Lori Garver - Escaping Gravity

29:39So it's funny to me because reading that quote, I thought, oh, I never knew Kennedy said that. But he's actually being fairly, again, pragmatic where he's saying the cost and the benefits have to get close to each other. And what you're pointing out is that those things didn't really have anything to do with each other for quite a long time. What of course we know now is that time and time again, historians see things with their own lens, and they tell something in order to advance, whether knowingly or not, that agenda. So the people writing about the early space years sell books based on romanticizing the decisions and the period.

30:25And the aerospace industry, who sponsors all these things, only talk about what Kennedy said that is reinforcing of what it is they want to do. 50 years after many of these decisions were made, lots of these books were opened up. That's where I was able to see what Eisenhower and Kennedy actually were saying and doing beyond the snippets that have been marketed and promoted as myths. I mean, mythology is great. You know, you use these things to tell a story. But who's telling the story was always somebody who either personally just was excited by what we were doing in space, or was involved in a little self dealing.

31:14Wernher von Braun constructed much of this, a brilliant person, and he wanted to use his rockets for sending people to the moon rather than bombing people in London. But he was also a pragmatist and was willing to use any argument or tell any story in order to get more funding. And I really don't have trouble because we all recognize it's nothing, no one, purely good or bad. We have heard one side of the story on human spaceflight. Sputnik scared the nation. We came from behind and beat them to the moon. Shouldn't surprise anybody. It was a little more complicated than that. Sure. Well, so let's follow on that because, you know, I think we're going to come back to this idea of, you know, what's worked in other cases.

32:11So one side of the story would say, look how successful America has been. But then you actually pointed out an interesting fact that I had never thought about. Oh, by the way, beyond Warner being a Nazi, which I didn't know, okay, beyond him being a Nazi, you pointed out that commercial airlines, as an example, are way safer, historically speaking, than traveling with NASA. Which I immediately, as soon as you said it, I said, well, that makes sense because think how many people have died, you know, as a percentage of the total people that have ever flown with NASA. And it's way greater than what we've had on airlines looking back.

32:45So I guess, you know, most people would say, but those are for profit businesses, Lori. They're, you know, in the Milton Friedman way. They're really only beholden to their shareholders. So why would they care about the quality of the ride? And the answer is, well, they actually cared more than the government. So do you think that kind of teaches a far different story about incentives for one versus another? Well, yes. And again, I look to aviation, as you said, as the analogy, because yes, over time, commercial aviation has become more and more safe. And it's understandable that NASA's record in going to space for safety isn't as good as the tried and true commercial aviation.

33:31But what I was comparing it to was commercial aviation is so much safer than our continued government operated air travel. So if you just look at aviation accidents with our nation's military service people in training missions, especially is a very bad record by comparison. What I was trying to argue for NASA was we had lost 14 people, of course, in the two space shuttle accidents over just 10 years. Sorry about my dog there. Who were we to say the industry would be worse? We have a very capable industry. And in the government, when we lost people on the space shuttle, no one lost their job. whereas in a commercial entity it probably goes away the company if you're going to lose i mean i i think the last major aviation airlines went bankrupt after their last accidents okay so let's go back to this idea of incentive structures laurie so you were the deputy administrator at nasa during the obama administration you were as you said pointed by the president, you worked with Charlie Bolden, who was the administrator, and you had to get approval and purse strings ultimately from Congress and deal with the OMB, the budget office.

34:59So how hard is it to align all those groups under one idea? Well, every dollar we spend in this country has to go through this process. So the space people love to complain about it, but it is really a given. And it works in the sense of the administration works toward putting a budget together. Of course, dollars are tied to policy. And when it hits the hill, you aren't supposed to have even talked about it much. So it was really challenging to make a big change through the budget process when you didn't have the head of the agency, Charlie Bolden, really on board and able to explain it. And he was an astronaut and a Marine general and a heroic figure.

35:54So these were difficult things to overcome. but if you look at where we are today we ultimately made a compromise with congress so this was the obama administration which at the time did have both the house and the senate democrat leadership and that first year we wouldn't have gotten very far without that but even so very hard to make dramatic change because, of course, the relentless momentum of the status quo in Washington, given the incentives are to stay. You get there, you get your money from your lobbyists, and you deliver to them. And that allows you to get reelected. Tough cycle to break.

