Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's Robert and Joe here. Today we've got
Speaker 1: something a little bit different to share with you. It
Speaker 1: is a new edition of the Smart Talks podcast series,
Speaker 1: which is produced in partnership with IBM. This season of
Speaker 1: Smart Talks with IBM is all about new creators, the developers,
Speaker 1: data scientists, c t o s, and other visionaries creatively
Speaker 1: applying technology and business to drive change. They use their
Speaker 1: knowledge and creativity to develop better ways of working, no
Speaker 1: matter the industry. Join hosts from your favorite Pushkin Industries
Speaker 1: podcast as they use their expertise to deepen these conversations.
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell will guide you through this season as your
Speaker 1: host to provide his thoughts and analysis along the way.
Speaker 1: Look out for new episodes of Smart Talks with IBM
Speaker 1: every month on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more at
Speaker 1: IBM dot com slash smart Talks. Hello, Hello, Welcome to
Speaker 1: Smart Talks with IBM, a podcast from Bushkin Industries, I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio and IBM. I'm Malcolm Glabo. This season, we're
Speaker 1: talking to the new creators, the developers, data scientists, c
Speaker 1: t o s, and other visionaries who are creatively applying
Speaker 1: technology and business to drive change. Channeling their knowledge and expertise,
Speaker 1: they are developing more creative and effective solutions, no matter
Speaker 1: the industry. On the final episode of the season, our
Speaker 1: guest is NASA astronaut and retired Army Colonel Mark Bandahi.
Speaker 1: Mark holds the record for the longest single space flight
Speaker 1: undertaken by an American. He spent three hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: five days in orbit on the International Space Station, returning
Speaker 1: to Earth on March thirtieth two. During his nearly year
Speaker 1: long stay in space, Mark conducted scientific experiments on behalf
Speaker 1: of NASA, including research where he himself was the test subject.
Speaker 1: By documenting the physiological changes he went through, Mark serves
Speaker 1: as an important source of data and understanding the impact
Speaker 1: of extended spaceflight on humans. I spoke with Mark about
Speaker 1: his experience as an astronaut and what he learned from
Speaker 1: living in space for a year. He told me about
Speaker 1: performing research only doable in space, times he felt true fear,
Speaker 1: and how seeing Earth from orbit challenged his personal beliefs
Speaker 1: and led him to become an advocate for mental health
Speaker 1: and sustainability. Okay, let's get to the interview, So tell
Speaker 1: me a little bit. Did you always want to be
Speaker 1: an astronaut? What? What? What drew you to space in
Speaker 1: the first place. I was always curious about space, largely
Speaker 1: because just trying to get my head wrapped around how
Speaker 1: we fit into the very grandest scheme of things has
Speaker 1: always been interesting to me. But I always thought of
Speaker 1: becoming an astronaut like trying to become Spider Man, Like
Speaker 1: that's just not a realistic idea. It might sound cool,
Speaker 1: but that's like a superhero thing. So when I first
Speaker 1: joined the Army, my company commander, my boss, handed me
Speaker 1: a note because he knew I had a degree in
Speaker 1: in a technical field. That was a message from the
Speaker 1: Army saying that NASA wanted military people with these qualifications
Speaker 1: to apply to the ASTERNAT program. And I looked at
Speaker 1: the list and I had a bunch of them. That
Speaker 1: made me really excited. I thought, that's like, that's a possibility.
Speaker 1: And then um, when I went to grad school, had
Speaker 1: a lot of different things to possibly study, and it
Speaker 1: showed space physics, and just randomly the Army said, Hey,
Speaker 1: we're starting a new career field called space operations. I
Speaker 1: signed up and got accepted to go into space operations.
Speaker 1: And I ended up getting loaned out to the Aston
Speaker 1: office at NASA to work in the Michig Control Center, which, honestly,
Speaker 1: I love that job so much that I could be
Speaker 1: doing that till and never having been an astro and
Speaker 1: felt like I was super blessed. Was amazing to live
Speaker 1: in history and just talking to the astronauts in space
Speaker 1: helping them solve problems while I'm listening to what the
Speaker 1: flight control team is doing. That's a fantastic job. I
Speaker 1: absolutely loved it. During the three year period that I
Speaker 1: expected to do that, They're hired another class and that
Speaker 1: was That was the first time I decided to apply,
Speaker 1: and largely because my wife said, Mark, come on, you
Speaker 1: gotta try. Because I thought there's no way they would
Speaker 1: ever hire me, so I almost self selected myself out
Speaker 1: of that possibility. So really, I feel very very fortunate.
