EP #2 I Almost Killed Stephen Hawking (True Story of Flying Stephen Hawking to Space) w/ Peter Diamandis

In this episode, Peter shares the story of the creation of his company, Zero Gravity, and his passion for bringing commercial spaceflight to humanity. Book a flight at Zero G. You will learn about: Why "no" isn't an answer The mindset required to solve big problems Why space exploration matters Making Stephen Hawking's dream come true This episode is brought to you by Levels: real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health: levels.link/peter Consider a journey to optimize your mind and body by visiting Life Force. Listen to Moonshots & Mindsets on: Diamandis.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Peter Diamandis?

  Byron and I gently lift Professor Hawking into zero G and then we pulled away and we're watching him. Now, Professor Hawking has very few muscles he can work, none in his arms and legs, a tiny few in his mouth and in his eyes. And for the first time ever, I see him smile. And there's this smile that looks like the smile of a child. And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm gonna do, this is the dent I'm gonna make in the universe.

• 1:13Peter Diamandis?

  Hi everybody, welcome back to Mindsets and Moonshots. Nick, good to see you, my friend.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, good to see you, man. I've seen a lot of you, which I enjoy. But hey, we have a good one for you folks today, and I'm just gonna get right into it. I heard in a meeting recently that you almost killed Stephen Hawking. Is this true?

• 1:36Peter Diamandis?

  Let's just say, we put him in a dangerous situation when we flew the world's expert in gravity into zero gravity. Long story, but I do remember a couple of phone calls when people heard that we were gonna do this. Like, Peter, you're insane, you're gonna kill the world's expert, you know, the top physicist on the planet. And let's just say, it was a dangerous gambit, it was something he very much wanted to do and something that I thought was the reason that I created Zero G in the first place, to give people the chance to experience weightlessness who might not otherwise be able to.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  So let's start from the beginning here. Why the idea for zero G in the first place? Why was that important? What kind of problem were you trying to solve? Or was it just something fun that you were trying to put into the world?

• 2:29Peter Diamandis?

  Well, listen, I've been a space cadet since I was a kid. You know, it was Apollo and Star Trek got me started. And I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to experience weightlessness. I wanted to open up the space frontier. And the first step for me was could I get on NASA's zero G airplane? So it turns out since the late 1950s, NASA has been using a weightless aircraft. It's a zero G aircraft. I see these photographs of people floating in this room. And I used to think when I was a kid, is there this zero G room? Like this room that you go inside, you flip a switch and people start floating. And the answer is no, there's no such thing. There's no way to cancel gravity.

• 3:11Peter Diamandis?

  But um, there was there what's called parabolic airplane. It's also called, I hate to use the name, the vomit comet, but that's a different story. And I learned that NASA has this airplane that they were flying these parabolic flights. It's like this giant roller coaster and you go up at a 45 degree angle. And as you go over the top and you come back down, you're weightless for 30 seconds. And on a typical NASA flight that they'd use to train the astronauts, so they do science missions and so forth. You'd be weightless for 30 seconds, then you'd wait twice as much for another 30 seconds. And they would do it over and over and over again. And they might do 30, 40, 50, 100 parabolas during a flight. And I was like, I want to do this.

• 3:56Peter Diamandis?

  You know, there's the, you know, the nine year old kid in me saying, I want to go experience weightlessness. So I go to my friends. In that case, it was two incredible individuals, Byron Lichtenberg, who had flown twice in the space, on the space shuttle. And then Ray, and then Ray Cronis, who had been flying 100 times on NASA's airplane. I said, can you get me on there? And I said, I'll volunteer, I'll be a guinea pig. And the answer after working it through was no, we can't. Uh, and I was like really pissed. And you know, for me, you know, no simply means begin one level higher. And so I ended up saying, well, if I want to go so much, I bet you other people want to go on zero G too.

• 4:37Peter Diamandis?

  And it was back in nineteen ninety-three, remember it was May of nineteen ninety-three, ages ago, and I said, we'll start a company. That's my reaction typically as an entrepreneur. Whenever I see a problem I want to solve or an opportunity, you know, is the first step towards opening the space frontier. And I figured the more people who got a chance to experience space or weightlessness, the more who would like it and the more who'd want to get involved. Long story short, we kick it off and I figure this will be a piece of cake. It'll be easy to go and do this, you know, we'll go buy the airplane, we'll go start doing it and start advertising it. But that wasn't the case.

• 5:20Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, we had to go through the FAA. And I remember the first time we went to go and meet with the FAA, uh, at the end of the day, they said, you're insane. There is no way we're going to allow you to put people in the back of an airplane, take off their seat belts, put them up into this forty-five degree climb, push it over the top and do this giant aerobatic maneuver with a large airplane. It just isn't allowed.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  So ti- timeout. If anybody is listening to this that's like me, how the hell do you get access to the fucking FAA? Is it somebody that you call and say, hey, can we bring these folks to space? This just seems so out of reach. This seems incredibly difficult. Talk to me about how you even got in front of them. How did this idea mature to a point where you were somebody who can actually demand a conversation with them?

