NASA Astronaut Explains: How to Become an Astronaut

Have you ever wondered what it takes to get strapped into a 4.4 million pound rocket? This week, all your listener-submitted questions are answered by none other than Clayton Anderson, a former NASA astronaut who completed multiple missions to the ISS. The team will dive into everything about his journey from one horrible intern experience to seeing the Earth out the window.

Additional topics include: astronaut diapers, "the bends", and a world-record underwater surgery.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Ignition sequence starts. Three, two, one.

(00:23):
Welcome back to university, everybody.
The podcast where we explore the hard hitting questions about earth existence
and the unknown. I'm Maj. J. Perrin with me as always is.
Judson Martin, and today we're joined by a special guest,
former NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson.
Hey!
Welcome aboard, Clayton.
And welcome back to everybody who's joining us again.
I hope you had a good Thanksgiving holiday if you're listening after that.

(00:45):
Clayton again, thanks for being here.
My pleasure.
First and foremost, tell us a little bit about where you grew up and we want to know,
has this interest in space been with you always or when did this, how did this come up?
That's a pretty global question.
So I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Ashland, Nebraska,
which is about two and a half miles to the west of Ames.

(01:08):
And I was eight, nine years old when I remember my mom and dad
awaking my brother and sister and I on Christmas Eve in 1968 to plop us down in front of a black and white TV.
For those listeners that don't know what a black and white TV is, you can Google it.
So check that out.
But we watched the Mission Control Center and, you know, back in those days,

(01:34):
Mission Control had two big cameras up in the back corners that looked at all the men that were running the console.
So ladies, we fixed that. We have women in that control center today, which is a big deal.
But we didn't back then.
And so the king of the room was the flight director.
And so I'm watching this with my brother and sister and it's Christmas Eve and we're not even supposed to be awake.

(01:59):
And my parents were pretty good about putting us in front of the TV when there was something important.
You know, when the guys would eventually land on the moon when Kennedy was shot, those kind of things.
My parents realized the implications for the future and put us in front of the TV.
Otherwise, we weren't, we didn't watch a lot of TV back then.

(02:21):
So here I am watching these guys listening to everything.
You don't see much because it's just dudes sitting at a computer console.
But they all are white shirts, skinny black ties, dark pants, pocket protectors.
Some of them are smoking.
It's just a different time in space back then.
And as I listened to the flight director, they were getting ready to do the go, no, go, go, no, go burn for translooner injections.

(02:46):
So, you know, the flight director says I need to go, no, go for translooner injection burn retro.
Go, G po go, fight all go, he come go, surgeon go, come, go.
And then they said, Hey, we need to talk to the crew.
So they said, Hey, crew of Apollo eight, are you go? And I'm thinking, Geez, do they really have a choice?

(03:07):
I mean, they're already out in space, but they said they were go.
And so everybody was ready.
They did the burn.
They went behind the moon for the first time and, you know, listening to that and experiencing that was like, I want to do that someday.
So you want to be the guy who doesn't have a choice.
I do want to be the guy that doesn't have a choice, at least in that endeavor, right?

(03:29):
So that's what I remember.
My mom would tell you if she were still around, she would say that we talked about me becoming an astronaut when I was six years old, that we discussed it.
And I just don't remember that, right?
I can't go back that far in my memory, but there's a very long answer to that question.
I mean, how many questions do you have?
I might have to shorten my answers up.

(03:51):
42 answers 42.
That sits well with our audience.
I was out there that understand what that means.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, here's an easy one for you then.
One we already know the answer to, but not everybody knows.
Where'd you go to school?
Ashland Greenwood High School in Ashland, Nebraska.
Then I followed that up with a physics degree at Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska.

(04:16):
And then I came to a school called Iowa State University and got a master's degree in aerospace engineering.
Awesome.
I think I remember, I listened to you speak before, and I think you talked about maybe a teacher who kind of made a deep impact maybe when you were studying physics,
who maybe in, or maybe it was in high school who kind of inspired you to keep going with the astronaut crew.

(04:38):
Was that true?
I had several actually.
In high school, I had a junior, well, junior high.
Her name was Alice Rakes, and she was my junior high science teacher.
And she established with me or in me a love for the physical method, right?
The ask the question, formulate the experiment, gather the equipment, perform the experiment, check the data, right?

(05:02):
Look at gather the data, check the data, and then summarize your results, right?
So the guy behind you doesn't have to reinvent the wheel all the time.
That scientific method was extremely important to me.
It kicked off my love of the physical sciences and that sort of thing.
When I went to Hastings, I had a great professor named Clyde Sackleman.
He's still with us today.

(05:25):
And he was that guy that pushed me beyond my limits, right?
I didn't really want to be a physics major in college.
I actually wanted to be a coach and a teacher.
I mean, that's what I thought I wanted to be.
And I took a couple coaching classes and figured out pretty fast that I didn't really want to do that.
But I didn't know what I wanted to do and he was very influential and he was very aggressive in pushing me into physics.

(05:52):
And, you know, I wasn't the greatest student.
I was okay.
But his enthusiasm for the subject matter and what I learned along the way, it was good for me.
But when I got to Iowa State and started to do engineering, man, I was lost.
You know, I was at Hastings programming computer, right?

(06:14):
You know, you had to do your computer science class and you had to write software and we're doing it in basic language.
Well, you get to Iowa State engineering world and it's Fortran 77.
I never heard of Fortran 77, right?
So every program I had to write as an Iowa State student, I had to write it twice.
I had to write it in basic and then I had to get my buddies to help me translate it to Fortran 77.

(06:40):
And anyone that's done software would know that that's fraught with error, right?
Just developing the first set in basic and making it work was enough effort, right?
But then to translate it over to Fortran 77 and then debug the code because someone write, you know, it was a huge undertaking for me.
So I'm really lucky I even graduated.

(07:02):
Well, he did a lot more than graduate.
Can you tell us a little bit about the journey from school to space?
How long did that take and what was that application process like?
Well, the overall summary is that I would go to Houston Johnson Space Center and be a summer intern in 1981.
So 81 I just graduated from Hastings and I got my first internship in Houston and I went down and it sucked basically.

(07:28):
I mean, they didn't know what to do with me and I sat in a huge room with about eight or 10 desks in the room.
And there was an we called them back then a secretary, a gal that was the administrator and she sat in the room with me,
but she sat way across at the other end and I was bored out of my brain.
They would give me something to do and I'd finish it in an hour and, you know, they'd go, oh, you're done already?