36:45Sure. Well, I mean, we call that pork barrel where I come from. And so you talked about some of the pork barrel that you had to witness. So you come in, you want to move a project forward, and you likened it to a game of Twister when you looked at the map of states. Explain what you meant by Twister. Yes, we were directed to build the next rocket literally according to the states where the contracts would be given. That's why I said, you know, right hand Louisiana for the engine tests, left-hand Utah for the solid rocket motors, et cetera. And these, ultimately, there wasn't thought to whether it could actually build a rocket that would be able to launch within the period of time and for the amount of money that was proposed and deliver the best value to the taxpayer.

37:42In fact, it did the opposite of that, no surprise. So you also caught my eye in your book. When you brought up, I just, I did not expect this because I'm sitting there thinking, okay, again, I didn't know you grew up in a Republican household, but I know you served in the Obama administration, but I also knew you liked Newt Gingrich. So it's kind of like, I don't know where you necessarily fall politically, but you said something on subpoenas that just terribly intrigued me because it just, it was funny to me. You said in your book, quote, my experience is a reminder that when subpoenas are served, they don't prove that those who've been served acted inappropriately.

38:14They may even prove the opposite. Explain what you meant when you said this. So when we were having this debate over which rocket should be developed, whether it should be this government directed twister game of having a piece of it in every state with no concern about its overall effectiveness as a rocket. versus putting out the competition for the private sector to bid on so they could lower the costs and get America innovating by doing new things. A couple of senators and their staffs subpoenaed my records, emails and so forth, because they thought I was trying to do things with the rocket program they wanted to advance that were in some way untoward.

39:06I never got an actual reason. They thought I was holding it up and they had, in fact, passed a law saying we had to do it. I wasn't doing that, but you have to turn over all your records. And to this day, people continue to say, oh, she did something wrong because she would subpoena it. Being subpoenaed is not the one thing that's doing something wrong. And the very people who had requested these records were, of course, the ones trying to advance a program that was self-dealing. And yet, when that came clear, there's no announcement. No one ever says, oh, by the way, we've looked at everything this woman has written for five years, all these emails, and didn't find she was doing anything wrong.

39:53I mean, I'm pretty sure if I'd looked at their emails, that wouldn't have been the case. Sure. Well, so I think the other thing too, and I think this says something a lot about you, but I think the other thing I took away from your book is don't expect a bunch of fanfare when you've done the right thing and had success either. Because I think you used President Obama's memoir as an example. Like he was a fan of what you did. Like you ultimately treated your role as deputy administrator as you were on his team, like we pointed out with your incentives. And yet you didn't get anywhere in the memoir.

40:27Sure. I was I would never have expected to gotten anywhere personally in the memoir. I always and when you work directly for the president like that, you do take on huge responsibility because, you know, everything is going to be hyper criticized, examined. And the program that we proposed, I felt I had convinced him to do. And he did the right thing. And I was so pleased that he was able to take this on. Most presidents have not been. But when he didn't really stand up for it and we lost a lot of ground, it hurt him politically. And I felt a little responsible. It, to me, led to the Obama administration not continuing to ask for larger budgets over the coming years.

41:23Our first budget request was a$5 billion plus up or$6 billion over the next five years. But he is known for cutting NASA's budget because that first year what he requested, the Congress didn't do. They didn't want to change their program. They wanted the same old stuff. And if you look at Dan Quayle and his memoir, he dedicated an entire chapter to NASA. Again, called it Rockets and Red Tape. But we, NASA, didn't rise to what we could have been in an Obama administration, in my view. And you did see later on, I believe, President Trump and more importantly, Vice President Pence take great leadership and care with their role at NASA.

42:08And that was something that we did not enjoy beyond the first year when we were doing things that could have made an even bigger difference. Sure. Something you pointed out that was really interesting, there were still good precedents of private businesses in operations around NASA. You point out the history of ComSat and IntelSat. Why were those treated differently than a lot of the other government work for the last 50 years? As with most government projects, you start out developing something new within the government and it transitions to the private sector. And that had happened, of course, for aviation and also in the early space years with commercial satellites.

