big part of what you were doing in those nine years.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Was it was not just doing it yourself, but improving the system for training.

[C]

Yeah. You know, the 40 foot deep, 6.2 million gallon water swimming pool was a great place to train. But every time I went out the airlock hatch in that swimming pool, I could see the bottom. Yeah. And so my first spacewalk as a rookie in 2007, on July 23, I was the lead spacewalker going out with a Russian cosmonaut. And between the two of us, his English was okay, my Russian was okay, so we were going to do Runglish. But as I floated over the hatch, when I finally opened that hatch and locked it in place, it was pitch black below me. You know, the sun was. Or the Earth was. Or the sun was blocked by the Earth. Pitch black. All I could see were icicles shooting from the back left of my spacesuit into the vacuum of space. Disappearing. Right. Because the pressure differential between that vacuum and the little area that was left in the airlock was shoving those ice particles out. So I'm watching that, holding on with two fingers onto a handrail, looking at pitch black darkness. And all I could think about was I was born to be here right now doing this. And, and, and that was, honest to God, that was the thought in my head. And it was a huge confidence builder for me that, you know, I was in the right place, I was in the right time, ready to do what I was trained to do.

[B]

Born to be here right now doing this.

[C]

Yeah. Beautiful. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and you know, we did great. And. And I think my career was solid. Did I piss people off? Oh, yeah. But that's also part of the deal, right, is when I got to the point where I had enough experience where I felt like, hey, I should be able to speak freely, because I understand better now, and I think I can make it better for the people that come behind me. And sometimes that's frowned upon, which is disappointing, but that's the way it is.

[B]

What was it like going into Russia in the early aughts or in the. In the. In the 20 odds? It was. We were still friends, but it was getting weird. Talk about. Talk about that.

[C]

It was my first day in Russia was in Feb. I think it was February, January or February. And it was, you know, eight feet of snow on the ground. I get into the Shermetova airport, and I'm wandering around. I don't really know where to go, and you have to exit with your luggage, and there's a little dude with a card that had clay on it, and he was a little guy named Dima, and he didn't speak any English, and he was my van driver, and he was going to drive me all the way out to Star City, Russia, which is where the military used. Well, still does, but that's where they trained all their cosmonauts back in the day. And as we drove through, it was nighttime, and we actually had to stop at an intersection in some piddly little town in Russia because there was a dead body in the middle of the intersection and a dude standing over with a machine gun. And I'm thinking, holy crap, what have I gotten myself into? And, you know, it turned out all right. But for a kid from Nebraska who'd never really been anywhere, to be in. In Star City, Russia was. Was pretty incredible. But at the people level, they're all good. Well, maybe not all, but most of them are just good humans.

[B]

Yeah, they're people, too.

[C]

Yes. Just like us. And I met some wonderful folks. I had some amazingly interesting experiences while I was over there, which, you know, that's a whole nother podcast in and of itself. But it was a good time, but it was also very emotional for me, being away from my wife and kids so much.

[B]

Yeah, I bet.

[C]

That's right. You.

[A]

You just talked about vocation, a word that Chris and I like to return to a lot on here, knowing that you were in the right place at the right time. Can you talk a little bit about the overview effect? What it is? Did you experience it? What.

[C]

What do you make of it?

[A]

What do you make of the guys on Artemis coming back, talking about seemingly that.

[C]

Yeah, the overview effect or the orbital perspective is something that a lot of astronauts talk about. And I totally get it when you go and see the Earth from above and you see the thinness of our atmosphere. You know, for kids that play basketball, if you take a basketball, the atmosphere is about one quarter of a millimeter around that basketball. And so it's very thin, it's very fragile, and we need to protect it. I get all that stuff, but what I talk about is that when I came back, it did nothing but strengthen my faith in God. Because everything I saw, every single day, all I could think of was, none of this is random. This is all ordered, right? It's supposed to be this way. We're the only human species on the only planet in our solar system that has life. And as far as we know, in our galaxy, we're the only ones. And maybe we are in the universe, but I kind of think the universe is big enough that maybe there's another species somewhere over here doing what we're doing, and we're over here. And maybe one day with enough money and enough brain power will meet somewhere in the middle. But that overview effect is important. And. And if every human on Earth had the opportunity to go into space for a week and then live in a third world country for a month, it would change everyone's perspective, I think, in a good way. But that's hard to achieve. And you know, all the astronauts talk about, well, it's our. We're all a same crew. On Spaceship Earth, yes, we are. But on that crew, there's a lot of hatred and a lot of envy and a lot of greed. And until you fix those pieces, you're not going to be the United Federation of Planets with Jim Kirk sailing around, you know, meeting aliens and, and saving the day.