(07:53):
Yeah, it wasn't that hard.
And so they didn't know what what do you give a kid to keep them busy to engage them to make them useful or feel useful.
So I was doing a lot of busy work.
And it was interesting because I would learn that that room was the quarantine room for astronauts.
So when an astronaut got assigned to a mission, they didn't use their regular office.

(08:17):
They came to this office of 10 desks or whatever it was and they sat in there to be isolated from everybody else.
Well, that was kind of cool, but didn't help me from keep me from being bored.
And I remember the astronauts walking through there on periodically, you know, and I'd go, oh, I wouldn't know what to do, right?

(08:38):
I had no courage to say, hey, you know, you're an astronaut.
I'm not.
I'd like to talk.
But anyway, I was pretty, it was a it was a bad summer from a work standpoint, but a good summer from being in Houston and the big city and watching the
Astros and the Oilers and, you know, being exposed to that kind of thing.
So I went back to Iowa State for my first year and then I got a second internship after that year and went down to Houston and then following my

(09:05):
graduation at Iowa State in 83.
I got hired by Johnson and this was with a different group.
So the second internship was with a group that actually had work for me to do and it was cool work.
It was on the space shuttle and it was fun.
It was interesting and actually got my thesis topic from that work.

(09:26):
So I was able to write a master's thesis at Iowa State.
It's on a dusty shelf somewhere here.
Actually, I have a copy of my office here, but that was kind of how it happened.
And then I would spend 15 years as an engineer and I liked it.
I had no qualms with being an engineer at NASA, but I moved up into management and as I moved up into management, my job kind of started to go away.

(09:51):
And the interest of the job was changing to paper pushing and I didn't want to do that.
So my last two years as a manager at NASA, I was the director of the Emergency Operations Center.
I applied.
They asked if anybody was interested and I made the mistake saying, yeah, I'm interested.
And the next thing I knew I had the job, but it turned out to be great.
It was really cool.

(10:12):
I worked with the security division, the fire division, the health and safety division.
I worked with everybody and the idea was to create a dynamic response to any emergency, whether it be terrorists and bombings, a hurricane that hits Houston, a medical emergency, a fire, all that stuff.
And I worked with the surrounding communities to build that rapport with them.

(10:33):
It was a great job.
I really enjoyed it and it gave me great exposure at Johnson Space Center that I never would have gotten before.
And I think that exposure would help me become an astronaut.
So as I went through that 15 years as an engineer moving into management and then running the Emergency Operations Center, then I would get my second interview with the committee and more of them knew who I was, more of them knew of my reputation and apparently it was okay.

(11:01):
And so I got selected.
So 15 years as an engineer, 15 years as an astronaut.
Very cool.
I guess what is the purpose for the astronauts to be in that quarantine room that you talked about?
Well, you don't want them to get sick, right?
So we had an incident on one of the flights where a non-astronaut came to a party, really called a party, but there's a get-together for the crew and their families.

(11:27):
And then there are some special guests that come in, you know, the big dogs at NASA.
And one of these big dogs was sick, apparently.
And they didn't know they were sick.
And so they passed the bug.
And so the bug made it to space so everybody was getting sick in space.
You don't hear about that stuff.
NASA doesn't talk about a privacy and all that kind of thing, but it can happen.

(11:48):
So that's why they isolate you.
But the funniest part was when I went to Russia training with those guys and they do quarantine too.
And you'd go, you knew where they were getting quarantined because it was right next to where we were staying.
And they'd be partying and drinking and smoking and standing outside with all their buddies coming over.
It was the most hilarious thing I ever saw because, hey, you're supposed to be quarantined.
Oh, yeah, it's no big deal.

(12:10):
You know, their approach to that whole thing was totally different.
But the idea is you just don't want to be exposed.
Sure. Okay.
So now kind of just getting into your time and space, what were you feeling like physically and emotionally, like leading up to or during launch?
Launch day is a, that's a big day.

(12:31):
It's a, I'd never experienced before, obviously.
And you can only train for so much and you can only learn so much from your crewmates, right?
I would look at the guys that had flown before and I would see what they were doing, how they were behaving, what they did and try to emulate that.
For example, our last meal on earth.

(12:53):
I play, what do you want for lunch?
I don't know.
I know the Apollo guys, you know, they had steak and eggs.
That sounds really good.
But if I get to space and I start puking, I don't want to be puking steak and eggs.
So what do I do?
So I watch these guys.
Well, they ordered like a roast beef sandwich and potato chips.

(13:15):
I'm thinking, really?
So I said, okay, I'll have a turkey in Swiss with spicy mustard.
And I just kind of followed their lead and I didn't get sick, but I took a medication so that I wouldn't get sick.
But the pilot and commander, the guys in the flight deck can't do that, right?
They can't be under the influence of some medication when they're supposed to be saving the day.

(13:39):
So those kind of things on launch day, it was funny.
They went for a run and they didn't invite me.
So the crew, it was interesting in that I was supposed to fly in August of 2007 with STS-118 and I got moved up to 117 to fly in June.
And there's a lot of stuff behind that story too.
But the bottom line is here I was with them on 117.

(14:02):
I hadn't trained with them very much.
I was just kind of baggage.
I called myself the sack of potatoes, the SOP.
Well, these guys go on a crew run and they didn't invite me.
And on the day you're launching and nobody wants me there.
It's like this weird feeling, right?
Because you know, your crew is supposed to be that group, that cohesive group.

(14:24):
I would end up experiencing that when I flew the second time with STS-131.
I got that whole experience.
But the first time, and your first time, you don't want it to be weird.
You want it to be the experience, right?
And so I'm walking around the crew quarters at the Cape going,
where is everybody?
Oh, they went on their crew run and what am I?

(14:46):
What am I, chopliver?
So, but then we got into the routine of, you know, Clay,
you got your schedule to report to the suit up room at whatever time it was,
2.30, I forget.
Well, when you start that process, now it gets a little different, right?
You're putting on the suit.
You're checking the suit for leaks.
You're like, you're going, oh, God, I'm going to space.

(15:08):
And of course, I'd said goodbye to my family, right?
So I wasn't going to see them.
I didn't want to puke in space.
I didn't want to have to pee and you go to the launch pad and you carry out your stuff to the 195-foot level,
where you get onto the shuttle and there's a toilet up there.
And that's the last chance you get to pee before you get into the vehicle.
And so I did that.

(15:30):
But then you're taking your suit apart and putting it back together by yourself.
And that's not straightforward, right?
And you don't want to catch your diaper or a piece of cloth or something in your zipper such that you have a leak,
because if you know, you need the suit later and it fills up with oxygen and starts leaking,
you know, that's not a good thing.

