Full transcript: Chris Hadfield on London Real
9:52 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose my guest today is Commander Chris Hadfield the retired Canadian astronaut who flew two space shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station. He became a global celebrity by posting images of Earth via Twitter and later filmed a music video in space performing David Bowie’s Space Odyssey watched over 27 million times on YouTube. You are the author of the New York Times bestseller An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth an incredible book one of my favorites Commander Hadfield welcome to London Real. Thanks wow that’s a double-barreled introduction. Thanks very much. You’re welcome you know I have a I have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for you because I’m also trained as a mechanical engineer MIT class of 93. My dad grew up on a farm in Arizona and and as I told you earlier we had a 68 Mustang or I did and we used to play with it and kind of bond and we always worked the problem I felt. Maybe we’re brothers. Yeah Sounds very similar. We also used to both wrestle in high school I found out and I then I later spent two summers at the aerospace corporation trying to I think get one of the Galileo high-gain antennas to work because it had a problem up there and so I’m all about redundancy and backup plans this whole studio is all about them we have two audio tracks running six cameras. I noticed you got a few cameras in the room. Yeah just in case you know I was just curious what it’s like for you to come
11:10 To London and what Britain means to you I know when you got to the space station you know the Queen sent you a message welcoming you there but I’m always curious what it’s like when you land here what are the what are the things you think about when it comes to this country. I grew up raised by a farm family like your own but my dad had been raised by his British grandparents. His grandfather came over from Yorkshire as one of those early settlers out to Canada’s west. They posted big signs across the farming communities of England saying you know the most fertile country in the world come settle the land we’ll give you 160 acres and that lured my great grandfather over around just after the turn of the last century and his daughter my grandmother had various troubles and so my father ended up being raised by his grandparents so it’s almost one generation removed for me that I was raised by a set of pretty strong Yorkshire values and as a teenager I came over just when I finished high school to tour Europe and we really started here in the UK and I landed in Scotland and then came down the coast and spent time in Yorkshire looking up where my family had been from and sort of it’s almost like looking deep into a mirror to find out who you are a little bit and then came down to London and rented a bed sit in London because I wanted to get to know this city back in the 70s and lived down in Crystal Palace with a buddy and we went to one major event today. We followed a whole trial
12:49 Through Old Bailey just to see what the legal system looked like and we went to all the museums and spent days in the British Museum and tried to go to a play or a movie every single day just to get a feel for the culture and the history that is this place and so it’s given me maybe like the perspective that you get from orbit not just a transient sense of where I am with London right now but also a little more of a global view and a view of the thousands of years of history in this place so it’s a delight to come here every time to see what it’s like right now but also to feel the bedrock of history that supports it. I have a vested family sort of background in it but also I’m delighted to have a chance to come and touch stone and see what it’s like again now. Also you’re a Canadian and so the British you know there’s the British the Americans obviously fought a revolutionary war together there’s the Russians we had the Cold War with America but you know you can kind of come in and not be associated with one group or the other group I know you were the commander at Star City as well for director at NASA there how is that role where you can come in and not be completely British not be American you know I’ve been the American in the room a lot of times it’s hard it’s a hard job. Right Canada of course was granted nationhood we didn’t have a war of independence we were a colony and a dominion and it wasn’t really till the first world war that Canada started asserting its own authority
14:26 As a individual nation state up until then we were basically at the beck and call on behest of what what England and the UK decided so it was a much more gentle gradual formation of a set of values that is Canada today so it’s different it’s not England it’s not the United States it’s not Russia it’s the particular formation of of the country that I’m from and therefore the values that I internalized as normal growing up but to me it’s it’s a lovely position to be in philosophically as well as geographically when when I was NASA’s director of operations in Russia NASA and America of course saw me as as a pretty near ally as a Canadian but the Russians saw me I speak Russian they saw me as another northern country not an American and so they felt an alliance and an affinity and a trust that otherwise I might not have been granted and and of course England and Canada have a continue we’re still a monarchy the queen is on our money and so we still have a very strong affinity and loyalty to what goes on here but at the same time we have the longest undefended border in the world with the US and there’s a huge parallel of existence between the two and so for me to be able to branch those culturally and and geographically I like it I like the position that it’s put me into especially when I’m in a very public position like commanding the International Space Station I think it maybe gives me a at least a different
16:02 Perspective than the other folks have brought to that role. Do you miss Russia? I know you said that you looked at that country differently when you knew the language and so then you said being there and knowing the language is just it’s completely different than just saying not and I know you had lots of great memories bonding with a lot of the astronauts there in your book but yeah
16:27 I think to walk into a big culturally complete and distinct place where you don’t have any of the references where you don’t speak the language it’s kind of overwhelming and a little bit baffling to walk into Manhattan with not a word of English is it’s a pretty daunting place to see and you don’t get a lot out of it I think you get sort of steamrolled just by the by the self-assured inertia of the place and Moscow is the same you walk into Moscow without any word of Russian language and and you are you are pigeonholed into being a non-Russian speaking foreigner and then you only get to stay in very certain places and you only get to see certain things and you miss most of what is really special about Moscow and about Russia the how do you absorb the true sense of history of that place the thousand-year roots of the city and the and the soul that that created it the imperfect soul that that creates so many of the great human institutions and I think with every word of Russian that you learn and an increased ability to communicate directly with the people you’re talking to but also then maybe to understand what the signs are all saying what the explanations are all about and then of course sort of the the confidence to be able to drill deeper into Moscow to go to things that otherwise you wouldn’t even have known were going on you’re not just Red Square the Kremlin the Bolshoi and I’m out of here and wow that was a nice trip but instead you you go to the things that Russians
18:01 Are going to and and you start to understand just how deep the soul of the place is and I’m by no means any expert but at least by spending a bunch of my life studying the language it allowed me a ticket in just to understand the place better than I would have otherwise I follow you on Twitter and I think you can learn a lot about someone from their social media Forbes magazine called you the most social media savvy astronaut ever to leave earth and you posted something a few weeks ago and you said good morning earth this is where we all live together do something kind for a stranger today it’s contagious and I watched a really short documentary called the overview effect and it it talked about people such as you that had seen the earth from from space and and one of the themes of the short film was that the original moon mission to the moon the goal was the moon but one of the great accomplishments was just seeing earth from there and uh and when I see you post things like that I wonder what it’s like for you I know you spent 166 days in space and just to continually look down on on that that piece um how does it change you I recently watched the movie room and in that it’s the story of some lady had been kidnapped and kept as a slave and then she gave birth to a child in this one little shed out in somebody’s backyard horrible story but it occurred to me that child who had been born into that room and had only seen the world through the skylight of this little