• 6:14Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, I mean, listen, every government agency has inroads, right? And, and there are, you can find out who the right person to go and speak to is. Um, one of the things that we did. Was, you know, and this is as an entrepreneur, you find the right buttons to push. You find the right people, right? It's like, who is the right person to get us in the door? And we ended up finding a gentleman who had, was now a lawyer, who had previously been part of the FAA. He was the general counsel for the FAA, now he's in private practice, and we hired him.

• 6:57Peter Diamandis?

  And we said, hey, we went and presented what we wanted to do to him. And he said, well, this is gonna be tough, but it should be doable. We should allow, you know, be allowed to do this. And we went in with him and we ended up pitching our case. And I'd never been so frustrated in my life when you run like full steam into bureaucracy. And the realization was that, that there was no benefit to the FAA supporting this. It was only downside. And this is a lot of challenges in, in all of the government agencies. Like if you want to do something that's outside the normal bounds.

• 7:40Peter Diamandis?

  You know, if you end up, if they end up approving it and it fails and someone gets injured, then it's all downside for them. If they approve it and no one gets hurt, well, it may be a little bit of upside. So we had this battle. And when I say a battle, it was a battle of wits. And this engagement with the FAA, Nick, lasted the better part of a decade. We started in late 93 and we got approval finally in 2004. This was an overnight success after 11 years of hard work. And when I talk about being passion driven, I mean, you have to understand being told

• 8:25Peter Diamandis?

  no, and no, and hell no. And then having to pick yourself up and say, well, what about this? And what about this? You know, I remember one time I said, well, maybe we're gonna make flying in zero G a religious right. And so we're gonna create the religion of ZOG, Zero G.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Wait, is that serious? You were actually gonna create an actual religion?

• 8:52Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it was like, it's like, the FAA can't tell you no about if you're gonna, if you're, I mean, listen, we were exploring every possible approach. We were, we were looking at doing it inside of a, a American Indian, um, reserve where, you know, the laws are slightly different. We were looking at, you know, having actually a religious, uh, practice that would allow, you know, have the FAA approve this. Um, I remember saying to myself, uh, listen, when I was talking to the, uh, pretty much the top level, the associate administrators, uh, you guys are either gonna retire or die before I give up. And it was that level of, of intensity of passion.

• 9:37Peter Diamandis?

  It was like, I refuse, it was like, I was going to make this happen. There was no way about it. It was like, I wanted to fly and I wanted to take everybody who wanted to fly into Zero G with me. Hey, thanks for listening to Moon Shots and Mindsets. I want to take a second to tell you about a company that I love. It's called Levels and it helps me be responsible for the food that I eat, what I bring into my body. See, we were never designed as humans to eat as much sugar as we do. And sugar is not good for your brain or your heart or your body in general. Levels helps me monitor the impact of the foods that I eat by monitoring my blood sugar. For example, I learned that if I dip my bread in olive oil, it blunts my glycemic response, which is good for my health.

• 10:21Peter Diamandis?

  If you're interested, learn more by going to levels.link backslash Peter. Levels will give you an extra two months of membership. It's something that is critical for the future of your longevity. All right, let's get back to the conversation in the episode.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  What were some of the things that the FAA was telling you, man, that you thought was just bullshit and it pissed you off? What, what were some of the things you were hearing? I can imagine you were hearing the same things time and again, every single time you came to them.

• 10:45Peter Diamandis?

  Well, well, so there's a part of the federal aviation regulations. These are the, what called the FARs. It's, they're, they're, it's said that they're written in blood. Every time that there's an accident, they go back and they find out what caused the accident and they writing you law to prevent it.

• 11:06Peter Diamandis?

  And one of the federal aviation regulations was if the airplane is going above thirty degrees nose up or above thirty degrees nose down, it is a, uh, it's considered a, um, man, that-

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Anybody listening, we got some construction happening in the background. I'm a big fan saying that there's two seasons in the world. There's construction and then other seasons. So I'm dying to get to the other side of it. So, uh, bear with us, folks. We got somebody living in reverse, uh, near fear at the moment, but, uh, we're gonna make, uh, we're gonna make there-

• 11:37Peter Diamandis?

  Anytime you fly the airplane above or below thirty degrees nose up and as you're climbing or down, it's, it's called aerobatic flight. And if you're flying someone in aerobatic flight, you're required to wear a parachute. So the FAA wanted me to have everybody inside the airplane wear parachutes. And I'm like, that's insane. Like, okay, they can wear parachutes, but there's no way they can get out of the airplane. If something goes wrong, they're gonna die wearing parachutes. And so it was like, it was a ridiculous requirement that would have killed the company right then and there. And so-

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Wait, hold on, pause, hold on. I, I, I'm sorry to cut you, but why would that have killed the company? I would have just said, fine, just strap on a parachute backpack and let me go. I mean, why, why, why was that a sticking point for you? I recognize the idiocy in it, but-

• 12:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So it was my belief that we wanted to create an extraordinary experience for people to enjoy weightlessness. It is the most peaceful, beautiful, like being in the middle of a, uh, of a magic show. And, uh, you know, in the nineties, I actually went to post Soviet Russia. And we'd started a company called Space Adventures that was, were taking people on zero G flights in Moscow at the Zhukovsky Air Force Base. And we'd get inside of a, uh, a Lucian seventy-six, one of these giant cargo, post Soviet cargo airplanes. And you'd put on a parachute for takeoff and landing, and you would sit on the floor

• 13:03Peter Diamandis?

  of this cargo airplane. They would put you into this parabolic flight. And it was, it was cool, but it was not the kind of experience I expected to be offering in, in the US. Um, and, and it was just- It was not what we desired and plus it's a parachutes are bulky and flying around. You're already bumping it to people if you're bumping into people who are twice as wide with parachutes on. It just wasn't going to work.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Fair enough, fair enough.