[B]

So is that, by the way, just to interrupt? Is that your favorite Sci fi? Are you a Star Trek? Do you do. Do you do sci Fi? And if so, what's your brand?

[C]

Star Trek was my show versus Star Wars. I like to read James Hogan. When I was a kid, he had some pretty cool books like the Minervan Experiment and the Proteus Operation are the two that. That jumped to mind. But I was, I was more into Superman, Batman and Robin, and I was into sports. So anything that had anything to do, you know, Kareem's autobiography, Wilt's autobiography,

[A]

Danny

[C]

Ainge, Pete Maravich, all that stuff, that's what I was into.

[B]

You entered the public consciousness for being. I guess this fits for a Nebraskan. Corny you. Every day, as I understand it, there's like a check in. And when you had, when you had the mic, you had trivia questions, you had corny jokes, you played music. What was your song you were famous for playing? There was a song that was associated with you that one time you rocked out from the International Space Station. But you genuinely, sincerely seemed like a person who was having fun. Talk about being a goofball in space.

[C]

Well, I'm a goofball normally going into space. You know, part of my goal was I wanted to share it with America, with, with the world. Because you have to understand what we're doing up there in order to help fund us. Right. If you see more what I'm doing on a real time basis, you know, and, and you can see now look at the Artemis, two people. We were watching them almost 100% of the time. Well, I like to take credit for part of that because I was one of the guys that was went to space that said I'm going to have some fun. And I did. In the morning I would dedicate through KISS radio, I would be a disc jockey briefly, and I would dedicate a song that I had sent up the day or two days before and I would dedicate it to somebody who helped me get to space. Right. And that's what was important about it. I didn't just dedicate it to the world. I dedicated it to an individual so that they knew that I was acknowledging their contribution to my career. And then at the end of the day, it was two things. Famous cities from Nebraska. And then I did trivia questions between the United States or the Houston control Center and the Huntsville, Alabama Control Center. I thought that was a lot of fun, but didn't go over too well with management, I don't think.

[B]

Really?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

You think they would love that?

[C]

I would think. Well, the, the mission control in Houston, they're pretty tighty whitey.

[B]

Yeah. Right.

[C]

And they're very serious. I took Larry the Cable Guy in there after I flew. You know, he did a forever only Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy and, and he came to Houston to go into the control center. Oh my God, you could just hear the underwear going. It's so. It was just fun for me to be able to share what I was trying to do. I remember people would call me and send me emails when I was talking about we had labels on in space. White, Yellow and Green. Right. They came up on the space shuttle or whatever cargo, they were white. And then the idea was is that you had to know whether it was a green return to earth label or a yellow stand space label. So what I did was I nicknamed them green for grass, yellow for sun, white when it comes up. So I always knew that if it was yellow label, it stayed on space station, it was green label, it was going down to grass on Earth. Right. And people would hear that stuff and they would go, oh, oh, that's kind of cool. Right? I could do this.

[A]

Let's go back for a second. You said here and elsewhere, pardon me, that the spacewalk strengthened your Christianity. I think there's a lazy pop culture binary about science versus religion, and I suspect all three of us here reject that. Can you talk a little bit about how you see them complementing each other, the complexity and the design of science, advancing your thinking about theology?

[C]