42:55And so you wouldn't have thought it would be this dramatic shift. human spaceflight was more difficult to see NASA transitioning because I think we see it as sort of the heart and soul of NASA. It's special in some way. And by protecting it, I felt what we were doing was really hurting our future. Because while the space shuttle was a grand experiment to try to reduce the cost of getting astronauts to and from space, it was costing over a billion dollars per astronaut that we had flown. And I don't think if the public knew that, they would have wanted us to do that. But those within the aerospace community who were paid that money and didn't really see a reason to change could use that as, you know, our astronauts are just too precious for us to risk doing things differently.

43:56And especially from someone like me, who, as you mentioned, had this different background. They did not like the fact that it looked like a SpaceX was going to be first to do it. I think they were concerned about this for you know their own rational reasons but if you looked at that bigger picture it seems so obvious that just like the early non-human base so more of the the satellite market had gone to the private sector we should follow it so talking about early i'll call it for-profit or you know at least kind of dreamers if you will on you know these space ventures you mentioned your book andy beal you mentioned Robert Bigelow.

44:43And then you also mentioned Paul Allen and what Vulcan and really his sister, Jody, who oddly enough, my dad actually went to college with at Whitman College, tried to do in, you know, in trying to advance their vision and their dreams in space. How do you look at those earlier, you know, shots at this? Do you look at it as that had to be done? It was going to fail from the beginning? How do you personally look at those things? If you were going to try to make a graphic about how we eventually were able to succeed in this, you would have had those early Beal, Bigelow, Paul Allen investors for reasons, both of, I think, technical advancements as well as just seeding the workforce.

45:31So you needed people who had experience building and testing rockets outside of the government that I think a lot of those companies helped develop. Beal's test facility in Texas, McGregor, was purchased by SpaceX more than a decade ago to test their own rockets. Beal had shut down because he felt he could not compete with the government. I felt that was a big loss. I had worked with him. I believe that they could have succeeded technically. But we were in a cycle of the markets where we had a number of constellations of satellites planned, but the tech bubble, the internet bubble, 2001 crashed.

46:16He no longer had that market beyond NASA because those large constellations weren't going to need to be launched. So there's so many different things that go into this. You had the policy, but you also need the money. You need the technical ability. And that's what had to come together. So certainly those folks, and especially, I would say, Paul Allen and now Jody, played some very unique and important roles. Sure. And obviously, as you're pointing out, Elon's had the market in the way that you've needed it to go out and fund a lot of this, looking back over the last decade. So but he actually, you know, and I given, you know, I didn't know this, I'm sure, you know, the space pirates, as you call them, knew this very well.

47:01But he originally went to the Russians to launch into space. Can you tell a story of what happened to him when he went to go do that? Sure. Elon early on in 2002, he believed that he wanted to do experiments on Mars. And ultimately, Mars has been his vision for having humans become a multi planet species. He had an experiment he wanted to launch. He was shocked at how high launch prices were in the U.S. And he went to Russia to take advantage of their bargain basement prices. And he did not feel he was treated well. The opposite. At one point, this is told by others, a Russian spit on his shoe.

47:53On his flight back from this trip to Russia, he decided to start his own launch company because he saw that there really, while we needed to get to space more cheaply, was no way to do that. And he wanted to address that. Lots of people said he couldn't do it, shouldn't do it. All these people, like you mentioned, had tried and failed, which I think is funny. Like what? So no one's going to ever do it. But I joke that it was the spit that launched a thousand spaceships because he was so offended. Egos can play a role, as you've learned. So DARPA, which obviously, for those that don't know, is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

48:38That's who originally funded SpaceX, right? So I think you did a really good job of talking about NASA is a civilian organization. Now, there are a lot of former military people that are involved, whether it be from an astronaut perspective or in the agency, but as a civilian agency. So it's funny to me that it was actually a military agency that funded SpaceX originally, which wouldn't have been what I expected. Sure. But what you would expect is that it's always individuals, right? These agencies don't do anything on their own. And it wasn't the head of DARPA. A couple of guys, Jess Bonnable and Pete Worden, both who are, well, Pete's a general, senior in their own right, gave a handful of million of dollars to SpaceX in the 2003-2004 timeframe to prove what they called operationally responsive launch.