• 13:32Peter Diamandis?

  And so we ended up proving our case that parachutes added no added value. The FAA required us to go through a huge series of flight tests. We were flying with all kinds of strain gauges onboard the airplane and flying it to the edges of its air capabilities. And, and we did, and we ended up getting all the data and ultimately, in our opinion, gained the data. But there was still nobody at the FAA willing to say yes. You know, it's just, it was just so outside of the norm. You know, there's an old saying that, you know, the FAA is not happy until you're not happy. Well, I wasn't happy.

• 14:16Peter Diamandis?

  Ultimately, there was a meeting I had with the head of the FAA. I was able to finally work my way up to the very top to a woman, Marion Blakey. She was, she had this beautiful Texas drawl and I sat down with her in her office and I said, you know, Administrator Blakey, here's the situation. I'm taking the top US entrepreneurs and business people to Moscow to go and fly zero G because I can't get approval in the United States. And I'll never forget, she said, well, we'll just have to change that now, won't we? And it was ultimately going to the very top to the person who had the authority to say yes.

• 15:00Peter Diamandis?

  And so for entrepreneurs, sometimes the person you're speaking to just doesn't have the ability to say yes. And you can ask until you're blue in the face. And that was the case here.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  I really want to pick that apart for a sec. That, that is fucking genius. You know, I would argue, Peter, that there's more than one force happening there. It's not just the person that you're speaking with, but it's also the leverage that you found. Don't you think? Because you know, from the beginning of time, this is not a political podcast, not what I want it to be. But you know, US and Russia have had a relationship is what we'll call it. Uh, and so you know, the moment that, uh, the moment that you hear that, um, oh, you're going to Russia to do it? Uh, let's bring you back home and get you, okay?

• 15:38Peter Diamandis?

  Absolutely. And that was a plan. That was a planned conversation.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Was that intentional? Was that intentional?

• 15:44Peter Diamandis?

  Without, without question, right? And, and it was also intentional to show how idiotic this was. That for the better part of 50 years, since the nine, early 50s through 2000s, NASA had been doing this safely. In an old military airplane. And here we were, uh, upgrading to a much newer commercial aircraft and having proven all of the safety. There was just no one willing to say yes. And, uh, and she got that. Um, and she finally, uh, approved it and you know, uh, zero G now and you can go to go zero G dot com for, to get details. It flies throughout the United States.

• 16:25Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, we have flown thousands and thousands of flight without incident. It's extraordinarily safe.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  So I, I, I want to take this to a broader view for a moment, Peter. Um, is, you know, why, why is it even important to open up the space frontier? You know, I think that we're going to talk about this a lot on this show. But why does that matter? You know, to someone like me, and I can imagine folks listening who have their own set of challenges that they want to face and, and take on in the world. Why did that matter in a, to you? And why did that matter in a grand scheme for humanity?

• 16:55Peter Diamandis?

  And it's a long conversation and I'll give you the Cliff Notes right now, but, um, when I flew Stephen Hawking into zero G, and we'll talk about that, uh, I remember we're on stage at a pre press conference just before, uh, we're about to take off. We have news, media from around the world. The cameras are rolling. Uh, uh, Stephen is there communicating through his computer. And the first question asked was, why do you want to do this? Clearly this is dangerous for you. You've got osteoporosis. You can break all the bones in your body. You've got severe pulmonary and cardiac issues. You could, this can kill you. Why do you want to do this?

• 17:37Peter Diamandis?

  And his answer is one of the two major reasons that I would put forward. He said, and this is paraphrasing him, I don't think the human race has a future unless it expands into the space frontier, that there are too many dangers facing us here on Earth, that all of our precious eggs are in this one basket called Earth. And with the potential for war, for nuclear, for virus, for asteroid impacts, for supervolcanoes, for all the things that could be existential threats. If we care about the long-term survival of the human race, we need to become a multi-planetary species, right?

• 18:16Peter Diamandis?

  This is very much a through line for me personally, for Elon Musk, for, you know, for Jeff Bezos and for Stephen Hawking. The other side of the equation is it's about inspiring greatness in humanity. It's about having a full and infinite frontier that we can go to. When the Europeans moved to the Americas and moved society from the old world to the new world, it was to create this opportunity for everybody, and it has.

• 18:57Peter Diamandis?

  You know, there's incredible science and historical research that shows the amount of breakthroughs and progress that's made when you're not limited by your race, creed, or color in a new frontier where it's a meritocracy, right? Where the best people survive and thrive is so important. And, you know, I think about being an American here, I'm thankful that 500 years ago, people risked their lives to come and open up.

• 19:30Peter Diamandis?