Speaker 1: I could have very easily not pursued this. I'm very
Speaker 1: happy it worked out, and I'm very happy I did
Speaker 1: pursue it. There's thousands of people that could do this
Speaker 1: job that never got the opportunity and may have done
Speaker 1: a better job than I did. I just somehow got
Speaker 1: the job. Yeah, now you had the record for the
Speaker 1: longest time in space. Right, it's the record for an
Speaker 1: American astronaut for the longest single flight. So Scott Kelly
Speaker 1: flew for through it in forty days continuously, and I
Speaker 1: threw flew for three and fifty five days continuously. What
Speaker 1: is it about you that allows you to do that?
Speaker 1: Like you know, if you I'm I'm I'm gonna say,
Speaker 1: if you put me through the exact same training you
Speaker 1: went through, there's no way I'm spending three days I
Speaker 1: would have I would lose my mind. I think what
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do is compare myself between the first flight
Speaker 1: and the second flight. After I came back from the
Speaker 1: first flight, I had no desire to go back. The
Speaker 1: big change for me between the first and second flight
Speaker 1: is I paid a lot more attention to my mental health.
Speaker 1: I got in the habit of meditating every day, and
Speaker 1: I think that helped me not only recognize the value
Speaker 1: of trying to appreciate the present moment and try to
Speaker 1: be curious about the present moment, but it also made
Speaker 1: me more aware of what internal habit patterns I have,
Speaker 1: and it gave me the ability to kind of almost
Speaker 1: be an external observer of those. So that when I
Speaker 1: I could recognize sometimes that hey, you're making up a
Speaker 1: very negative story and that's why you're grumpy right now,
Speaker 1: And that really helped me out with making a mental shift.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about what you're doing when
Speaker 1: you're up there. Why is it important to do various
Speaker 1: kinds of experiments and things in space? Yeah, great question.
Speaker 1: That's a really important question too. So it is a
Speaker 1: national laboratory, and it's it's unique because a lot of
Speaker 1: dominant forces on the ground are not dominant forces in space.
Speaker 1: So you get pretty interesting effects, like when you make
Speaker 1: a flame on the Earth, because of the pressure differentials
Speaker 1: and the fact that the hot combustion products are lighter,
Speaker 1: they will rise up and go away from the flame,
Speaker 1: and that will draw in the auction rich gases that
Speaker 1: keep the flame going. So in space, those combustion gases
Speaker 1: will just make a ball around the source of the fire.
Speaker 1: Turns out that flames in space burn more efficiently and
Speaker 1: at a lower temperature, so there's some potential to have
Speaker 1: a cleaner burning combustion engine. But that just gives us
Speaker 1: a more depth of understanding of how these things work.
Speaker 1: It just gives us another way to change some of
Speaker 1: the the variables. Another thing that that we can do
Speaker 1: on the space station is sedimentation. If you take a
Speaker 1: solution over time on the Earth with the heavier items,
Speaker 1: and that solution are going to settle to the bottom. Well,
Speaker 1: in space, there's no preferred direction for those things to
Speaker 1: go in because everything is in this what I like
Speaker 1: to call a free fall that just keeps missing the Earth.
Speaker 1: So we're in a continuous state of freefall. Solutions stay
Speaker 1: very homogeneous. You can do experiments like there's even the
Speaker 1: way we try to simulate the human body with body
Speaker 1: samples and try to understand how things work. In the
Speaker 1: space station, where those things float, it's a closer simulation
Speaker 1: to something being inside the human body. So there's this
Speaker 1: I could go on and on. Clearly there's a whole
Speaker 1: lot of different things that allows us to do. And
Speaker 1: delicate structures, even protein structures that we could never make
Speaker 1: stay together on the ground can stay together in space.