19:36 Uh extremely confined place he had an understanding of the world but his entire world was room what was that little place and the and the weird um non-real images on the television that they were allowed and then the little glimpse of the sky that was his understanding of the world and in in reality all of us live like that it’s just our room maybe slightly bigger or maybe the skylight with which we see the sky is slightly bigger but to try and actually see the world in its totality uh it’s virtually impossible but maybe we can see you know a documentary program or we can read a travel book or we can look at a coffee table book or we’ll get on an airplane and go somewhere and go somewhere else and you start to piece together some of the threads of the fabric that is our actual planet but i’ve been lucky enough to take sort of the best of our transportation technology that that we’ve ever invented and to get on board a ship and go around the world in 92 minutes and not just once because that would just be a travel documentary you’d most of everything would bounce off you because you can’t absorb that much information so quickly but to go around the world a hundred times and then a thousand times and and not just going around the world but around the world 16 times a day where it turns underneath you so every circumnavigation is like another voyage of discovery and the angle between you and the sun in the world because of your speed is constantly
21:11 Changing and the seasons are changing i went from one side of the sun to the other right across the solar system while i was on the space station right around it so you saw winter and summer swap ends on the world and so each time around you see the world slightly more for what it is more clearly and somewhere along the way in one of those thousands of orbits uh i think you fundamentally i don’t know if it’s shift or deepen or both but you start to see the world as what it actually is which is room but it’s the whole thing it’s one place this whole thing is just our uh collective shared room and we almost all miss that because we’re we’re just only able to absorb the confines of the part of it that we’re raised with but i i feel hugely privileged to without anybody telling me what to think and without any filters in the way to actually have seen the whole world over and over and over again until it seeped into me permanently and it doesn’t necessarily give me any outlandish insight or any outlandish imperative to change the world but i think it does give me a perspective that i feel compelled to try and share to try and let as many other people i was there on behalf of a lot of people you know it took a lot of lucre to to build that rocket ship and accelerate my body to eight kilometers a second and let me stay there and so i feel a responsibility to do my best to let other people see what’s beyond
22:54 Their room based on the things that i’ve seen uh and that’s why i wrote that book you talked about why i published a book of photographs why i wrote music about it why i’m talking to you i think i’m hugely lucky and i think we collectively are more liable to make good decisions for ourselves and for where we live the more clearly we can see the whole thing as one place and you started posting these pictures on a whim really on twitter you were taking these beautiful photographs from up in space because you see so well picture what it’s like you’re there with a camera and you’re going around the world and you float over to the window and you say i’m not even going to take a picture today it’s i just want to look at the world and you’re looking at something you go and you you got to grab the camera because there’s there’s your your emotions are trapped behind you you can’t keep up and you go i got to take a picture of this so i can look at it later because if i if i don’t it’s it’s like one of those super high speed photographs of a bullet going through a balloon you wouldn’t really understand what’s happening if you can’t then go back and go wow look what actually happened look what i really saw and so you take these pictures and now you know you pull the little chip out of the camera and put it in your zippered up pocket so it doesn’t float away you stick another chip in the camera and by the end
24:07 Of the day you’ve kind of got a whole bunch of those chips you got like the whole world in your pocket waiting for you to truly look at it and you go into your quarters and you plug in those little memory chips and you upload them so that nasic can download them during the night but you flick through them and there is some magnificent unexpected intimate view of the world and now what do you do with that i mean you just let yourself go oh that’s pretty or do you go wow i learned a lot from that or holy cow look this is what it really looks like and the beauty now of the space station and social media is that i could i could just go and honestly write and the beauty of twitter is it’s so short you have to be honest just write what i was thinking and hit send and then just turn it loose to anybody who might also be curious about the world and it was amazing delightful to see the reaction to see how many people uh millions by the end by the time we landed who were also delighting in what that technological invention allows us to see about ourselves and were they getting a bit of that overview effect subtly subconsciously like oh wait a second slow down a little bit wow okay that’s all of us we’re all together hopefully as we get older we all get a little bit of the overview effect and the the causal nature of things the interconnected nature of things hopefully we’re all students of the human condition whether we mean to be or not and and as we get a little
25:44 Older we gain a little perspective and all the overview effect and the overview effect is not something invented by astronauts and not everybody necessarily feels what they mean by that the same way i think what we’re truly getting at is is a collective understanding of where we are and what it means and and the where we are is is is the part that we could share the best what it means is is an individual choice but the more people you meet the more you understand what battles people are fighting the more you see the commonality of the human experience itself i think the more clearly you start to perhaps understand what could be called the overview effect we just sort of get force-fed it as an astronaut it’s a overview effect at a fire hose and and uh but then the real question of course is if you do feel that maybe something has enlightened you a little bit or if you’ve had a thought that most people have have not do you just have a secret smile or do you do you try and maybe share it with someone you love or write it down or take a picture or with social media say hey here’s something really intriguing i thought about anybody else ever thought of it this way and and i think shared understanding is is what empowers us more than anything and i’m guessing it took this the space station to get you there and i’m guessing it took weeks for it to kind of soak in because i’m guessing that on the space
27:11 Shuttle there was too much to do not enough time to soak it in like as you mentioned at the outset i flew on the space shuttle twice once to go help build the russian space station mir and then on my second flight to go help build the international space station and do spacewalks but on my third flight you know this wasn’t just a week or two onboard the space shuttle this was launched as the pilot or the board engineer of the Soyuz and then stay in space for almost half a year it’s a very different experience it’s the difference between having a cabbie take you through a city and then moving there with all your luggage and getting mail and postal code and all that and and staying there for five months and then leaving you you it’s the same place you’re the same person but what you come away with is probably significantly different and it’s not to belittle those initial shuttle flights they were magnificent and hugely instructive to me but i count myself hugely lucky to at the end of all that to have had a chance to go live off the planet for five months to be asked to command the spaceship so that level of of seriousness and responsibility but also just the richness of of what comes along with that experience itself you talked about the spacewalk and it was strange for me to hear that getting up and out of that craft was such a completely different experience than looking out of a window in that craft it makes sense when you explain it but i hadn’t actually
