Hello everyone, welcome to the TeamCast. I'm Coleman Ruea's Director of Performance at the Mission Critical Team Institute. And the TeamCast is a show where my colleagues, Dr. Preston Klein, Claire Murphy, Harry Moffitt and myself, along with our guest, discuss all things Mission Critical Teams. Mission Critical Teams are teams of four to twelve people who are indigently trained and educated and who solve rapidly emerging complex adaptive problem sets. MCT's work in immersive environments of 300 seconds or less, but the consequence of failure is death or catastrophic loss. Regardless of whether you're on a mission critical team or not, we aim to bring you the broadest range of topics and guests as possible. Thanks for joining us, and I hope you enjoy the TeamCast. Hi everybody, welcome back to the TeamCast. I am Dr. Preston Klein and today I am joined by Reed Wiseman. Reed just stepped down as the chief astronaut at NASA, where he served for a little while now. He was formerly a Navy test pilot and has spent 165 days on the space station. And as a Navy test pilot, as an astronaut, as a person in charge of astronaut, Reed and I have spent a lot of time talking about sort of the development of humans. Just this idea of, look, you've got to get, however, qualified a person is and get him to transition to the next thing. One of the things that came up recently in a conversation is that we both recognize that no matter what you do, and we'll use the astronaut example, but no matter how well you're trained, and we're talking about years of training, that the moment that you move from the thing, the training into the actual thing, whether it be training for combat, entering combat, training for surgery, entering surgery, the first few minutes, hours, days are always kind of a mess, because even though you're trained and even though in your head you have this idea, I'm supposed to know what I'm supposed to be doing, it's always a bit chaotic. And when we think about that in our world and the world of mission critical teams, this is actually a fairly critical issue that we've talked about in the past with both our beginner's mind concept and our day one project. And that is, if you think about firefighters, nurses, doctors, astronauts, special operation soldiers, whoever, that ability to get them from zero to 60 miles an hour or cruising altitude or whatever metaphor you want to use as quickly and as efficiently as possible, is actually the difference between life and death in some circumstances. And so it is deserving of some thought and some conversation to explore. And so with that, let me just introduce you and say how grateful we are to have you here. Thank you very much, sir. Thanks, Preston. It's great to hear your voice, and it's always good to be on a podcast with you. Nice. That's very kind of you. And so let's give everybody kind of a practical sense of this. So if you take us back to you've launched on a rocket, or even you start wherever you want, but here's what I'm imagining. You've launched an rocket. You've entered the International Space Station. You've trained for years to do this job. You get there and you probably have an expectation things are going to go a certain way, and they don't. And you can use that example. You can use a Navy example, but something like that where you could just paint a picture for us of when your expectation and reality sort of intersected. I think we have hundreds of examples of this you and I both do, but the one that was most glaring to me was exactly what you said. I had trained for four years to arrive and be a productive crew member on the International Space Station. And then I actually arrived to the International Space Station, and I to be quite frank, I was a clown. You don't know how to drink water. You don't know how to go to the bathroom. You don't know how to conduct science. You don't know how to live. What do you do with your clothes? Where's the emergency equipment? You know where it is, but you really don't know how to actually access it in this living working environment up there. And it just struck me as it was just this intense feeling of four years of training. And I'm completely useless right now. And I had to get on the step very quick. But I think in the mission critical teams world, we have probably far better examples of this when you, I was teaching my daughter to drive. You don't take them right to the highway and let them drive. You take them to a parking lot and let them cruise around. You know, you have these little baby steps. But if you think of a seal team in combat the first time, or the first time I launched on a Russian rocket ship and the engines cut out, now I'm in Earth orbit and I have to function immediately. And I'm wait for the first time in my life. Like that period of 10 to 15 minutes, I was quite lost and you rely on your procedures. But that was kind of what I would love to talk to you about today. Yeah, and let's even blow that up a little bit. Because to your point, we would all love a world in which man, you look at the bike, you put training worlds on the bike, you grow at least slowly, but there is a moment where you actually have to ride the bike. In our world, when a medical student or a nurse first enters the operating room, would we love it for them to have like a little time to get accustomed to sure we would? But that's not the way the world works. When the gunshot wound victim arrives, they arrive and it has to happen. No matter how well prepared you are as a police officer, the first time you pull a weapon, your training is useful. But there's a bunch of other things happening, right? And so, as we talk about this, and it's really a freeform discussion, let's sort of think about where would you start? So now that you've been through it, now that you've been in charge of astronauts, and you could pick anything that you know that there's not going to be an opportunity where you get to do training wheels. There's going to be training in a classroom in a shoot house, in a firehouse, wherever it is, right, the laboratory. And then all of a sudden, the next thing that's happening is, no, it's for real, and if we blow it, think people are going to die. So now that you can look a little bit at this in the rear view mirror, where do you think would be a good place to start? And then we'll just go back and forth. I think not being a seal, but at least being a military pilot. The thing for me that I've started to learn over 47 years of life is, the fundamental that always keeps me at least seemingly safe in these environments is, I know my emergency procedures, and I know my machine that humans have created that I'm now charged with operating, whether it's a weapon or a fighter jet or the International Space Station, I have learned, at