Speaker 1: Oh that's sting. So it just gives you a it's
Speaker 1: like another context for trying to advanced scientific knowledge. It
Speaker 1: just you've you've changed all of kind of the defining
Speaker 1: variables of the experiment. Absolutely, that's it's a very significant thing. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: And then there's also that the idea of what we're
Speaker 1: doing in the space station, not just for science, but
Speaker 1: for human exploration. Because we're putting people in space for
Speaker 1: such a long period of time, we're getting a better
Speaker 1: understanding of how to keep people healthy. We can do
Speaker 1: technology experiments to try to figure out how to get
Speaker 1: things to work for these longer age and space flights
Speaker 1: where we're gonna put people much further away from the
Speaker 1: Earth than I was on my flight. Some of those experiments,
Speaker 1: as were associated with me being a subject of the experiments,
Speaker 1: give me an example of a kind of health care
Speaker 1: related line of research. Sure, I'm very open about the
Speaker 1: fact that I lost eight percent of my bone density.
Speaker 1: That's not typical for somebody at my age and my
Speaker 1: activity level. But as a function of being in space,
Speaker 1: I lost eight percent of my bone density because there's
Speaker 1: no more you don't you're not exercising with any resistance
Speaker 1: at all. Is that? Is that the reason almost true?
Speaker 1: You spend all of your time except for when you're exercising,
Speaker 1: without really needing a skeleton to to to support you,
Speaker 1: because that's why we have a skeleton. When you're in
Speaker 1: a freefall all the time. There's nothing that you have
Speaker 1: to use to resist the ground or to keep you
Speaker 1: standing on the ground. So we have a resistive exercise
Speaker 1: device on the space station that actually it's very interesting.
Speaker 1: It uses vacuum cylinders as the source of the force.
Speaker 1: So when you expand the vacuum cylinder, unlike a spring,
Speaker 1: the vacuum cylinder the force will be constant regardless of
Speaker 1: how far you pull it, whereas with a spring, the
Speaker 1: more you expand the spring, the higher the force gets.
Speaker 1: So that allows us to have kind of what we want.
Speaker 1: But I like to tell school kids, if you imagine
Speaker 1: those vacuum cylinders being attached to one side of a
Speaker 1: seesaw pulling upwards and you on the other side of
Speaker 1: the seesaw pulling upwards, then you can change the mechanical
Speaker 1: advantage by moving where the pivot point is, where the
Speaker 1: folk firm is. And so we have the ability to
Speaker 1: turn a crank and it can adjust the force you
Speaker 1: feel anywhere from twenty pounds to six pounds. But even so,
Speaker 1: I'm stunned though by in the space of a year,
Speaker 1: even given determined efforts on your part to counteract the
Speaker 1: effects of the physiological effects of being in a zero
Speaker 1: gravity atmosphere. Even then, the effect on your body was profound.
Speaker 1: It's a lot, but I lost seven percent on the
Speaker 1: first flight, and I got it all back before the
Speaker 1: second flight, So I fully expect to get it all back.
Speaker 1: It does come back, and with If somebody ever, some
Speaker 1: archaeologists someday ever examined my bones, they would be able
Speaker 1: to tell that I had flung in space, because the
Speaker 1: way that matrix is built is somewhat different. But I
Speaker 1: fully expect all the all the bone density to come back.
Speaker 1: You know, the series we're doing is it's called The
Speaker 1: New Creators, and we're really focused on the role that
Speaker 1: creativity plays in kind of pushing the envelopes of knowledge.
Speaker 1: So I'm just I'm just curious about you up there
Speaker 1: in this strange environment doing what sounds like some pretty
Speaker 1: sophisticated experiments. Can you give me an example over the
Speaker 1: time when you felt your kind of your creativity was
Speaker 1: being tapped in a meaningful way in this experience? Yeah? Interesting.
Speaker 1: I would say there is an experiment called celestial immunity
Speaker 1: that involved us with uh small peatrie dishes that contained
Speaker 1: body uh samples. I don't know if it was a
Speaker 1: solution with some blood or or what or what. But
Speaker 1: I just know they were from various people, elderly and
Speaker 1: young people, and we would go through and use a
Speaker 1: pipette too inoculate them with various things, and then we
Speaker 1: would take these devices, put him in a black box
Speaker 1: to control the carbon dioxide and the temperature, and put
Speaker 1: them in a in a place to let them kind
Speaker 1: of incubate for a while. In the process of doing it,
Speaker 1: I think my creativity came in as I was describing
Speaker 1: the challenges that I realized that the the people who
Speaker 1: designed the experiment might not have realized we run into
Speaker 1: and I was able to to use what I've had
Speaker 1: my hands on to to give them advice about ways
Speaker 1: we could change the experiment around. Because those Petra dishes
Speaker 1: didn't have a lid, so they were just held in
Speaker 1: there by surface tension. And so the first time I
Speaker 1: did it, I I put them very slowly into the box.
