0:02

Hey

0:07

buddy, how honest do you want to be about what we're doing right now? All

0:10

the way, always honest. Okay.

0:14

Okay. Well, honest doesn't mean you

0:16

have to say everything about what's happening in

0:18

life and all of that, but all

0:21

right, how do you read it? What do you make of this moment

0:23

that we're having right now? All right, so here's the deal.

0:26

So Matt and I recorded

0:29

days ago, maybe a couple of

0:31

weeks ago. I don't remember when it was. When was

0:33

it? Do you remember? Yeah, it was like three days

0:35

ago, four days ago. Okay. It felt

0:38

like weeks ago. Okay, fair enough. We've done a lot.

0:40

And we did it in the middle of you doing a

0:42

lot of things in your personal life and me doing

0:44

the final approach on a video. And

0:48

when we got set up with our Bluetooth

0:50

stuff, we had a huge delay.

0:53

Yes. Like huge delay. Nice marriage.

0:56

Yeah, we had. It was awesome. Yeah,

0:58

and so we recorded this episode about Italy,

1:00

which is something we've been wanting to talk

1:02

about forever, and we sent it to Tina.

1:06

And the problem with polishing

1:08

a turd. I

1:13

can just see where it's going. I can see it

1:15

in your expression. Is that it's still a turd? It's

1:18

still a turd. Yeah. We've

1:22

done a turd episode before. And I'm going

1:24

to let people just guess which one it is,

1:26

but we have a turd episode on this podcast.

1:29

You and I both know which one it is. It's

1:33

the bar that we aspire

1:35

to never stoop below. And

1:38

we both listened to the episode. We were going to publish

1:40

it today, and we were both kind of

1:42

beating around the bush a little bit. But

1:44

ultimately, I think we agreed, dude, this

1:47

is a turd. It's a turd. We

1:49

shouldn't publish. It's not nice to the third chair. No,

1:51

it's not. We should not publish this. Yeah.

1:54

So we're not. No, we're not going to. So

1:56

here we are. We like to

1:58

get two episodes out every month. And were

2:00

on the last day the month and

2:03

as the sun is down. And.

2:05

Reduce the very short amount of time. Or

2:08

yeah, and I think it's okay. Because.

2:10

The conversation I wanted to have for this episode.

2:12

It didn't make sense when we recorded it because

2:15

you done with your thing but you been telling

2:17

me about this neutral buoyancy lab thing that you're

2:19

doing. You been teasing me with details remember when

2:21

you traveled to do it and I've been really

2:24

curious about a by and seen the video. I

2:26

haven't seen any footage, I just knew it was

2:28

a massive endeavor, a huge investment of time and

2:30

the the massive added as well as agree like

2:33

an hour an hour like a feature film. Yeah.

2:36

Of. The. Length of this stone

2:38

runtime you're put into it and so

2:40

we weren't able to do the episode

2:42

we wanted to do which was this

2:44

one. Because. You weren't done with a

2:46

thing, Will now. As. Luck.

2:49

Or. Providence. depending on how you see

2:51

things would have it the video is

2:53

out. I've had a chance to watch

2:55

the first little bit of it. And.

2:58

Now we can do the up so that I

3:00

want to do on which is ask you about

3:02

your neutral buoyancy lab thing and what the heck

3:04

you're doing in scuba suits right and on. Though.

3:07

I wax boards with Nasa astronauts and stuff

3:09

in a fake underwater moon. Is I mean

3:11

that I my seen I? right? That's right.

3:14

Yeah, it was awesome. So.

3:16

I'm years ago that there was

3:18

a decision made that if you

3:20

were going to prepare astronauts for

3:22

a zero gravity environment, You.

3:25

Have to figure out a way to take

3:27

their their weight away from them. So.

3:29

Their bodies have mass but you are take the way the way

3:31

right. Sure, So how

3:34

would you do that? Like if you want

3:36

to do that? So my like Whitman, get

3:38

in hair and then you're all were in

3:40

a little white shirts, little black guy women

3:42

we've we've gotta train the astronauts right now

3:44

and.they're gonna be in a weightless environments and

3:46

we don't know what to do. This is

3:48

your job Whitman, Go do it. While.

3:50

We're really asking me. Yellow. Didn't. Fix

3:55

Hey this is embarrassing but this I would

3:57

not have gone straight to go underwater. I.

4:00

would have gone to some elaborate

4:02

gyroscope with a bunch of bungee

4:04

cords attached to some kind of

4:06

belt thing, like the unit that

4:08

I use to suspend my microphone

4:10

that I usually use. It's all,

4:12

it's got like shocks in every direction so that

4:15

if you bump anything it doesn't go all the

4:17

way through to the microphone. Except I would put

4:19

that around the astronaut and trainings

4:21

waist on like a belt, but then all the

4:23

weight would be distributed right from their waist and

4:25

that wouldn't feel natural. So I put on some

4:28

kind of suit with like suspenders

4:30

and stuff that comes off their

4:32

shoulders and their arms. It would

4:34

be this whole elaborate Ready Player

4:36

One style rig that sort

4:38

of bounces and then I would get the

4:40

tension of all of

4:42

the goofy rig stuff to

4:45

be such that it would match the gravity

4:47

of wherever I'm training the astronaut to

4:49

go. So yeah if

4:52

you go into the moon I guess

4:54

you got to figure out however many G's

4:56

the moon is and you

4:58

get the tension just right and you tune

5:00

it for their weight and then you put

5:03

them in the giant ridiculous basically baby hopper

5:05

toddler jumper machine. Yeah. And you have them

5:07

do moves and stuff. That's how I would

5:09

do it. That's how I would engineer that.

5:11

Go ahead and mock me. No,

5:14

that would work actually. I don't think

5:16

it would work. How on earth would that work?

5:19

It does work. NASA has built one and I've

5:21

seen it. Yeah. A baby

5:23

hopper for astronauts? Yes, absolutely. So

5:25

you described two things.

5:27

You described back in the day there

5:29

was this thing called Pogo which was

5:31

a partial gravity simulator. It's very similar

5:34

to what you're talking about and

5:36

so they've it's exactly what

5:38

you just said. It's kind of it's not like

5:40

a bungee thing you would do. You've seen these

5:42

amusement parts. You've got you hook the

5:44

kid up to the bungee cord at their waist and they can jump

5:47

a little bit. It's not unlike that.

5:49

It's very similar to that and

5:51

then there's another one a more modern

5:53

version that's better. It's called Argos and

5:56

here's an acronym active response

5:58

gravity offload. Now,

6:02

the difference in POGO and Argos, if

6:04

I understand it correctly, so

6:07

what would be the problems with emulating

6:09

this 5-6th G offset?

6:11

You understand why I say 5-6th offset?

6:14

Do you understand that? Yeah.

6:16

Low orbit – 1G

6:19

is Earth. 1G is Earth, yes. So

6:22

low orbit isn't

6:24

the same as just

6:27

full-on space, right? Low orbit, you've still

6:29

got a little bit more gravity than

6:31

just out there, or is low

6:33

orbit just not gravity?

6:36

Once you get into

6:38

low Earth orbit, which is what you're talking about,

6:41

basically the simplest way to think of orbit is

6:43

if we were to fire a

6:45

rifle parallel with the ground off the

6:47

top of the Empire State Building, that

6:50

thing is going to fall towards

6:52

the Earth. If we neglect drag just for the

6:54

math, that thing is going to fall to the

6:56

Earth at 9.8 m per second squared. Meters

6:59

per second squared. Yeah. It's going to be a

7:01

parabolic arc. Now, once it's in drag, it's a

7:03

little more than a parabola, but you get the

7:05

idea. So if you ever

7:07

shoot that bullet faster and faster and

7:09

faster so that the fall

7:11

of that bullet happens to match up with

7:13

the curvature of the Earth, that's

7:16

orbit. Oh!

7:19

That's all orbit is. So

7:21

if you go up really, really high… So you're still

7:23

trying to fall, you just

7:26

can't because of the shape of the Earth.

7:28

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's

7:30

what orbit is. Well,

7:33

huh. That's pretty cool, right? Yeah.

7:36

Yeah. So if you're in low

7:38

Earth orbit, you feel

7:40

weightless because your spaceship

7:43

is falling and you're

7:45

falling, you just never hit anything. That's

7:48

orbit. So in low Earth orbit,

7:50

you're weightless. If you're on the

7:52

moon, there is gravity.

7:54

There's about one-sixth as much gravity

7:56

as there is here on Earth.

7:59

Exactly. If you wanted to simulate the moon, which

8:02

is what we did in the video, you

8:04

have to offset five-sixths of

8:06

your weight so that you're left

8:08

with only one-sixth of your weight. So

8:12

one-sixth is what

8:14

feels like orbit gravity

8:17

in the lived experience of a person who

8:19

is in that environment. No.

8:22

Orbit is zero gravity. And

8:24

I'm just now realizing I confused you because

8:26

when I brought you in the office and

8:28

I said Whitman, I said they're going to

8:30

be weightless. And now I'm talking

8:32

about five-sixths offset. So I'm sorry about that.

8:34

I'm jumping ahead. Okay, all right, all right.

8:36

The point is what you're saying will work.

8:39

And they have a little ride that when

8:41

people come to space camp here in Huntsville,

8:44

Alabama, they rig them up

8:46

and they get to climb on the outside of

8:49

the International Space Station and do a quote space

8:51

walk. And it just takes their

8:53

weight away. Yeah. And

8:55

then Argos, which is the

8:57

active, it's this whole rig you just

8:59

invented in your mind, but it's active. Now

9:03

what does active mean to you? It

9:06

means that it is receiving feedback from what

9:08

I'm doing with my body. And

9:11

it is compensating for that blazing fast

9:13

in real time. It's running calculations as

9:15

opposed to letting the rig just do

9:17

it physically or analog.

9:19

There's a digital calculation and feedback

9:21

that's occurring. Exactly. So you

9:24

have like a spring or a bungee cord that would

9:26

be reactive. An

9:28

active response gravity

9:30

offload system predicts what it's

9:32

going to need to do based on

9:34

what's happening right now. It has a control loop.

9:37

And so that control loop, imagine

9:40

under a crane, not

9:42

like a crane, like a Tonka truck shaped

9:44

crane, but like an overhead crane in a warehouse.

9:46

You've seen one of these? Sure.

9:49

Okay. So the crane trolley

9:52

can move up, you know,

9:54

XYZ. Exactly. And that

9:56

can wire on the ceiling. Z would be

9:58

represented by dipping down. The grab whatever it

10:01

to grab from the floor exactly. And so

10:03

X and Y. Are. Are

10:05

pretty. Please. You. Know

10:07

possible. but the problem is you have

10:10

to move that whole trolley overhead and

10:12

it has mass. And. So

10:14

you have lag because you get accelerate that

10:16

whole trolley system over your head. To.

10:18

Look at, that's the hard part of that. But

10:21

anyway, My. Point is what

10:23

you said will work and in fact

10:25

Nasa uses that to train astronauts for

10:27

for reduced gravity environments. What I stabbed

10:29

his the Pogo system. The old version

10:32

is a Pogo, the new one is

10:34

called are A R G O S.

10:37

And Pogo stands for something is just one

10:39

of those really fun acronyms where you make

10:41

it match what it reminds you of in

10:43

your brain like Pogo stick I. but I

10:46

think consider some. A I

10:48

think if we complicated marshall gravity simulator

10:50

and in people just call it pogo

10:52

is it is can have out of

10:54

yeah it's It's basically a it looks

10:56

like an engine noise kind of thing

10:58

from the pictures I've seen I've never

11:00

seen the poker system of the have

11:02

seen are ghosts and them yes So.

11:05

Yeah what what what you describe would work that

11:07

would that would get some of it done bit

11:09

but there's some problems with what you've described. There's

11:13

another. Thing. You can do okay.

11:15

Can I guess what the problems or. Yeah. I'm

11:18

I don't I don't know about Argo

11:20

some and a pogo them in that

11:22

that's not something I'm glad. So lie

11:24

would think the pogo system would work

11:26

pretty well as long as. The.

11:28

Astronaut in training is

11:31

basically upright. By

11:33

as I learned in Enders game. There.