  America and the American West. And I think hundreds of years, or actually not even hundreds, you know, dozens of years from now, people will feel the same way for those who opened up the space frontier. This is what we humans do. We have a, an exploration gene in us. We explore, we move into new frontiers. In those new frontiers, we find new resources, we find new problems to solve. And when we're solving problems, we're making the human race more resilient and, and bring new capabilities to everybody. So those are some of the themes we'll talk about in future shows about why space even matters.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  So let, let me pick that apart for a second, then I'm going to get back to the story. But this feels like a worthy rabbit hole. What do you have to say to the folks, Peter? And I, I've certainly said this in my life, and to some extent I still do, is, you know, well, why are all these folks going to space? You know, don't they, why, why not devote their time and energy to solve the problems of our planet? Um, such as climate change, education, food, hunger, et cetera.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  What's your take on that?

• 20:37Peter Diamandis?

  And the answer is not one or the other. It's both. And we are spending a huge amount of energy going after food, energy, water, healthcare, education. And I spend, you know, ninety eight percent of my time on that. But we have to be spending some portion of our time looking beyond that. Right? Um, you know, I talk about existential threats a lot, and I do this with my X Prize hat on. Uh, one of the existential threats we've been talking about for, for many years before the pandemic was in fact pandemics. And, you know, the, the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 pandemic is

• 21:20Peter Diamandis?

  Is actually a warm-up act. It was a small glimpse of what could happen. You know, if it had a much higher mortality rate, you know, it would have been a hell of a lot worse. And so hopefully it's a wake-up call. Hopefully, you know, the scientists around the world are looking at a multitude of different antiviral and protective mechanisms to prevent something that could have a much worse implication. You know, like the Spanish flu 100 years ago did, or the Black Plague, or any of those. The second existential threat is, in fact, asteroid impacts. I keep on screaming this, and I hope it doesn't happen, but, you know, today, we do not have the capability, should we see an asteroid coming, barreling towards

• 22:04Peter Diamandis?

  the Earth, to truly deflect it, and to find it even. We miss most of the near-Earth asteroids, and one of those asteroids doesn't have to be a dinosaur killer, like we had 66 million years ago. It could be a fraction of the size, just landing on top of Manhattan, or Moscow, or Beijing. It would shut down economic markets around the world. It can also have a multitude of other, you know, it just goes on and on. So, you know, I think about asteroid impacts as, I love the phrase, "God asking, how's your space program doing?" We need to be able to protect ourselves in that regard.

• 22:48Peter Diamandis?

  And then, at the end of the day, everything we hold of value on Earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate, is in infinite quantities in space. It's going to be a means by which we can uplift humanity. And I'll add one final threat we can talk about, which is, it's going to give us a chance to reinvent society. There's no place you can go on the planet today and start a new country. It used to be, you know, 100 years ago, hundreds of years ago, you can go and conquer some native peoples and come in with a new government. It doesn't happen today peacefully. But there will be, you know, we'll start new nation-states in the virtual worlds, which

• 23:32Peter Diamandis?

  I think is very cool. We'll also start new nation-states in space, whether it's on Mars, which Elon wants, or whether it's going to be in space colonies, which Jeff wants.

• 23:47Peter Diamandis?

  Either one is going to allow us to practice new forms. I mean, I'm a proud American, right? I'm a libertarian capitalist, if I was ever gonna label myself. But the idea that we have a representative democracy versus a true democracy, because that was the only thing possible 200 years ago. There's no reason that we shouldn't be able to reinvent how we practice government more efficiently, more effectively.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, those are great takes. And one more for me here is, you know, I hear you that it's like a both hand situation, man, but I'm gonna push back on that and say, all the attention is going to these big moonshots. It's going to Elon's going to space, you know, what SpaceX doing today, you know, Jeff is on Blue Origin, Sir Richard is a Virgin Galactic. And so, you know, it may be true, these people are working on it, but I think there's something to be said about the diversification of focus. And I think that that's actually a threat, a key threat to really solving these problems. You know, historically, I think that we've seen when people focus on something intensely,

• 24:56Speaker 02

  it's really when it gets done, and that's when the human spirit shows up. So how do you weigh in on the trade off that's being made between, you know, going to space and also diverting attention to solving, you know, matters of our own planet?

• 25:08Peter Diamandis?

  Well, first of all, I think the definition of a moonshot, which we talk about a lot on this program, is doing something extraordinarily difficult that no one thinks is possible. And I think having moonshots that people accomplish inspire others to take moonshots, right? So I think the whole ethos of what Elon is doing with SpaceX, and, you know, we can rationalize space as giving us better communications and manufacturing things in orbit that you couldn't manufacture in the gravity well of Earth and so forth, but I call bullshit on that. The real element of opening up space is inspiring kids to go into math and science. It's inspiring people to do things that otherwise they think is insane and crazy. And it's not...

• 25:54Peter Diamandis?

  Like we're spending more than a fraction of a couple of percent on this area. So it's not. It seems like it though. Am I mistaken? It might seem like it, but you are mistaken. Uh, the numbers are are miniscule. You know, the U. I mean, at the height of the Apollo program, the U. S. Government was spending 2%. It's now, I think it's a quarter of a percent today. So the number of relative amount invested and it's private capital going in. Um, and honestly, if if uh, if if Richard and Elon and Jeff want to spend money going into this, I'm saying fantastic, go for it. Build businesses.