Speaker 1: I closed the box, couldn't see what they were doing,
Speaker 1: and I had to very gently move them over to
Speaker 1: to the place where they're gonna incubate. And I had
Speaker 1: no idea if I was succeeding or failing so I
Speaker 1: think there was a lot of conversation, a lot of observing,
Speaker 1: a lot of trying to draw on the unique experiences
Speaker 1: I'm exposed to to help out them. And it turned
Speaker 1: out I was an orbit long enough that the second
Speaker 1: iteration that came up, and they had, among other things,
Speaker 1: that had put a thin sheet of flexible plastic on top.
Speaker 1: So instead of having to try to contain everything there,
Speaker 1: we just had to puncture it with a needle and
Speaker 1: add the add the inoculation that way, instead, tell me
Speaker 1: a little bit more about that experiment that that celestial
Speaker 1: immunity investigation. By the way, that's like the best name
Speaker 1: ever for a science experiment. Um, I agree, it sounds
Speaker 1: like Jesus is involved in somewhere. I agree, no wrong,
Speaker 1: But what was that experiment about trying to trying to
Speaker 1: trying to investigate. We're trying to understand how the human
Speaker 1: immune system reacts to different situations. So again, I think
Speaker 1: it's a great experiment to highlight because a better understanding
Speaker 1: of the human immune system will help out everybody. So
Speaker 1: on Earth, we might do an experiment where we have
Speaker 1: a variety of of different cell samples that were exposing
Speaker 1: to various pathogens and studying them and hear, what we're
Speaker 1: doing is repeating the experiment under a radically different set
Speaker 1: of of conditions and in the hopes that changing the
Speaker 1: parameters of the experiment exposed some new bit of knowledge
Speaker 1: or yes, And I don't know if that's been successful
Speaker 1: or not, but we do know. We do know that
Speaker 1: there are viruses that are more virulent in space for
Speaker 1: some reason. We don't understand why the biological things react differently.
Speaker 1: What was the most fun thing you did? Uh? One
Speaker 1: of my crewmates, Caleb Baron. For some reason that two
Speaker 1: of us decided we're going to try to do some
Speaker 1: stunts together. So we we literally would just have our
Speaker 1: feet hooked underneath some handrails and push off towards each
Speaker 1: other and then do something like get curl up, hit
Speaker 1: our hands down low. It causes to each spin um
Speaker 1: simultaneously n directions to a couple of backflips and then land.
Speaker 1: And it took a lot of attempts before we actually
Speaker 1: made it look like something was in sync. I've never
Speaker 1: once done a backflip in my life, but I've done
Speaker 1: four in a row before I hit my head on
Speaker 1: something on the Space station Uh, we grew hatch chili peppers. Uh.
Speaker 1: I recently got a certificate from New Mexico that said,
Speaker 1: congratulations your hatstronaut. So I'm proud to have that title.
Speaker 1: The thought we didn't cook with them. We of course
Speaker 1: it was science, so we had to ship most of
Speaker 1: them back to the ground frozen carefully. But they were
Speaker 1: very nice about letting us have some of the chili peppers,
Speaker 1: and they warned us that the stress response to the
Speaker 1: space environment that these peppers have, they think would be
Speaker 1: that they're more potent. And I think they were more potent.
Speaker 1: They were shockingly spicy. Yessa could sell those chili peppers
Speaker 1: to some fancy restaurant and it could be, you know, celestially,
Speaker 1: you know, celestial pepper soup or something. You know, what
Speaker 1: a great name for a dish. I'm sure that celestial
Speaker 1: foods will be the culinary trend of the future pretty soon.
Speaker 1: Will all be paying extra for specially vegetables grown in space.