11:35

Isn't really. Down in

11:38

Space. And. So.

11:41

I. Would think and version would

11:43

require require like a series of

11:46

gyroscopic rings. They. Could move

11:48

inside but then you have actual gravity

11:50

working against you in different ways that

11:52

would feel unnatural. And would

11:54

not simulate zero gravity. And.

11:56

There's really nothing you can do to

11:58

simulate. The. inversion without an active

12:01

system. So I would think the Argos

12:04

system would do better

12:06

at getting you oriented to being

12:08

an environment where there is no up or

12:10

down in reality. But

12:14

yeah, I don't know. That's the only problem

12:16

I can think of. That's the only limitation that immediately springs

12:18

to mind for me. I think it

12:20

would be difficult to design it. Like

12:23

I'm imagining Trappie's artists, these aerial acrobats,

12:25

and they have the bar, or in

12:28

gymnastics when they do the, you know, the, what

12:30

is it, the split bar thing? You know what

12:32

I'm talking about. I think you could flip over

12:35

that stuff. So I can imagine them mounting an

12:37

astronaut spacesuit in a yoke

12:40

and you could just flip over front or back. But

12:42

I think it'd be very hard to move in the cartwheel

12:45

axis. I think that would be difficult. Yeah,

12:48

I could see that. I think it would be difficult.

12:50

I'm sure the engineers are smart and they figure that

12:52

out. So yeah, you're right. That's

12:54

one way to do it. There's another way

12:56

that's really, really cool that I got to do

12:58

one time, a long time ago. I think I told you

13:00

about it. Do you remember what the other way is? If

13:03

you were going to simulate reduced gravity? Upside

13:06

down and inside out, we're going to fail

13:08

it. What is that? The

13:11

OK Go song? Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah.

13:13

They did a video with your zero

13:16

G plane drop

13:18

thing, right? Yeah. That's

13:20

the song even that goes with the

13:22

video. Upside, something like that. It's really

13:24

cool. It's a fantastic video. The vomit

13:26

comet. Yeah. There we go. So basically

13:28

what they do is they take an

13:30

airplane and they just start pointing up

13:33

and then they just kind of go over the hump. And

13:36

so basically you're pointing up at the sky at a

13:38

45 degree angle or something like that. And then you

13:40

just nose over the airplane and then

13:42

you start going over and then down. And

13:44

the cool thing is because you're

13:47

pushing the nose

13:49

of the plane forward, you're weightless or

13:52

you can fly any parabola you want. You can

13:54

get a one sixth G or a one third

13:56

G. You can do whatever You're

13:58

weightless as you're still going. up in the airplane.

14:01

So. You think you suppose you know you're really high

14:04

in the your nose? Dive it down towards the

14:06

ground. And you'll be weightless the

14:08

whole time you're falling in, you pull up

14:10

for you, the ground this my Howard's at

14:12

all, you're pointing up and in your point

14:15

not point up and in knows over in.

14:17

Then you're weightless from there, all the way

14:19

over the hump until until you start pulling

14:21

the nose up again halfway through the like

14:23

if you're to graph Weigel sign x. It.

14:26

Would be at all where where that curve

14:28

crosses zero. Those are the points where your

14:30

and either zero g or two g. Is

14:33

you're pushing over a football match? Huge. He.

14:36

Is. Will see you start your for X.

14:38

Okay yea I know I can see all

14:40

of that. I've never really understood how that

14:42

worked or when you would get the experience.

14:45

So. It's like. Thirty. Seconds that

14:47

you get on the upper part

14:50

of the parabola. Exactly This limitation.

14:52

Soviet. She got something you want to. Test.

14:56

How. Do you do that? So? Literati.

14:58

you want to test which is what

15:00

I get to observe. You want to

15:02

test and next generation. Astronaut.

15:05

Space Suits. Walking.

15:08

In Lunar soil. Ats.

15:11

One. Six Gee. How

15:13

would you do that? Okay,

15:16

I'm still struggling with the

15:18

five six one six thing.

15:20

I'm sorry, madam, adapt your

15:22

one sixth g. Is

15:25

moon gravity? It's that's just sixteen point seven

15:27

percent of what I would be used to

15:29

hear. Correct yeah. Does that mean that if

15:31

I have a four inch vertical leap which

15:33

might be what it's down to at this

15:36

point, That. I. Would

15:38

then have. They. Kept. Our

15:41

twenty inch vertical leap is it just. is

15:43

it all just linear like that in terms

15:45

of how you modify everything out. I'd.

15:48

Help things or respond as a great question. I

15:50

I don't know how miles around her muscles work

15:52

and so I would have saying yards. Now I

15:54

can throw at one hundred. i

15:56

don't know the answer that that's great that's agree

15:58

question but i'm not I do know

16:01

that that it's

16:03

different than you think and so Surprise

16:09

me it's different than I thought as well.

16:11

I thought oh you're in one 6g everything

16:14

Everything is easier to jump easier

16:16

to throw but there's another

16:18

component I didn't think about and that's inertia and we'll talk

16:20

about that in a minute The first

16:22

one set the stage for what I get to do,

16:24

which was amazing if that's cool. I'm sorry I've got

16:26

one more question for you. Okay, so So

16:29

one 6g is the moon But

16:32

you were simulating 0

16:35

in the vomit comet, right? Correct Okay,

16:37

but the pogo system or Argos

16:40

system you could simulate 0

16:42

or you could simulate 1

16:46

6 depending on what the pogo system Tension

16:48

of the the physical feedback the springs

16:51

or whatever with the Argos system You

16:53

would just dial in the active feedback

16:55

to simulate the gravity you want to

16:57

simulate Vomit comet you kind of get 2g

16:59

or 0 Correct because

17:02

you're oscillating on either side of one You

17:05

can you can fly a different parabola.

17:07

And so oh, okay. Yeah, so instead

17:09

of taking away instead of Decelerating

17:12

at 9.8 meters per second

17:14

squared. You can decelerate it You

17:17

know 85% of that and

17:19

then you can create a 1 6th G Parabola

17:22

and so you can have you

17:25

know, you take away most of the gravity but not

17:27

all of in fact when I got to do this

17:29

as an undergraduate We

17:31

flew our 20 parabolas for our experiment and

17:34

then at the end they flew a lunar

17:36

parabola And then they flew a

17:38

Martian parabola, which I think the

17:40

way they do that. Yeah, it's awesome What

17:44

what is Martian gravity? It's

17:46

I pulled it up here. It's about 38% of

17:49

the gravity on earth is 3.7

17:51

1 meters per second squared. I knew that

17:54

when I was watching the expanse, but I

17:56

don't remember it anymore. So, okay All

17:58

right. Okay, she expands Now I'm tracking with all

18:00

of that. Final question

18:02

for the setup run here so I understand

18:04

what I'm learning about. You're

18:07

talking about old generation

18:09

of spacesuit. You're

18:11

talking about next generation. What

18:14

was wrong with the old stuff? Why are we updating it? What

18:16

does the new one do that's better? Well,

18:19

the Apollo system, that's

18:22

a really old spacesuit. Then we had

18:24

a newer one, a newer spacesuit

18:26

that's being used right now up on

18:28

the ISS. Think about it.

18:30

They're not made to walk because

18:32

if you're doing an EVA and

18:35

extra vehicular activity on

18:37

the ISS, you're just

18:39

using your hands and you're like moving around

18:41

all over. It's not like you're Spiderman.

18:43

You don't have to like grapple to it because you're weightless.

18:46

You can just hold yourself and move yourself with your pinky,

18:48

right? So there's

18:51

no, like if you look at the boots on the

18:53

ones with the ISS, they're like hard plastic. They're not

18:55

made for walking. So

18:58

they don't have to worry about space

19:00

dust. They don't have to worry about like

19:02

regolith. The lunar soil is called

19:05

regolith. They don't have to worry about

19:07

that getting up in the sleeves and all that kind of stuff.

19:09

So anyway, it's a completely different thing. Also

19:11

they've learned some lessons over the years

19:14

and it's pretty hard to put that

19:17

thing on. The cool thing

19:19

about this episode is years ago, I

19:21

was allowed to put on a spacesuit

19:24

at NASA Johnson Space Center. So

19:26

what we did is I

19:29

was there. This is back when I was making

19:31

some videos with Smarter Every Day and they said hey, we've

19:34

got time. I might be able to get

19:36

you into this astronaut like

19:39

anthropomorphic study where we're

19:41

measuring people's bodies and then we put

19:43

them in the spacesuit like to get

19:45

more data like you're this big, you

19:48

weigh this much, your forearm is this long

19:50

and they took all these measurements. They're

19:52

like okay, you need this, this and this part of

19:54

these spacesuits and then they Lego

19:56

you a spacesuit together and then

19:58

you get in it. And it was

20:00

cool. I got to do that. And so that

20:03

was super, super awesome. And I did it

20:06

years ago. And so I got to finally

20:08

use that footage because I

20:10

didn't want to release it prior to now because

20:13

back in the day I was like really excited about wanting

20:15

to be an astronaut. And so I

20:17

didn't think it made sense to release that video

20:19

because it felt too self-centered. Does that make sense?

20:21

You've got a video of – You know you

20:23

will – what do you mean? I

20:26

mean it seems normal enough. I mean that's

20:28

a really cool experience. I don't understand how

20:31

that would be self-centered I guess. I

20:33

don't know man. There's – you

20:36

know that you and I at one point in time we

20:38

decided to turn a camera on and point it at our

20:41

face and then upload that to the internet. Yes,

20:43

I remember that. Like

20:46

at some level – like you thought that was a

20:49

good idea. At

20:52

some level I did. Yeah, I

20:55

think there was – there's

20:58

a degree of humility in that exercise. There's

21:00

also a degree of pride in that exercise.

21:03

There's a white wolf and there's a black wolf in

21:06

my soul. And

21:09

whichever one I feed more, that

21:13

one more informs why I'm turning on the

21:15

camera. Hold

21:19

on. We

21:22

should do that again. Like

21:26

– I'm sorry to say this, but

21:28

this is something me and Steve have been talking about.

21:30

Like the thought of the black wolf being the bad

21:32

one actually ends up – you

21:35

don't have to do that. But I don't care. You

21:37

can roll with it if you want. I just marked it. If you're

21:39

cool with it – It's light

21:42

and darkness. This goes back to

21:44

ancient Persia in terms of this

21:46

distinction. I'm not willing to change

21:48

it. Okay, cool. I will caveat

21:50

this. And

21:54

obviously light and dark in that

21:56

scenario is a reference to the

21:58

ideas of the Bible. of where the

22:00

light shines and where the light does not

22:02

shine, ancient ideas of yin and

22:05

yang and balance and all of that stuff.

22:08

In this case, I don't

22:11

know, I'm overthinking it, I'm over communicating it.

22:13

Just simply put, yes, cameras do

22:16

weird things to your soul. And

22:18

if you're the one in charge of what you film

22:20

and what you say and what you edit and what

22:22

you show people and what you don't, there

22:26

is a temptation to try to make yourself look

22:28

cool and have it be all about you, when

22:30

we get that. That make yourself look cool thing.

22:32

So there was a shot that I had in

22:34

there of, and keep in mind,

22:36

wanna be an astronaut kind of thing, there's

22:38

a shot of him putting an astronaut helmet on

22:40

your head and latching it and

22:43

you start breathing. And I'm not

22:45

filming that, somebody else is filming that. And

22:48

I was like, man, there's no way I'm putting this on the internet.

22:50

This is just too, it's too much.

22:53

I don't know, it felt like too much. Self-serving?

22:55

Yeah, it did. Like it would flip the point

22:57

of the video from being about the person watching

22:59

to being about you? Yeah, yeah, I

23:01

don't know, it was weird. I couldn't, I

23:04

don't know, it was just strange. So anyway, but

23:07

that was it heavy? What was the suit like?

23:09

It's super heavy. Just wait, crap-sone? Super heavy, yeah,

23:11

absolutely. There's a backpack called a Pliss, portable

23:14

life support system. That thing

23:16

was crazy heavy. And so I

23:19

had to walk, they mount the hard upper torso,

23:23

they mount you to that, and then you

23:26

climb up through it. It's very difficult. And

23:29

then you put the pants on, and

23:31

then they put the helmet on and the glove. It's

23:33

just a very difficult thing to get into by yourself.