• 26:35Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, businesses, don't forget are fail if there's not a business market for them. Right? It's not like people don't, you know, are gonna uh, use this if they don't need it. So if Star, if if uh, if SpaceX and Blue Origin are succeeding, it's because there's a need for it. Uh, there are companies like Planet Labs that are launching hundreds of satellites, imaging the entire planet uh, all the time, always. So you can understand what's going on in the environment. You can see what's going on in Ukraine moment to moment. Uh, it's giving eyes and democratizing access to visualizing the entire planet submeter all the time.

• 27:18Peter Diamandis?

  It's making it a live and living organism. So all of these things people don't realize are coming from the space program, but that's not the reason I'm excited about it. I'm excited about it because it's uplifting the human spirit. And it's it's the tip of the arrow where humanity is ultimately going. And it's giving us the ability to uh, make ourselves a multi-planetary species, which I think is. Uh, is fundamental. I think it's a moral and ethical obligation that we have to the future of the human species.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  And, you know, I, I, I can't argue with that. Um, while I'd like to, I can't. And it's just, I, I, I'm, I'm humble enough to admit that I don't understand the problem in its entirety.

• 28:01Peter Diamandis?

  Hey everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode. Let's tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebonimus come to my home to draw bloods, to understand what's going on inside my body. And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co-founding a company that sends a phlebonimus to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter. Put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range, what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family, and I'd love it for you. If you're interested, go to mylifeforest.com backslash Peter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  I'm going to summarize what I heard there and then I'm going to jump back to zero gravity. Um, but you know, what I heard is that, uh, the answer is a lot more beautiful than I expected it to be. And it's that, you know, when you focus on a moonshot that's on your heart and it's on your soul and spirit, um, you inspire others to pursue other moonshots that are on their heart, soul and spirit. And, you know, maybe somebody out there listening to this, or maybe somebody out there, just in general, need Elon to go to space as an, as a, for instance, uh, so they can figure out a different problem. And maybe one of those challenges are, are, or more, you know, relevant challenge, what we're feeling now. And I like your take on uplifting humanity. But, you know, jumping back into zero G for

• 29:27Speaker 02

  a sec, um, so you, you met the head of the beast. She heard you were doing this in Russia.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  She didn't like it. And she made sense of the fact that this is bullshit with you. She empathized with it. Um, and she effectively, I'm assuming, approved you guys to go. Now, you know, something I think I want to note and get out of here, Peter, is, you know, I think that the Americas were founded on the principle of risk and change and bravery.

• 29:57Peter Diamandis?

  Love it.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  And, you know, we lose that in a lot of bureaucracy. And I feel as though, you know, this story is a great reminder of being a force for that as more than just an effort to do something fun like being zero G. But also to remind people of what we're made of. How much of that was driving you and how much of that drives you to this day?

• 30:14Peter Diamandis?

  First of all, one of the lessons here is if I didn't really deeply care about making this possible, if there wasn't this, what I call a massive transformative purpose of opening the space frontier, which was my MTP back then, I would have given up on this 11-year journey. There were so many times, over and over and over again, where everyone said, this is insane. Stop banging your head against the wall. You know, this is never going to happen. You're running out of money. And for me, this was part of what it meant to be an entrepreneur and to be an explorer. And I agree, the, you know, America's, the ethos of this nation was about risk-taking, about making the impossible possible.

• 31:00Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, and there was an element of that for me. Um, I wanted to, I didn't see space as something that a few select astronauts should be able to experience. I wanted to make it accessible to anybody, any kid who dreamed, like I was a kid from nine years old dreaming of this. And that was a battle worth fighting for me. And so I fought it. Now, Marion Blakey gives us permission, and you have to understand, this is after 11 years. We're running on fumes.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  So what is this, 19 or 2005?

• 31:31Peter Diamandis?

  This is 2004. This is early 2004. And, um, I had landed a contract.

• 31:40Peter Diamandis?

  With Richard Branson's television show called Rebel Billionaire. So this is, you know, the Donald had done his, his show and Richard Branson gets the show where he's got these young entrepreneurs that need to prove themselves to him. It was called Rebel Billionaire and only did one season. And so one of the episodes is going to be all of these, these rebel billionaire wannabes flying in zero G. And it was a contract for us to fly for flights. And we're, we're excited about this because it's all the money we need to launch the company.

• 32:25Peter Diamandis?

  And we are about to go and start flying. And my engineers tell me that the airplane is down for a maintenance issue. Now, on a filming script, you know, it was, we're going to fly two flights on a Thursday and two flights on a Friday. And they had paid us all the money in advance. So Wednesday night, I'm told the airplane's not going to be ready to fly in the morning. And so I have to call the, the film team and say, guys, um, hate to tell you this, but we can't make the morning flight. And they're like, it's okay. We've got three flights. We just need to get one of these flights. And so Thursday afternoon, we canceled the second flight.

• 33:10Peter Diamandis?

  Thursday night, I am panicking because we're, if we have to return the money, we are bankrupt. And after 11 years, it's game over. There's a part that is broken down. We're in the middle of Las Vegas where the flights are taking place. And there's a part that needs to be found to fix the airplane and no one can find it. I'm on the, on the phone all night long. We find one flight, uh, we find one part in New York and one part in Los Angeles. And this is about 10 o'clock at night. I'll never forget, I'm literally on the floor in a ball, like this is ridiculous. I buy a ticket and I have somebody get on a red eye from, uh, from New York.

