Scott Kelly — Lessons Learned from 500+ Days in Space and Making Hard Choices | The Tim Ferriss Show

Tim Ferriss interviews former astronaut Scott Kelly about the unlikely path from a bottom-half high-school student staring out the window to commanding the International Space Station. Kelly traces how reading Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff sparked his transformation, how a phone call from his twin brother taught him to study, and how he learned to make high-stakes decisions by privately gathering input from everyone around him. He discusses failure as a necessary risk, the importance of scientific literacy in an age of denialism, and his nuanced views on missions to Mars. Bonus lessons cover his ISS partnership with crewmate Cady Coleman and the contrasting Russian system of penalizing cosmonauts for mistakes.

• Kelly recounts getting a call in space that there was a golf-ball-sized hole in his shuttle's heat shield, the same kind of damage that killed seven colleagues on Columbia.
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• He explains his decision-making method: instead of calling a group meeting where groupthink sets in, he polled each crew member privately, even those not returning with him, to avoid the kind of silencing that doomed Columbia and Challenger.
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• Kelly reveals he believes he likely has undiagnosed ADD/ADHD, describing 13 years of being unable to pay attention in school as one of the greatest regrets of his life.
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• The turning point was randomly picking up Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff in a college bookstore; he read it in bed for days and it gave him the inspiration to completely redirect his life.
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• His twin brother Mark cursed him out over the phone for planning to attend a frat party before a calculus test, told him to do every problem multiple times, and Kelly then scored 100 and finally understood what success required.
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• Kelly argues science denial is dangerous because believing the earth is flat opens the door to denying vaccines, the pandemic, and climate change.
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• He quotes his brother that going to Mars 'is not about rocket science, it's about political science,' and says he does not see Mars as a viable Plan B for Earth.
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• In a bonus lesson, Kelly shares that he has a transgender son and hopes to see a transgender astronaut in his lifetime, saying it would be a loss to NASA to exclude such people.
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• Kelly set the American record in October 2015 for total accumulated days spent in space and flew the single longest space mission by an American astronaut.
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• To prepare for the police fitness test, Kelly's father secretly built the practice wall an inch taller (7 feet 5 inches) than the real 7-foot-4-inch wall so his mother would be over-prepared.
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• Kelly served as his mother's training dummy because he weighed exactly the 130 pounds she had to drag 100 feet for the test; she became the first female police officer in their hometown.
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• An F-14 Tomcat lands on a carrier at roughly 150 miles per hour onto a moving, pitching, rolling, angled deck barely wider than the plane itself.
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• Kelly says landing on an aircraft carrier is actually harder than landing the Space Shuttle, which is a poor-flying glider you only get to land once or twice in your life.
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• Kelly recounts reaching out to Steph Curry after Curry got heat for doubting the moon landing, and Curry was happy to talk and walk back his comment.
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• Crewmate Cady Coleman played the first Earth-space flute duet with Jethro Tull's founder, and colleagues feared she and Kelly might kill each other due to their differences.
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• Kelly packed a vacuum-sealed gorilla suit aboard the ISS because 'nothing gets people's attention like a gorilla in space.'
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• Cosmonauts earn bonuses of roughly $350 to $700 per day and can lose pay for mistakes, while American astronauts get only $5 per day in per diem; a dedicated person in Russian mission control tracks cosmonaut errors.
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• Kelly describes the Russian practice of 'blame smithing' and says he would tell cosmonauts to blame him for errors so they wouldn't lose their bonuses.
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