23:35

They got some kind of tube on your thingy, so

23:38

you can pee while you're in there, or you have to go

23:40

in for a bathroom break. How's that work? So

23:43

Apollo did, Apollo

23:45

did have the urine system. It was, it's

23:47

like a little rubbery, condom-y

23:49

type thing, and it would, you

23:51

would pee into that, and

23:54

then that would go into a little bag. And

23:57

they came in three sizes. Do you want to guess

23:59

what the sizes were? I'm

24:04

going to go with large, extra large,

24:07

and extra, extra large. It was actually

24:09

humongous is the word that you said.

24:15

You're depending on these people to

24:17

operate very sophisticated, expensive machinery in

24:19

space. Other people's lives depend

24:21

on it. You can't have them second

24:23

guessing themselves or their competency level. Yeah.

24:27

Large, extra large, and humongous. Well done, NASA. Michael

24:29

Collins in his book, he was talking about

24:31

that. If I'm not

24:33

mistaken, instead of small, medium, large, it was large,

24:36

gigantic, and humongous. So

24:41

funny. In that space

24:43

suit that they're using now on station,

24:45

they use what's called a MAG, a

24:47

maximum absorbent garment. It's basically a diaper.

24:51

I was offered the diaper to, hey, do

24:53

you want to... Astronauts wear a MAG.

24:55

Do you want to do that? I was like, no, thank you. I

24:57

really wish I had done it. You should

24:59

have taken it and peed in it. I know,

25:01

right? Exactly. Why not? That's

25:03

the astronaut experience. I know. Exactly.

25:07

So the thing I was invited to

25:09

do was go to the NBL, the

25:11

Neutral Buoyancy Lab, which is this other

25:13

way to do weightlessness, which is basically

25:15

you get in water and they

25:18

trim you out with weights. And because you're in a space

25:20

suit that has air in it, you float. And

25:23

so you... Have

25:25

you ever been scuba diving? I have.

25:28

But now we're to new suits.

25:32

Yeah, we're in new suits. Smaller and lighter than

25:34

what you tried on, I assume, because newer things

25:36

tend to be smaller and lighter or still huge.

25:38

They're just better in several ways. They

25:41

have shoes made for walking. They have

25:43

what's called a rear entry. So

25:45

they have a hatch on the back and you can climb in it.

25:49

Something you can actually get into by yourself. You

25:53

really need people to help you. I

25:55

guess in theory... Like getting into a mech. Yeah.

25:58

Kind of like the... Borlon,

26:00

which I believe is the Russian suit,

26:02

it was rear entry. The Russians designed

26:04

a rear entry suit years ago, and

26:06

you supposedly can get in there and

26:09

throw this lever and you latch yourself in. The

26:11

problem is sealing yourself in there, right?

26:13

That's the problem. Don't want to get

26:15

that wrong? No, I don't think so. I don't think you would

26:18

want to. The

26:20

new one, the XEMU, which is the name

26:22

of the new government suit. There's

26:24

a contract recently that went out, and so

26:27

there's two companies. I

26:29

believe it's Axiom and ILC Dover.

26:32

They're making new spacesuits. They have the

26:34

contract to do that. But

26:36

in the meantime, NASA made a

26:38

government suit. This is the

26:40

XEMU, and the purpose of the XEMU is

26:43

to gather data. We're

26:45

going to just come up with all

26:47

this data on how these suits work,

26:49

what pressures are best, and all these

26:51

things, and then we're going to give that

26:53

data to the contractors making these

26:56

suits. Which I think is interesting. So

26:59

that brings us to the big

27:02

picture, the neutral buoyancy lab, and you getting

27:04

to try this out, and you're

27:07

wearing one of the XEMU

27:09

suits in there? No, sir.

27:12

I didn't wear the suit. I was allowed

27:14

to scuba dive with the astronauts that

27:16

were wearing the suits because

27:18

the astronauts were testing a very

27:21

interesting thing. They were testing the pressure

27:24

of the suits. So before we get to that, you

27:26

said you've been scuba diving? I

27:29

have. Yeah, not a ton.

27:31

I mean, I've snorkeled a ton. I love

27:33

that activity. But a little bit of scuba

27:35

diving, I had a buddy who was into

27:37

it, and he taught me how it worked,

27:39

and I learned, and I made some

27:41

mistakes, and I did okay, and it was really neat.

27:44

Did you learn how to control your

27:47

ability to float in the water? Like do you

27:49

know what a BCD is, a buoyancy control device?

27:51

Do you remember that? I

27:54

remember that. Yeah,

27:58

it's been a while. Walk me through it. like

28:00

a floaty vest. Do you remember wearing a floaty vest and

28:02

you could hit a button and go choo, choo, choo, choo?

28:04

And you could pump air into it? I

28:06

do remember that. Okay. So the

28:08

deeper you go in water, the

28:11

more pressure there is on you, right? Sure. And

28:14

if you have an air bubble with you and you

28:16

take it down, it's going to shrink. And

28:19

when you shrink, your volume gets

28:21

smaller and so your density

28:23

goes up. And so

28:25

what can happen is this really weird thing, when

28:27

you're descending with a

28:29

scuba diving rig, as

28:31

you go down further, your vest can start

28:34

to shrink and you start to sink faster.

28:37

So it's this really strange thing that

28:39

happens. And so it's

28:41

kind of counterintuitive. And so when you're coming up, the other

28:44

way, I think you and I have spoken about this before,

28:46

there's this, let's say you're at the bottom of the pool

28:48

and you take a big breath and

28:50

you hold your breath. If you

28:52

were to swim towards the surface with

28:55

your breath, you're holding your breath, what would happen? Hmm.

29:03

I think it, I feel like it

29:05

pressures down with that. If

29:08

I swim toward the surface with a full breath. Yes.

29:14

Yeah, I feel like that pressures down. It

29:16

would blow you up. You would

29:18

explode. Well,

29:21

not from like six feet underwater.

29:23

Not from six feet underwater, no. But

29:26

like if you go to the bottom of 40 to 100 feet

29:28

or something like that, you take a breath.

29:31

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So when I take a

29:33

breath, okay, sorry, I'm tracking with scenario now. So let's

29:35

say we're in the 12 foot range. Okay. And

29:38

I take a breath and I go down. I feel that compression. Yes. I

29:41

feel my shoulders wanting to roll in. And

29:43

the relationship between

29:46

my body and my lung capacity

29:48

feels cramped. It feels different. So

29:51

you were asking me to imagine getting the

29:54

breath somehow magically 12 feet

29:57

below water and then going up

29:59

with it. my understanding? Yes, with a

30:01

scuba regulator. I'm sorry, I wasn't clear about that.

30:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I've never experienced that.

30:05

I didn't go very deep in my little bit

30:07

of training and goofing around that I did. But

30:11

yeah, yeah, that would hurt as

30:13

I came up, I would expect. Yeah. Have you ever

30:15

seen a fish? You've probably seen this deep sea fish.

30:17

And if you've ever seen a fish with their swim

30:19

bladder, like all puffed up, have you ever seen that?

30:22

Yeah, I had to trident a

30:24

koi recently to euthanize

30:27

it. What? Swim bladder became

30:30

damaged. It's a tough deal, man.

30:32

We had a fish named Blubber, lived in the

30:34

backyard in the koi pond. We inherited him. I

30:36

didn't, it's not even my fish. I got him

30:38

from the previous owners. They've had this fish since

30:41

the 80s. I don't know, it's a very old

30:43

fish. He had all the cancers, all

30:45

the fish diseases you could have. He had all of

30:47

them, but somehow he just didn't die, right? Well,

30:50

I go out there last season and

30:52

it's over. He

30:55

just can't control it. So I give him

30:57

food. I was down there trying to

30:59

push the little food pellets into his mouth. Like,

31:01

come on, Blubber, my kids love you. Come

31:04

on, Blubber, pull through. But he's

31:06

80% cancer at this point. There's

31:08

a little bit of fish left, but it's mostly

31:10

just disease. And he's just

31:12

flipping over, rolling over. I'm in the

31:14

water with him, trying to prop him

31:17

up. There are tricks when the swim

31:19

bladder gets deflated

31:21

from pressure or stress with a trout,

31:24

where you can get them righted by moving water

31:26

along the gills and holding them at a certain

31:28

angle. You can get that bladder functioning

31:31

right. Again, you can get their equal. Is it normally

31:33

too big or is it too small, the swim bladder?

31:39

Well. I don't know how a fish swim bladder works. I

31:41

would think it's too small. I would think it would be

31:43

too small in my experience because usually

31:45

if I see a swim bladder that's too

31:47

low, I'm fishing with a new fisherman and

31:49

they're freaked out by the fish and they

31:51

over clinch it. Oh, the fish goes. And

31:57

I'm like, Oh good. You're doing a good job. That's great. I

32:00

put that one back for you and so

32:02

to me it looks like they Squeeze

32:04

the air out of the poor thing and

32:07

I imagine that as I work it against

32:09

the current in the most oxygenated part of

32:11

the flow I'm getting air back

32:13

into the swim bladder, but I don't know the

32:16

anatomy of fish dude I just know that it

32:18

works and then eventually when they feel right You

32:21

can feel the tense up in their

32:23

flanks and their musculature and that means

32:25

I'm right again. I can swim and off the trout

32:27

goes blubber There

32:30

was no such tensing I think the where

32:32

the muscles were it was just cancer and

32:34

bloat and I worked that fish

32:36

over and over I'm you know I fired up

32:38

some air bubblers, and I got the little like

32:40

aquarium. Oh Really bubbler

32:43

right underneath him. I'm you did you

32:45

try you attempted fish CPR basically take

32:47

all that air, buddy What about

32:49

all this air? Are you hungry? Here's some more

32:51

fish pellets? I'm fish in these water Yeah,

32:54

well I had there was he was getting

32:56

water too cuz he was in water Oh, I seem

32:58

like he had plenty of all it just wasn't working.

33:01

He's a bobber. He's dead It was over so I

33:03

tried that for a couple days without telling the kids

33:05

and finally I was like It's

33:08

over for blubber the dude dad. He

33:10

can't I he's maybe the tiniest bit alive, but

33:12

it's over how big how big is blubber blubber

33:16

is a big koi maybe Eight

33:18

inches did you get him mounted pretty

33:21

big koi? No although I did get a

33:23

trout map my Camilla Got me the biggest

33:25

trout. I ever caught just yesterday. We got

33:28

we got it's on the wall. I'll show you

33:30

a picture It's awesome really great big

33:32

fatty rainbow. Yeah, it's on the wall It's above the is

33:34

this the thing now where you don't actually have to keep

33:36

the fish you just take the pictures from a certain angle

33:38

And then they can do it yes

33:42

Dude, maybe we should do a whole conversation

33:44

about this, but I'm cool telling you real quick There

33:46

is a guy in hot spring

33:48

South Dakota. It's a matter of an hour

33:50

south of here Camilla

33:53

looked him up online dude is amazing. I

33:55

went to his workshop yesterday. I saw

33:57

how he does everything Yeah

34:00

It is amazing, but

34:02

we went in there and he's like, well, show me the fish that you

34:04

want to do. And I took a ton

34:06

of pictures because I knew this service existed and I might want to

34:08

do it someday. I showed him all

34:10

my pictures. He's like, oh yeah, it's more

34:12

than enough. No problem. And he pulls out

34:14

this big digital catalog and he's

34:17

like, all right, you measured it. And yeah, I

34:19

showed him me measuring the fish. He's like, I

34:21

had a 23 inch trout, really good

34:23

girth on it. It's all footballed up. He's

34:26

like, all right, right here. This is

34:28

the model. And there are like

34:30

10 different fiberglass plastic models

34:33

of exactly the dimensions of

34:35

the fish I caught. And

34:38

he just had me pick the pose I wanted. I was

34:40

like, yeah, I bet it struck that pose right there at

34:42

one point in its life. And I put it back. It's

34:45

still alive. It's out there in nature somewhere. And

34:48

he's like, all right, we'll just, you know,

34:50

give me the highest res version of the

34:52

photos possible and I'll paint it to look

34:54

exactly like this fish. The spots, the speckles.