28:36 The thought of it and i know you had that amazing experience well in retrospect about going blind when you’re out there and the tears tearing up i’d love to hear more about that and i know you also have a a fear of heights and i was wondering how that all combines when you’re out there hanging outside of of you know the space station and what that experience is like there are a few different ways to to experience some things some are just through your imagination you can read a book about flying an airplane and you sort of have some understanding of what it’s like to fly an airplane or you can buy a ticket and get on british airways and be sitting in seat you know 17f so that you’re by the window and looking out the window of your airplane and seeing the world that way and it’s very different than what the book told you but imagine if instead of being on the inside side of that window you were on the outside of that window looking at the world you’re only three feet over but it’s an entirely different experience you have the the nature of the actual interface with the environment you’re in you feel the wind pressure in that case you feel the cold of it it’s 50 below outside that little window and you have no sense of that sitting inside but plus the yawning enormity of where you are is sort of lost on you when you’re sitting there but to be outside of that airplane which with the wind rush it would be pretty hard to do you know a wing walker on an airliner
30:03 But you would really start to understand what’s actually going on spacewalks like that you can read about a spacewalk or watch a movie of a spacewalk and you sort of get a sense of it you know gravity with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney they sort of tried to show what it’s like they got the psychology all wrong and the technical stuff all wrong but the visuals gets sort of close and then when you’re on board a spaceship and you’re floating weightless by the window especially a way of one bulging window the cupola so you can almost freely look around in 180 degrees you get some sense of where you actually are but the day that you for real are going to be on the other side of that window and you you’re going to assume the danger of it you’re going to put on this build this spacesuit around your body and then go into a tiny bit of the ship and close a hatch behind you you’re going to become a torpedo and then take all the air out of that little part you’re in and then open up the hatch and now actually physically pull yourself on the outside of the ship that’s entirely different even though it’s only a few feet away and even suddenly trained astronauts you know to manage your adrenaline levels more than anyone else you’re you’re hugely ready for it hundreds of times underwater everything spent my whole life visualizing it dreaming about it talking to guys who’ve done it and then training and virtual reality training underwater but suddenly the part
31:31 Of your body that’s in the sun is plus 150 celsius and you feel the searing heat of that and the part of you that’s in the shade is minus 140 celsius and so when your legs touch the the fabric of the inflated suit it’s it’s like growing up on a farm with super cold metal on a stovepipe and you don’t want to let it touch your skin because it’s so searingly cold and you feel the environment that you’re in and there’s a complete silence to it because we drop the pressure in the suit down to less than a third of an atmosphere for 4.2 psi so the sound doesn’t even conduct as well so it’s whisper quiet in there and the world is silently you can see an entire face of the whole planet uh right across a continent and it’s right there beside you and it’s silently turning and the whole universe is right here and you’re you’re in the middle holding on with one hand it’s extremely visceral and physical and personal and intimate to be in the world that way and and you’re you’re hugely prepared for it you got all the technical stuff you’re like the ultimate ballet dancer who has studied how when i’m going to flick my wrist and raise my toe and i understand the music and my dancing part in it really well from years and years of study and invention but imagine if those dancers in swan lake um were actually out on swan lake or if they were uh on the top of mount evarist while they were performing the ballet or in a you know or in a hurricane we want you to perform the ballet but we want you to do it
33:11 In a hugely stimulating external environment so it’s not just the beauty and the focus of the technical nature of what you’re doing but it’s the magnificence of everything else trying to drag your attention away and and and a spacewalk is all of those things and and it’s life or death one little mistake and you may cause irreparable damage to something that’s almost beyond value or kill yourself or kill the person that you’re out there with so the stakes are extremely high so it’s an amazingly focused eight hours of your life to be out on a spacewalk and what i consider perhaps to be the most magnificent time that i’ve ever spent in in all the various things i’ve done in my life and then your eye starts tearing up and then yeah the tears go to the other eye you can’t see is the initial feeling like uh what is that feeling obviously also you being incapacitated there puts other people in danger uh houston’s wondering what’s going on uh and there’s so many different issues i was uh on my first spacewalk i was out with a guy named scott perizinski who’s who’s climbed evarist and amazing guy medical doctor commercial airline pilot brilliant fellow um he and i were out on a spacewalk together and i was working away and suddenly my left eye just seared with pain and stopped working like slammed itself shut and you can’t rub it on anything you can’t reach it because it’s in a helmet so i just kind of like uh you know just tough it out what am i going to do i got something in my eye i can’t get
34:41 It out of my eye what do you you could call that to houston but what are they going to do you know they’re just going to say so can you live with it so i just stayed quiet about it live with it but your eye tears up so badly try to fight whatever the contamination is and the tears don’t drain because there’s no gravity so you just have this big bigger and bigger ball of contaminated whatever it was until eventually the ball gets so big that it goes across the bridge of your nose and contaminates your other eye just from the surface tension of the tear flowing across so then i was truly blinded couldn’t see out of either eye and it’s not like my eyes were gone they were just contaminated so bad that i could not even if i forced my eyelids open against the pain i couldn’t see there was too much murk so uh so i had to stop working then i can’t follow the timeline anymore i got a call down to houston let them panic about it and you know work all their problems and of course they’re going to try and give me all the best advice they can talk to scott could could be a pretty uh terrifying moment if you weren’t ready for it but scott and i had gone through all the various training all of all of the visualization we could think of and while he and i had been underwater in the pool in houston texas at the johnson space center so many times 400 hours i think underwater i mean divide that by 24 that’s a lot of days underwater um one of the many thousands of things we’d practice was what
36:11 If one of us gets incapacitated what if you get the bends or you have a heart attack or your calm system quits or you have a horrible cramp or or whatever you punch a little hole in your suit what if one of us gets incapacitated how are we going to react and so you practice we call it incapacitated crew rescue you practice being able to hustle over getting the person working with their various tethers and linkups and then bringing them like like like a macy’s day parade float you know and bringing them back and then stuffing them into the airlock which is not that easy because it’s a small round hole and try to squeeze the person and then crawling in with them and getting them hooked up to the ship’s oxygen and cooling communications so that they can stay alive uh we practice that and our our trainers would sometimes they’d come on the private loop and say okay pretend you just passed out so that the other person had to even go hey chris how you doing chris chris can you hear me and then having to follow all the reactions to make it as realistic as possible so when i was actually blinded it wasn’t so bad it’s like i can still talk and hear and scott and i are discussing and i’m still holding on i just can’t see and it’s not going to be that hard to get me back into the airlock if that’s the only thing we can think of but we popped open the vent on the side of my helmet and we let my oxygen squirt out into the universe fed by the tank on my back