Speaker 1: Forget farm to table, try orbit to table. Kidding aside,
Speaker 1: there was one thing I made sure to ask Mark.
Speaker 1: I wanted to know more about the relationship between the
Speaker 1: astronauts and space and the NASA team on the ground.
Speaker 1: New technologies are reshaping the way astronauts communicate with their
Speaker 1: counterparts on Earth. IBM, for example, is testing edge computing
Speaker 1: solutions on board the space station to try and reduce
Speaker 1: the time it takes to analyze and send data. But
Speaker 1: what does this information flow mean for an astronaut's day
Speaker 1: to day life and what happens if there's an emergency?
Speaker 1: I asked Mark for more details. Tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about the role that technology plays in UM in
Speaker 1: all of this. I mean, you're you're doing these experiments,
Speaker 1: you're actively learning in this new environment. UM, what's happening
Speaker 1: with the data? How are you making sense of it?
Speaker 1: Processing it? Tell me about that angle on the on
Speaker 1: your work. The astronauts live in the space station. The
Speaker 1: ground control team is controlling the space station, so that
Speaker 1: data flow that's telemetry from the space station and the
Speaker 1: commanding to the space station is happening just to actually
Speaker 1: get the thing to work, to get the lab to work,
Speaker 1: to make it if we want to change the temperature,
Speaker 1: we could we could go ahead and go deep into
Speaker 1: the software we've got on board that we're trained to
Speaker 1: use in case we lose communications with the ground. But
Speaker 1: if we even want to change the temperature, we just
Speaker 1: call the ground control team and say, hey, one of
Speaker 1: our crew members feels a little cold. We all a
Speaker 1: red we should raise the temperature by a degree or something.
Speaker 1: They would change it. So they're in charge. We live
Speaker 1: there and we take we take care of everything that
Speaker 1: we possibly can. So data transfer is crucial to the
Speaker 1: way we operate the space station today. In your time
Speaker 1: up there, did you have any kind of moments of crisis?
Speaker 1: Did you ever lose communication with Houston? Two times we
Speaker 1: lost out of control. I think we got to the
Speaker 1: point where they told us to start executing the procedure
Speaker 1: and then we're able to call us off, or they
Speaker 1: warned us that it's possible you could lose you know,
Speaker 1: maybe ten minutes from now, there's a risk of you
Speaker 1: losing communications. For example. What never felt scary to me
Speaker 1: and I don't. I think the reason it didn't feel
Speaker 1: scary is because when we do that on the ground
Speaker 1: for training, when we do it in a simulation, the
Speaker 1: simulation is much harder because in space, the ground was
Speaker 1: trying to help as much as possible. But on the ground,
Speaker 1: they give you a scenario where you call the ground,
Speaker 1: you get no response. Every everything is as bad as possible.
Speaker 1: So it was to me it felt just like a simulation,
Speaker 1: but where the trainers were willing to give us more
Speaker 1: help than they were willing to give us on the ground.
Speaker 1: So and the culture that I got trained in and
Speaker 1: that's worked for me really, really well, is one that says,
Speaker 1: slow way down. If you're on an emergency on the
Speaker 1: space station, unless it's an amumonia leak. In all other cases,
Speaker 1: slow way down because the worst thing you canna do
Speaker 1: is go so fast that you make a mistake and
Speaker 1: cause problems. But otherwise it's a very safe system. When
Speaker 1: I was leading newer crew members, I tried to encourage
Speaker 1: them to have a culture where if they had any confusion,
Speaker 1: that they would feel comfortable stopping everybody and say, hey,
Speaker 1: why are we going down this path that doesn't make
Speaker 1: sense to me, because that could be the one question
Speaker 1: that gets us to stay on the correct path. You
Speaker 1: said you didn't get scared in that moment. Do you
Speaker 1: ever get scared? Mark? Oh? Yeah, I definitely get scared.
