Today’s episode will make you look at the world in a new way. I have dreamt about interviewing Chris Hadfield for a long time. His book An Astronaut’s Guide To Life On Earth is one of my favourites, and I have always felt this special affinity with the man. Commander Hadfield gives off this profound and powerful humanity. And quite honestly, I get the feeling he would have been like that had he never set foot on a space station or left the earth’s atmosphere. Despite his scientific background, his talent for music and his famed attention to detail, I get the sense that Chris lives for new experiences, new perspectives and a deeper connection to life. Chris tells me about some unimaginable things. Stories about travelling a thousand times round the sun, and crossing the solar system. He says you don’t just get to know the earth from this perspective, you begin to feel it in your bones, and see just how connected and dependent on each other we really are. When we disrupt our consciousness in this way, our minds literally expand. And as Chris told me, the bigger and clearer the perspective we have on our lives, the better decisions we make. Powerful stuff. You might have first encountered Chris Hadfield after he started posting pictures on Twitter when he was commanding the International Space Station. His rise to fame as a social media phenomenon didn’t come from a casual decision. It happened because he was simply compelled to share his experiences and to capture the astonishing views he was privy to every day. He had to take pictures and he felt a duty to share. It is one thing to experience new perspectives, quite another to share those new visions and possibilities with other people. Forbes Magazine called Chris the most social media savvy astronaut ever. It is an important achievement. Chris has harnessed the connective power of our age, and he is helping shift the way we think about ourselves and the planet we live on. His message is crucial at this moment in history, and it takes the humility and quick thinking intelligence of someone like Chris Hadfield to pull it off. You will also know Chris from the viral music video he made in space, covering the late David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Again, part of the power of this video is how it shifted people’s perspective on the song, and what life in space is really like. David Bowie was a genius at making people see themselves in new ways, and Chris Hadfield did the same thing with a short video that has now been seen 27million times. Chris puts it beautifully when he says that a shared understanding empowers us more than anything else. This “overview effect” that astronauts get gazing on the planet from outer space is something we try to emulate every week here on London Real. Not only do we try to find guests whose perspectives will shock us out of our assumptions and push us into new possibilities, we also create those possibilities simply through the honesty and power of the connections we make. Every now and then, I get this feeling with a guest. I just know that the energy of this special moment is going to spread to millions of people around the world. London Real is about new perspectives, shared and communicated in an empowering and revolutionary way. Each conversation reminds us of the connection we have to each other. My time with Chris Hadfield is a highlight of my life as a broadcaster. When I experience a shift in my own world view, and I feel the human connection deeper than I did before, you guys experience it too. I know you guys have been waiting for this conversation for a long time, so here it is.
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