least through academics, every way that these things can fail and I can get hurt, and I've learned how they should work. And I think that is the foundation. And whenever my training starts to go way down into the weeds of all the details, I got to be honest, I sorted zone out there, because I know that a year from now or two years from now, that is not the information that is going to be critical to me when I take that step into the actual operational world. Does that make sense? It makes total sense. So let me break that down even further, because what we often talk about, say, in shoot houses or in burn buildings with firefighters or other things is we talk about the first 10 seconds. So if you can automate as much as possible, right, for your working load memory, your situational awareness, and I'll come back to that in a second, to maximize that and your shared situational awareness with your team, right? What can you do to buy yourself momentum? And so we often talk about know your craft, so automate all where your hands are going to go to reach for things. And then also maybe memorize or automate some of your first dance steps. If you're in the cockpit of a test plane, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I imagine that when something happens, you have your first three moves, choreographed. Is that an accurate statement? I think that's a fair statement. Now you're like the creative juices are flowing in my mind of like all these things I've done in my life, where I have planned the first step. And I would say almost every time I've planned the first 20 steps, that was not really an effective use of my time. So it's those first like three or four steps. How are we going to operate exactly when we get to the aircraft carrier? Who is going first? Who is going second? What am I doing? And then from then, you're letting the entire world take over and all these nuances are starting to come together. And you're just learning very rapidly, consuming every bit of information that you can and trying to continue the mission. I'm certain that the special operations community, firefighters, police officers, I've been, it's all very identical to that. Yeah, it's interesting. You've touched on a bunch of things there that I'm going to come back to. But one of the things I want to start with is it's interesting because in my research and you know, decade plus of looking at this question, one of the key things in the selection of the personnel that are listening to this to folks like yourself is this concept of rate of learning. And the reason this really matters and the reason because it comes up in the following way, you'll appreciate this read is that let's say that you want to be a green beret, a ranger, FBI hostage rescue person, right? Whatever. And you're in the pipeline, you're in the training pipeline and you've got all the heart in the world, you've got all the passion in the world, people like you, you're doing well, but you're not keeping up with the pack. Whatever's going on neurologically, you're not able to take the information and turn into behavior change. You're not able to implement the lessons on a day by day by day. So you're falling behind. Now there's two schools of thought. One is, oh, no worries. Let's just give them some remedial work to bring them up to speed. That's that's a reasonable response. And the other one is, no, we got to deselect them. And here's what's interesting about this. Depending on the situation, I'll be on both sides of that fence. So there are certain situations, right, in an unconstrained environment where I'm like, no, remedial, we have time. But to your point, this is what I want to come back to you about, to your point, when the job itself requires a certain rate of learning, then that problem is actually a selection problem, meaning that I've actually got to select people for a rate of learning. So remediation doesn't solve a problem for me. It actually just forced stalls a problem that becomes worse later, because as you described it,
You can choreograph the first two or three steps, right? That's what we call contingency planning. But then you have to have the capacity to improvise, to figure it out, what we call it, right? In the coming steps, and that requires you to learn, take in a huge amount of information and change behavior concepts, et cetera, that growth mindset versus fixed mindset. So I'll pause there and say, does that resonate any thoughts? I think that's incredible. That starts to make me think about every team I've been on. I can't say that I've ever heard one say, we're selecting the members based on rate of learning. But I can look at the teams that I've been on and say, all right, this person was extremely successful on this team. And I'm talking operational teams where you are doing something very high capacity, short duration. And I can look around even the astronaut office and tell you, okay, I know who are the absolute top performers in that category. And it's not always the pilots and the special operations astronauts that we have. It's sometimes it's a school teacher or sometimes it's a scientist. I think then that makes me want to ask, is this born into you or is this trainable into you or is this a life experience thing? How do you get to that point? Well, I think, you know, let's take a look at the neuroscience for a second. So many people listening will be familiar with the famous research that was done on the London taxi drivers to study for what's called the knowledge. Are you familiar with that? Not at all. So it's a pretty famous case study. So let me just describe it for you and the listeners is what they did was they were trying to understand how the brain stores information in different ways. So it turns out that we store masks different than we store spatial like maps. Spatial knowledge gets stored in a very different different place. I think it's the hippocampus, but let's not get into the weeds here because the neuroscientists right now losing their mind while listening to this. But the research is basically that what happened was they did a study. They took these these taxi drivers now that taxi drivers in London. I think this is still true. Have to study for a test called the knowledge. And it's been going on for a zillion years. And this test takes something like two years to study for. And what's required is that you have to memorize the map of London to the degree that you know what direction streets are going. You have to know where banks are, where the hospital are, where police station is, where post office box are. You have to memorize the map of London down to some pretty excruciating detail. It turns out that they did an FMR eyes. They studied the brain, the density, the neural density of the brain. And it turns out that