Speaker 1: I don't believe you. To give you an example, my
Speaker 1: experience of returning to Earth is everything's really interesting while
Speaker 1: you're going through the atmosphere and you're in a ball
Speaker 1: of flame and the heat shields melting away. You can
Speaker 1: see things that are melting away going past the window.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. But then when there's nothing to pay attention
Speaker 1: to while you're falling towards the earth, and this time
Speaker 1: you know you're in a trajectory that will result in
Speaker 1: you hitting the earth with nothing to do except wait
Speaker 1: for the parachute to open for what I think was
Speaker 1: probably a couple of very long minutes, and nobody was
Speaker 1: having a conversation. We're just all quietly waiting to find
Speaker 1: out if we're gonna live and gonna die. I didn't
Speaker 1: realize how afraid I was that it wasn't gonna work
Speaker 1: until the parachute actually opened, and how giddily overjoyed I
Speaker 1: felt when when it actually opened, because I was just like,
Speaker 1: we're gonna live. So yeah, I was scared, And again
Speaker 1: I didn't realize it until after the fact. Yeah. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: let's talk You mentioned at the beginning you're sort of
Speaker 1: interest in mental health. Let's talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 1: You know, you're you went through an experience which is
Speaker 1: exceedingly difficult and unusual and surely must have taught you
Speaker 1: a great deal about the kind of the challenges of
Speaker 1: maintaining one's mental health. Yeah, it was a good experience,
Speaker 1: but certainly those life skills doesn't matter if you're in
Speaker 1: space or not. Um. I tend to get distracted easily,
Speaker 1: and so practicing trying to stay focused on one thing
Speaker 1: and paying attention and trying to maintain a sense of
Speaker 1: curiosity about something as simple as breathing is I think
Speaker 1: a really good practice to try to to expand your
Speaker 1: ability to stay focused and and actually even find joy
Speaker 1: and relaxation in it. It's it's very reassuring if you
Speaker 1: can get yourself to feel really relaxed no matter what's
Speaker 1: going on, that it's it's it's like you've got this
Speaker 1: island of comfort that you know is just internal to you.
Speaker 1: So I thought that was very powerful. It's not something
Speaker 1: that I how does the skill before my fifties at all.
Speaker 1: And I think meditation has certainly helped the awareness of
Speaker 1: the negative impact that the narratives that I would use
Speaker 1: to fill in the gaps and information I had was
Speaker 1: really powerful for me. And I'll give you an example
Speaker 1: that's associated with space flight. We have a module on
Speaker 1: the space station that's called the PMM. It's like the
Speaker 1: attic of the space station. If you of a task
Speaker 1: that takes for you that they've given you for you
Speaker 1: miss a do part of every activity is typically gathered
Speaker 1: the materials you need and a lot of time. That
Speaker 1: means you go into the p MM. And it's not
Speaker 1: unusual to see somebody's just ankles and feet sticking out
Speaker 1: between bags as they're digging with a flashlight a head
Speaker 1: lamp on trying to get deep into the into the
Speaker 1: depths of these bags that are bungee corded in place.
Speaker 1: And it can be very chaotic when you have to
Speaker 1: get multiple items, and if if you just loosely put
Speaker 1: it underneath the bungee cord and then bump the bungee cord,
Speaker 1: it can disappear very easily. So it can be very frustrating.
Speaker 1: So there was an instance I remember really well where
Speaker 1: I was had already spent twenty minutes trying to find stuff,
Speaker 1: and I still hadn't found the first thing, and I
Speaker 1: was getting mad, and I realized that the reason I
Speaker 1: was getting grumpy was the narrative I had was I
Speaker 1: the ground's going to start thinking of Vanda High is
Speaker 1: one of the slow the slow guys on the space station.
Speaker 1: He always takes longer to do other stuff. But then
Speaker 1: I realized that I didn't know that that was just
Speaker 1: some detail I was adding. And then I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: wait a minute. For all I know, the ground feels
Speaker 1: bad that they didn't give me enough time to do this,
Speaker 1: So what do I really All I really knew as
Speaker 1: fact was that I was on the space station and
Speaker 1: my job was to find stuff space hardware in these
Speaker 1: bags that are all bungee corded and floating around, and honestly,
Speaker 1: that was kind of cool, and I had really if
Speaker 1: it took me longer than they expected, then that was
Speaker 1: just a fact. It took longer than I expected. They
Speaker 1: didn't have to be a positive or negative emotional associated that.