Yeah. And you know, I would honestly tell you that I'm probably more biblically, biblically illiterate than I should be. But as a person of faith, to see all of that happening and to be a part of that and to understand. You know, I had a teacher in at Ashland, Alice Raikes, who taught me to love and understand the scientific method. Right. If you have a question, you figure out what you're going to do to try to answer that question. You gather your materials, you collect your data, you analyze your data, but then the key thing is you write it down so that other people can read what you did and not have to reinvent the wheel. I think we do a lot of reinventing the wheel all the time. But that basis in science is what drove me and led me to this ability to see the earth from 250 miles up and look at how rivers came from the mountains and tripled down through the States and to the Gulf of Mexico, America, to the Atlantic, to the Amazon into the Atlantic, all those things. And I think it really cemented me when I saw my first iceberg. And this is really weird and I don't understand why, but my Russian guys told me they were really good at photography and they said, clay, clay, look for white blue spot. And in the South Atlantic. And I would look and I would look and I finally saw one and I grabbed the camera with a telephoto lens and I shot and I blew it up on the computer and I captured an iceberg. So clearly that was floating in the ocean and you could see the waves in the ocean around that iceberg. And. And those things just said, oh my Gosh, this is not random. This is not chaos. This is order. This is how it's supposed to be. And the equations that I learned as a kid and in college and in graduate school, that sometimes I understood easily, sometimes I didn't. But, you know, every time we have an equation like that that proves there's a relationship that's bigger than us. I just think that's so cool. And I think it goes all the way back to a creator that just threw all this out. But they threw it out such that it's orderly. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to figure this stuff out, right? What Einstein did, what. What Edison did, what all those great scientists, you know, Meals Bohr, all those people, they figured stuff out because it's not random. And math is poetry. Exactly. Exactly.

[A]

Chris, I wanted to toss to you, but I need to do one more parenthetical on Nebraska Homerism. Notice just on the flyby. Clayton says, oh, my teacher, Alice Raikes, aunt of Jeff, or little, Little Ashland, Nebraska, aunt of Jeff Raikes, I believe, former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the board of Stanford's mom and chairman of the board of Stanford. Nebraska just keeps on giving to the rest of you. 49 states over to you, Chris.

[B]

Okay, noted, noted, noted. Chuck Yeager stipulate here that Chuck Yeager mention for you the I want before Ben wraps us up here. You talked about the benefits of the space program for Americans, the technology that comes back and the advances. But why do we need to explore space? So I get the benefit part, I get the yes part. But why? Why do we need to do this? I don't know whether Sir Edmund Hillary actually said, because it was there. Is it as simple as it exists? Human beings are curious and we want to know and we want to go. Is it conquest? What is it about human beings and our relationship to space? Why do we need to do this?

[A]

And a footnote too, just for a second. Why not just why do we need the data and information? And I think Chris is driving at this as well. But if, if I'm hijacking us, I'm sorry, why is it insufficient just to send lots more sensors and drone like technologies that get us the data back? Why do we need to go? As opposed to surely cheaper? How do we just get more information from farther away?

[C]

All good questions. You know, Neil Armstrong said a healing can be both amazed and amused. A robot can be neither. And so I think they have to work in tandem. I think that you, you, you do as much as you can with a robot, right? To Protect the human frailty. So if. If you can, you know, send that robot up to hook electrical transmission towers off I80 over 680. Right. Without putting a human up there who could fall off and kill themselves. That's an okay thing. But I think if you go back to the big question you asked me, why should we do this? I would always answer it by saying, it's not where we're going. It's what we learn along the way. That's my. My premise. That's why we should do it. Because every time you're doing a challenging effort and endeavor with humans, you're going to learn, Learn something. And that's the key to me is what you learn along the way to doing these grand endeavors. And you can bring back, hopefully, to the Earth, to all the humans that are here, because this is not an American thing anymore. It's a global thing. It's a humanity thing. And that was proven in Artemis, too, by the fact that those four people captured the imaginations of the world.

[B]

I totally understand the point about the benefit, and I also enjoy Tang. There are many, many, many, many, many benefits. But that's not why we go, right? We go because of something else. When you were a little kid in a parade, wearing your homemade spaceman costume, the thing that makes people do what is fundamentally an insane thing, right? It is a fundamentally insane thing to say we're going to leave the atmosphere of this little blue marble and we're going to go hurdle ourself into deep space. What's the why? I get the benefit, but what's the why?

[C]

Well, I would say that it is the human condition. If you go hiking in the. In the Rockies and you're climbing up a very steep hill, you know, one of the things that you. You anticipate is what's over that hill? What am I going to find on the other side? Well, somebody maybe already did that for you, but for yourself, you're always looking for what. What else is there? What else is out there? And I think that's what drives us as humans. You know, when the Mayflower came to Plymouth Rock and those people, you know, damn near all of them died because it was so cold and nasty and all that. But they began. Began to figure it out. And once they began to figure it out, they began to say, well, what else is there? Let's go this way and. And let's go discover. Let's see what's out there. And as they did all that, you know, some of them stopped in Iowa, and some of Them stopped in Nebraska because it was too hot, it was too hard. Yeah, yeah. The blessed, the winners. But it was so hard, right. It was so difficult. And you know, my wife and I just took a trip to the Black Hills and then we came down. I'd never seen Chimney Rock. And we drove down through Nebraska and we saw that. And then we read about how those pioneers fought their way through that nasty, nasty area. Right. That was. I would have trouble walking through it now. And they were dragging pianos and covered wagons and horses and kids and.