34:56

What? The depth of the

34:59

gill cuts, the color around the gills,

35:01

the life in the eyeballs, everything. And

35:04

then I'll make a little rock base for it. I

35:07

got the thing back. It's a spitting image in

35:09

my hands. It sits in my hands, just

35:11

like the picture of me holding this fish up out of

35:13

the water. It's a two hander. And

35:16

it's the most amazing thing ever. The guy is an

35:18

absolute artistic genius. And

35:20

now that fish lives on my wall and I haven't

35:22

decided what the fish's name shall be yet, but

35:25

it shall have a name someday. My

35:28

children and grandchildren shall inherit it and

35:30

be like, that is what our

35:32

eccentric grandpa did. And now we have

35:34

his fish for some reason. Well, I

35:37

think we should workshop names real quick.

35:40

I think we should too. What do you have in mind? Is

35:42

it a, is it a boy or a girl? I

35:45

think it's a boy, but I'm going to, I'm

35:47

going to verify, but yeah, let's assume boy. How

35:49

did he make you feel? What

35:54

a thoughtful question. Elated?

36:00

I was just okay. This is what happened

36:02

with this fish I walked up to

36:04

a clear stretch of water and I had a whole

36:06

gallery with me there were a bunch of

36:08

people on the trail my My

36:11

three kids my wife were there and her

36:13

parents were there my

36:15

father-in-law is a spin fisherman who likes to

36:18

catch trout, but does not like fly fishing

36:20

and He performs

36:22

very well often outperforms me with his

36:25

lures and spinners and all of this and

36:28

so I Walked up to

36:30

this particular pool. He didn't have a rod out

36:32

I did have mine and I've

36:34

got this teeny tiny little fly on there and

36:36

we walked up and both of us were like

36:39

Well dang, that's the one you'd want

36:41

to get right there So

36:44

I was like, all right Let me see if I can show you how this

36:46

is supposed to work Well the fly rod

36:48

we got to wait and we got to watch at

36:50

this low angle So he can't see us but we

36:52

can we can see him. We need to see how

36:54

he's feeding snow Yeah, and

36:57

where the food is coming to him

36:59

from yeah, yeah Yeah, exactly that the

37:01

angle of refraction that would defeat the

37:03

fish's ability to see you So

37:06

we watched we looked at what bugs were

37:08

floating on the water. We evaluated

37:10

exactly how the fish was feeding. I

37:14

Decided I have more or less what I

37:16

would want already on tied onto my line

37:19

So I don't need to change flies I just

37:21

need to drop it Upstream here

37:24

and nurse it so that it follows the current here

37:26

because he seems to like things that are coming down

37:29

Exactly that way, but I

37:31

have to manage my rod so he doesn't see

37:33

it, but there's no slack It's too

37:35

old to fish You're not gonna get a fish that old if you

37:37

got a bunch of line in the water The

37:39

fly needs to be the only thing on the

37:41

water coming downstream and

37:43

so My cast was

37:46

good. I liked where it hit Everybody's

37:48

all crouched down my whole family including

37:50

my in-laws who are not super

37:53

young and I

37:55

cruised it right into his strike zone.

37:57

I saw him snap his tail one

37:59

time, which means, oh, I'm in hunting

38:01

mode, watching, watching. I'm like, he's gonna

38:03

hit, he's gonna hit, he's gonna hit. Sure

38:05

enough, boom, came up and rolled on it just the

38:07

way you would hope. I set the

38:09

hook. It was a long, long fight.

38:13

And I won. I got him in the

38:15

net. I got him to shore. And then I he's

38:17

so big, you can't I mean, he's exhausted when you

38:19

defeat a fish that big. So you got to keep

38:21

them in the net in the current. So

38:23

I was kind of in the water with him making sure that

38:25

I wouldn't kill this beautiful

38:27

animal. And so the couple

38:30

of shots where I lift him up out of the

38:32

water for pictures, I was elated because

38:34

I picked the fish I wanted. I

38:36

wanted to try to show my father in law

38:38

that this kind of fishing is legitimate and actual

38:41

and it's credible. And

38:43

it worked on the first cast. We get

38:45

the fish we wanted. My kids were excited.

38:48

Yeah, my wife kind of had that take

38:50

me, take me now look in her eyes.

38:52

She did. Yeah, absolutely. That didn't happen at

38:54

all. I completely made that part up. She

38:56

was, you know, only

38:59

moderately impressed. But I was elated.

39:01

It was exactly the fish I wanted. That's how I felt. So

39:04

what does that mean? The name should be. Oh, I

39:06

mean, I've got a few suggestions. Okay.

39:09

Most of them start with Darth. No,

39:12

is he a good fish

39:15

or a bad fish? Like is he more

39:18

evil or more good? He's a great fish.

39:20

So he's more of a Jedi, less of

39:22

a Sith. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'd like

39:24

to say we're friends. Okay, so

39:26

Goliath is out. Goliath

39:29

is out. Yeah, too negative. Yeah, it's negative. So

39:31

you said he snapped the water. What about Snappy?

39:35

Well, I mean, that would describe the

39:37

action he took. What

39:40

are we doing? Dr.

39:43

Snapples. Oh, that's good.

39:45

Lieutenant Snappleton. Oh, that's

39:49

good. Yeah. Dr.

39:52

Snapples. That's great. What

39:55

if we keep workshopping that at another time? I don't

39:57

think we're, I just, it doesn't feel doesn't

40:00

feel like we're quite

40:02

there yet. Okay, cool, yeah, we'll keep working. So,

40:06

such a long story short now. Blubber, he

40:09

was done. I decided like

40:11

he's deceased. The fish is dead. Goodbye to

40:13

this beautiful koi. You've been a good friend

40:15

to the family. I will now

40:17

bury you in the garden and you will become

40:19

part of the food we will later eat. Aw.

40:22

Thank you. Your gift continues. So yes, the giving

40:24

fish. So I dug

40:26

a little hole. I took his body out and

40:28

I set it in the little hole and he

40:30

starts going, bah, bah, bah, bah.

40:33

Well, dang it. He buried him alive?

40:35

He's not dead. Yeah, I'm not gonna

40:37

bury him alive. Okay. So I'm

40:39

like, well, I need to

40:41

run him through with something. I gotta put him out here

40:43

and get any. He's

40:45

done. The fish is done, man. I know when a fish

40:48

is done. But I don't wanna club

40:50

my fish to death and I was like, what

40:52

do you kill a fish with? And

40:54

I'm like, you kill a fish with a trident. Yeah.

40:57

Oh, there's no trident. There is a trident because

40:59

we had a thing that you stick in the

41:01

garden for a sprinkler that had a trident on

41:03

the end. So just out there

41:05

in my backyard, I just took the three

41:07

pronged trident. I stood over him.

41:10

I thought some kind thoughts. I

41:12

just sort of pressed the middle

41:14

kind of the trident and do his

41:16

answer. Was it like the knife fighting

41:18

scene in Saving Private Ryan? Only

41:21

the blubbering you. Dude,

41:23

that's so dark. Actually,

41:25

it was exactly like that. And

41:30

he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And

41:34

then I buried blubber and now he is part

41:36

of the food we grow in our garden. And

41:38

he will have missed. It's a wonderful

41:40

fish. That's a great story. Thank you for that, Matt. You

41:43

bet. This

41:45

episode of No Dumb Questions is brought to you by

41:47

the patrons. Those are the people

41:50

who took a look at this situation. We're like, hey,

41:52

I like that podcast and it's free and I don't

41:54

have to pay for it at all. What if I

41:56

did anyway? I really appreciate that

41:58

equation that you ran. Thank you. Absolutely.

42:01

And I mean, let's go truth

42:03

again, right? So we

42:05

are motivated to get an episode

42:08

done right now because... Yes!

42:11

Yeah. The patrons not only paid

42:14

for this, they told us to

42:16

do it. They slapped us on the hand like, hey,

42:20

do it. No kidding. It

42:23

is 8 47 pm where you live. It is 7 47 pm where I live. And I had

42:25

a... Wonderful

42:30

Easter Sunday with my family. We got

42:32

up early. We did church stuff. We

42:35

had a great dinner. We played games.

42:37

Wonderful day. And I

42:40

came down to publish the podcast and you and I touched

42:42

base and we were like, well, it's

42:44

hot crap. We shouldn't publish that at

42:46

all. Why would we put that milky

42:48

sludge on the internet and forever besmirch

42:50

our name and bore our listeners? They're

42:52

nice to us. We shouldn't do

42:54

that. So we had two options before us. A fork

42:56

in the road, if you will. Fork

42:59

option number one was... I

43:03

just don't do anything. Punt.

43:07

Didn't work out. We missed on that one. Didn't get

43:09

to where we wanted it and we're out of time,

43:11

whatever. Option number two was...

43:13

Yeah, but the

43:16

Patreon thing's quite the motivation and this is the last

43:18

day of the month. Yeah. We

43:21

should do that. This actually really helps

43:23

our families. Which tells you how bad

43:25

that other episode was. So we climbed

43:28

Mount Mordor and we cashed it into

43:30

the volcano. The point is

43:35

thank you very much patrons for supporting the

43:37

podcast. We are severely grateful

43:40

and if you want

43:42

to check that out, go to

43:44

patreon.com/no dumb questions. And I think

43:46

we're going to start doing the

43:48

conversation over there, right? We

43:51

are. Yeah, I'm going to figure that out in the upcoming

43:53

month and we'll let people know how to do it. But

43:56

more or less, we're going To make

43:58

it so that anybody... You don't even have to... They

44:00

pay or contribute but anybody can

44:02

be a free member of the

44:05

paid member of patriotic and wisdom

44:07

of the conversation over there because

44:09

I like the culture unpatriotic better

44:12

as bunching. Once you

44:14

who are awesome. Who. Are on Reddit

44:16

and on Reddit frequently, but. I

44:19

don't want to force people who

44:21

want to talk about the program

44:23

to have to spend time on

44:25

Reddit. When. I think that could

44:28

have positive or it may be negative.

44:31

Impacts on a person's life. So woods

44:33

move it over to patriarch and let

44:35

everybody participates. Whether. Their patron or not.

44:37

He. I think so. Pitcher and I

44:39

com/the dumb questions. Thank you so much

44:42

for a encouraging. Our. Conversations his

44:44

friends at I think it's great. I really

44:46

enjoy it. And who are

44:48

we always say stuff like hey, this exists because

44:50

of you but no, look me in the ah

44:52

right now place. And. Looking you the if you

44:54

are a patron. This.

44:57

Actually does exist entirely because of you,

44:59

so if you hated this episode, blame

45:01

the patrons. But if this was fun

45:03

for you and it's been very fun

45:05

for me, Think. Of her current. So

45:09

what we're gonna talk today about: Tridentine

45:12

fit right in my household pets. Tridentine

45:14

Household Pets now to tile that together

45:16

with their city divers, that the Neutral

45:18

Buoyancy lab and they all have tattoos

45:21

and most of them have Triton's on

45:23

them. Really? Yes, they

45:25

do. So with that worked out better

45:27

than expected by think you ask me

45:29

about swim bladders, right? Yeah, so so

45:31

basically. When you go really deep in

45:33

water. Is. Is cool thing happens the

45:35

air gets smaller. And. So this

45:37

is really cool Things I think you live.

45:40

Talk to them for call a Caesar a

45:42

controlled emergency swimming ascent. says.

45:44

Oh yes, yeah yeah, didn't know that was

45:46

a term used by take a breath out

45:48

of your you know your regulator. And it's

45:50

a pressurized breath because you're under so much

45:52

pressure at the bottom that that's where you

45:54

have as big tanks on the back of

45:56

a scuba diver. You take this pressurized breath

45:58

and in you can. You can just open your mouth and

46:00

go, ahhhhh,

46:03

and you can swim up and your

46:06

breath will never run out. What?

46:08

Yes. No, I didn't know that's how it

46:11

worked. I've heard you talk about that before.

46:13

I had no idea that's how it worked.

46:15

That's how it works. So basically, and that's

46:17

an emergency maneuver? It's an emergency maneuver because

46:19

you've heard of the bends. Like you can...