49:37Not only were these things expensive, they took months of planning. Well, a warfighter doesn't have months of planning. And they were these advanced thinkers who had a little money and put it on the project. And I don't think they're given enough credit. In the very beginning, those Falcon 1 flights, the first of which weren't successful, were largely funded for very, very little money. You know, that's one thing I want to make sure to say when, yes, these governments, we have given and awarded money to SpaceX and other commercial companies. It is pennies on the dollar compared to what we were given to the cost plus contractors.

50:21So they were leveraged dollars that returned so much, but probably the most leveraged were those first eight million from DARPA. So you make the case that SpaceX is the lowest cost producer of rocket launches in the world. You know, we often study companies and ask, you know, who's the low cost producer? Because the low cost producer can obviously deal with an unknown future for whatever happens a lot easier than their peers. Do you always see that they'll maintain that low cost producer? Or is it just they have the biggest advantage from the incumbents that obviously had the cost plus structures?

50:58these combined requirements technical money aligned with our policy at spacex we gave contracts awarded contracts to multiples of people and so far spacex has has out delivered on everything people always ask well what's the secret why do you keep giving the money They deliver. We gave them less money than their competitor on the cargo missions, which were in the hundreds of millions of dollars, to Orbital Sciences, which is now Northrop Grumman. We gave them less money. They did twice as many launches and also returned goods from space, whereas the Northrop Grumman rocket only goes to the station.

51:49It doesn't come back. On Boeing, Boeing got nearly twice as much money and has not yet launched people to space. They do have, I think, hopefully, because we want competition, competitors in the smaller rocket area. And hopefully Blue Origin will get their new Glenn rocket to launch in the next year or two and give them some competitive reason to keep their prices low. because i do fear that why would they you know these are markets um if they've if they've got the run why wouldn't they charge a little more what they're doing which is synonymous with successful companies that i'm sure you know a lot more about than i do is they keep replacing themselves so their falcon 9 rocket which is the workhorse for all satellites launched today in the US.

52:47There's, again, 80 launched by them, maybe a handful from anyone else. But they're developing a bigger rocket. Well, they developed the Falcon Heavy. And now they're developing the Starship that will put those potentially out of business, but they keep advancing. And so it's hard for others to keep up when others are trying to compete with some of those earlier variations, and they're getting leapfrogged. The ballot is still out. What I say in the book is, you know, the comparison between Bezos and Elon is the most stark because they were one in two as far as the richest individuals in the world.

53:28And they both had rocket companies. Sure. And I got to know them both. But it is not going to be possible for Jeff and Blue Origin, I say to catch up unless Elon and SpaceX trips. Now that could happen. But I think they're running the table right now. So I have, I this is kind of I've cheated because I kind of know your answer on this next question. But I would just say like, from your own personal opinion, what did you not like about Blue Origin's rocket design?

54:04i uh i didn't say i didn't like it that rockets are phallic symbols there's no question i don't know how much that has to do with more men being uh supportive of spending more money on space than women but time after time that is true um you couldn't help with that comparison of rockets because you also had Richard Branson. And Richard Branson's is more of an airplane. Yeah. But there's no question that the rockets, go back to the movie Airplane, everything can be seen as a phallic symbol. And Jeff seems to have done his best to make his rocket one. Yeah, because you mentioned that at the Ridgeline Conference.

54:51And I thought, wow, that's not what I expected Laurie to give her view of. but I was tickled because I just couldn't quit laughing. So let me go back to, so inertia is still a powerful force in all of physics, okay? Mike Coates, one of, as you categorized it, one of Charlie Bolden's cup boys, he still won't admit that what you advocated for has succeeded. John Maynard Keynes said, when the facts change, I change my mind, and that's what pragmatism gets at. But why for some people or in certain situations is pragmatism not very natural for humans? In other words, where they just continue to ingrain themselves in their right?