Speaker 1: It was just a fact. So instead of as many
Speaker 1: times before I've come out of there feeling angry at
Speaker 1: the world, at the situation, just beating myself about not
Speaker 1: being good enough in my job, I came out being like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, this is kind of cool. It was just
Speaker 1: such a huge shift, And I think over time you
Speaker 1: perform better too when you give yourself a break, like that.
Speaker 1: So I think there's this aspect also about being more
Speaker 1: accepting of yourself, being more curious about it. There's just
Speaker 1: so many things that I think have helped make my
Speaker 1: life easy here and again, by no means am I perfect.
Speaker 1: I This is a continuing process that I'm still working
Speaker 1: on and struggling with. But it helps you to keep
Speaker 1: your kind of perfectionistic and self judgmental side and check absolutely,
Speaker 1: is that the most significant change that you've undergone. No,
Speaker 1: honestly that the most significant change for me was, uh, well,
Speaker 1: the first big thing was when I first got to
Speaker 1: the space station. It was after a very long day
Speaker 1: and I had the next twenty four hours off to
Speaker 1: recover from that. I spent the first ninety minutes the
Speaker 1: first one time around the planet looking out the window
Speaker 1: in awe, and the first thing that struck me was
Speaker 1: how isolated the Earth looked. When you are looking at
Speaker 1: the Earth and in the sun and your eyes are
Speaker 1: adjusted to the sun, it makes the backdrop to the
Speaker 1: Earth space look inky black, like the definition of lack
Speaker 1: of light, like it's liquid. So that was shocking to me.
Speaker 1: What do you say shocking? It was shocking because I
Speaker 1: don't think it was like I had never seen something
Speaker 1: that black. It was just like again, I I if
Speaker 1: you can imagine taking a ball and dropping it in
Speaker 1: a in a in a pool of black ink, That's
Speaker 1: that's what it looked like. And I knew it was
Speaker 1: I knew it was emptiness, but it was it just
Speaker 1: there was an emotional impact in that. I think, uh,
Speaker 1: I think there's been people that have been it's it
Speaker 1: can be hard to grapple with the sense of the
Speaker 1: Earth being isolated. Later on in the flight, as I
Speaker 1: was getting ready to come home again this is my
Speaker 1: first flight, I felt like I should be going back
Speaker 1: to the Earth with some unique perspective and some type
Speaker 1: of change to me. And I thought, am I blowing this?
Speaker 1: Am I? Like, I don't know what that is. I
Speaker 1: had this incredible sense of smallness. And I say that
Speaker 1: because another thing that struck me looking at the Earth
Speaker 1: was when you look towards the horizon, the atmosphere looks
Speaker 1: like a varnish on a rock. It's like a puddle
Speaker 1: in a parking lot. It just looks super thin. So
Speaker 1: recognizing that first of all, and then recognizing that on
Speaker 1: that same horizon none of the mountains show up they're
Speaker 1: too small. So these things where we perceive as huge
Speaker 1: relative to the size of the earth are unobservable lot
Speaker 1: on the horizon. But then the only thing about the
Speaker 1: largest structure that humans have ever built, and how that
Speaker 1: compares to the largest mountains, and then how big we
Speaker 1: are compared to those structures. I just I felt like
Speaker 1: any sense of self importance I had was stripped away.
Speaker 1: So I was really struggling with is that what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna come home with? This this idea that that that
Speaker 1: there's this meaninglessness to it like that was really troubling
Speaker 1: to me, and also had a lot of time to
Speaker 1: think about my mortality because I, you know what, I
Speaker 1: might not serve I have this, So it's a for
Speaker 1: me at least. I don't tell him that everybody has
Speaker 1: had his experience, but for me, it was a very
Speaker 1: thoughtful time. Yeah, I realized that you had. I was
Speaker 1: struggling with the scale of things when really part of
Speaker 1: my role is to be attentive to the scale. I
Speaker 1: choose if I'm studying a plant for my whole career,
Speaker 1: or maybe I'm sitting around the dinner table and being
Speaker 1: attentive to the scale right there, which is just my
Speaker 1: loved ones around the table, or maybe you're studying the
Speaker 1: structure universe. Just being attentive to that scale, the scale
Speaker 1: you choose and we have the flexibility to pick it
Speaker 1: and they're all okay. But just kind of accepting that
Speaker 1: I thought was was a big leap for me. UM. So,
Speaker 1: mental health advocacy is something that you've become quite interested in.