46:21

Yeah, it's nitrogen poisoning basically from

46:23

rapid ascent, inappropriately rapid ascent. Yeah, so

46:25

if you go to the bottom of

46:27

the pool and you start breathing air,

46:29

then what can happen is the

46:32

nitrogen can absorb in your tissue, in

46:34

your blood, in your like everything. You

46:36

can just absorb nitrogen in your synovial

46:38

fluid, I think is how you say

46:40

it, like in your joints and stuff

46:42

like that. And so if you

46:45

swim up too fast, if you ascend too

46:48

quickly, then you'll end up like blubber. You'll

46:51

get maybe... Oh, tridented. Yeah. You'll

46:54

end up with your... Basically,

46:56

the nitrogen will boil out of your blood, but

46:58

it's not quite as violent as it sounds. But

47:01

anyway, that's the same effect. Bad

47:03

things happen. I call it the bends because you're bending

47:05

over in pain. Okay. Yeah.

47:08

And so anyway, you want to avoid that. And

47:11

so at the Nutri-Boyancy Lab, they said, hey, we're going

47:13

to do these new spacesuit

47:15

tests and we're

47:17

going to do a blind test

47:19

where they run the spacesuit itself

47:21

at a certain pressure. And

47:24

so they said, hey, we're going to run the spacesuit at

47:26

4.3 psi or whatever it was, but

47:30

it might be running at 6.2 psi. We

47:33

don't know. And I'm like, well,

47:36

why would you want to run it at a

47:38

higher pressure? Because when I tried on the spacesuit

47:40

years ago and I put my hand in the

47:42

glove, as soon as they pressurized the spacesuit, it's

47:44

like being inside of a balloon. And

47:47

so imagine a balloon, the

47:49

shape of your hand. Now

47:52

imagine it's pressurized. Now imagine trying

47:55

to close your hand. You

47:57

can see that you'd be fighting the balloon, right? How

48:01

much real estate is there

48:03

between your flesh and your

48:06

balloon hand? In

48:08

fact, they put a foam block on

48:10

the back of your wrist to push

48:12

your hand into the palm of the

48:15

glove. That's a very good

48:17

question that you just asked, because they have

48:19

to think about it. And they also put a metal

48:21

bar over the front of your

48:24

palm, so you're kind

48:26

of in there. You've got a foam

48:28

block on the back of your wrist, and you've

48:30

got a metal bar on the palm, and it's

48:32

pushing you so that your fingers are engaged with

48:34

the glove. Make sense? Yes.

48:37

Yeah, good description. Okay, I get it. So how

48:39

much pressure would you want in your suit? Like

48:42

what – I just told

48:44

you it's either four or six, but do you think you'd

48:46

want more pressure or less pressure? Four

48:49

or six of what unit? Did you say

48:51

PSI? PSI, yeah, pounds per square inch. So

48:53

– Dude, I couldn't even –

48:56

Would you want more or less pressure in

48:58

your suit because of this balloon hand? What

49:01

would be easier to say? Well, I would

49:03

think I would want more, because all

49:06

my movements would translate, clumsily,

49:08

albeit. They would translate to

49:10

the outside with more pressure.

49:13

But I could get more precision movement with

49:15

a smaller suit and a smaller bubble

49:18

at a lower pressure where there's just a

49:20

little bit more ability

49:23

to engage with the material.

49:25

I could see an advantage to both. Yeah,

49:28

if you have the tighter

49:30

the pressure – basically, the

49:32

more pressure in the suit, the more

49:34

the suit will fight against you on

49:36

your hands, so your hands can get

49:38

really tired. So they really have to

49:40

design those hands – or,

49:43

excuse me, the gloves so

49:45

that they can close easily because you're fighting

49:47

that pressure. It's called a – every

49:50

joint – the goal for

49:52

the joints are to be a

49:54

zero-work joint, meaning the

49:56

physics equation for work is Pressure

49:59

times – Help the volume in so you

50:01

want to make it so that when you

50:03

extend your elbow, Or. Or

50:05

closure elbow. You're not changing the volume of

50:08

the suit at all. Said.

50:11

Make sense. Wow. I had not even thought

50:13

of that, but. It. Makes.

50:16

Infinite. Sets Exactly Yeah,

50:18

I mean. Humans articulate

50:21

in. Me: what's the number? One

50:24

hundred different ways with all the little

50:26

things that we can bend. every one

50:28

of those. Is. A change in

50:30

pressure. In. Part of the suit. Oh.

50:34

Wow, I'd never thought about that

50:36

complication. At.

50:39

All so you're oh, it's okay, see you're suggesting.

50:41

That. What they're trying to do is make

50:44

it so that no matter what you

50:46

articulate, the pressure remains uniform throughout the

50:48

suit in. On. Below the

50:50

Air Envoy loop. Is

50:52

that Am I here? Yeah yeah.

50:54

A constant volume joint is the

50:57

goal. Like. In In think about

50:59

building a C D T Control Variable Transmission

51:01

A C B. O Joint. J

51:04

Okay, I got it, I got it

51:07

yet. Accosted Volume joint. Not a constant

51:09

velocity joint which is a thing in

51:11

the car I have yet. great but

51:13

but eight. Basically imagine building a suit

51:16

of armor so that all the elbows

51:18

and knees and stuff thinned without a

51:20

is if the hard thing to do

51:22

right. Name is a very and oh

51:25

ring and every one of those joints

51:27

and it wouldn't be challenging. So. I

51:30

I didn't understand why they were test. they

51:32

said hey we're gonna do this test in.

51:34

It's possible that we're going to run at

51:36

a higher pressure or a lower pressure. Went

51:39

on until the astronauts what they're testing. Where.

51:41

You can put him in the suit are hey, you're on the moon.

51:44

Go. Walk around on the moon and we're

51:46

gonna. We're in a trim out your buoyancy

51:48

with await strapped to your legs and stuff

51:50

and phone blocks strapped to your back in

51:52

very specific locations and that that's kind of

51:54

what the video that I made is about

51:56

as at how they get those locations right

51:58

now an interesting topic. right now though.

52:01

So basically they get these astronauts perfectly

52:04

trimmed out, put them

52:06

in the water and they say, okay, go do all these tasks.

52:09

And then they say, how tired are you? And

52:12

it's a blind test. They don't tell the

52:14

astronaut what pressure they're at. And it's like,

52:17

I don't know. I'm a four out of

52:19

10 tired at the end. I don't know.

52:21

How easy was that task?

52:23

It was a three out

52:25

of 10. And so there's these, there's

52:27

these subjective type.

52:30

Is that the correct way? I've always get that confused.

52:32

Subjective. Yeah, so you're having

52:35

to give a guess of

52:37

how hard something is. And

52:39

the problem is when you're doing it, you've got another

52:42

astronaut sitting right beside you. And if you and I

52:44

pick up a block and somebody says,

52:46

Hey, Hey, man, how hard was it to

52:48

pick up that block? For me, it's going

52:50

to be like, Oh, super easy. And for you,

52:52

it's going to be really taxing. Exactly. Right.

52:56

There's a little bit of competition going on.

52:58

So if I say like, well, this block

53:00

was about a four. And then like, okay,

53:03

astronaut Whitman, what was that for you? One?

53:06

Yeah. Like a negative one. I don't

53:08

know. It just because

53:10

of all my math with my mind. Exactly.

53:13

So it's a hard test to run. But,

53:16

but they do it. But what I didn't understand

53:18

is like, why, why in the heck would you

53:20

want the suit to have more pressure? If

53:23

the human body is happy to operate at four

53:26

PSI, by the way, the

53:28

atmosphere you're in right now,

53:30

I'm in 14.7 PSI or a

53:32

little bit less. You

53:34

are what's your altitude where you're at? I'm at about

53:36

700 feet here. Where are you at? We're on the,

53:39

we're kind of

53:41

going up the hill here in

53:43

Rapid City. So 3000 ish. Oh,

53:46

wow. Wow. Not like Wyoming, where I mean,

53:48

in Lander, we were solidly at

53:50

a mile. Oh, wow. You probably have

53:52

way more hemoglobin than I do. Yeah,

53:55

I was going to say that. And I was

53:57

afraid of hobgoblins growing up, but you know, the. The

54:00

hemoglobin globin. Yep.

54:03

What is that white blood cells? Hema?

54:05

It's the red ones. How do you

54:07

say it? Hemoglobin? Hemoglobin, I think. Yeah,

54:10

so that's the oxygen Saturated

54:12

cells. Yeah. Yeah, you have more red

54:14

blood cells to transport oxygen

54:17

Oh, the white ones are the ones that

54:19

they fight the bad stuff, right? Yeah, seriously

54:21

eighth grade health I haven't covered this as

54:23

a child. So I don't remember So

54:26

the okay the whole purpose of the test was fascinating

54:28

to me because because I wait How do you know

54:30

you just know your psi off the top of your

54:32

head? For some reason

54:35

that's well one atmosphere

54:37

for some reason. I remember all

54:39

these numbers it's

54:42

1760 torr, I think it's 101.3

54:45

to 5 kilopascals. It's 14.7 psi and was it was

54:47

the other ones? I

54:52

don't know. There's more but for some reason

54:54

I got really excited about one atmosphere of

54:56

pressure and just Memorized a bunch

54:58

of it 29.92 inches of mercury. I think that's right Or

55:03

maybe thank you if you know how

55:05

many kilopascals I didn't know there was

55:07

a kilopascal. I Don't

55:09

know. That's pretty good. You get the things that you

55:11

memorize. You could tell me when

55:14

did when did Israel fall to Nebuchadnezzar

55:17

when was that 586 BC? Okay. Yeah,

55:19

so, you know this stuff winded Arias

55:22

take over approximately Yeah,

55:24

520 give or take yeah, you know

55:26

these things. I don't know that stuff. So

55:29

anyway, the test they were running

55:31

was fascinating They said ideally When

55:34

astronauts go to the moon with

55:36

Artemis we could run them at

55:38

a higher pressure And

55:41

I said why would you want to do that because that that

55:43

makes it harder for the glove thing, you know I

55:45

remember this from years ago and they said oh well

55:48

it it will decrease the pre-breathe time

55:52

What does that term mean? Yeah, basically right

55:54

now on the International Space Station and

55:56

people don't realize this if they go

55:58

do a space You think, oh,

56:00

they're gonna put on a spacesuit and then they're

56:03

gonna go out the airlock and then they're gonna

56:05

go, you know, like move around on the outside

56:07

of the space station. Yeah. Yep. Sure. Except

56:09

that's not exactly how it works. You

56:13

start by putting a mask on your face. It

56:15

looks like an oxygen mask in a hospital. Okay.

56:19

And you breathe 100% pure oxygen for

56:22

like two and a half hours or

56:24

two hours or something like that. You

56:26

have to do what's called pre-breathing because

56:29

you have to get all that nitrogen out of your blood

56:32

because on the space station, they're at

56:34

14.7 psi. They

56:36

have more pressure inside the space station than you

56:39

do where you're at right now. Yeah,

56:42

it's interesting. And so— But they're picking that.

56:45

Yeah, they get to select that. They pick that number. And so— Why

56:49

are they picking that number? It

56:51

makes sense because if

56:53

the goal of the International Space Station is to be

56:55

a lab and we

56:57

are trying to test microgravity, then

57:01

you would want the only different

57:04

variable to be gravity,

57:06

right? And so

57:08

you would want to pretend, oh, like

57:11

we're at one atmosphere. You would want to pretend

57:13

that. And so basically they

57:15

said we're going to do that at 14.7

57:18

psi, and then

57:20

after that, we'll see what happens. The

57:23

interesting thing is Apollo, when

57:25

Neil and Buzz went to the moon, they

57:27

were at 5 psi, but

57:30

it was way more oxygen. Like

57:32

right now, do you happen to know the percentage

57:34

of oxygen in one atmosphere?

57:36

If you had

57:39

to guess, 0 to 100 percent. How

57:41

much of the air you're breathing, would you

57:43

say, is probably oxygen? Just like

57:45

oxygen, like O2, not like— Correct.

57:49

Including CO2. Yes. So

57:51

CO2 is very, very minimal.