(15:51):
So there was a lot of anxiousness.
I had a lot of anxiety with everything we did.
And I'll tell you a quick story and then I'll shut up on this one.
But you get in line to get into the shuttle.
There's an order.
The commander's first and the next person right.
But there is a definitive order.
But there's a telephone on the 195-foot level.
And as you line up, getting ready to go into the shuttle,

(16:13):
it takes a while for each person to get strapped in and buckled in by the crew that gets you ready.
Well, it came to be my time to talk on the telephone.
Well, the idea was I'd call my wife.
You're looking at a regular telephone with push buttons and you pick it up and you dial eight for an outside line.
And I dial my wife's number and I say,

(16:36):
Susan, and all I hear on the other side is screaming and crying.
She goes, it's Clay, it's Clay.
I know it's Clay.
He can't hear me.
I can't hear whatever it was.
She couldn't hear me for some reason.
And so I'm sitting there talking to her and she doesn't hear what I'm saying, but I can hear her crying and she's frustrated.

(16:57):
She can't say, I love you, right?
So I don't know what to do.
I know there's people waiting behind me.
And so I decide I got to hang up the phone and try it again.
So I took a risk.
I hung up the phone.
I picked it back up.
I hit eight.
I dialed her number and I said, Susan, I love you.
And she goes, I love you too.
So the connection was made and she was able to relax and she was able to say, I love you.

(17:19):
And, you know, I'll see you in six months or whatever it was.
But can you imagine if that would have been the last phone call that I would have had with her before I went into space?
And then if something would have happened, right?
Right.
Those kind of feelings that you get, you're supposed to be able to compartmentalize.
And I'm sure I did to a certain level, but there are always pieces of this puzzle that when you're laying on your seat and you're waiting for launch for two and a half hours,

(17:47):
and you're just listening to the chatter that goes on that kind of tells you where you are on the timeline.
You think about things, or at least I did.
And those are the things I thought about, right?
The letter I wrote to my family in case we exploded off the pad or if we had a Columbia and didn't ever make it home, right?
All those things were within my brain.

(18:09):
And it's hard to push those to the side until you hear the words in the communication loops that say, oh, crap, we're going to space.
We're going pretty soon, right?
Because as you listen to the timeline and the countdown and those things, you know when it's time.
And that's when your training kicks in and that's when you don't focus on the extraneous anymore.

(18:34):
You're focused on not making a mistake because you don't want to be that person that fails to do a job that you need in the sequence to be able to do your job, right?
So it was a stressful day.
It was a cool day, but it was stressful, but it was helped by the fact that I could talk to my wife that last time.

(18:56):
It would turn out that when I got to space and we docked to the space station two days later, the first time I could call down to my wife and I connected with her on her cell phone that NASA had given her.
She was with our whole family.
And so that was another sign that this was going to be okay, right?
That I had picked up the phone.

(19:17):
The signal was good to the satellites.
I connected with my wife and there she was with her kids, with her sister, with her brother, with my brother, with my sister, with my mom.
Everybody was there.
And so that was a very special, special time for me.
I got asked leading off of just kind of what you just said.
Did you have a feeling like when you were leading up to getting onto that rocket that you might not come home?

(19:43):
No, you don't think that way.
Unless you have an incident, you know, unless you have a thing where you can't connect with your wife on the phone.
That brings the human aspect to light more.
But if you don't have those things, right, if I would have picked up the phone and said, hey, honey, I love you.
I'll see you in six months.
Everything's good.
Tell the kids, give them a hug.

(20:04):
If it would have gone per plan, at least in my brain, you don't think that way.
Right?
You're trained.
They train the fear out of you.
You're trained to do the things that you're supposed to do as you walk down the ramp, as you climb into the shuttle, as you get in your seat.
You know, you're checking your seat belt, your auction.
You got people helping you.

(20:26):
All that stuff is what you trained and practiced.
And so if you're on that flow, or at least for me, when I was on that flow, that took over.
It was those times when the two and a half hours leading up to launch, when I'm laying on my back on this uncomfortable seat and parachute harness and parachute,
and I got to pee like a wild racehorse, and I can't pee in my diaper.

(20:49):
Right?
And you start thinking about stuff.
You know, and it makes for a great story now.
It wasn't a great story when I was sitting there trying to, you know, Niagara Falls, Niagara Falls, Leaky Fawcett, Leaky Fawcett.
Come on, come on, come on.
And then just about the time I was ready to pee in my diaper, the commander calls down.

(21:11):
He says, Clay, how you doing down there?
Everything good?
Man, you just broke my concentration.
I had to start all over again.
I never did pee in my diaper because by the time we launched, then you don't have to pee in your diaper anymore.
Right?
Your whole brain shifts and says, no pee in worry, no worry about pee in now.
We're getting ready to do some serious stuff.
And that was when it was exciting.

(21:34):
That was when it was cool when you heard and felt those rockets ignite.
I mean, it's the most incredible, powerful thing a human can probably experience, right?
We're fist bump and we're high fiving and, you know, and I have no idea what's going on, right?
I mean, I do, but I don't.
I haven't experienced it before, but I'm sitting next to a guy that had experienced it.

(21:57):
And I would be that guy three years later on STS-131, right?
And that launch was way better for me to take in all that was going on and to understand and to be in the moment, right?
And listen to the other rookies giggle and squeal and drop stuff.

(22:18):
And, you know, that was fun.
That was really fun.
Speaking of rookies, what is the selection process like that take that decides like a good astronaut from a bad astronaut?
How do they, how do they, what are they?
You shouldn't be asking me.
And mental assessments to say like, sorry, you're, you're candid and you're, that's all you'll ever be.
That's a, that's a question that I don't think anybody knows the answer to.

(22:42):
I have no idea why I was selected, except for my dashing good looks and amazing humorous personality.
So you're saying we got a chance to.
Yes.
Okay.
Well, you do your partner.
So that was good that we did that together.
You know, there's a committee that selects, but you got to get, you got to get through a lot of hoops to be even considered and be getting in front of that committee, right?

(23:06):
The selection or the interview committee is the, is the final piece of your puzzle, right?
If you get by those guys and they like you, you're in, but, but see, that's just the question.
Do they like you as I got in?
Was I technically as qualified as other astronauts?
Oh, hell no.
You know, I couldn't fly a fighter jet.
I couldn't pilot a helicopter.

(23:28):
You know, I wasn't a military jet jockey.
I hadn't, I wasn't a PhD.
I hadn't invented anything.
I didn't have any patents.
I hadn't discovered a chemical element that was brand new.
You know, I hadn't done anything except my job at NASA Johnson, right?
They gave me a job and I did it to the best of my ability.
And as I did it to the best of my ability, I got more responsibility and eventually moved into management than I was the boss of other employees, right?