37:40 So that it would hopefully dilute and and clear my eyes as quick as possible and from the time i first started having problems until i was back to work was about a half hour but by the end of it my eyes were stinging and i couldn’t see great but i could see well enough whatever it was had had diluted and evaporated off my eyes i stopped squirting my oxygen out to the universe which was a nice valve to close and then got back to work and if anything it just made the first spacewalk more interesting you know we got everything done it the rest of the spacewalk wasn’t easy either this was just well things aren’t going to go right things are going to go wrong we’re going to have to face up there were lots of little things you know procedural mechanical forces uh torques things that didn’t go exactly as planned either but by the end of it when we finally scott got in i get in closed up to hatch started to repressurize the airlock it wasn’t like the only thing we were talking about was the fact that i’ve been blind for a while it was wow that was a huge endeavor a huge piece to try and bite off and chew up and we’d succeed it and got everything done and and uh and we’re getting ready then for our next spacewalk to go finish everything up a couple days hence pretty amazing day in the life one of your mantras is prepare for failure yeah which is pretty much the entire mantra of nasa and astronauts right that’s what you do more so than anyone has a comprehension of
39:09 I think the movie apollo 13 did a bit of justice to that because i think you got to see you know the preparation and i think you got to see some of the teamwork and we can talk about that a little bit later but you prepare for failure you put you make redundancies upon redundancies upon redundancies you train yourself that’s really what an astronaut’s about right uh well in my experience things hardly ever go perfectly even if you want them to stuff goes wrong that’s just life you know stuff goes wrong you’re trying to make it to a meeting and there’s traffic or you have a flat tire the odds are pretty high that you’re going to have a flat tire or you’re going to get stuck in traffic or something uh but we call that going wrong i i think it’s sort of just going normal yeah i don’t know why we call it wrong so but reality is how do you prepare for the things that are liable to go wrong that’s what life kind of is is when things happen how ready were you to deal with them or did they just derail your plans and what you were what you were hoping to do with your life and it can be as simple as okay if you get a flat tire do you actually know how to change a tire have you checked the spare tire in your car do you have that weird little funny locking thing that undoes the locking hub that kept someone from stealing your tire or not or is it in the glove box or is it something you lost years ago and did you have the
40:28 Jack and the mechanical skill or do you have some automobile association or what plans do you have and it’s not like you need to invest a huge amount of your life getting ready for that one time you can say at some point in my life i’m going to have a flat tire with this car let’s just take the next five minutes and go make sure i get everything i need and go through open up the boot the trunk have a look figure it out go which yep i can do this i can do jeez i don’t have a jack okay i need to get a jack get the jack and then for the rest of the time you’re driving your car you can go i don’t want to have a flat tire but i might someday if i do i get everything i need i know how to do it fine and then move on to the next thing and i sort of treat everything in my life as that potential flat tire and i try and use the time available beforehand to be ready for it and to me then i’m not driving through life going man i hope i don’t have a flat tire because i have no idea what to do which i think just gives you an ulcer i would much rather go through life saying if this problem pops up i know what to do and when i think of some other problem that might pop up i’m going to spend the time i got to get ready for that and i think you appreciate life more then you’re not just driving through life all tensed up and nervous at the things that you don’t know what to do and you have sort of a calm and a confidence so that then you notice the nuance of what’s happening around you i just
41:47 I prefer life that way and it’s really good on a spaceship on the day that you’re blinded by your space suit yeah it’s really good on a spaceship um you know you’re a musician you’re a very accomplished musician and uh it’s what’s your latest video on youtube channel it’s fantastic and i remember watching a documentary with jack white of the white stripes and he said that i play one of his songs i love that you do yeah which one uh ah we played it in the band i forget the name right now we’ll come back to you in the documentary he says sometimes i like to stick the keyboard you know two steps further than i had planned um to keep it because i know that when i have to run over there i’m going to miss a beat and it’s not going to be what i planned and so something creative happens and so it’s funny you know when i went to MIT there’s no music department there’s no art department and it’s kind of like you’re an engineer and the other people down the road are at harvard or these other places and so you being a musician and being creative and probably you know a lot of musicians that are in the flow i’m guessing your average musician probably isn’t prepared for failure but you know when you’re in your creativity piece as a musician do you ever think you know maybe it’s better if i didn’t have that contingency plan because i might find something creative happening oh i i don’t think the uh the habit of being prepared changes your uh process of creation or creativity or invention
43:09 Or the fact that if things don’t fit somehow within the scope of what you’re prepared for that now suddenly you’re you’re flummoxed and out of luck if it doesn’t go somewhere within that i think instead just like the the keyboardist in the white stripes it’s like i know when i get to that keyboard i can do all sorts of different things because i practiced and i know all the chords and i know how to work all the various modulations on this thing and if i get over to it two beats late then we’re going to create this music in a way nobody ever has before and to me that’s the best part of music live music is never going right it’s always a recovery it’s like flying an airplane you’re never perfectly straight and level all you’re ever really doing is recovering to get back towards straight and level from what reality dealt you and music is that way too and i love that what i love most about live music is when we’re playing and i look around inside the band and i look at what my lead singer is doing or what what the bass player is doing and and realize no one has ever done it this way because of the randomness the news the monitor failed or or his jack came unplugged for a second and now you know we got a cover for him for a second or the lead singer forgot that verse and now suddenly we’re into the chorus here and that’s okay everyone’s fine with that it’s just music and but then the way the song comes out then is both unique and and beautiful to us because we created it that way
44:35 And you don’t have to necessarily move your keyboard an extra couple feet over to make that happen i think life is the music that you’re playing which is the result of how you’ve learned to play your particular instrument but then reacting to to what actually occurred and and to take great pleasure and joy in the music that results i think is is the whole point of it understood july 16 1969 my brother was born oh really yeah and uh did they call him like apollo or neil we had like a like a knit piece of the apollo 11 games and on july 20th my parents drove home from the hospital and they were in the garage listening to the landing on the radio and they stayed in the car because they knew to warm up the tv would have taken time and so they listened to it in the garage and um you were nine years old watching that on television yeah um a kid in canada uh with uh no real obvious chance of ever being asked the opposite of a chance really yeah uh summertime july a lot of canadians try and take advantage of the warm weather have some little cabins somewhere that we go to traditionally i was at my parents cottage no television um but one of the neighbors had a television so everybody in the whole this little tiny community we all went over to the neighbors you couldn’t have more people in that living room and we’re all sort of looking at this little tiny black and white tv with the bunny ears because there sure isn’t any cable or anything on this island and you so this almost deliberately
46:07 Murky image of what’s happening but walter kronkite and the capcom and neil and buzz and the voices and the the clipped professional brevity of what they were saying but also the import of what was happening and listening to the fact that they were having buffer overloads and serious problems and then neil having to actually say we can’t land here and taking control and then taking it over and touching down on the moon with 16 seconds of fuel left 16 seconds it took me longer to describe it than he had fuel left to do it touchdown tranquility base here the eagle has landed and that affected billions of people that that affected i mean the entire world let out a breath at that moment and and then looking at what that meant to us the things we can accomplish when we set our minds to it things that had been impossible uh when your brother was three or four days old the morning of july 20th impossible to walk in the moon by bedtime july 20th walking on the moon impossible things happen as a result of a huge amount of hard work to realize that it it was like permission to me as a nine-year-old kid to watch that happen to realize this wasn’t fate this wasn’t uh inevitability this was the personification of human ingenuity and drive and desire to explore and desire to understand and then to cooperate and make something happen right at the edge of our capability and impossible things happen it inspired me to try and change who i was going