57:53

Nitrogen, argon, let's

57:56

say oxygen is 82 percent. It's

58:01

backwards. You're thinking about nitrogen. So

58:03

oxygen is like 21%. Oh,

58:06

nitrogen is a big contributor. Nitrogen is the big

58:09

one. Again, eighth grade science. I

58:11

don't remember that. The thing that

58:13

I thought was interesting is when the

58:15

Apollo guys go into the thing, they have

58:17

like 100% oxygen. And

58:22

so you've got 5 psi

58:26

in the Apollo like lunar lander,

58:28

but it's almost all oxygen, which

58:31

is scary because oxygen

58:34

helps things burn, right? Oh, with

58:37

that I know. Yeah. And so imagine

58:40

being in like a spacecraft

58:42

with 100% oxygen. If

58:44

you were in that environment at

58:47

14.7 psi at

58:49

one atmosphere, like everything around

58:51

you is dangerous. Everything is fuel. It's

58:53

like all rocket fuel. And like holy

58:56

cow, this thing wants to kill me.

58:58

But once you decrease the

59:01

pressure, everything changes. I

59:03

mean it's like a balance. And so what

59:05

they're trying to do is they

59:07

say, okay, right now these

59:11

astronauts, they're in a

59:13

spacecraft. If

59:15

they need to go do a spacewalk,

59:17

they have to pre-breathe oxygen for like

59:19

two hours, and then we put

59:21

them in the spacesuit. And then

59:23

they have to do like exercise in the spacesuit

59:26

and get ready. It takes like three and a

59:28

half hours for

59:30

them to – like if you say, hey, we're

59:32

on the moon. The

59:35

FedEx Moon guy just rang

59:37

the doorbell to bring us

59:39

our moon package. Let's

59:41

go open the door and greet the FedEx

59:43

Moon guy. It would take

59:45

you three and a half hours to be able to

59:48

do that because if you depressurize

59:50

really, really quickly and you just go from

59:52

like a high-pressure environment to boom

59:54

to like something like four

59:56

psi, then you would get the bends.

1:00:00

It's like, it's just like blubber.

1:00:03

Well, not really blubber because he was hanging out

1:00:05

in the backyard. But like if you're at the

1:00:07

bottom of a pool and you go up really,

1:00:09

really fast, you get the

1:00:11

bins if you've, if you've been like

1:00:13

saturated with nitrogen, cause you've been down

1:00:16

in the bottom of the pool so long. And

1:00:19

so doing a space walk is like being

1:00:21

at the bottom of a pool and swimming

1:00:23

up. And so

1:00:25

you have to constantly think about how

1:00:27

much nitrogen saturation is in your body.

1:00:30

Does that make sense? Yes.

1:00:32

Okay. Three things very quickly. Uh,

1:00:34

one, no, I really

1:00:36

am an idiot because I make

1:00:38

fires burn things and I understand what oxygen

1:00:42

does to things and that oxygen

1:00:44

in high concentrations is that that's

1:00:49

ideal for stoking fire,

1:00:51

flammable even. So for me

1:00:53

to guess that the world we live in is

1:00:55

82% oxygen and we don't constantly

1:00:58

explode. Bad form Whitman.

1:01:00

It's basically live radio. What do you think?

1:01:02

You're good. I'm not showing you up the

1:01:04

questions in a, in a easy to understand

1:01:06

way. No, no, no, no. I, my

1:01:09

bad. Should've had that too. Okay.

1:01:11

So that's a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere

1:01:14

and we are taking that

1:01:16

out of, I mean they're

1:01:19

breathing basically just oxygen, right?

1:01:22

They're trying to super saturate the blood with oxygen. Is

1:01:24

that weird? Yeah. When they're

1:01:26

pre-breathing. That's right. Yeah. Do

1:01:29

you need, I mean, what would happen if we

1:01:31

just breathe all oxygen forever? Do

1:01:34

you need the other stuff that

1:01:36

is in earth's atmosphere? Are

1:01:39

our bodies adjusted to it or

1:01:41

do we really only need the oxygen

1:01:43

part? I don't know the answer to

1:01:45

your question and it's a great question

1:01:47

because there may be some long-term physiological

1:01:50

effects of breathing too much oxygen. And the reason

1:01:52

I say that is because when I was doing

1:01:54

my little lessons to get ready to go in

1:01:56

the neutral buoyancy lab, they said, okay, look,

1:01:59

normal scuba dive. They use air

1:02:01

compressed air We dive

1:02:03

with nitrox here at the NBL, which is

1:02:06

basically air that has more oxygen in it

1:02:08

than normal Now normal

1:02:10

nitrox is like 32% Did

1:02:14

you see the on the zoom call? Did

1:02:16

you see the balloons just go up? Yes,

1:02:18

I'm a hundred percent sure that just happened

1:02:20

I think you waved your hand. What just

1:02:23

happened make a peace sign How

1:02:25

I don't know what happened. There were balloons and they

1:02:27

came from nowhere I

1:02:30

thought I understood I was talking about the

1:02:32

concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere and now

1:02:34

I don't think I know anything I'm

1:02:38

trying to do the thing like the uma Thurman

1:02:40

dance, you know, okay, that was crazy. That's not

1:02:42

doing it So so anyway

1:02:44

the the oxygen In

1:02:48

the the gas that you breathe at the NBL,

1:02:50

it's called nitrox 46 You

1:02:52

can't like it's not normal nitrox. So

1:02:55

basically what did you put 46? That's

1:02:57

a concentration of oxygen So

1:03:00

so if you put more oxygen in your

1:03:02

air and you compress it and you go

1:03:04

down you breathe it you can stay down

1:03:06

Longer. Okay, depending on the double ish the

1:03:09

oxygen of what you normally get. Yeah,

1:03:11

I guess it is Yeah, so so

1:03:13

anyway, we breed nitrox

1:03:15

at the NBL And so

1:03:17

you don't have to worry about doing the

1:03:19

Oh neutral buoyancy lab. Yeah, I'm sorry. Forgive

1:03:21

me so one thing you do if

1:03:23

you're a If you're a scuba

1:03:25

diver you're gonna go to the bottom of the pool

1:03:28

and like the deepest dive I've ever done was about

1:03:30

A hundred feet and that was a long time ago

1:03:33

It was okay and I was looking at my pressure

1:03:35

gauge on my tank and man my air was going

1:03:37

fast because as I was breathing it it

1:03:40

was Compressed more and I was taking more

1:03:42

of the air out of my tank. It's

1:03:44

a very interesting thing So anyway, I was

1:03:46

I was diving and once you do that

1:03:48

if you go that deep and you and

1:03:50

you're breathing under such high pressure You

1:03:53

can't go to the surface because you'll get the bin

1:03:55

So you have to go up just a little bit

1:03:57

and then you look at your watch and you just

1:04:00

You just sit there and you float at a

1:04:02

certain depth and you start exhaling the nitrogen. And

1:04:04

then you go up to another one. You do, it's called

1:04:07

a safety stop. You go to about 10 feet or something

1:04:09

and you just start breathing, breathing, breathing. Try to get rid

1:04:11

of all that. And sometimes they'll say, hey, we're

1:04:13

going to do a two minute safety stop. And

1:04:16

then we're just breathing the nitrogen out and then you

1:04:18

go to the top. And then you still have nitrogen

1:04:20

saturated in your joints and in your blood and stuff.

1:04:23

You heal it afterwards even if you do it right? I

1:04:25

never have. But one of the things you

1:04:27

can't do, and this is interesting, is you

1:04:30

can't fly after you scuba dive for 24

1:04:32

hours. Huh.

1:04:34

Because if you were to go up to

1:04:36

your elevation, that's

1:04:38

less pressure, right? Right. And

1:04:41

so anyway, the thing that I

1:04:44

learned in this trip that was the

1:04:46

most eye opening to me is

1:04:49

you want the pressure of the

1:04:51

spacecraft to be as close to

1:04:53

the pressure of the spacesuit as

1:04:55

possible. Because

1:04:59

Neil and Buzz- Okay. That's my third question.

1:05:01

I think you're speaking to it right now. Remember a second ago, I

1:05:03

was like, I got three things and I forgot the third thing. The

1:05:06

third thing was everything you're describing is

1:05:08

so slow. What

1:05:11

if something happens- Exactly. And you're like, well,

1:05:13

I got to breathe oxygen for three hours.

1:05:15

So I mean, there's

1:05:17

a space gremlin out there destroying

1:05:21

our life support apparatus.

1:05:23

A real thing making it happen. I just got to

1:05:25

breathe- A micrometeorite. Let's say we

1:05:27

got oxygen tanks outside and a micrometeorite strikes

1:05:29

one of the tanks and they're all connected

1:05:31

together, but there's a valve over there. I

1:05:34

can go shut the valve. There's

1:05:36

always a manual switch. Right. Someone's

1:05:39

going to have to sacrifice themselves.

1:05:41

I know the spot. Yeah. So basically,

1:05:43

you can't just be like, oh, Sanchez,

1:05:45

he's going to do it. He's going

1:05:47

to save us. I

1:05:50

don't know. It just seems- I

1:05:52

think Sanchez is the guy, actually. I do.

1:05:55

Yeah. I think he's going to be great.

1:05:57

So that's the thing- So the idea here is we

1:05:59

can- speed up the time that

1:06:02

you could get out and address things. This

1:06:07

is vital for the long-term prospects

1:06:09

of doing space stuff or

1:06:13

colonizing something

1:06:15

with little or no atmosphere. You

1:06:17

have to be able to get out there quicker than

1:06:20

three plus hours in

1:06:22

order to just maintain

1:06:24

your existence because you're exposed. You

1:06:26

have no shield. You have no armor out there. The

1:06:33

design of the suit, the pressure of

1:06:36

the suit, the pressure of

1:06:38

the space colony

1:06:40

or space station, all

1:06:43

of those things might need to be reconsidered to

1:06:45

see if we could shrink the

1:06:48

necessary time to respond to things happening

1:06:50

outside. Absolutely. You

1:06:53

nailed it. That's the deal. I

1:06:55

didn't know this was a thing. I

1:06:58

was able to observe a government test. They

1:07:01

let me scuba dive and watch these astronauts

1:07:03

in these suits at the bottom of the

1:07:05

pool. I was

1:07:07

able to be like, oh wow, this makes so much—if

1:07:09

we can increase the pressure of

1:07:11

the suit or decrease the pressure of the

1:07:13

lander, the closer we

1:07:15

can get them together—for example,

1:07:17

right now, if you needed

1:07:20

to go get band-aids right now at the

1:07:22

store, how long would it take you to get ready?

1:07:26

I would slip on my slip-on shoes

1:07:28

and be out the door. If

1:07:31

that was the thing I needed most in

1:07:33

life, I could be out the door in

1:07:35

15 seconds. Exactly. We

1:07:37

need to be able to respond to that. But

1:07:40

if it's the whole family getting ready

1:07:42

to go to church for Easter, and you all want to—let's

1:07:50

say for some reason you all have to dress like

1:07:53

penguins or something. I know you don't dress up. I

1:07:55

don't want to go to that kind of church. Yeah,

1:07:57

I know you don't. But let's say it's a— Don't

1:08:00

know it's a daddy-daughter dance or

1:08:02

something and a everybody has

1:08:04

to get ready Like how long is it

1:08:07

gonna take you guys to get ready? Forever

1:08:09

I know right so

1:08:11

I I think there's a middle ground. I think

1:08:13

there's a middle ground that you can do I think

1:08:15

like an hour Like if

1:08:18

you think about a spacesuits over in the corner How long is it

1:08:20

gonna take me to throw on that space is it'll take me? I

1:08:23

don't know 30 minutes. I gotta put on the magic underwear that

1:08:25

cools me off I gotta put on

1:08:27

you know my diaper. I gotta

1:08:29

put on my little snoopy head suit. I gotta like

1:08:32

you know all 30

1:08:34

minutes, you know, maybe I don't know You're

1:08:37

seeing my skeptical face here. I mean That's

1:08:40

nice progress But

1:08:43

you're gonna have to figure out something quicker because

1:08:45

here's the thing man. My brain goes right to

1:08:47

military strategy if you put people in

1:08:49

space Eventually the

1:08:51

people will fight each other right now

1:08:54

the relationships in space are highly

1:08:56

cultivated Curated controlled

1:08:59

I'm not worried about people on the

1:09:01

space station get into a fistfight right now. I think

1:09:03

they do great I don't think that's gonna happen, but

1:09:06

if you start putting multiple people with multiple

1:09:08

interest in in

1:09:11

different stations in space Let

1:09:14

me just put it this way Eventually people will

1:09:16

fight people off of this planet.