[A]

And I just 5ft high grass.

[C]

Exactly. And it's just, that's the human spirit that says, hey, there's something better. I want to find out what it is. I want to keep going until I see what's out there. And that's, that's something I can't describe really very well. But I had it as a kid. I had a telescope that I would put out in our backyard and I would look at the stars, I would look at the moon and I would dream of being there and I would dream of, wow, what would happen if we did have a Star Trek ship that could zip us to wherever it could zip us to. You know, and I always, this is stupid, but I always thought of Superman and planet Krypton. Right. That this alien came to Earth. Maybe he's really out there somewhere. You know, those are things that just capture the imagination of kids. And I'm hoping that Artemis too, in the same way they went around the Earth or around the moon that I witnessed with Apollo 8, that there are thousands of kids that are dreaming about doing amazing things. And whether those amazing things are in space or in a laboratory somewhere on Earth, I don't care. I just want them doing amazing things.

[B]

I love it.

[A]

I, I love this. What I hear you talking about is the noble piece of the human condition that where explorers were made for discovery and wonder and hunt. God created this diversity of creation and called it good. And the complexity of it is so much bigger than we understand. And part of our brain, it ties a little bit space, orbital math and music that the desire we have to try to make sense of it. The riddle solving that is in our soul. So I buy it all. So I'm going to ask a pragmatic question, but don't hear this as anti wonder. If you think about the rate limiters though on us going faster and farther on space exploration, how do you disentangle the different riddles or rate limiters?

[C]

A different.

[A]

Clayton. Clayton Christensen, a guy we talk about on here sometimes the historian of technology who was at the Harvard Business School. A huge thing that happens when there's a technical technological innovation is not something bigger and better and more complex, but something that becomes so much cheaper that lots of historic non consumers get to come off the sidelines and start consuming it. So in Elon's world about either attritable stuff or reusable stuff, how do you think about what the bottlenecks are that we need to break through to have exponential gains both for the US and for the world and for science, but also for kids imaginations. If a lot more people were spending a lot more time in space, we will then start to discover new things that we never even knew was possible to discover before that moment. What are the rate limiters and the bottlenecks as you see them right now?

[C]

I'll give you two. Propulsion is easy for me, right? We need a better way of propulsing our spaceships through space faster. You know, if you want to go anywhere, even Mars for an example, it's six to nine months with current tech. Well, that's a long time. And that leads me, that leads me to number two and is that we haven't solved the psychological impact of all this. You know, you don't ever hear NASA talk about this. I've written about it in some of my work and, and a work I did for NASA a while back. But we have to start thinking about humans going somewhere for a long period of time in a relatively confined space. And how do you deal with sex and sexual attraction? How do you deal with, you know, alcohol or, or drug supplements that the humans may need to take the edge off? How do you deal with the arguments that will invariably happen when Betty has sex with Joe and then, then Susie finds out that Betty had sex with Joe and Susie was looking at Joe and you know, all, all that stuff we, we haven't, I don't need a diagram here.

[A]

I'm confused.

[B]

Betty gets around, that's all. That's all I can say.

[A]

50 million miles, Chris.

[C]

Exactly. And so those things, the, the psychological ability of a human to handle all this, you know, if you, if you go back to the pioneer examples going around Chimney Rock, they were a lot stronger than we were, or we are, I think, both physically and mentally. But those challenges that, that come on the mental side we need to address and I don't know, maybe NASA is addressing, maybe somebody's looking into it. I just reviewed a book called Becoming Martian and it talked about the idea of having children on Mars with 1 3rd gravity versus 1,6 gravity on the Moon versus the Earth's gravity. And do you have to do C sections on everybody? How will the kids come out? You know all. Well, those are pretty powerful questions if you're going to explore the universe. And Elon will tell you, we can terraform Mars, right? We can make it Earth. Okay, maybe we can. That would be nice. But in my opinion, you either have to build Earth when you get there or you have to take Earth with you. And so those are the two things, I think. The, the mental aspect and then if you talk technical, the propulsion aspect of how you get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

[A]

I got a tiny. And then over to Chris for the last one. When you give your analog of a basketball with a quarter of an inch around it, is that what you said? Is that the ratio, quarter of a millimeter to a. What's a basketball? 13 and a half inch diameter or something like that? Like that. How far is Mars relative to how

[C]

far is the moon?