• 33:54Peter Diamandis?

  And I have someone get in a car and start driving from Los Angeles, trying to get the part to us. We get the part at 6 a.m.

• 34:04Peter Diamandis?

  The engineers are begin working on the airplane to get this is a compressor for this is a 727. And at the end of the day, we end up getting approval on the repaired airplane at four o'clock on Friday afternoon. Now, the the show runners, the everybody producing the show is pulling out their hair. They're about to pull, you know, pull it. And it's four, it's four thirty, it's five, the airplane is working. We start getting on the airplane. And the pilot comes to me and goes, we can't fly the flight. I'm like, WTF? What do you mean you can't fly the flight? We have just spent the last seventy-two hours going insane. Airplane's working now. He goes,

• 34:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, but our aviation regulations only are allowing us to fly parabolic flights during daylight hours. And by the time we get up into the airspace, it's going to be after dusk and we're not allowed to legally fly. And I look at him, and I'll never forget, I said, if you don't fly, it's game over. We're bankrupt and this will never fly again. He looked at me and he goes, we're gonna fly. So our first flight, and we're past the statute of limitations here, I think was illegal. But we got the flight off and it was great. And you can go to Rebel Billionaire and check it out. But that was, you know, I think the ultimate battle, everything's impossible till you make it possible.

• 35:33Peter Diamandis?

  And I think the definition of an entrepreneur ultimately is just battling against all the no's until you will it into existence. That was insane. I never wanted to face that again, but I did. So about a year later, the Ansari X Prize had been won. We had flown this private spaceship into space. And I'm introduced to Stephen Hawking, who I'm in awe of, right? Anybody who loves science and technologies and awe of Stephen Hawking. And I get a chance to meet with him. And I'm meeting with him and he's communicating through his assistant, his nurses and through his computer. And he had heard about the Ansari X Prize.

• 36:16Peter Diamandis?

  We were going to sequence his genome as part of a different X Prize back then. And he says to me, can you fly me into space? And I said, Professor Hawking, I wish I could. I can't, but... I can fly you into zero G. And he said, yes, on the spot. He said, yes, I would love to do that. And I'm thinking about this and I go, well, why don't we actually turn your flight into a fundraiser for ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, his disease that he suffers from. And he thought it was a great idea and we were gonna basically create a fundraiser where people could fly with him in the airplane and it would fund the flights and then the money left over would go towards the ALS research.

• 37:00Peter Diamandis?

  So I put out a press release the next day and I announce, zero G to fly Professor Stephen Hawking, the world's expert in gravity into zero gravity as a fundraiser. And I didn't check with anybody before putting out the press release. It was picked up in newspapers around the country and it was, you know, big news. I get two phone calls. One phone call is from our aircraft partner. And the CEO, the aircraft operator who's flying our airplane for us, providing the pilots and the maintenance, turns to me and he goes, you're insane. You're gonna fly the world's expert in gravity and kill him. And he was just beside me with the idea that we would fly

• 37:40Peter Diamandis?

  this frail individual because, you know, the zero G flights are not for the faint of heart. And, and he said, but it's your ass. If you want to fly him, you're risking the entire company here. You can do it. But the second phone call I get is from the FAA. And they say, your federal aviation regulations, your operating specifications do not allow you to fly Stephen Hawking. And I go, what do you mean doesn't allow us to fly Stephen Hawking? It's like I've fought 11 years and battled every bureaucracy to get the ability to fly anybody into zero G, you know? Look at your operating specifications.

• 38:21Peter Diamandis?

  They require that you fly only, quote, able-bodied individuals. And clearly Professor Hawking is not able-bodied. And I'm like, huh. That sucks. And then I had the presence of mind to ask one question. I said, who determines?

• 38:40Peter Diamandis?

  Whether Stephen Hawking is able bodied. And the associate administrator there said, well, I assume it would be, you know, FA physicians, or it would be his doctors. I said, fantastic. So I then turned around, and the story is one you can't make up. I went and found a group of doctors who were aerospace doctors, as well as his physicians, and asked them if they would be willing to write letters to FAA that Stephen Hawking was able bodied, and that I would buy them malpractice insurance to protect them against any lawsuits that might follow.

• 39:21Peter Diamandis?

  And I did, and I got the letters, and I sent them to FAA, and they said, like the head of the aircraft company, well, it's your risk. If you want to do this, we advise heavily against it. And so, we did. And it was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. So, we end up flying a test flight the day before flying Stephen Hawking. We'd gotten a high school student who weighed the same weight and height as Professor Hawking, and we set up- Hold on, timeout. How did you find this high school student? Oh, we went to a- That seems like a monkey, right? So, so we're gonna fly, we're gonna fly Hawking's flight out of the Kennedy Space Center. So, the Kennedy Space Center has the longest runway in the United States.

• 40:06Peter Diamandis?