1:09:18

It's going to happen really

1:09:21

it's going to happen I wish it wouldn't happen,

1:09:23

but it's going to happen because of human nature

1:09:26

and we have fought each other Everywhere

1:09:30

else we've ever been Ever

1:09:34

why are we not gonna fight each other there? Yeah,

1:09:37

okay. So are we get

1:09:39

to a place where combat happens in

1:09:42

space based on what you're telling me

1:09:44

about spacesuits? Fastest

1:09:46

suit wins the end

1:09:48

that'll be the deciding technology of who

1:09:50

wins at combat in space Holy

1:09:52

crap, man. I've never even thought about that. Also

1:09:55

don't want to think about that, but you're right

1:09:58

Have you heard of the I've heard about

1:10:01

this recently. It's called the the side

1:10:03

of these trap This

1:10:05

I don't know how to say it. I've only read

1:10:07

it It's a trap that

1:10:09

was popularized by this American dude

1:10:12

Graham Allison. I'm reading from the Wikipedia page

1:10:14

now Basically, he says that

1:10:17

if there's an emerging power that

1:10:19

threatens to displace a great power

1:10:22

Then they kind of always get into

1:10:24

a fight. There's always a war and

1:10:28

this guy Allison he uses

1:10:30

this to describe the relationship between China

1:10:33

and America however

1:10:36

However, there's a lot of I saw

1:10:38

this and I was like what you know

1:10:41

He's almost speaking as if war is inevitable

1:10:43

and I went back and I said no

1:10:45

There's no and so there's a lot of

1:10:47

counter arguments to this that say well actually

1:10:49

if you go back to history And this

1:10:51

is your this is your bailiwick if you go

1:10:53

back to history every time you see a new

1:10:55

power and emerging power coming up oftentimes

1:10:59

war happens, but not all the

1:11:01

time and so it's a really

1:11:03

interesting thing to study and Maybe

1:11:06

we maybe we table that and learn about

1:11:08

that different time. I mean one thought yes

1:11:10

it depends on the time frame that

1:11:13

depends entirely on the parameters if

1:11:16

you say the Phoenicians

1:11:21

under all kinds of pressure in the

1:11:23

Levant from The

1:11:26

the coming and going of the Assyrians the

1:11:28

Babylonians and then the Persians if

1:11:30

you say alright well the Phoenicians decide We're just moving

1:11:32

west we don't want to be a part of this

1:11:34

anymore. The Levant is not a good place to live

1:11:37

There's a nice chunk of ground in

1:11:39

modern-day Tunisia, North Africa. We're just gonna

1:11:42

go set up. It's just a colony

1:11:44

for now We're just colonizing. What was

1:11:46

space to them back then? We're just

1:11:48

gonna go colonize that and they quickly

1:11:50

figure out This is

1:11:52

way more hospitable to our lifestyle

1:11:54

than old Phoenicia North

1:11:57

of modern-day Israel. Let's just move the

1:11:59

whole thing over there. Okay,

1:12:02

well if you look at a very

1:12:04

narrow time frame there, they,

1:12:07

overwhelmingly, the Carthaginians, who

1:12:09

are the Phoenicians, moved

1:12:11

west, overwhelmingly they got along

1:12:14

with Rome. Eventually

1:12:16

they had a series of really

1:12:19

ugly wars with Rome, but

1:12:22

it kind of defeats the thesis when you zoom

1:12:24

out a little bit and you're like, yeah, but

1:12:27

for the most part that worked out. It ended

1:12:29

very badly, but do the

1:12:31

hundreds of years where it worked out

1:12:33

not count for anything? I mean,

1:12:37

those are good times. I think it counts. So

1:12:41

my question on all of that in terms

1:12:43

of a big grand historical theory would be,

1:12:47

what counts as a rising power and

1:12:51

how long do they have to be rising before we

1:12:53

count them? I'm not

1:12:56

sure I'm convinced, but I'm convinceable and that would

1:12:58

be a fun conversation for another time. Golly,

1:13:00

dude, it's so interesting that your

1:13:02

brain just instantly solved that problem.

1:13:04

Like, the Space

1:13:07

Force is a thing and isn't there like

1:13:09

a space movie now where people fight on the moon? I

1:13:11

don't know the name, but for all mankind. I haven't seen

1:13:13

it, but people don't know what that is. It's

1:13:16

some kind of show and I don't know. I

1:13:18

know there is a, there's a

1:13:20

scene that I've seen like floating around on

1:13:22

social media of like astronauts with rifles or

1:13:24

something. Don't like to think about that, but

1:13:28

the fact that there is a Space Force implies

1:13:30

that eventually. What a waste. Yeah.

1:13:32

What a waste. Why is it a... Oh,

1:13:35

you're seeing what you went through

1:13:37

to almost become an

1:13:39

astronaut? You're baiting me right now. And

1:13:41

then thinking about what it would look like for somebody

1:13:44

to go through all that and just be like, there go to

1:13:46

space. Now here's a gun. Shoot

1:13:48

somebody else who went through

1:13:50

all of that. I mean,

1:13:52

what a squandering of a mind,

1:13:55

of a life, of the dream,

1:13:57

of the energy. All

1:13:59

of that worked. to go and fight in

1:14:01

such an inhospitable space where the slightest wound

1:14:03

is basically death. There you go. I

1:14:06

mean, it's just, never would there

1:14:09

have been such an expense of

1:14:11

soul and of treasure to get

1:14:13

one dude in a place where

1:14:15

he could point a gun at

1:14:17

another dude. We should

1:14:20

not fight in space. This is very, very

1:14:22

bad and that idea sickens me. Even

1:14:25

just from a human resources perspective,

1:14:27

it's a horrible idea. Human

1:14:31

resources like, you know. Welcome to

1:14:33

AnyTech just a moment. Like that

1:14:35

kind of human resources? No, I'm joking. No.

1:14:39

The Russians put a gun in space. There's

1:14:42

a gun on the International Space Station right now. What

1:14:45

do you use it for? The

1:14:47

idea is for bears. If

1:14:49

you land on Soyuz and you land

1:14:51

in Europe or excuse me in

1:14:54

Asia, if you land on the land, Soyuz

1:14:56

is interesting. It's designed to land like on

1:14:58

Earth and so they have these,

1:15:01

they call them soft landing rockets but

1:15:03

it's anything but. Right when it comes

1:15:05

down, there's a radar altimeter. Right

1:15:08

before Soyuz, the Russian, you know,

1:15:10

reentry capsule before it hits the ground, it fires

1:15:12

these rockets to decelerate you

1:15:14

and so you don't just basically

1:15:16

hit really, really hard. It's

1:15:18

the same as the Soyuz anyway. What's the name

1:15:21

of their reentry thing? I

1:15:23

haven't heard that term before.

1:15:25

Soyuz, S-O-Y-U-Z, the Soyuz capsule. And

1:15:29

so anyway, it's like a little gumdrop kind

1:15:31

of thing but anyway, they have a gun

1:15:33

on board as I understand it in case

1:15:35

they land in the wilderness and there's bears.

1:15:39

The US has decided, no, we're not going to put a

1:15:42

gun on the space station. We don't need

1:15:44

to do that but if the Russians. If

1:15:46

the Russians feel like they need to do that, then

1:15:48

they can do that. So there is a gun on

1:15:51

the International Space Station which I thought was interesting. Do

1:15:53

they say which Russian did it? Was it Anton Chekov?

1:15:57

Because that would have so many layers. Who's

1:15:59

a fan? Okay, so

1:16:02

you get I mean what was your experience

1:16:04

at the lab? I mean, are you getting

1:16:06

suited up alongside the astronauts? Are there other

1:16:08

scuba divers in there watching this? I mean

1:16:11

I saw just a the tiniest little intro

1:16:13

to the video and it looks

1:16:15

like they made a moon But put it

1:16:17

underwater and all I can

1:16:19

see is you down there writing on a wax

1:16:21

clipboard I mean I saw the first few seconds.

1:16:23

Yeah, it was amazing dude So I

1:16:26

get to go down I get to see him do the

1:16:28

test They were picking up rocks and then

1:16:31

I learned about this last thing. I'd

1:16:33

like to explain so We

1:16:35

mentioned earlier that on the moon

1:16:37

you have one-sixth of

1:16:39

your weight, right? Yeah, okay,

1:16:43

but how much of your mass do you have? All

1:16:46

of it exactly all of it so

1:16:49

in Football when you run

1:16:51

or basketball you're running straight and

1:16:53

you try to change directions real quick. Yeah,

1:16:56

what happens to your feet? Well,

1:17:01

that's where a lot of the energy

1:17:03

transfer happens you're pushing off

1:17:05

of a stable

1:17:08

surface to redirect

1:17:10

that energy you got however many jewels

1:17:13

of force moving in one direction

1:17:15

and You're

1:17:18

trying to redirect all of that force you

1:17:20

can't do that without something dot work against

1:17:22

So what are your toes feel like when

1:17:24

you make that pivot? I'll say

1:17:27

you're juking somebody. What are your toes feel like in

1:17:29

your shoe? You

1:17:31

can film kind of post. It's a poorly fitted

1:17:33

shoe You feel them kind of mash up against

1:17:35

the front and you'll pay for that later. Exactly,

1:17:37

right? So now let's this

1:17:40

is so what enables you to put that much

1:17:42

force into the ground. I would

1:17:44

argue it's your weight I Know

1:17:50

and your momentum. I mean that's

1:17:52

what's producing force. No, no

1:17:54

your momentum doesn't let you put that into the

1:17:56

ground Like

1:17:59

you're You're having to do a

1:18:01

pivot force, right? So

1:18:04

you need traction on the ground. So if

1:18:06

you're playing basketball, you've got rubber shoes and

1:18:08

a hardwood floor. And

1:18:11

so your side to

1:18:13

side forces, that's friction,

1:18:16

right? You need friction on

1:18:18

the ground. You need, in other words, traction.

1:18:20

You need traction with the ground. And

1:18:24

the reason you can get traction is because of

1:18:26

how much you weigh. Do

1:18:29

you see that? Yes. It's called your

1:18:31

normal force. But does, OK.

1:18:35

But you don't float when you

1:18:38

run. There's downward force pushing

1:18:40

your body into

1:18:42

the ground as well. I mean, that's

1:18:45

momentum force. That's angular momentum that's

1:18:47

pushing you into that pivot. I

1:18:50

mean, it's why you get the, what do they

1:18:52

call it? When you do drawing classes,

1:18:54

you learn how to draw comic book style

1:18:56

art. You do all of these exaggerated impossible

1:18:59

poses. And the one

1:19:01

everybody learns in those elementary drawing

1:19:03

classes is the impossible pose. And

1:19:05

it's the one that is usually

1:19:07

depicting the god Mercury, where he's

1:19:10

leaning forward in a way that no

1:19:12

one could possibly ever stand upright. But

1:19:14

the idea is that that angle, you can kind

1:19:17

of picture it. It used to be like a

1:19:19

male or FedEx or somebody had

1:19:21

that as their logo. And you're

1:19:23

leaning so far forward that the

1:19:25

mind sees that and says, you

1:19:28

can't achieve that posture standing still.

1:19:31

Only with great speed can

1:19:33

you do that. Because your CG

1:19:35

is forward of your feet. Yeah,

1:19:37

OK. So when I picture that,

1:19:40

and I really break it down in my brain, I

1:19:43

am sensing downward

1:19:45

force, the speed

1:19:49

that is driving into the

1:19:52

ground and also forward

1:19:54

force and speed that is pushing

1:19:56

you forward, but you are

1:19:58

telling me and I'm fully. to

1:20:00

defer to the engineer on this one, that

1:20:04

that pivot is a function of weight,

1:20:09

not a function of angular

1:20:12

momentum. Yeah, that's what

1:20:15

I'm saying. And so that

1:20:17

downward force that you feel, there's this

1:20:19

thing in physics called the normal force.