[A]

And what is the propulsion, math and economics ratio in that?

[C]

Well, the. So if you break it down this way, the space station is about 250 miles, the moon's about 250,000 miles, and then Mars, gosh, I don't even know off the top of my head, but it's six to nine months in current propulsion technology to be able to get from Earth to Mars. Then in order to get back in a six to nine month time frame, you have to wait for the planets to move in their orbits, right? So they're at the closest point, and that means you have to wait on the planet's surface for about six to nine months. So six to nine months times three is roughly a three year, let's say three year journey. And yeah, there are astronauts that say right now, oh, I'll go, I'll go, I'll go. Well, I will not. But if they will, three years is a long time to be away in a very demanding environment, dangerous environment, with the hope that you may or may not ever come home. And so that is just three heavenly bodies within our puny little solar system. And so going beyond that, to find one of these Goldilocks planets that exist supposedly in some solar system on a star that's light years away, there's no way right now, right? Absolutely no way. All right.

[B]

I could ask you to do trivia questions with me. I could ask you a lot of. I could ask you a lot of things, but mostly I just want to thank you. You. I'm really Grateful for your service. And I'm really grateful for the example that you set. And I'm sure the kids at Iowa State love your class.

[C]

There you go. Okay, trivia. Trivia question hit us. Where did Clayton Anderson first meet Ben Sasse?

[A]

I hope. Memorial Stadium.

[C]

No, the Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum. Senator Sasse came for the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce eventually, and it was during my first or second year as the president of that museum. You were on stage with Mike Flood and Don Bacon and those guys to do your. Your panel thing. That was the first time that you and I shook hands.

[A]

Well, I will echo Chris and saying thank you for your service, thank you for this time.

[C]

And.

[A]

Go, big Red brother.

[C]

You bet. And thank you, Senator Sasse, for all you've done for Nebraska and for the United States of America. I am honored to be with you. This was fun.

[A]

Take care.

[C]

You, too.

[B]

Thanks, Clyde. Okay, professor, that's pretty good. What did we learn today?

[A]

Oh, I'm so torn, brother. On the one hand, the nerd in my soul wants to go. Frederick Jackson Turner's, you know, Frontier Thesis, Kennedy saying once it had closed in the Midwest, the West, and then the Midwest, you had to go to space for America to make sense. But I kind of feel like we need to pursue the weird pivot he took toward orbital sex.

[C]

I don't.

[B]

Did not see it coming.

[A]

I did not. It wasn't on my bingo card. I don't think the nerds at NASA, on average, have a lot of understanding of terrestrial sex, so.

[B]

Oh, well, what about the lady that wore the diaper that drove all the way to Florida that they clearly understood gravitational coitus. Just saying.

[A]

Oh, my goodness. Cloaca and coitus.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

In the same season.

[B]

Try not to get them in the same episode. Yeah, try not to get them in the same.

[A]

All right, all right. Pulling back up to more elevated things, I do think the hunt is in us. I think the way you said it was exactly right. I was neither a Star wars nor Star Trek kid, but if I had it to do over again, I'd like

[C]

to know and watch Star Trek.

[A]

I feel like there's layers of humor in that and. No, neither are we.

[B]

The planet, the. The vision. Basically, Star Trek is model UN in space.

[A]

No, I'm not interested.

[B]

There are a lot of meetings and discussions about things. It's, you know, if. If you're into it, you're into it. But again, that's. So the thing about America can only be America if it's expanding. And that America can only Be America if it's going forward. This speaks to then the idea of the United States as stagnant in this period. Is that right?

[A]

I'm so torn. The the Edmund Burke by Russell Cook. Part of me thinks that little platoons is what America is and then people do their own things where they're from. And yet I also know you need a common enemy and you need some common cause. You need some national narrative to bind together the imagination a little bit. And so I do think that we're missing a big, big, big project together. And Elon is quirky, but I think he's on to something about pieces of this that we should be doing together. Yes. No.