(23:56):
And I tried to do that to the utmost of my ability.
I tried to get better.
I took classes, right?
I did all the things to better myself as an employee with the hope of one day becoming an astronaut.
Well, how did that happen?
I don't know.
I think a key thing was becoming that emergency operations guy simply because it put me in front of people that I probably never would have been in front of, right?

(24:20):
Had I kept on the path I was on.
So it's sometimes good to swap jobs or roles, but what I would advise to young people is be careful that you don't do that too fast too early, right?
If you're constantly hopping around looking for something, you may never find it.
You might, but I see that a lot that the kids take a job and leave a job, take a job and leave a job, take a job and leave.

(24:44):
That's not a way to establish yourself, in my opinion.
But I was lucky enough that my path as a non fighter pilot, helicopter jockey, PhD scientist, whiz, I was fortunate that I was on a path that was visible to the people who would ultimately select.
So was I qualified?

(25:06):
Apparently.
Did they like me?
I'm guessing they did, right?
And I had a good reputation.
As a matter of fact, my last interview, when before I got selected, I told them, hey, you've read consumer reports, right?
They said, hey, Clay, you got anything you want to close with?
I said, yeah, you've read consumer reports, right?
Oh, yeah.
I said the car issue.
Everybody's read the car issue, right?
Where they say, here, this car is highly recommended or not recommended or we need to gather more data.

(25:32):
I don't know if you guys have ever looked at the consumer reports, but that's what we did when we bought cars back in my day.
And so I said, I am that car that I believe I should be highly recommended, but I'm guessing most of you are thinking that I'm the needs more data.
And so I said, so go outside, go walk the floors and the halls of the buildings and the grounds at Johnson Space Center and everyone you see, grab them and say, hey, do you know Clayton Anderson?

(26:01):
And if they say yes, which I was pretty confident that a huge number, I mean, it's a small community, right?
Would know who I was and then ask him, do you think he'd make a good astronaut and see what they say?
Now, did any of them do that?
I don't know.
But I was confident in saying that to them because I believe that most of the people they'd run into, they would say, yeah, that guy's, he's smart enough.

(26:26):
He's a hard worker and he's a good dude.
He's a great team player and yeah, I think he would make a great astronaut.
That's kind of a badass way to promote yourself.
I don't want to talk about myself, but every single other person you will will.
Well, you know, I was taking a risk.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the first person they came across could have been my ex-girlfriend or something or, you know, former office mates.

(26:51):
Ah, guys of butt head, you know, on him.
I don't know, you know, but I was confident and I was trying to be confident and I really believe that the case would be that the majority of folks would say, yeah, that guy's a good dude.

(27:13):
Let's talk about a little bit of time on the ISS.
How about that?
Okay.
Jed, what do you got?
I mean, and this might have happened before maybe you arrived to the ISS.
Sure, sure.
What was your first time that you turned and saw Earth from space and kind of what you were thinking during that moment?
I do.
I was on the ISS 117.
It was our first day in space.

(27:34):
I'd cleaned up and gotten out of my space suit, which was one of my first jobs, changed into my on orbit clothing and I was doing my stuff.
I was turning on stuff, right?
That was my role.
But I had a shot, a chance to shoot up to the flight deck and I looked out the window and it was like, whoa.
Because it's so bright.
It's just so bright.
You can't understand how bright it is and how beautiful it is.

(27:59):
Now, I had no idea where I was looking, but it was cool.
I would go back and then I do remember better when I went to the space station.
So we docked on day two, flight day two, and then they transferred clay, the sack of potatoes across and basically they forgot about me.
The shuttle guys started to do all the shuttle stuff, right?
Get the arm ready to fly, get the spacewalk gear ready, all that stuff.

(28:23):
And Clay was there trying to figure out, what do I do next?
I'm on the space station.
I'm taking over for Sonny Williams.
Sonny, what should we do?
Should we do some handover stuff?
No, I'm too busy.
I'm too busy.
I'll get to you later.
So I was just floating around, wandering around, listening, learning, trying to soak in as much as possible.
But I do remember the first day I had a chance to actually look out the lab window on the shuttle or on the station, which looks at Earth.

(28:50):
And I looked out and it was beautiful.
It was, you know, aqua blue and clouds and the ground.
And I thought, that looks really familiar.
Where is that?
What was Houston?
We had just flown over Houston.
I didn't even know it, but it looked familiar.
And that's how disappointing those moments were, right?

(29:11):
Because you weren't ready for them.
You couldn't study for them.
So fast forward a little bit.
And then I knew through a computer program we had where our ground track was going to be, right?
Where we're flying.
And I saw that we're going to fly over Ashland, Nebraska and Omaha and Lincoln, right?
Where I grew up.
And so I put cameras in the, around that window.
I've outcrowed them to the wall and I had batteries ready and I had chips in the camera to,

(29:36):
to record the images and all that.
And I set a timer and I was going to figure it out and I was going to take my first picture of where I grew up.
All that's ready.
I set the timer.
I'm doing some work or email or whatever.
And I hear the, the egg timer.
And so I leap away from my computer and I see where we are.

(29:57):
We're coming in over the Northwest United States and I'm thinking, how am I going to find where we are?
I get down in the window and it's a flat window that looks at earth.
So you have to turn your body in your head and kind of look to the right or to the left to see where you are as you start to move five miles every second.
And I look for the Missouri River because I knew that was the squiggly line between Iowa and Nebraska.

(30:18):
Well, harder than it sounds.
But I found the dams on some of the northern parts in Montana and North Dakota, South Dakota.
But, but you could kind of trace the river.
And as you trace the river and as we're moving all the time, we're getting closer and closer to Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska.
And it's rolling by the earth, rolling by and I'm following.

(30:39):
I'm trying to find that squiggly line.
And when I finally get my bearings, because there's nothing that says Omaha on the map or no star at Lincoln.
And there's no italicized Missouri River that we all grew up with maps in school.
And Omaha would be a huge gray blob.
That's what it looked like.
I didn't know what it's going to look like.
It looked like a big gray blob and Lincoln, you turned your head and looked the other way.

(31:02):
There was Lincoln.
It was a little gray blob.
Well, somewhere in the middle was Ashland.
Well, as we rolled over that, I didn't take one picture.
I just cried.
I broke into, I cried.
Yeah.
Because I was so emotionally moved that here I was flying 240 miles above the place where I grew up where everyone,

(31:23):
everything I know is right down there.
And I can't talk to him.
I can't see him.
I can't touch him.
But I know they're there, right?
And it was a hugely emotional moment for me.
And I cried for quite a while and not one picture was taken.
I didn't touch one piece of camera equipment and then it sailed by and in seconds it was gone.