1:20:22

And so you take the mass of

1:20:25

the object times the acceleration

1:20:27

due to gravity of the object, and

1:20:30

that's your normal force. Okay. Okay,

1:20:33

sure. Yeah, sure. And

1:20:35

so you can increase that

1:20:37

normal force. If you were running on a

1:20:39

Hot Wheels ramp and

1:20:42

you were running up a curve, then yeah,

1:20:44

you would have some of that. You'd be

1:20:46

slinging out into the ground more, and so

1:20:49

you'd have more radial acceleration. That

1:20:51

didn't hit. Pretend that I didn't say that. No, no,

1:20:53

no, no. No, no, no. No, like the hedgehog. I

1:20:56

can picture that. Yep. No, that was

1:20:58

a great example. Okay,

1:21:00

so your ability to put your foot

1:21:02

on the ground and push forward is

1:21:05

a function of your normal force or

1:21:07

how much weight you have. On

1:21:09

the moon, you don't have that. But

1:21:13

16.7% of that. Correct.

1:21:16

But you still have the mass. So

1:21:19

you still have the same amount of

1:21:21

mass you have to accelerate forward, but

1:21:26

you have 1 sixth of

1:21:28

the traction on the ground. This is the

1:21:30

first time I have ever understood this. I

1:21:32

have never thought about this in my entire

1:21:34

life. I didn't understand this. I

1:21:36

am a-hying really hard right now. I didn't understand this

1:21:38

until I went and saw what they were doing. And

1:21:40

so what they were doing is they were trying to

1:21:43

walk in the zero,

1:21:45

excuse me, the 1 sixth gravity

1:21:47

environment. And granted, the

1:21:50

neutral buoyancy lab is not a perfect simulator

1:21:52

because there's water drag all over your body.

1:21:55

But you're still, if I were to

1:21:57

walk in a straight line towards you right now.

1:22:00

And I would decide I want to pivot and I

1:22:03

want to move to the side. On

1:22:05

Earth, that's not a problem at all. But

1:22:08

Arthur C. Clarke, the author

1:22:10

of 2001, A Space Odyssey,

1:22:13

he wrote it like this. He said that

1:22:15

you're very sluggish up there. He said that

1:22:17

– how did he say it? He said

1:22:20

that you're – oh, gosh,

1:22:23

I have to get it right. It's like one-sixth. Oh,

1:22:26

I wrote it down in the other room. Basically, he said

1:22:30

you are one – excuse

1:22:33

me. You are six times more

1:22:35

sluggish than your weight would

1:22:37

suggest. That's what he said. You

1:22:40

are six times more sluggish than

1:22:42

your weight would suggest. So

1:22:44

you feel the other way. Yeah,

1:22:47

right? I think in my brain, if

1:22:50

you cut 83.3 percent

1:22:54

of my weight, I

1:22:57

would be blazing fast. My ability to

1:22:59

cut and dart and move – I

1:23:02

mean, it'd be amazing. I mean, you'd lose a lot

1:23:04

of musculatures, so I guess that's there too. But

1:23:06

I just imagine, whoa, you lose weight, you get

1:23:08

quicker than I think space. I'm

1:23:11

like, well, you lost weight. So you must be quicker. But

1:23:14

I hadn't thought about the component that was not

1:23:16

intuitive to me that you were just explaining. Your

1:23:19

ability to – to use my layman's term, cut

1:23:22

is relative to your

1:23:24

weight, which gives you that – oh,

1:23:27

wow. Well,

1:23:30

if you were to just run in a straight line,

1:23:32

you've seen the astronauts bunny hop in the

1:23:34

Apollo footage. I have. If you were to

1:23:37

go straight line, then you could slowly accelerate, and

1:23:39

you could get going, and you could start bunny

1:23:41

hopping across the surface. You could probably go faster

1:23:43

if I had to guess. You

1:23:46

could probably go faster, but the moment –

1:23:48

you're not going to have races in tracks

1:23:51

on the moon, at least

1:23:53

not in tight tracks, like in a circle.

1:23:56

The ability to turn is compromised

1:23:58

because you have to – have all of

1:24:00

the inertia that you have right here on

1:24:03

Earth. If you

1:24:05

could run as fast as you could

1:24:07

here on Earth on the moon and

1:24:09

then and then I say okay stop. It

1:24:13

would start a long a very

1:24:17

long event of you plowing a ditch

1:24:19

on the moon because the soil is

1:24:21

not very compacted in certain places you

1:24:23

know it's like moon dust and you

1:24:25

would try to put traction into the

1:24:27

ground but you would just drag your

1:24:29

toes and it's a

1:24:31

really odd thing to think about that I

1:24:33

had never understood but anyway

1:24:35

that was the big there are two takeaways for

1:24:38

me from this whole experience number one I just

1:24:41

did the balloons again did you see that the thumbs

1:24:43

up what I don't

1:24:45

have it activated but you do you did a

1:24:47

thumbs up and a thumbs up just appeared but

1:24:51

how did the balloons happen that's the thumbs I

1:24:54

don't know maybe okay there's two

1:24:56

things that I learned if

1:24:59

this experience that were amazing the first one

1:25:01

is you want the pressure of your

1:25:04

spacecraft to be as close to the

1:25:06

operating pressure of your spacesuits as possible

1:25:09

that's the number one now

1:25:11

you asked a great question earlier about can

1:25:14

you just go 100% oxygen forever I don't know I do

1:25:17

know they monitored me for oxygen toxicity I

1:25:19

don't know what that means and

1:25:22

like the guy goes hey that was a great

1:25:24

dive just stay right here I got to monitor

1:25:26

you for 10 minutes for oxygen toxicity and

1:25:28

I said what what does what would

1:25:30

that look like he goes ah just a bunch

1:25:32

of shaking and stuff you look fine I

1:25:35

was like what hold on what does this mean

1:25:37

anyway so the first thing I learned you

1:25:40

want your spacecraft in your spacesuit to be as

1:25:42

close in pressure as possible and

1:25:45

the second thing I learned is that walking

1:25:48

around on the moon is

1:25:50

in my it wasn't difficult it

1:25:53

was just different I actually

1:25:55

called a guy from he retired

1:25:57

from NASA and I said hey you

1:25:59

know I'm doing this video and I just do a little research here

1:26:01

and I want to ask you about word

1:26:03

on the street is you're the expert on the falls on

1:26:05

the moon that the Apollo astronauts have I just want to

1:26:07

talk to you about that a little bit and

1:26:11

you know I hear it's difficult that they're

1:26:13

you know the way they they did it

1:26:15

was just pretty difficult he goes you do

1:26:18

not propagate that bullcrap about it being hard

1:26:20

they had fun on the moon and I

1:26:22

was like wait what I'm just he goes

1:26:25

they enjoyed it they were skipping they were

1:26:27

singing while they were walking it was not

1:26:29

difficult it was different okay

1:26:32

that was a yes sir yes sir but it

1:26:35

was the second thing is

1:26:37

that you are more sluggish because you have

1:26:39

the same amount of momentum but

1:26:42

you don't have the ability to cut

1:26:44

or transfer any of that to

1:26:46

the soil you don't I feel

1:26:49

that a little bit underwater when I fight

1:26:51

with my kids and we do underwater karate

1:26:53

and Street Fighter and stuff some

1:26:56

of that some of that is the resistance of

1:26:58

the water but I'm compensating for that

1:27:00

some of that is the

1:27:02

fact that I simply don't

1:27:04

have the weight to drive

1:27:06

into the bottom of the pool

1:27:08

surface if I'm understanding you correctly

1:27:11

that I do when do we do fake

1:27:13

Street Fighter karate ninja stuff in

1:27:16

real life I just simply

1:27:18

don't have the ability to drive off

1:27:20

of that and change directions I

1:27:22

attributed that entirely to the resistance of

1:27:25

the water I think I'm now

1:27:27

understanding that there are two functions working against me

1:27:29

here one is the resistance of the water two

1:27:31

is I don't weigh that much in

1:27:33

the water and it's harder to push off I don't have

1:27:35

as much to work with my mouth is a gate because

1:27:37

I can't believe I didn't see that but you're absolutely right

1:27:40

man that would have been a great illustration to

1:27:42

talk about but I didn't see it that that's

1:27:45

a great illustration good job yeah

1:27:48

cool thank you for teaching me that yeah

1:27:50

that's great so yeah

1:27:53

that was it those are the two big things I learned

1:27:56

and I loved it the opportunity was incredible The

1:27:59

people at the Neutral Boys, The Web and there's a

1:28:01

guy their name Dominic Door. Ah, so that he actually

1:28:03

was part of the reduced gravity bomb it com as

1:28:05

thing I did when I was an undergrad. he was

1:28:07

running at that time. And now he's doing.

1:28:10

Other things that demands and everything. There's another

1:28:12

guy named Pat Killer. He's a scuba diver

1:28:14

and he's the guy that maybe basically babysat

1:28:17

mean all time and he kept me safe.

1:28:19

And. Are They did great and so it

1:28:22

was. It was wonderful but. There's.

1:28:24

There's some things about that video that. I.

1:28:26

Can't I don't get do a good

1:28:29

job of explaining it like Neil Armstrong's

1:28:31

X in the video and he explain

1:28:33

something about the angle of attack. Of

1:28:35

a spacecraft on the moon. And

1:28:38

it made me realize that landing so

1:28:40

hls the human lander system of the

1:28:42

Nasa's working on the ability to land

1:28:45

that on the moon is it's like

1:28:47

a cartoon way atlanta rocket like is

1:28:49

it's the the starship for Spacex you

1:28:51

landed on the you know the tail

1:28:54

without like a bright on the moon.

1:28:56

Okay, One. Thing I realized making

1:28:59

this video is that when we come in

1:29:01

to land that thing, we're going to have

1:29:03

to spend a lot of fuel just stopping

1:29:05

it. Stopping. Is lateral motion because

1:29:07

you have to tilt over rockets a lot

1:29:09

more? On. The Moon To stop them.

1:29:11

It's hard to explain, but it did make

1:29:13

sense with graphics in the video. So I

1:29:15

realize that in order to land on the

1:29:17

moon or to basically have to be coming

1:29:19

straight down like a needle. In

1:29:22

a pencil when you're jumping in the swim

1:29:24

for you know when you get are you

1:29:26

either pencil So. Yeah. It

1:29:28

it It was a a wonderful experience

1:29:31

and. I. Think. I.

1:29:34

Think that's the main deal. Those two

1:29:36

things: Attraction was amazing. I get to

1:29:38

see an astronaut fall on his back.

1:29:41

On. Like on the bottom of

1:29:43

the pool and I understood why. Because

1:29:45

it was he mismanaged his Cg. He

1:29:47

didn't miss manage. it was just different.

1:29:49

He was seven funny, was singing there

1:29:51

you go private yes, apple cramped a.

1:29:55

As it there is great to or

1:29:57

it was great experiences that thanks for.

1:29:59

They ceramic. I I will never See

1:30:04

the physical world the way I did

1:30:06

before this conversation. I understand my relationship

1:30:08

with the world around me better

1:30:11

than I did before we talked and What

1:30:14

an amazing way to spend whatever it's

1:30:16

been an hour and a half.

1:30:18

I can't say that after most conversations. I really

1:30:21

understand The

1:30:23

physical world better. Thank you. Well,

1:30:26

thank you for teaching me that when I'm wrestling in

1:30:29

The shadow in of a swimming pool that

1:30:31

yes, I'm fighting the drag But

1:30:33

I'm also not getting traction on

1:30:35

the ground, which is why it's so hard to

1:30:37

run in a swimming pool. That's interesting That's

1:30:40

weird that that's what you took with you The

1:30:42

real important thing that I taught you in this

1:30:44

conversation is that the only?

1:30:47

Honorable death for a fish that is

1:30:49

your friend is what to

1:30:52

try to them in the swim bladder That

1:30:55

is correct. All right people ever doesn't

1:30:57

say I'm got speed You