55:31Yeah, I really like fields where you can be more pragmatic. And I do believe that, again, being the daughter of a stockbroker, that is just how I grew up. And that is how I feel about the space program. But many people, and Mike Coates is an astronaut who, like many of the early astronauts, are not pragmatic about the space program. To them, it's romantic or more like a religion. And you don't convince people through facts on religion. And I should never really have tried, but my point is we are not a religion. There is a reason. And I think more people will be supportive of space, the more they see the value proposition.

56:23Obviously, we didn't really question it in the Cold War days. But today, and we don't spend enough that it's a large public policy debate. but one of the things that was argued against this privatization effort of for astronauts is that the public cares too much about its astronauts and their heroes and that would no longer be the case if they weren't flying with the government that's that's not a pragmatic argument. That's a hero argument. But you know what? There's something to it. And I should have been and would people always ask, what would you do differently? And I love to think about that.

57:11The hero astronaut is a great thing. This nation has very much tied up, I think, our superpower power-ness with being leaders in launching people to space. And I continue to be surprised by the amount of momentum that early space program gave us. Inertia is a big thing. And I don't know, firefighters, who else are the biggest, you know, we've lost so many of our heroes, that professions that we used to find so heroic, but astronaut still seems to be one. Yeah, well, and I think it's the difference also of like, you know, some people believe you learn to know, and you actually continue to learn to learn.

57:59That's what we're doing in life, right? We're adding it's a, it's a cumulative effect. It's not an endpoint, if you will. Because to follow on that, you talked a lot about how the military can ham things up. And you mentioned Mike Coates being from the military perspective. but you know I actually walked away thinking man as an American one of our super powers or like kind of our super abilities continues to be again what we do in capitalism to quote this is coming from your book quote in his confirmation hearing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testified that the innovations of space entrepreneurs as a means of strengthening the military's hands was a uniquely American way of sharpening the military's edge end quote he's saying it was our capitalism, it was our ability to fail, our ability to dream, you know, a very American response, which is why SpaceX isn't in Russia.

58:51It's not in Europe. It's not in China. Don't you really think, I mean, at least I'm giving my bias away, but I think that's a uniquely American superhero trait. Would you agree? I would agree. And this is what was so frustrating to me was I was being chastised for being anti-American. for not wanting the government to keep doing things the old way. Neil Armstrong and Gene Cern and two hero lunar walking astronauts testified that what I was proposing and what the Obama administration had put forward this transition was going to end our leadership in human spaceflight. And I precisely felt we were doing the opposite for the reasons that you just outlined.

59:43How do we outcompete? How do we continue to lead this world? It didn't end in 1969. It's by out-innovating. And our capitalist forces do that the best. I don't think that's really a debate. So by being pragmatic instead of romantic, I was the one advancing something that truly has become more successful. that Lloyd Austin and subsequent statements by the military talking about how this innovative edge in space has allowed us to outcompete the rest of the world and remain a more secure country is very gratifying, given the years that I was named and directly told, you are ruining the future of this country.

1:00:32So, but you're also a very particular kind of person. And you talked about this in your book. So I appreciate you kind of looking at yourself. And I love your line on this. To quote your book, you said in your book, quote, as Jessica Rabbit says, I'm just not drawn that way, end quote. You talked about how that you knew you were right in what you were doing. And unlike, and I think you even said, and you can correct me if I misquote this, but I think you even said in your book that other women would tend to want to kind of be liked by people, but you didn't care. And I find that like kind of like a uniquely if someone says, well, that's a Lori Garver thing.

1:01:10I'd be like, that's a Lori Garver thing. Lori is very unique. It's like God bestowed you with that. He blessed you with that. How important is it at times in someone's career as an investor, whatever that may be, whatever context they live in, how important is it at times just to say, I don't care what other people think? You know, I do like to be liked. I think we all do. But I'm someone who believes in that broader purpose. And I think it's tied into being pragmatic. I couldn't get the big picture things achieved and also be liked. So the big picture things had to win out. Yeah, I'm not bad.