  It's where the shuttle takes off and lands. It's many miles long. And we figured it would be a great place to have this, this flight. And, and so we went to a local high school there in Melbourne, and we said, listen, Professor Hawking is this high, he weighs this much, you have a student who's similar in height and weight, we need a guinea pig, because we're gonna set up an emergency room onboard the airplane in case anything goes wrong, and we need somebody who is going to be sort of a stand-in for him on these test flights. And so we did. We got this great seventeen-year-old kid, who was, you know, was thrilled to be the stand-in for Stephen Hawking.

• 40:47Peter Diamandis?

  And we flew these flights, and we had three physicians and two nurses on the flight. And we set it up where the professor would be monitored with an EKG, looking at his heart, we'd be monitoring his blood pressure, his partial pressure of oxygen in his lungs-

• 41:07Peter Diamandis?

  And we flew the, we flew this kid and we flew him through all kinds of, if he broke, if Stephen Hawking broke a leg, if his lung collapsed, if he had a heart attack, all of the potential downsides, which there were many. And we assured ourselves that we had at least some means to deal with these things. So, the next morning, Professor Hawking arrives. We set up a press conference. There's press from around the world. There are hundreds of cameras there. We're on this large dais that had been set up at Kennedy Space Center. And Hawking steps up and he says, "Listen," and he's doing this through his computer,

• 41:51Peter Diamandis?

  "I'm doing this because I think the human race must go into space. That if we don't open the space frontier, we don't have a future. We have to become a multi-planetary species. There are too many threats that are civilization-ending, that are potentially before us." Now, I prefer the optimistic reasons for doing it versus the dystopian reasons, but you know, let's belt in suspenders here. And at the end of that, I announced to the world that we're gonna go and fly one parabolic arc. We're gonna give this world expert in gravity 30 seconds. And that would be amazing.

• 42:31Peter Diamandis?

  And ultimately, we had a plan that said if it goes well, we'll do two or three. But before we go on this flight, because it's gonna be an open channel of communication between the airplane and air traffic control, we set up a bunch of code signals. And as we're flying, the FAA gives us this block of airspace that's 10,000 feet high between 2,300 and 3,300,000 feet, and 100 miles long and 10 miles wide, and we're the only airplane in that block of airspace. And I set up with my head of operations, three code signals. One, everything's great.

• 43:15Peter Diamandis?

  Two, he's injured and we're coming back. Or three, The worst of all cases, right? And we go up, we set it up. I look towards, we have, I'm at Stephen Hawking's head as he's lying down. And we're flying straight and level. At the other end at his feet is Byron Lichtenberg, two-time astronaut and co-founder of Zero G. And I look to the three doctors, the emergency room doctors who are on this plane with us. They've got their equipment there, they're monitoring his heart rate, his breathing rate, his blood pressure, his, his partial pressure of oxygen. And they're like, thumbs up, all looks good.

• 43:57Peter Diamandis?

  We talk to the pilot and say, okay, let's go for the first parabola. And the way this works, we're at about 2,300, 23,000 feet. And going to a slight dive to pick up velocity. And you can feel going into a dive. And then the pilot pulls up and to about 45, 50 degrees nose high. And as pulling up, you feel yourself getting heavier and heavier and heavier. And Professor Hawking's body is pushing down against the floor. Now, we're inside this airplane that has no seats for the first hundred feet. It's all foam padding on the ground, foam padding above. It's so it's safe, it's well lit. There are 30 seats in the back that everyone who had, you know, donated to this flight is in the back strapped in, watching this.

• 44:43Peter Diamandis?

  And the cameras are there, click, click, click. And Professor Hawking, as we come out of the top of this pull-up and push over to the top, Byron and I gently lift Professor Hawking into Zero G. And then we pull away and we're watching him. Now, Professor Hawking has very few muscles he can, he can work, none in his arms and legs, a tiny few in his mouth and in his eyes. And for the first time ever, I see him smile. And there's this smile that looks like this smile of a child. And it was extraordinary, it was captured on, on film.

• 45:26Peter Diamandis?

  And as we start coming out of this parabolic arc, Byron and I slowly take him back down and we go into straight level flight again. And I turn to the physicians and I say, you know, are we good to go? And they say, yes, he was perfect. You're good on the second and third parabola. So we do a second and third parabola. And it's, you know, each time he's floating by himself longer and longer, sort of like just having this, you know, the best I could describe is a shit eating grin on his face. And we come back down and they're like, he's rock solid. He's doing amazing. I said, okay, let's do a few

• 46:08Peter Diamandis?

  more. Now, we had promised just one parabola. And so I turned to his two nurses who are there and who had been talking with him and said, what do you think? Should we continue? Because they said, yes, absolutely. And in fact, Professor Hawking wants you to, you know, twirl him around in zero G. And I'm like, I'm like, at this point, I don't know if they're like, just trying to get back at him for something, or they really had had that conversation. I said, okay, well, let's do this. And so the video footage, which we should find, has us basically lifting him up and spinning him around gently in zero G. So we ended up doing eight parabolas with Professor Hawking. We get back, you know,

• 46:53Peter Diamandis?

  the code signal is, he's great. He did awesome. And we land and, you know, he had not wanted to do a post flight, a post flight press conference because he thought he'd be too tired for this. And he was just so jazzed. And he said it was most extraordinary experience of his life. And I remember I've gotten to know Lucy Hawking, his daughter, very well. And she said it was one of the highlights of his life. And it most definitely was for me. And I'm so happy we didn't kill Stephen Hawking.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  I mean, what a, what an honor and a badge of honor you wear. Um, well, I, I, I, I, I feel like it just deserves a round of applause, that story, mate. And, um, you know, where is Zero G today? As a company, is it still, is it still in function? Can people go fly? How much is it?