47:45 To be in life it sort of gave me permission to say that’s what i want to do to not not say it out loud because people laugh at you but to at least quietly resolve to yourself that you know impossible stuff happens look what those guys just did that’s what i’m going to try and turn myself into and it really was the catalyst the trip the tipping point that started the process that led me to fly in a rocket live on a space station which included being a test pilot and you were at edwards air force base edwards air force base so i have to ask was it exactly like the movie the right stuff were you doing tequila shots at night with broken ribs breaking the sound barrier riding horses was that was that what happened you know the right stuff tom wolf’s summary of what that whole process was like of of spam in a can and test pilots in the early space program and chuck yager and scott crossfield and all that a lot of it he got really right the truth of it and edwards we had horses at edwards i rode horses out there when i did the first out of control program in the f18 when i was a test pilot i’d actually broken my ribs water skiing the week before and and i i mean it hurt and i but i went to see a doctor doctor outside the navy because i didn’t want um somebody to tell me no i went and said hey is this going to cause a problem he says no it’s just going to hurt i said can i do anything about it he says not really so i just i just sucked it up and lived with the fact that i had a
49:12 Broken rib as a test pilot and as a group of students going through test pilot school it was the hardest year of my life the most intense academic year of my life we would study control theory and all of the complicated um technical things that allow airplanes to fly right at the edge of what they do and then we would go fly i flew 32 different airplanes that year and you’re not just like going for a ride it’s single seat airplanes and you’re not just going out hey i’m going to take 10 training flights and now i know on your very first flight you’re going to go put this airplane out of control my first flight in an a7 was to go put it out of control and i it’s a single-seat airplane so that level of seriousness of focus um there’s that undercurrent of that just like in the movie or maybe the movie’s just like reality um so then of course nights are a good time to relax and party and in my case whiskey not tequila shots but yeah very much that year at edwards and uh several people out of that class uh we went on to be astronauts in fact susan helms who uh lived on the space station rick husband great guy who died as the commander of columbia uh and we were all at edwards together um learning how to test airplanes pushing ourselves to the limit uh that being a test pilot or a flight test engineer requires loving the life together just having a great time but also pursuing maybe the impossibility of doing
50:42 Something even more challenging than that as an astronaut afterwards and the subtext of that movie is kind of the the end of the test pilot era right because in the movie they take some of the test pilots and now they’re now they’re like we don’t want those guys because they’re the cowboys and then we’re going to maybe find these other guys and put them into space um yeah how was that narrative and are you kind of the last of the test pilots that became an astronaut yeah a lot of the test pilot movies portray us as cowboys you know that sort of cavalier uh take a risk for the hell of it kind of feeling and and a lot of the movies portray astronauts the same way in truth astronauts and test pilots are not adrenaline junkies we’re not thrill seekers we are not people who take a risk because taking risks is fun it’s sort of the opposite actually which is a little bit subtle in that taking a risk is necessary to accomplish something you internalize that right at the beginning if we’re going to fly an airplane someone’s got to take a risk and take it up on its first flight and figure out what’s right and what’s wrong about flying airplanes but flying an airplane is worthwhile that think what it does for world communication and transportation and and just how it’s changed our ability to be a global species but someone had to take a risk thousands of people over the years have had to take risks to get airplanes to the state that they are right now those people are test pilots but the cavalier
52:13 Cowboy test pilots all die they die early because we don’t want adrenaline to be what allows us to succeed if you’re counting on adrenaline to let you be successful as an astronaut as a test pilot then you’ve blown it right out of the gate what you instead need is a dry measured absolutely complete prepared understanding of everything that might happen and a very strict understanding of what you’re going to do on this particular flight with this airplane so that you could push the edge of the envelope with a slightly bigger bump after you’ve come back from this flight you’re not trying to impress anybody you’re trying to ring everything you can out of the short time that you got with this amount of fuel to slightly better understand how airplanes fly and make it safer and better for everybody that comes behind you so it takes a certain mentality it’s not a bungee jumping mentality it is a it is a willingness to internalize risk and then spend a huge amount of your life getting to a point where you could take that risk with some assured assuredness that you’re going to survive it that’s how i walked out to every airplane as a test pilot and it’s how all astronauts walk out to their rocket ship they know this is risky but i’ve put so much into this in advance that no matter what this thing throws at me i think i have as good a chance as anybody ever has in history to prevail to survive and come back with a slightly increased understanding of what we can do you have this
53:43 Concept of being a minus one zero or a plus one and you said those numbers actually change on say a space shuttle mission as opposed to a space station mission because it’s a you know a longer period of time a bigger crew and and you were saying sometimes someone with an attitude or an ego can easily you know turn into a minus one where on the space station you really have to get along with people for long periods of time and that might fly on a shuttle mission but won’t fly elsewhere um just briefly talk about that whole concept of going for zero shooting for zero as a fighter pilot often you’re in a single seat airplane and you have a fully armed airplane and you have some tasks to go do and there’s a there’s a huge amount of trust that you’re going to do your job properly and we don’t always get it right i was a cold war pilot i would launch in the middle of the night with a fully armed f-18 with radar missiles and heat seeking missiles and a noseful of bullets and go out and intercept soviet bombers that were coming into north american airspace i had at the flick of a couple little switches the capacity to significantly change history as did the crews on board the soviet bombers and you need a certain type of personality to be able to do that job you have to be pretty confident you have to have be pretty cocksure about what you uh can do if if the chips go down and and that type of personality
55:08 That is needed to be a fighter pilot doesn’t necessarily blend well under all circumstances but you sort of gain this this view of yourself that i’ve accomplished some pretty hard and rare things and therefore i’m god’s gift to any situation i can come in and if someone’s doing some plumbing or trying to fix their typewriter or dealing with a squalling child or whatever that i’m like i can handle this i’m a winner let me take over at this but i learned a little later in life that it’s important to have those skills but when you walk into a nuanced situation almost never do you get the fine subtleties of it when you first walk into the room and you come in thinking i’m this big plus one i am going to be a positive influence in everything that happens and i’m going to look at this for 10 seconds and go huh i got that sorted bang bang bang change this change this and everybody in the room goes whoa what a minus one that guy’s a big negative he doesn’t understand anything that’s going on he thinks he does but obviously he’s he’s just uh you know bull in a china shop or whatever and so a little later in life especially when i got into the complexity of space flight i recognized that it’s a lot more beneficial to everybody including yourself let’s aim for zero at the start i’m going to try and aim to be a zero in a new situation so that i come in and i look around and try and soak up some of the the delicate nature of what’s happening look for
