John R. Miles

But to me, mattering is the solo human operating system on which connectivity sits.

So when you think of the communities that we reside in, oftentimes we think we just have to find a community, whether it's a church or a special operations team or perhaps Toastmasters.

We think all of a sudden the community just happens to you, but you actually have to cultivate yourself into it.

And where I wanted to go with winter sports is culture.

In the Olympics and alpine skiing, which is probably one of my favorite events, and what you found in the book is that there's this certain city called Norwich here in the United States where they produce more skiers who go on to the Olympics than almost anyone else.

Yeah.

What did you find about Norwich that redefines these communities?

It's interesting, Dan.

I have a really good friend I went to the Naval Academy with.

Turned out he became the chief astronaut.

Chris was originally a Navy SEAL, and he ended up taking the concepts that he learned from going through BUDS and spending over a decade with the teams to the astronaut program.

And this really paved the way for when he was up on the International Space Station, how the team behaved.

because when they were up there, they cultivated this community that we've been talking about throughout the episode and really created this ecosystem of trust between the different astronauts.

I thought this was a really good example because he did this famous spacewalk with this Italian astronaut, Lucia Paratimo, where everything went horribly wrong.

It was probably the most dangerous or one of the most dangerous spacewalks there's ever been.

Lucia's helmet started to collect water in it.

And at first they thought it was just his sweat, but then it turns out it was a mechanical failure and he was tasting cooling fluid

that was going into his mask.

And what ends up happening when you're up there in space is that these molecules need to go someplace, but they don't move.

And so they're accumulating around his face.