(31:45):
That was a key moment for me.
I would capture it later, right?
When I was a little more stable in orbit in terms of the emotions and no one when things were coming,
okay, I'll get ready.
Here it is.
And then it took some great pictures of Ashland.
Took a picture of Memorial Stadium in Lincoln during a game in October 2007.

(32:07):
And you can actually see the red people wearing red and the green field is pretty cool to be able to capture that.
So there you go.
That's my story.
That's awesome.
You know the astronaut Edgar Mitchell?
I know who.
I met him.
Yeah, he was a good dude.
Wow, that's cool.
He's got a quote where he says upon returning from the ISS, he says,

(32:28):
you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation,
an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it.
Is this something that kind of lines up with how you're feeling looking back on Earth when you're in space?
Yeah, I think that's a pretty aggressive take from him, but I understand it.
Astronauts today call it the orbital perspective.

(32:50):
What's the perspective you get of life on Earth from orbit?
Well, to me, I get all this and I understand the orbital perspective and I see the thin atmosphere and I say,
yeah, we should protect this place.
I mean, there's only life on Earth.
There's no life on any of the other planets in our solar system.

(33:13):
There's no life that we know of in the Milky Way galaxy, which is our galaxy, right?
Now, the universe is huge.
So is there life elsewhere?
I'd say the odds are pretty good, but we're all we got.
The Earth is all we got.
And so I agree that we should protect the Earth.
I'm a climate realist.
I don't deny climate change, but I also don't think it's all that we hear about through the media.

(33:41):
But I came home and I took care of my stuff, right?
Take care of your stuff.
Don't try to take care of everybody else's stuff.
Take care of your stuff.
If you want to mulch your grass when you mow, mulch your grass when you mow.
If you want to recycle, recycle.
If you want to get solar panels on your house, get solar panels on your house.
If you want to turn your heat to the temperature that doesn't use electricity, do all that.

(34:05):
But be realistic as you make all those assumptions and don't push them on everybody else, right?
Do I want an electric car?
No.
If I were to buy something like that, I'd probably get a hybrid, a gas and electric, but I'm not going to.
It's not in my finances.
It's not in my wish list.
I'm not going to do it to show everybody that I protect the Earth.

(34:29):
Status symbol, which is what some people do.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to do what's right for me.
And I'm not going to push what I think is right for me and make it what I think is right for you.
But I do understand that Earth is what we've got and we're all in the same spaceship traveling together as crewmates.

(34:51):
And that's the big orbital perspective thing, right?
That the Earth is our spaceship.
So yeah, we should protect it.
But look at the human brain.
It has developed over centuries, right?
The Cro-Magnon man didn't know what we know, right?
And so our brain is constantly developing.
We have smart people at Iowa State and at all universities around the world that are trying to figure these problems out.

(35:15):
And every day we figure something out.
And every day we try to make something better, right?
So I believe we will figure this stuff out.
And we will figure out the balance between solar and wind and hydro and nuclear and fossil fuels.
But I personally, Clay, does not believe we can survive without all five of those pieces of energy, right?

(35:40):
And I'm not going to tell you that we should be solar and wind only.
No, I think we should have nuclear.
I think nuclear should be something we really look at hard, right?
Because it couples with all those other things that will help in the bottom line to me as economics.
If every human has access to electricity, that's what causes your civilization to grow and to prosper and all that stuff.

(36:06):
But if everybody has access to reasonably cost, reasonable cost electricity, no matter where it comes from,
it will all better off. And if we all work together to figure out those various balances, right?
That you can't put a wind turbine everywhere. I tried to put one at the museum I run.
And I have to have a 400 foot fall radius.
So if that sucker, that tower, turbine falls, I have to protect a radius that I can't protect.

(36:34):
And also our museum sits right in a migratory bird path.
So I can't put it there because of that.
So it can't be the end-all solution, right?
It has to be, in my mind, a combination of solutions.
And that combination has to be economically feasible for everybody.
So there's my take on that.

(36:55):
You make a good point about that economically feasible for everybody.
Because a lot of the people who might just say, like, you need to go get an electric car,
you need to get solar panels or whatever, just don't even consider how expensive that is for some people.
And consider what is required to make that vehicle, right?
Sure.
Fossil fuels required.
Sure, yeah.
All the stuff in this room is based in fossil fuels, right?

(37:19):
So we can't say, no more fossil fuels!
Well, how are you going to build a laptop and iPad?
How are you going to build, you know, carpet?
I mean, there's a lot of stuff that people get on these soap boxes and they don't,
they stop thinking realistically.
That's why I say I'm a climate realist.
I try to be and I'm not that smart.
That makes three of us.

(37:41):
You want to do space walks now?
Well, I kind of had a, I would want more thought kind of on the nuclear energy.
I'm in a class now.
Shout out to our episode.
Let's go back like 10.
Oh yeah, well, we did have, we had an episode about fission versus fusion and things like
nuclear energy production.
Figure out fusion and you're in good shape.
Yeah, I think that's kind of hopefully where the future is headed,
but it's difficult to get there because there's very few, at least states in the United States

(38:05):
that are allowing generation four, it's generation four reactors is what they're called
are just new nuclear technology.
And it's, I think it's upsetting for a lot of people to see that just because.
But why is that right?
Most of it's because of places like Chernobyl and stuff like that.
Well, that was a long time ago.
Decades ago, right?
And our developing brain that I talked about, we figure out those problems.

(38:27):
Yeah.
Right?
What we knew then is different than what we know now.
And, but too oftentimes the press and people hang on to the bad stuff that they heard,
you know, oh my God, people growing three legs and their ears were, you know,
Yeah, they just don't understand right now.
They haven't, they don't have the wherewithal to, or the desire to go do the research, right?
That they could go do the, on their own, they let the media tell them,

(38:50):
they let others tell them what, how the cow eats the cabbage.
And that, that can be an issue, right?
Yeah.
And it's important that folks are well educated and think about this.
But again, I'll go back every time I talk about this and I don't talk about it much,
but that developing human brain is the key.
And, and the things that we know today that we didn't know 25 years ago, just look at it, right?

(39:14):
I mean, look at what we're doing with our phones and our podcasts and all this stuff.
We didn't do this 25 years ago.
Especially the podcast.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
This podcast, right?
So you just have to consider that we're going to get smarter and we're going to get better.
And we, and that will apply that knowledge in the right way.
And I think we'll be good.
I think that makes sense.
I have faith in the human race.