56:32 The little clues look for the variables that i didn’t even know were were affecting what’s happening try and become as informed as i can before i start trying to be a plus one and be way more selective in being a plus one and it doesn’t work if the building’s on fire to buildings on fire then you have to start taking action but so many people treat life as if the building’s always on fire and it hardly ever is and and my experience has been especially in a complex multi-dimensional situation which is what most of life actually is you’re far better served to target being a zero initially it sounds limp but but in truth i think it’s better and target being a zero and then selectively be a plus one and to command a spaceship when i was teaching leadership as part of the astronaut program that’s one of the things i would mention specifically is to think about your role what you’re going to do how you’re going to interact how you’re going to soak up a new situation and when it’s time to truly go in an authoritarian role and act and i and i think a lot of people would be well served to consider that as an option zeros i like that concept talk to me about coming back to earth and adjusting to life back on earth you know buzz aldrin you know famously had a hard time readjusting depression you know substance issues that kind of thing a lot of people would see that you know as the highest high or something you can never create and yet you got down and and you you know you were done you
58:11 Retired from your career um can you explain that transition in the 60s when we were in the race to the moon right uh americans soviets who’s going to make it first kennedy making that grand proclamation after just one space flight kennedy has the guts to stand up and say we are going to put a man on the moon and safely return him by the end of the decade what a gutsy call but it also gave kind of a mandate to the nation to accomplish this thing and then kennedy was shot which gave almost a holy grail necessity to make it happen and so the urgency of the thing was enormous and the deadline of the end of the 60s as a decade was enormous and what that created then was an environment where the task was everything get the astronauts to a level where we think that if we could just get it done we could get them to the moon they can get outside they can walk around we can fulfill the destiny that we’ve been handed but nowhere in there did kennedy say and bring them back as whole men and and bring them back and figure out how to get the most benefit out of this for them and for everybody they interact with from then on it was almost sacrificial the way that we decided to go to the moon and we kind of said that the measure of success is boots on the ground in with people in them uh on the moon and then safely return them and and so nowhere in the training did people say what’s it going to be like to have ticker tape
59:45 Ticker tape parades for the next decade of my life or for neil you know so for the rest of my life as soon as i say my name out loud or someone recognizes my my cheekbones no one will ever treat me the same i you know he’s just an engineer test pilot no one said this is how we’re going to help you for the rest of your life and it’s not like a movie star where we pay them enough as a society that they can build walls around themselves and have some privacy and try and have some semblance of a normal life neil was a government employee as was buzz not much pay at all no insulation no real plan and so it was psychologically i think very difficult for those people to internalize and to survive and a lot of marriages failed and and as you say a couple of the people had pretty significant difficulty internally dealing with it we learned from that though and when we started the shuttle program and instead of just a very few immensely public flights uh we started having a lot more people fly in space first just a couple and then four and then five and then seven people on each space flight so that you could fly with a lot more anonymity but also the nasa psychiatrists learned a lot and they learned from looking at what the soviets were doing because the soviets had some really serious problems psychologically with their first cosmonauts we learned from it and we got better at it and as part of astronaut
1:01:08 Training we would spend time with psychiatrists and psychologists and behaviorists and talk about how does this fit into your whole life and how are you going to take care of your crew not just leading up to enduring but after and what what is the year after going to look like and what do you want to be doing when you’re 80 and how how think about the whole picture and not just the sacrificial nature of accomplishing this one thing and so i don’t know of any astronaut in the shuttle era that had an epiphany on orbit it’s still a little difficult to climb back down the ladder if you’ve commanded a spaceship uh depending on how you viewed yourself in doing that job how do you then go into a middle management job in an enormous bureaucracy and feel comfortable with yourself or how do you determine to measure your own particular threshold of success and failure and and several people leave the astronaut office and get it wrong for several years as they try and find a balance in their life but not nearly as hard as we made it for for our original space explorers whether they were soviet or or american i i think we treated them like soldiers serving a purpose and and weren’t too concerned about the effects of the battle on them i think we’ve learned from it right but what about you your commander hadfield you two are the world talking about this and that everybody always wants to ask a lot of probably the same questions
1:02:30 I’m asking do you ever get tired of talking about it do you not want to be commander anymore do you want to move on to other things or do you do enjoy it when i was a nine-year-old kid watching that little black and white tv and seeing neil and buzz walk on the moon it didn’t have to be that way nasa could have said we’re probably going to blow this you know this probably isn’t going to go right uh neil and buzz might mess this up they might crash they might both die today or they might blow the procedures or we’re probably we’re not going to make it to the moon but nasa said on july 20th 69 this is way too important to keep to ourselves we need to share this experience we’re gonna we’re just gonna broadcast it live no matter what happens that is crazy you know talk about reality tv there’s no scripting to this what happens the world is going to see and draw their own conclusions what i saw as a kid in a different country was a recognition that how you share the experience is maybe just as important as the the experience itself and the ramifications that’s going to have on other people’s decision making and what they choose to do with their life is the result of how they shared the experience of how other people saw it and and so i think i resolve without even thinking about it as a little kid that if i ever get to do that then part of the job is to share it with other people i need to do the job right neil and buzz they weren’t too worried about what the media was
1:04:08 Saying while they were trying to land on the moon they were as focused as two people could be because they recognized if we blow it then no one will ever remember anything except that but at the same time we did transmit it and we did share it with the world and so i think i’ve always carried that undercurrent of necessity that i need to do this job right and that’s what i’m going to focus all my time on but at the same time every opportunity i get i am going to share it i’m going to let people see it so people can then uh decide what it means to them and during my first space flight i used ham radio and took all the pictures i could and talked in schools i signed a poster for every elementary school in canada 16 000 i think it was just to try and let people feel a part of something that is right in the fringe of the human experience and on my third space flight with social media and connectivity being what it is there was an unprecedented opportunity to just open up to say you would not believe what i just saw today here what do you think you know and and that responsibility that comes with with being trusted with being an astronaut i think it’s been delightful to see the effect of it i mean i took i think 45 000 pictures over my three space flights and after a year i got back from landing i was like what are we going to do with all those photos i mean do we just let them sit in a file i thought why don’t