1:01:49I'm just drawn that way. Like, of course, not everyone wants to advance society in some way. And had I, you know, I believe that I am liked by my children and husband and friends like the people that matter. Yeah. I think there's just throughout history. This is so true. People say it a lot about Elon too, but I don't know if there is a gender attribute to this. My sister is always like, I wish I was more like you. I like to be liked too much. And you don't stand up for things you believe in when that's the case. I think, however, there is a way to do it that can be a little maybe more forgiving, more open.

1:02:42I was in this fight and all of us in this fight were geared up for the battle. And so I don't mind saying where I leaned in too far or saying how I would have handled things differently. I think that's part of your learn to learn, you know being able to take cumulative knowledge and one of the reasons I wrote the book was so that other people could learn from this and take those next steps. Sure so you got my mind going on something that I've never heard anybody talk about with space travel but I was like oh my gosh Lori is on to something and it actually it gets back to the Kelly Airmail Act it gets to what we're talking about with, you know, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX, but you talked about suborbital travel.

1:03:34Okay. I was never old enough to fly the Concorde. I'm super depressed about that, Lori, just so we're on the same page. I would love to fly, you know, beyond the speed, the speed of sound. And yet that I can't do that today. I can't go from, you know, Phoenix, Arizona to London very quickly. How do you see that progressing via consumers with what we have with SpaceX and Virgin Galactic today. Cole, I have no doubt that you will be able to go suborbitaly to a distant part of the planet in a very short amount of time within your life. That was supersonic transport. I also never got to go on it. Also, I'm not feeling great about that.

1:04:23But suborbital is a whole nother animal where, I mean, we orbit the Earth in 90 minutes. So just the travel time to Tokyo or Sydney would be 45 minutes. So that's way faster than the Concorde. Yeah, well, I agree. And it's like if you tell me, hey, Cole, you skipped the Concorde. Yeah, we skipped the Concorde. But there are companies still trying to do subsonic transit, like the company Boom. And as you try to make these advances, it's not clear to me that we won't overtake that with traveling through space to get somewhere. But there's a lot of logistics to it. Agree. And by the way, if you look at the post-pandemic world, go look at the other thing that I thought about because when I heard you say that in your book, I was like, oh my gosh, Lori's onto something.

1:05:20Go look at charter jet travel post-pandemic. It's off the charts, the value of the planes, the people using the services. So you can see that there's an inkling for that market out there. The question is how much of that market would love to say, I don't need a G6 because I can just go suborbital and be there in 40 minutes. I mean, what would they pay for that, Lori? That's what I thought about. Well, right now, the suborbital vehicle that is active, I think the next flight will be next Friday, is Virgin Galactic Spaceship One. And people pay$200 ,000 in the early days,$200 ,000. So very little money for those trips.

1:06:05and they go and come from the same place, but it is the exact same technology that could take you across the continent, over the oceans, and land within 90 minutes. I've always been a fan of Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic. It operationally is happening now once a month. They need to be doing that much more regularly and have more vehicles, whether it's that technology or whether it is Starship that can take 50 to 100 people at once, we'll see. Certainly, as we're seeing with suborbital travel, the wealthy people will go first. That happened with aviation. But once a market expands and we get those costs down.

1:06:57We never say we're going this far and no further. And people's time is ultimately the most valuable thing we have. Correct. Yeah. George Gilder calls it the information theory. And obviously, the more information we accrue as a society, all our time gets worth a lot more. And therefore, you can attain a lot greater things. I have this debate often, Lori, with my dad, where he's like, oh, you know, these millennials, they're not going to travel as much as they did, except that if you look at like in the average wage, the cost of traveling has never been cheaper in aerospace, you know, when I talk about commercial airplanes than ever.

1:07:34And so it's naturally that once it gets cheaper, it just gets used a lot more. So I totally I agree with you there. I think that will continue to propel. One thing that I want to ask you about, this is not in your book, I just I kind of wanted to dig this out of you because I I also get the sense you're a huge optimist, Laurie. And so Paul Ehrlich wrote Population Bomb in the 1970s, which became a very popular book, arguing that we had too many people, and we're ultimately going to kind of ruin the Earth's resources. Elon totally disagrees with that and says, ultimately, we don't have enough people today.