[B]

You know, I thought about during the Artemis craze and it was very fun as a broadcaster to get to do the launch. That was a lot of fun. And there was a lot of discussion around the fact that we haven't done anything for a long time. Right. That we've, we've been sort of stuck in neutral. And we heard Clayton talk a little bit about the, the lull in US space exploration. So I looked it up. It was a hundred years from the days of Prince Henry the Navigator and starting to send those missions down the coast of Africa to find the tip and start doing all that stuff to Magellan. So it was a century. And I think for Americans, the idea that we begin our space program say, you know, let's say 1961, but it's. There are obviously things before that. And so we have this big achievement from 1961 to 1968. Wow. We've done it.

[A]

Badass. Yeah.

[B]

And amazing. And now we're just going back to the moon. And it's been what, 60, almost 60 years. And you know that, that it stalled. But it takes a long time, right. The. For a people, for a civilization to explore. And I know things happen faster now, but I guess that's a confession on my part that I have been too dismissive about the achievements of the space program because in the relative. It is historically speaking, the relative blink of an eye from the space shuttle program to today.

[C]

Well said.

[A]

I think you said three things and I know this is too listically for our clothes, but one, yes, that it's badass that Kennedy can say we're going to go to the moon before the end of the decade. Decade. And boom, we just do it seven years later. Two, we slow down at almost everything we do as a common project that you could spend whatever California tries to spend to get from San Francisco to LA on a High speed train and get none of it done. People should be disgusted and annoyed by that regulatory cluster. And yet part of me is really torn between saying public projects really aren't the main thing. We need to be a people. And yet we got to have some of them. And I think you're right. We got to find. We need a menu. We need to have a big constructive debate sometime in a presidential campaign about a menu of big projects we could do together.

[B]

Yeah, any minute. That, that. Any. Any second. The substantive, you know, just to, just to force a little political history into the discussion. The, the alternate timeline for the United States, speaking of Kennedy, is the one that in 1964, we knew America knew who the nominees were going to be. We hadn't. We were going to have an incumbent president. And Barry Goldwater was certain to be all but certain to be the Republican nominee in 1964, before Kennedy had been a year before, it was already pretty clear that it would be Goldwater. And the two of them agreed that what they were going to do would be fly around the country together with their families and do debates in different cities, the two of them, because their families got along with each other, they enjoyed each other's company, and that they were going to do it that way. And that is a different and much, much better timeline than Lyndon Johnson's Daisy ad. And the unraveling of those discussions that happened thereafter. Okay, I learned that I should be nicer to interns. That was something that I learned about how he was frustrated and disappointed. He got the dream internship and sat there and was just given busy work. And I apologize to all my former interns and I promise I will do a better job in the future of being a mentor. I learned about keeping your head down. How do you do it for 14 years? And you think about the act of continuing to apply for a job that the system is telling you suck it. We don't want you, we're not interested in you. We want the jet pilots and we want these people, and you're not exceptional and you're not going to get to be one of these people. And I said, how did you do it? And you remember what he said? Said I kept my cut, I kept my head down and I just kept working and I just kept doing it. And that my performance was the job interview itself, which was amazing, beautiful. But what I will most take away from this was his line about having struggled with this imposter syndrome and believing some of the doubts, right. That in that long struggle to make it into the elite cadre with these people and do this and that. He had some doubts about himself and the thought that he had when he stepped out on his first spacewalk. I may get it printed up. I have some things that I have hanging on my wall. This may be it. I was born to be here right now doing this. Which reminds me about. Do you know about the Halvorson blessing?

[A]

No.

[B]

So I apologize for whatever I'm butchering here. He was the chaplain of the Senate for a long time. He was the pastor, New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, which is a beautiful building to go into.

[C]

I won't.

[B]

No commentary on anything else but his benediction. His blessing was, wherever you go, God is sending you. And whatever you do, Christ, who indwells you, is working through you. And I got the goosebumps when he talked about that, because that's like if I'm having a reality check, I'm supposed to remember, just as those icebergs aren't a mistake, it's not a mistake that I am here right now doing what I'm doing.

[A]

All right. I'm not bringing us down from that height. That's a good way to close. Thank you, my man.

[C]

Appreciate you.

[A]

All right.

[B]

All right, that is it for this week's episode. We hope you'll like. Review and subscribe and tell a friend. Feel free to email us with your thoughts, corrections, questions, or whatever else is on your mind. Write [e-mail] this podcast was produced by Scott Emergut with the help of our colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. The music is from Drew Holcomb and the neighbors. Thanks for listening and keep living the good life.

[C]

Sa.