• 47:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's amazing. Zero G is doing, uh, is doing great. Uh, we've been flying, we do the calculations here since two thousand and four, call it two thousand and five, so seventeen years. Uh, and we're flying about seventy, eighty flights per year. Um, uh, people rent out the airplane for birthday parties, weddings, all kinds of things. Imagine that.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Weddings? People go get married up there?

• 48:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you got thirty seconds to say I do. Uh, we've had, we've had most, you know, incredible television shows filmed. Yeah, if you go to the website, it's gozeroG.com. And, uh, it really is.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  How much is it?

• 48:22Peter Diamandis?

  Unimaginable. Um, I think the price today is around seventy-five, a hundred bucks, eight thousand dollars. Um, and, you know, compared to, you know, three, four hundred thousand dollars for a, uh, suborbital flight, uh, on, on Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin. Uh, you're flying, you do fifteen parabolas, so you do three or four lunar parabolas, where when you go up commercially today, you'll feel what it's like to walk on the moon. So if you weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, the moon is one-sixth your gravity. So you go from a hundred and fifty pounds to twenty-five pounds. And I love lunar parabolas, because you can do one R push-ups, you can do backflips, frontflips, you can sort of like launch and fly through the air, then you can land on your feet, reposition yourself to do something else.

• 49:06Peter Diamandis?

  So you do four of those, and then you do about eleven zero G parabolas, and you're weightless inside the airplane. Thirty seconds at a shot. So you've got about, uh, you know, five, six minutes of total zero G time, which is actually more than you get in a suborbital flight on Virgin or, um, uh, yeah. But it's thirty seconds at a time, it's a fraction of the price, and, you know, I've done this flight now a hundred times. Uh, flying with friends and family, I've taken my eleven-year-old boys up who love it, I've taken them up twice. So if you can afford it and you've got kids, it is a, it's a life-changing experience. And you're in the middle of a magic show. Yeah.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  I get motion sickness, so I'm gonna have to uh, I'm gonna have to figure out whether or not it's the vomit comment for me, or uh, it's something that I'm gonna do in my lifetime. But you know, ju- just in closing here, Peter, there's a saying, promise made, promise kept. Um, you know, I know that your initial drive to do this was to begin to be a pivotal, and you know, maybe it's overstating to call it pivotal. I don't think it's overstating. But to be a role player in the grander scheme of things and opening up the space frontier, have there been positive signs and affirmations for you after this company's existence to confirm that that's, that that's been true?

• 50:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, between Zero G and X Prize, you know, we're seeing today uh, incredible renaissance in the commercial space industry. You know, it's a trillion dollar industry. Between all the companies, right, there are so many startup rocket companies and small rocket companies. And of course, uh, we see SpaceX and we see Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and all of those companies. And you have to remember back in the early nineties, when, when I had started and co-founded Zero G and X Prize, this didn't exist. It was all government. People believed this was something only the government programs could do.

• 51:03Peter Diamandis?

  And I think, you know, to some small part, whether it was changing laws and regulations for a private commercial spaceflight, or attracting public attention, or bringing capital to the table, we lit a fuse and uh, it's not a genie that's going back into the bottle. I think we're on the edge of the human race, opening up into space irreversibly. You know, I make this akin to when the first lungfish moved out of the oceans onto land. Um, we are at the edge of that precipice where we're moving off of the earth into space irreversibly. Uh, and it's an extraordinary time to be alive.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  That's a really great analogy, actually. It feels just as frightening to me to imagine the life of the lungfish to survive on on Earth, then from water than it does for us to survive in space than it does our planet. But what a brilliant conversation. Hats off to you, sir. And I think for anybody listening, it just goes to show, when you follow your moonshot, the first, second, third, and fourth order, world order consequences are completely unbeknownst to you. But if you fight hard enough, you just might get there. And from what I understand, years later, Sir Richard Branson picked up some of the rights that you fought so hard to get for the better part of a decade to leverage for Virgin Galactic.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  Is that accurate?

• 52:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's another great story. The Ansari X Prize birthed Spaceship One, the first commercial space, you know, human spaceflight. And Richard bought the rights from that competition, from Mojave Aerospace Ventures, to build Spaceship Two. And, you know, it's been interesting, right? Watching Richard, watching Jeff Bezos, who I've known since college. Jeff was the president of the Princeton Chapter of Said Students of Exploration and Development of Space, a nonprofit I had started while at MIT and was the chairman of. But that's time for another story, some other time.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Cool. All right. Well, this has been another episode of Moon Shots and Minds. With Peter Diamandis. My name's Nick. I'm But Peters producer. And Peter, thanks for being with us today, man. This was a lot of fun.

• 53:18Peter Diamandis?

  My pleasure, Nick. Always a pleasure.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  All right. Adios.

• 53:22Peter Diamandis?

  Take care.

• 53:34Speaker 00

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