(39:35):
That's good to hear.
Yeah.
Although, although I see some examples where I go, yeah, I was, you gotta believe there's two sides to it though.
There's some people that, that lower that faith a little bit and they're like, okay, maybe we got a chance.
It's kind of a sine wave.
Yeah.
One of these spacewalks that you'd gone on, you had jettisoned some old equipment from the space station.

(39:56):
And it was a, around a 1400 pound tank.
Is that?
Ammonia tank.
Yep.
So, we, me and Judd can do that on earth, but it's cool that you're able to do it once you're on your gravity.
I'd like to see you do it on earth actually.
So I was curious, did you, did you just shove that towards earth atmosphere?
How did you, or I guess what was?
So there was a lot of analysis that went into that, not by me, by the folks that were training me.

(40:20):
I was lucky enough to get that assignment.
There were other astronauts who lobbied to get that assignment.
Oh, Clay, he shouldn't do that.
He's a rookie and I've done 37 spacewalks.
And of course I have much more talent and the ability to do that important task than he does.
I'm being facetious, but there was some of that going on.

(40:41):
I just did what they told me, right?
They assigned me to a flight.
They said, you're going to do a spacewalk with Fyodor your cheek in the Russian cosmonaut.
And then you're going to do these tasks.
Okay.
And the task was to throw away two pieces of equipment.
One was about the size of this, about twice the size of this table we're sitting at.
And it held things.
So hardware was delivered to space and it sat on this rack.

(41:05):
Okay.
Well, we took all the things off and they'd been installed in the space station.
So now the rack was empty.
We didn't need it anymore.
So Clay, throw it away.
That was my first one to throw away.
That was easier to throw away because I could get a lot of velocity on it.
And so the idea was, where do you aim the throw?
And I had a cone, imaginary cone off my chest.
So think of a basketball player doing a chest pass.

(41:27):
So I had to hit 30 degrees in that cone, right?
That was the size of it.
So if I threw it, chest passed this piece of equipment within that cone in the right direction at the right velocity,
it would deorbit and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
So the first one was easy.
I chunked that baby at 144 feet per second or some crazy because A, I'm very strong and muscular.

(41:51):
And B, it was very small.
There's some MLB teams that are a peak interest right now.
Exactly.
I actually announced over the comms during the EVA that I threw it faster than Roy Oswald and Brad Lidge,
who were Houston Astros at the time.
So you were a Houston astronaut beating the Houston Astros.
Pretty much.

(42:12):
My velocity was higher anyway.
So the second one though was a little different in that when we practiced,
we practiced on an air bearing floor in Houston with me and my spacesuit laying on my side on the floor.
Right?
And so I'm sliding and I had this mocked up 1,400 pound ammonia tank that I was practicing throwing it.

(42:34):
That one was way tougher.
I can't remember how many feet per second.
I hit, I was above the feet per second I needed to get it, the velocity to get it to go where we wanted.
But we didn't really understand, none of us did, where we should point the throw.
It turns out we should have pointed it right at the Earth's atmosphere.

(42:55):
So as I came around and I was upside down on the arm toward the Earth,
the space station had been rotated, yawed to fly backwards to put me in a position where it was safe for everybody
for me to throw this big honking double refrigerator away.
So when we got to the point where we were going to eject it, I wanted to eject it over Nebraska, right?
That was Clay's goal, but we couldn't do that because we didn't have calm during that.

(43:18):
We passed over Nebraska and it would have been so cool to throw it away there.
But we didn't.
We threw it away.
I was over Saudi Arabia or somewhere, but I chunked it and I chunked it kind of with a little bit of luck.
I was in the cone, that's easy to hit the cone.
And I threw it as hard as I could and all that seemed to work well.
But that one took a year and six months or something to re-enter the atmosphere.

(43:41):
The first one took about three months to come in.
How do they track that?
Like, no, when it's, you guys are just watching it from the station.
So no, NORAD, and those guys in Cheyenne Mountain, the military guys, they can track things that are bigger than a softball or bigger.
They can track Santa too, I'm pretty sure.
They do track Santa, yeah, but I wasn't up there for that.
They followed them and it was funny because the day the ammonia tank entered the atmosphere, the first call I got was it was coming in over Baja, Mexico.

(44:13):
The second call I got, it was coming in somewhere over Africa and then it ended up landing in the Tasman Sea.
So, you know, their ability to track accurately was, their predictions were a little off, but it came in and didn't hurt anyone that we know of.
So that's a good thing.
But yeah, and Fyodor, during a press thing we did after the spacewalk, Fyodor called them Nebraska one and Nebraska two.

(44:41):
I was going to ask if you got to name those.
No, he did.
Fyodor did.
And he knew my love of Nebraska.
He knew that I'm the only astronaut from Nebraska and that it's hugely important to me.
And so that was cool of him.
He didn't have to do that, but it was very cool that he did.
Well, I'll be following your footsteps and I'll take number two.
Okay, that'd be good.
Tell me how much time did you have spacewalks total?

(45:04):
38 hours and 28 minutes.
Okay, so I guess one question I have is the like you don't just kind of put on your suit and then just leave the doors.
No, right?
It takes.
You mean like Mark Watney did and the Martian?
Yeah, yeah.
No, you know, it doesn't work that way.
It's an involved process.
It is.
From being inside the station to being outside the station and like, you know, doing your work.

(45:27):
So can you tell us, I want a little bit about that process, but two, there's something called the bends, right?
Yep.
Yeah.
Can you tell us what that is?
So scuba divers will understand the bends is too much nitrogen bubbles in your bloodstream, right?
So as you get in a situation where pressure changes on the outside of your body and gets less, those bubbles start to fizz out of the solution.

(45:50):
So imagine opening a can of coke, right?
When you all that stuff now has less pressure holding it in and so it escapes.
You don't want that happening in your body and in your blood because those bubbles get in your joints and I've had the bends in a test in Houston in the vacuum chamber and I got it in my right knee and I do not ever want to have that again.

(46:12):
It was hugely painful and you can't make it go away, right?
You can move your leg.
You can try all sorts of stuff and it doesn't go away until the pressure changes to push that stuff back into solution.
So how do we accommodate that in space?
We pre-breathe oxygen and the idea then is if you're breathing pure oxygen, then that's pushing into your blood and pushing, forcing the nitrogen out to be dissipated.

(46:38):
So now you have less nitrogen, which means you have less chance that those bubbles get in your joints.
And while you're breathing this pure oxygen, they have you do like exercise, right?
Yeah, it's pretty minor exercise.
By that time you're in your suit.
So the way the process actually works is you put a mask on and you breathe for a while, then they close the hatch and then they drop the pressure in the airlock and you spend the night there at a lower pressure.