1:05:40 We take the best and put them in a book and and then put why each picture meant something to me why why this picture i think is is important what it meant and then put it out there for and all our profits go to the red cross so this is this is just a sharing of the experience and and let people then maybe see the world for what it truly is or at least a slightly clearer view or a more complete perspective rich view of the world and then just like me as a nine-year-old boy maybe they will then be a slightly different person with their choices or or decide to pursue something otherwise they might not have even seen was available to them and it’s why i can i work with schools every week i do a thing through skype i just tie in with the classroom and talk for a half hour we call it on the lunch pad because we do over lunch hour but i thought the technology’s here i can share these ideas with kids who are still trying to choose what to do with their life why wouldn’t i it’s why i teach at university and we’re doing a kids book it’s the same idea of how do you share this experience as richly and completely as you can so that it has the ultimate beneficial impact for us as a group of people speaking of sharing the experience when you’re up in the international space station shooting a music video of david bowie’s space odyssey space oddity space oddity space oddity all right uh did part of you at one point say
1:07:05 I’m actually shooting a video up here uh it was a great video by the way some great lighting i was like how did he get the lighting it was really cool the whole lighting story was kind of fun but just quickly i’ve never covered a bowie tune in my life before i left earth covering bowie it’s ridiculous it’s you know it’s just outrageous i’m gonna cover bowie yeah right then i’ll do some elo and and bach while i’m at it you know it’s just it’s it’s arrogance you’d practice rocket man in case you play without john rocket man sure but rocket man is more of a folk song bowie is he’s such a uh creative creative artistic force it’s just you know it’s you’re not going to cover him very well um and i’m more of a bar musician or folk musician but i got to orbit there was this sort of a growing internet clamor as soon as they learned there was a musician on board because i wrote with my brother this christmas song released it just before christmas and it got through uh soundcloud i think it was out you know 70 or 80 000 people had heard this song and so there was this big clamoring oh you got to cover oddity uh and it just never occurred to me to cover a song nor to do oddity but is it odd how strangely accurate oddity is when i look at those lyrics it sounds like you must be up here thinking david was really thinking what it was like to be up you know he david bowie wrote that song before they walked on the moon
1:08:29 You know he sort of did it in a response to space odyssey the movie but it was prior to apollo 11 that he released that and he wasn’t very old and to but he the way the song sounded to me after i did my like my karaoke version out of there david in one ear i just sang along with him did just a straight audio track on on garage band but the thought you just said when i listened to my voice singing that song on orbit i could i could feel that the words and the environment somehow worked together so that it became more than i thought it was going to be the place had soaked into my interpretation of the song somehow and i wasn’t expecting it then i called a friend em griner who used to sing in bowie’s band she was one of the the backup singers in his band and i said hey i’m thinking of doing oddity for morbid she said don’t do oddity the astronaut dies at the end that it’s kind of you know everyone’s done oddity but i said well but listen to this vocal track and she listened to it and she went oh man could i could i put a little piano in front of that because i think it would sound really nice and and then she brought in joe corcoran down in la and and they put the instrumentals underneath and it became that audio track and then when i heard that audio track i realized this isn’t just a you know a little project a father-son kind of thing anymore because it had been my son evan who’d kind of goaded me into doing it um i realized this isn’t this is way better than i thought it was going to
1:09:56 Be this is a really cool audio version of the song and we should try and do something with it and um and then my son evan said dad it’s got to be video you’re on a spaceship you gotta make a video of it and i was busy and doing stuff but um but one saturday i thought okay i need to make a video of space oddity on a spaceship and i can’t i can’t bug anybody else because everyone’s busy doing what they’re doing i need to do it by myself so and my son just said just make a video i’m like okay what do you do so i i just thought well you know i’d seen some videos and i had enough documentaries made at least i had some idea of how to construct it so that it might work so then i just i took my the recording that we had of me singing the song put it on an ipad and then strung up a camera and just floated around singing the song in a bunch of different places and just singing the song like it like it feels to me what it means to me like i would sing it if i were singing it live in front of an audience and then i mounted the camera somewhere and did some guitar and played what the singing the song and then i thought it’d be really nice to actually evan sent me you know saying dad we need some with the world in the background if you could possibly do it said that’s really hard to light you just can’t do that said but i like it got a half hour and point so i got up into the cupola with a little bit of time
1:11:12 I if you look closely at the video you see there’s a light right here and a light right here on my face like like two toaster oven elements on my face i couldn’t see a thing i set up the camera i hit record and i got these two lights on and i couldn’t see a thing but luckily just we happened to be over a part of the world where the lighting was such that my face stood out it wasn’t darkened by the brightness of the background and i just recorded the song once i didn’t even look at it i just because i was in a hurry pulled the chip out of the camera that night down linked it and and that became the song and um and it’s been seen hundreds of millions of just where my son posted it it’s you know it’s i don’t know 28 and 27 million or something like that it’s it’s crazy because i think people didn’t expect the space station to be like that i think people sort of have a weird incomplete idea of what it’s like to be on a spaceship some sort of strange robotic laboratory boredom and loneliness and i think by trying to let people see by using an iconic artistic song to express what it’s actually like to be on a spaceship i think people that otherwise would have no interest or no real comprehension of it suddenly saw it a little differently the cultural nature of it the introspective nature of what it feels like to us and to express it through music is maybe a whole different way for people to grasp the feeling of of uh of living on board a spaceship it’s it was
1:12:48 Just a little project but it’s been fun to watch what it turned into yeah my daughter saw it last night when i was just preparing for this and she got it right away i didn’t have to say okay this is spinner halffield and he was in there and she’s like she got it she’s like oh okay i get it and the the lyrics seem to be it seems to be like you’re thinking about the lyrics as you’re singing them and yet i know david wrote them you know a long time ago and uh yeah it’s very moving we did change the lyrics slightly actually when my son said hey dad everyone wants you to sing audity i’m going the astronaut dies in audity i don’t want to sing a song about dying so being a father i was like this is a teaching moment son if you’ll change the words a little bit so the astronaut doesn’t die i’ll sing the song because i didn’t think it was going anywhere but he did a great job evan did a lovely job of just changing a few lyrics around so that it became um sort of updated this because moe was guessing and and he thought they were going to die on the way to the moon they almost did in apollo 13 um and since then we’ve lost some crews in space but at the same time it’s immensely optimistic and and and far reaching and historic and and evan did a really nice job of of just tweaking a few of the words but it’s it’s essentially completely bowie’s creation but whenever i sing a song uh somebody wrote those words somebody wrote that music this isn’t
1:14:09 This isn’t right said fred banging out some words that are really just a rhythm but these are actual lyrics talking about an idea this is poetry set to music and and you shouldn’t read poetry like a robot you should read poetry with your emotional expression of what it means to you that’s that’s how you should read poetry quietly to yourself or out loud it’s definitely how you should sing a song and so even while i was floating around in the ship singing it uh you know there’s nothing more important than what you’re doing right now and singing those words it’s worth thinking about the words that you’re singing and let them let them express through you the way that they they really move your emotions around talk to me about traveling to mars i heard you mentioned that the psychological effect of being detached from earth is something powerful enough that even at a two second delay you felt it up in the station i remember you said one of your female colleagues said something like oh yeah earth said this and without knowing it subconsciously she had kind of placed everyone there um and you said quite a great interview you’re in you said as you get further away you without that direct communication as in a conversation like this you you turn into a Martian as in you no longer feel connected to that world and we don’t know psychologically what that will do to people i know they’ve done studies where they isolate