Speaker 1: The sustainability has also been an idea that UM is
Speaker 1: that something that also grew out of your those sort
Speaker 1: of observations when when you were in space. That interesting
Speaker 1: is to ability. Yeah, I do think that I did
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time on the space station thinking about, well,
Speaker 1: this is probably my last time in space, what's my
Speaker 1: what am I gonna do after I work at NASA?
Speaker 1: What is my purpose here? And I love being outside.
Speaker 1: That's why I joined the Army as opposed to the
Speaker 1: Air Force. I I just the idea of being outside
Speaker 1: and being comfortable in challenging environments is something that's always
Speaker 1: been appealing to me. And I also feel like with
Speaker 1: devices that we all carry around that are engineered to
Speaker 1: distract us, I think it's very easy for us to
Speaker 1: stop being attentive to the environment. That we actually live in.
Speaker 1: I I do think we've got challenges ahead of us.
Speaker 1: The climate change is is atmospheric change again, I I've
Speaker 1: already mentioned my perception of the atmosphere is that very
Speaker 1: thin resource. And I really want to get that message
Speaker 1: across the people, because it's easy to think of the
Speaker 1: earth as so big that how could we possibly impact it?
Speaker 1: But really it's not the whole earth we're worried about.
Speaker 1: It is just this thin layer we live in. That idea,
Speaker 1: as well as concern that we're getting so sucked into
Speaker 1: screens that I would love to get involved in helping
Speaker 1: younger people appreciate that there's other alternatives, that there's an
Speaker 1: outdoor world that's super interesting, and I don't think a
Speaker 1: lot of young people are getting the opportunity to compare
Speaker 1: one way of living to the other like we have.
Speaker 1: We grew up without those things. We know what it
Speaker 1: was like and how much fun it could be without
Speaker 1: having a cell phone in your pocket all the time,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people are growing up without that.
Speaker 1: So I'd love to get involved with getting people to
Speaker 1: experience that. Yeah. Yeah, well, wonderful, Thank you. Some of
Speaker 1: this has been really fascinating. Thank you. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for taking the time to chat with me, Malcolm,
Speaker 1: It really really was a pleasure. Um, I feel blessed
Speaker 1: I got to talk to you. It was really a
Speaker 1: wonderful opportunity for me as well. When Mark was looking
Speaker 1: at Earth from orbit and grappling with how insignificant we
Speaker 1: all seemed, he said he felt troubled by the possible
Speaker 1: meaninglessness of it all, But then he realized it's up
Speaker 1: to human beings to choose the scale we pay attention to.
Speaker 1: We decide what's worthy of our attention and what's meaningful.
Speaker 1: That might be something as expansive as studying the cosmos,
Speaker 1: or as immediate as having dinner with our loved ones,
Speaker 1: or as minute as the well being of a single
Speaker 1: hatch chilly pepper plant. This piece of wisdom from Mark
Speaker 1: is a great place for us to end this season.
Speaker 1: Pay attention to the scale you choose, because creativity begins
Speaker 1: when we give attention to something previously unnoticed, a minor
Speaker 1: detail overlooked, a bigger picture still unseen. As we strive
Speaker 1: to be new creators in our work and in our lives,
Speaker 1: let's remember that new insights can be found wherever we
Speaker 1: choose to look as long as we're attentive enough to
Speaker 1: see it. Thanks for listening to Smart Talks with I
Speaker 1: b M. This is our season finale, but stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more smart Talks coming soon. Smart Talks with thy
Speaker 1: b M is produced by Matt Romano, David Jaw, Royston Reserve,
Speaker 1: and Edith Roussela with Jacob Goldstein. We're edited by Sophie Crane.
Speaker 1: Our engineers are Jason Gambrel, Sarah Brigar, and Ben Holliday.
Speaker 1: Theme song by Gramoscope. Special thanks to Carl magliori Andy Kelly,
Speaker 1: Kathy Callaghan and the eight Bar and I b M teams,
Speaker 1: as well as the Pushkin Marketing team. Smart Talks with
Speaker 1: I b M is a production of Pushkin Industries and
Speaker 1: I Heart Media. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts. I'm Malcolm Glamo. This is a paid
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