John R. Miles

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.

And my point here is that Chris used the trust that he had built up with Lucia and that community to guide him.

Because there was a point as he was doing this that Lucia was pretty much blind.

He couldn't see.

And so Chris had to guide him back to the safety lock.

And then once they got in the safety lock, he had to calm him down enough for the 10, 15, 20 minutes while they're in there that he would stay calm.

I express this because they were way...

above our gravity.

And it shows you the magnitude of what successful communities can build.

Where I'm going with this is we talked about mountaintops and alpine skiing, and we've talked about outer space now.

I now want to switch to underneath the ground because that same bond