(47:02):
So that lower pressure of 10.7 versus 14.7.
More nitrogen is leaving your body every time you exhale, right?
So you do that overnight and that helps tremendously.
You put the mask back on in the morning.
They open the hatch up and equalize so you can go poop and pee before you get in your suit.
Then you come back in, they close the hatch again and you're always breathing either pure oxygen or reduced pressure, right?

(47:28):
So then when you finally get in the suit and you put the helmet on, you breathe in pure O2, then you do a little bit of exercise to increase your heart weight.
And that just means you move your arms slowly and you move your feet slowly in the suit.
And that will raise your heart rate slightly, which means you're forcing more blood to run through the system, which means more nitrogen will theoretically pop out.
Cool.
And I never had the bends anywhere except that one day in that test.

(47:52):
Did you know anybody else on board the ISS while you were there to struggle with that?
I don't know of anyone that had the bends ever.
Most astronauts don't talk about that stuff because they don't want it.
Oh, he got the bends. There must be something wrong with him, right?
There's a lot of that thought philosophy, right?
Anything that happens negative to you in your training or in your life as an astronaut can be a mark against you when you're going for a flight assignment.

(48:16):
Like almost drowning in your helmet.
Yeah, and that one never should have happened in my opinion.
That was stupid.
The system leaked before when you went out the first time.
Let me just ask you that question now.
The suits that they use on board the ISS right now are not new by any standard.
Right, correct.

(48:38):
Decades old.
So when you were out on your spacewalks, what were some of the difficulties that presented themselves with the suit?
What were some improvements that you would have wanted made?
Well, the question of suit sizing is always important.
When you ultimately get out in space in your suit, you're supposed to be floating inside your suit, right?
There's a little bit of space in every nook and cranny.

(49:02):
So there's no pressure points.
When you're in earth, in the pool, in the tank training, there's still gravity.
There's still weight, all that good stuff.
And so you sit in your suit in the water.
And so if you have a crappy suit fit, you know, there are metal pieces that rub for six to seven hours that don't feel good.
Or your feet can get squished or your hand.

(49:26):
There are all sorts of things that can happen in the water because the suit is in a gravity environment.
Well, if you suit fit correctly in space, it will feel really good because you're floating inside it, right?
You shouldn't have any pressure points, theoretically.
I didn't, my first three EVAs, it was awesome, but I had one pressure point on my left thumb.

(49:48):
And it pressed so hard during that seven hour and 41 minute space walk that we did that my thumb was dead when I came back inside.
I couldn't feel it, right?
And it took several days before the feeling came back.
But what we did was we then put a pad over that so it would alleviate that pressure on my thumb as long as it fit in my glove.

(50:10):
And then it was okay.
But those are the kind of things you have to worry about when you put on that suit.
The last three EVAs, I had a huge bruise on my shoulder and it was purple and blue and all those ugly colors and the skin had ripped and it was bleeding a little bit.
And I was like, wow, why did that happen?
I had no idea.
Well, I'd changed sizes since, you know, 2007 to 2010.

(50:32):
I'm sure I got more buff from all the working out I do, you know, because I'm huge, massive.
But something had changed, right?
And so I had an experience that I really didn't like getting back in the suit right now.
My shoulder was, that's a very painful thing to get back in that suit and have a constant pressure on a bruise that had torn skin and was bleeding.

(50:54):
And so that freaked the doctors out.
And then we had, you know, it turns out to be okay.
But that suit is older.
It's been upgraded over time to the best of our ability.
But we need a new suit.
The problem today is people want to build a suit where one suit does everything.
And that's hugely difficult, hugely expensive.

(51:15):
And then you have to ask yourself what size of human are you working on?
The smallest astronaut can be 5'2", the biggest 6'4".
And so all that range of humanoids that can be both male and female give you a huge envelope if you're going to be able to suit 98% or 90%, whatever the two sigma.
Yeah, the distribution, right.

(51:36):
The distribution curve is that we are told we will fit 97.6% or whatever that number is, % of the population.
That's hard to do.
That's expensive to do.
And people don't get that.
You know, if I was the boss and I was picking space walkers, I'd line everybody up by height.
And I'd go from the biggest 6'4", down to the smallest.

(51:57):
And then I'd look for the athletic people.
Right?
Did you play football or basketball or run track or cross country or softball when you were in high school?
Yes, step forward.
Right?
Because those are the kind of people that I know now haven't done six space walks.
Those people will succeed in space walking.
Not to say the others won't, but I'm pretty confident that if I get the biggest, strongest, most athletic, they will succeed in a space walk.

(52:24):
But that's Clay's opinion again, so NASA probably won't back me up on that.
Well, speaking of, I guess, injuries that maybe were sustained as an astronaut.
Perfect transition, Judd.
It's a segue.
One of the other injuries you sustained was actually underwater on an underwater mission.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Nemo 5.
Clay slices his thumb.

(52:47):
So what happened there?
Yeah, so part of our training is to put astronauts in stressful situations.
Well, you can't go to space to give them that opportunity.
It's too expensive.
What other ways can we put astronauts together as a crew, stress them, see how they behave?
So we send them to national outdoor leadership school, put them in the mountains and have them camp out together for a week.

(53:09):
Or we do it in the wintertime, which is even worse.
Or we put them underwater in the Aquarius habitat off of Key Largo, Florida, which was really cool, great experience.
And when we do that, you're in a crew of six we had, three astronauts, a scientist, and two habitat technicians, the guys that knew everything about the Aquarius habitat.

(53:30):
Also great dudes.
The six of us were down there and during the day, you're doing a space station type timeline, but an EVA, a spacewalk becomes a scuba dive.
Right.
So one of the tasks we had to do on a scuba dive was we had to build a structure and the structure was built out of PVC pipe.
And the PVC pipe was pre-drilled with holes.

(53:52):
It was pre-marked with piece numbers and all that stuff.
So it was a puzzle piece you had to put together.
You had to shoot a bolt and put a nut on the end of a bolt to fasten all the PVC pieces together.
Well, the guys that had drilled the holes didn't use the size bit that would easily allow the bolt to go through.
So some of the times when we put the bolt, try to put the bolt in the hole, it wouldn't go through.

(54:13):
Well, I had a pair, I had a wrench of some sort and I can't remember like a crescent wrench and I would whack on it with a crescent wrench and try to get it to go through the hole better.
This is underwater.
Underwater.
You had a scuba gear, right, on the bottom, 65 feet below the surface of the ocean.
Well, that became a pain in the butt and it didn't work all the time.
But then I found out we had a PVC pipe cutter.
You know the thing you put the pipe in and you squeeze and squeeze and it ratchets down and it slices through the pipe.