1:08:09And my thinking that you're kind of the ultimate optimist, where do you sit in that Elon versus Paul Ehrlich kind of discussion? Is the future so bright that it doesn't matter how many people? Or how do you look at a debate like that? I am an optimist, but an optimistic pragmatist. So I think I have tried to understand Elon's argument, but I think I am more with Paul. Although my concern today would be that, you know, it's more about what have we done and what are we doing to the environment that it's going to cause the population to have severe conflicts based on resource limitations and so forth.

1:08:57And really, if you look at Bezos and his ideas that were based on Dr. Gerard O 'Neill from Princeton back in the 70s, it is that we can take the, if there were overpopulation, we can take the heavy industries, those things that are hurting our planet off Earth and put those in space. Earth can be maintained as more of a park and the work and heavy industries will be done in space. And these are generational issues. There will, of course, be people on the moon and Mars and hopefully beyond, because ultimately you really do need to leave the planet to survive as a species over the very, very long term.

1:09:50And I do give, I think, the billionaires, namely Jeff and Elon, credit for keeping that perspective in mind. When they could just be spending their money on themselves and not doing any of this stuff. Sure. So in effect, kind of like the moon would become Australia, what Australia is today from a resources perspective. Sure. Not to mention there's science fiction that say it should be our first penal colony. I was going to say, it fits the model perfectly. Yes. But resources in space are really interesting, again, over the longer term. We live in a gravity well, so there isn't going to be a lot of efficiency to mining the Earth and throwing our stuff off the planet.

1:10:33So you look to asteroids, our moon, other moons for those kinds of things as you are going to develop if we survive long enough as a species. And our technology continues to advance as it has. starships. So I there's a lot of things we didn't talk about in the book, we didn't, we didn't get into as much of the inside baseball on the contracts part, we didn't get into the asteroid discussion and what the goals and objectives of, I'll call you know, what we're trying to learn about asteroids, how we're trying to land on them, destroy them if needed, etc. So there's a lot in your book we didn't cover.

1:11:12And also, I would say for listeners, Because Laurie's book is not some exhaustive book where you tie yourself out 100 pages in. It's a very great read at like, what, 250 pages, Laurie? So I just want to ask you, you know, is there anything else that you do think needs to be mentioned about your story, about your writing, about your experience? You know, I think the themes that we touched on were very much aligned, even as you listed what we haven't discussed. You know, the asteroid versus lunar destination example has a lot to do with do you do this for romantic purposes or pragmatic purposes?

1:11:51Asteroids, we need to study because they have hit our planet in the past and can cause great destruction. They also very well could include scientific information of different parts of the galaxy, as well as resources for future space development. landing on the moon, walking on the moon, that's a symbolic, very wave your flag experience. That's why we did it in the 60s. And politicians, one after another now, Trump and Biden have both said that's our next big goal for humans. There will undoubtedly be benefits that come from these things. But as with most things, I think those of us who really see the pragmatic side, look for the end state first.

1:12:45And how do you reach that goal best? And when you're working for the government, I think that's a pretty straightforward calculation. Yeah, deducing yourself backwards from your end goal is always a good way to start. Lori, this has been totally awesome. It's been an utter pleasure. I really appreciate you joining me. Your book taught a lot about, and me personally, about dealing with situations where there are many opinions, but very little agreement, how incentive structures can cause the most incredible things, and depending on how you shape them, the worst possible things, and also why free market capitalism can always unleash the human potential.

1:13:26I would argue that all of our listeners should go out and buy a book, a copy of Escaping Gravity today. If you enjoyed this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to a book with legs. Give us a review. Tell others about the books and great authors like Lori Garver that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with. For our tribe, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcast at smeedcap.com. That's podcast at smeedcap.com. You can also send your suggestions to us on Twitter. Our handle is at smeedcap. Thank you for joining us for A Book With Legs podcast.

1:13:58We look forward to the next episode. Thank you for listening to A Book With Legs, a podcast brought to you by Smead Capital Management. The material provided in this podcast is for informational use only and should not be construed as investment advice. You can learn more about Smead Capital Management and its products at SmeadCap.com or by calling your financial advisor.

1:14:27Thank you.