1:15:32 People for a year here and there but um can you just comment on that aspect of the travel let alone the technology having been a spaceship commander i picture what it’s going to be like for the commander of the first crew going to mars and one of your responsibilities as being the leader of that group of people is how do we keep everybody psychologically healthy we’re obviously going to focus on being technically competent we’re going to understand our job we’re going to figure out how to take care of our families and things while we’re away but how do i keep this group of people productive psychologically comfortable enough that they’re not hating they’re loving what they’re doing they’re they’re they’re identifying with this job they they they recognize that this particular portion of their life they’re going to spit out the other end of it and they’re going to come out of it as a better person than they started so how would you do that with a crew going to mars and i i think the right way to do that is to stop being an earthling as soon as you safely get to orbit recognize that okay there’s seven and a half billion people over there but they’re not us they’re facing an entire different reality than we are the only way we are going to psychologically thrive up here is to is to completely internalize and accept the fact that we are different we are not of earth anymore we’re in a little ship
1:16:54 And the purpose of our ship is to go explore another planet and therefore the quicker we can make that schism the quicker we can say to ourselves we’re not earthlings we’re marshes that’s who we are we’re marshes that is our home that is our objective that is our self-identity you know we’re the whatever we’re we’re some football team you know that gives us a sense of identity uh we’re Manchester United that’s our team that’s who we are that that’s who we identify that’s what we take pride in these are the colors we’re wearing we are no longer earthlings i think it’ll be the only way for that crew to be able to survive mentally if they view themselves as as lonely earthlings or as people who are weaned away from the world and now have to survive if they just see it as an exercise in survival they’re dooming themselves psychologically and therefore they’re really affecting their chances of success i think they’re going to be marshes and proud of it and they’re going to thrive as a result that’s how i’d lead that team anyway and uh and i’m pretty sure whoever has that role will do something similar can i ask you a couple questions about your own personal success secrets like habits that you do every day i know when you were on the station you trained for two hours every day to keep your bone density and keep muscles and things like that but is there anything you do now that you’ve learned through all of your training that just kind of sets you up for just you know regular
1:18:24 Success in life psychologically physically these success secrets are only available on the London Real academy become a member and get access to live shows exclusive courses my webinars bonus content meetups live events an amazing community and much much more now back to the rest of the show when you think of the word successful who comes to mind is it is it an astronaut is it someone in your life is someone alive or dead if you’re an astronaut and you sit down next to somebody and you’re having a polite conversation maybe you’re in the barber chair or you’re sitting on a bus or an airplane and they sit you’re you’re going oh what’s your name my name is chris nice to meet you yeah where are you going today what do you do for a living as soon as if you say i’m an astronaut all normal conversation ceases right it’s like you’re not going to talk about them anymore you’re going to talk about the 10 common questions and it’s fine but i as a self-defense mechanism because i never got to learn anything about anybody else i started sort of deflecting what i or starting the conversation so why are you traveling to to pakipsi today why what do you know oh really your grandma oh that’s it where’d your grandma come from oh and at first i just did it because i was tired of talking about the same astronaut questions but after a while uh the beautiful side effect of that was i learned just what everybody else um is truly thinking about and or at least
1:20:10 How they’re dealing with life through their own particular set of circumstances and also the selfless heroism that is sitting next to you that look just like another person and the huge personal tribulations and battles and successes that that person has had so when you ask me who do i view as successful it’s kind of a question of how do i define success and i think as i’ve gotten older i’ve realized that success is personal you could be like you could be the richest person in the world and still pissed off irritated angry unhappy still grasping or if you’ve got you know say you’ve made a billion dollars then do you really need to make another billion dollars what what is your measure of success what what is it about that billion dollars that allows you to feel that you’ve succeeded and i think what i learned from from the simple act of of engaging the person next to me in a personal conversation was that uh successes is individual and internal and you can you can be successful every single day you can have the most successful day of your life today if you want and it’s your choice it kind of defends if you have to earn a billion dollars to feel like or win an olympic gold medal or be on the cover of time magazine to feel successful then you’re probably going to feel like a failure your whole life but if instead you can feel successful because of you’ve accomplished this thing or you made this person feel good or you did this thing well or
1:21:52 Just success i think is something we’re all pursuing but we’re allowing someone else maybe to tell us what it is which which is a bad rabbit hole to go down and and there are astronauts who don’t consider themselves to be successful and there are people that otherwise you would think have never had one success in your life in their life that consider themselves to be a rollicking success and i’d rather feel successful so i try and evaluate what i’m doing not through someone else’s filter but my own i always finish every episode with one question and and that is this if you could make a phone call to the 20 year old chris and give that young man a bit of advice because you probably still be training as an engineer um what would you tell him there’s a there’s a great arrogance of youth and and a myopia especially to be a young male you know you you view the whole world through the the filter of your own experience and your own metabolism and and there’s there’s sort of a um i don’t know in my case anyway a male-dominated confidence that that’s lose your whole view of the world i think what might have been worthwhile to explain to myself at 20 is to recognize that every single person you meet is is struggling i didn’t know that then you tend to see other people as completely formed individuals i still do sometimes but to recognize that everybody you’re you meet every single one of them no matter how expensive their suit is or or how serious their expression is they are
1:23:43 Uh looking for significance they are trying to do the best they can and they fail regularly and and they’re they’re you know within their own particular battle of their own life and so cut them some slack for that don’t don’t let them off the hook but recognize the um the shared nature of being a human being and and let people be themselves make some allowances for them treat people a little more kindly as a result i think i would have been a better 20 year old if i’d known that commander havefield it’s been an honor having you here uh one thing that’s a theme that’s happening here on London Real is we have these longer conversations and people listen is this whole idea that you know we all are one that’s in some way and we’re all connected and and i find that just having these like long conversations where we actually listen as opposed to talk to our fellow humans that everyone just gets even for a brief minute we feel this connection that yeah we’re all one something you could probably see easier from a spaceship or uh in different reference points and so um everything that you talk about really is is much in line with what we talk about at London Real so great thank you so much for your time i feel terrible because i learned nothing about you in this conversation i feel i want another one of these where i i get to sit in that chair and and listen to the intricacies of the life that you’ve led to get here which has been fascinating also so hopefully we’ll get a chance to re-engage