(54:37):
I said, oh, that's perfect.
I'll just take that out in the water tomorrow and I'll put the pointy end in the hole and I'll just go,
a couple turns and shave the diameter of the hole and make it a little bigger.
I was rocking and rolling, man, I was, creak, creak, throw the bolt through, put it in.
We were doing record time putting this thing together until I did it and it slipped and the blade sliced across my thumb.

(55:03):
And I'm sitting there underwater floating and I'm looking, you can see the scars right there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And blood's coming out of my thumb, right?
65 feet below the surface, it's green because the red is filtered out.
Okay, that's what you're saying.
So I was Vulcan for a time.
I was living long and prospering, but I was worried that I might not be living much longer because there were sharks in the water around us

(55:28):
and I'd watch Jaws the movie, right?
And they chum with blood and here come the sharks and I'm thinking, holy crap.
And so I'm watching this bleed and then it dawns on me, we better do something.
My partner's Emma Wong and we did the old with your hand underwater so you can hear the pop.
And I look at Emma and she looks at me and I do the wiggly fingers like swimming and I say, we got to go back.

(55:54):
So we go back inside and now the poop hits the fan, right?
Because now, right?
When you got to the airlock, a shark like jumped at you right as you were closing it.
No, I wish that would have made for a better story, but we avoided the sharks.
We got back into the habitat.
We got out of our gear, but the the Habtecs are pouring ammonia or not ammonia.
What's the anisceptic?

(56:16):
Hydrogen peroxide?
Yeah, hydrogen peroxide ammonia.
Look at this chemist over here.
Yeah, so they're pouring hydrogen peroxide.
They're irrigating my wound and I can see the wound now and it's a wound.
It needs to be sewn, right?
It turns out, Clay's blessed because there was a hand surgeon in a boat above the habitat who'd been out.

(56:39):
He was going to interview us.
He's he writes books.
His name was Ken Kamler.
He's a doctor and he's an extreme environment doctor.
So he's helped people on Mount Everest.
He's helped people in the jungle and he helped me on Nemo.
They have to activate their emergency response for the habitat.
And he had been out scuba diving, but he had been back to shore.

(57:01):
So they had to take a speedboat to get his bag of doctor gear and then speedboat it out.
And he'd been scuba diving.
So they had to make sure his surface interval was OK so he could go back down.
So they potted.
They put his gear in a pot that sealed and that is waterproof and they bring it down to the habitat.
And then he came down and so this guy sews my thumb.

(57:23):
I mean, it was an amazing.
It's in his one of his books. It's a chapter in one of his books, which is kind of fun.
Are you aware that that like might be the record for the deepest underwater operation of all time?
I would say it is.
It is like you you have that title.
Oh, there you go.
How many people know that?
Well, three of us now.

(57:44):
And then the thousands that are listening to the podcast.
So it was funny because when he comes down, the first thing they do is they give me a needle shot of Novacaine, right?
And and all I remember is is that I went and I passed out and I saw some guys, Harry Belly.
And my face was going right for this guy's Harry Belly button.
Sweaty, sweaty, Harry Belly button is really gross.

(58:07):
But then I woke up kind of instantaneously and I watched him sew my hand.
And then but then all I could think about was they're going to make me go home.
They're going to make me go up to the surface and I can't finish the mission.
But fortunately, they figured out a way to wrap my hand, put a glove on it, keep it dry.
And I was able to finish the mission and then be a subject in his book.
That's awesome.

(58:28):
Yeah.
Well, we got to be done.
Unfortunately.
Yeah.
You have to have me come back.
I was going to say we are about halfway through our questions, which is perfect because that means we've got one more episode worth of stuff.
So we're going to figure out something in the future.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I would love to do that.
I love to do these podcasts and share the story.
Right.
I have a ton of stories and I love to share them.
I go to www.astroclay.com and you can learn stuff about me.

(58:53):
I have books that I've written that you can purchase there.
And you've also got a museum, right?
I run a museum, the strategic air command and aerospace museum in my hometown of Ashland, Nebraska.
I've been there for 18 months now in the president CEO chair and things are getting better.
We're turning it, trying to turn it towards space a little bit more than the historical aircraft of the strategic air command.

(59:17):
But we build on that history and look to the future.
So come visit us there and check out my books.
And I have a new children's book out.
So you want to be an astronaut.
It's great for Christmas.
Great for men out there because it's a rectangle.
It's easy to wrap rectangles.
Guys.
Very nice.
All right.
We've got to say thank you again.
Thanks for having me.

(59:38):
Anytime.
I was over here playing footsie with an astronaut the whole episode.
Really?
Yeah.
I kept like, he would adjust his feet and I have to move mine.
I was bumping your knee a little bit too.
So I could tell when you were shifting because I had to shift and stuff too.
But yeah.
Okay.
Well, thanks a bunch for listening guys.
This episode was pretty awesome.
I'm not going to lie.
That's great.
I loved it.
And he had a lot of a lot of interesting things to say and I'd love to have him on again.

(01:00:01):
Yeah.
We had a conversation as he was out the door.
He said he'd be happy to come on again.
So lucky for those of you who really liked listening to him.
And I guess unlucky for anybody who didn't.
But that's okay.
You don't have to listen to that.
Yeah.
So our listener shout out this week is Guy Duggins, 18 year old from the Bronx, New York.
And his message for us is every time I listen to a new episode, it reminds me how much there is.

(01:00:24):
I don't know.
And he had a quote to give us as well actually.
And I get the sense that this young whippersnapper is wise beyond his years.
This is, let's listen to this.
He says, allow the answers to yesterday's questions to breed questions for today for answers tomorrow.
That's profound.
Very profound.

(01:00:45):
From a whippersnapper one or two years less.
Yeah.
Just literally two years less than us.
But thanks Guy.
What a guy.
What a guy.
Thanks for being an amazing fan.
I'm wishing you all the best in whatever you're keeping up with and keep exploring wherever your curiosity takes you.
And if you want to be featured as a listener shout out like Guy, you can do so.
If you hit us up on Instagram and our DMs, we might give you the opportunity or if you look at our stories or posts sometimes we'll give you a full.

(01:01:11):
A form that you guys can fill out to also be the listener shout out.
Man, he had a lot of great stuff to say.
Yeah.
And if you're, I mean, if we want to, if you want to learn more about Clay and his stories, hopefully we'll have him on again sometime in the near future.
But otherwise check out his website and his books and things like that.
Yes.
Website, book, museum.
Boom.
Peace.