the brain actually changed in structure from the start of that to the end of that. So what ends up happening is, and this, this becomes really important because there's debate right now in the military and other places is whether or not we should still be teaching map and compass, for example, because people are like Ron GPS, Ron, other things. It turns out though that that ability to read a map, to navigate a map, you have to actually build the neural density ahead of time. You can't actually just get it like that. That's a thing where your brain actually has to build that. So that is me saying to you that it is both nature and nurture because I can build my capacity to become a jazz dancer read and I could do it. But if you've ever seen me, no one wants to see that. And I'm never going to be great at it. So it's it's one of those things like, you know what I mean? Like everybody has the capacity to do something to a degree, but there are limits. My limits as an opera singer, ballet star, a couple of things. That goal is probably I need to let that one go, right? And that's sometimes what we need to do with folks. What I love about talking to you and it happens every time I talk to you whether it's at a launch or a selection is I learn Preston. It's amazing how how gifted you are in the ability to instruct and the ways that you think about the human being is impressive to make. That was a great slowly. You just had. Thank you very much. But and I appreciate that. That's very kind of it. But but I think, you know, what you were just sort of describing was a really hard thing in selection, which is look, we've got Sally or Joe. They're at the 70% mark. And we need them at the 85% mark and we're running out of time, right? And this is where things are hard. It's easy to know that people we don't like. They're like a spotlight flashing light. They just need to move on. Just that's part of the job is to say no, no, thank you. If you'll be successful somewhere else, there's the folks that you know we're going to make. We're going to come back to that because they have their own little special thing. But it's really what breaks my heart 100% at a time are the 70% folks because they're just on the bubble. And I'm always a person because I've always been on the bubble and everything I've done, right? Like some by the grace of God, somebody kindly lets me in the back door and I get to keep going. So I'm I've always got a sort of a saucepot for that. But I've also been burnt a lot of times when I try to have a project where oh, just give me me. I'll fix them. I don't. I've been 100% unsuccessful. There's a reality to this work where it's not just about passion, heart, or even talent. There's a whole bunch of things to have to come and play and you willing it to happen won't won't get you there. So just I'm doing more talking than I should be doing. But I really want to hear your thoughts on this. Like I definitely resonate with everything you're saying from my from my personal the thing that keeps coming back to me on this particular topic is when you're flying a fighter jet in the military, if you want to get better at landing. Yeah. You hit a level and you're like, okay, I can land on the aircraft carrier. But if you want to get better, sometimes you have to go do something different and harder. Yeah. And then you come back to landing. You're like, oh, now I get it. So I'll go out and do 20 minutes of dog fighting. I'll get my behind handed to me by a really good pilot. And then I come back and all of a sudden I'm just better at landing and I'm thinking about the way your brain is reworking and thinking about problems differently. And I tell my kids like you probably will never use differential equations in your life. But changing the way you see problems based on that knowledge you're getting towards the end of your high school, that is something that will be useful to you. And so you've really opened my mind to a whole bunch of things that I really want to think about. And it is those challenging things that we put ourselves into will make us better at all of the other things. So someone's having difficulty mastering the robotic arm on the International Space Station, giving them 100 more sessions on the robotic arm might not be the answer to making them successful at that. That's right. It's so interesting too because there's this, you know, once again, an area I know nothing about, which is sports and specifically boxing. Someone wants to explain to me that there's a certain group of boxers who will become really good in their region, but they will never box outside of their region because they know that they will lose number one status. And to be frank, one of the ranger gifts of my life is to work at a place like the Wharton School where I was never the smartest person in the room. And because everybody in the room could win a Nobel. And so I was always understanding like someone's going to have to like shift down to explain it to press then and like simple terms. But why I'm bringing this up is because what I see, for example, in the military and other big organizations is you'll find people who achieve power but avoid rooms where they're not the smartest person in the room or don't have the most authority. And I think, you know, for people that were listening to this, my advice would be if you're still looking to become better at what you do, you've got to be around people that are better than you. That is awesome. Absolutely. When I think back of my life, the best pilot I've ever met, Lucas K. Darr, I would be around this guy all the time because he absolutely made me study harder. He made me fly better. And just the knowledge that I would pull from him and the way I would watch him operate the aircraft, he just made me better being around him. When I got to the International Space Station, Dr. Steve Swanson, who's a computer science PhD, just looking at the way he would move around and the way he managed emergency procedures and all of his, I call it gear, like his clothes and just the way he ate. I was just watching him and learning and learning and learning. And so that's incredibly true. And then that kind of lends towards mentorship and mentees and how do you advance in these sorts of areas and just how important. There's so much stuff that's more important than the training. There's the whole human package is just critical to educate. Yeah, I'll never forget I had a professor at Rutgers, my undergraduate, and he was actually my faculty advisor and he made my life miserable because he never allowed me to just, he was just always expecting me to be much more than I thought I was. So one day I was trying to impress him and I was reading for the first time an adult book. I was reading Lay Miserables, which by Victor, you go pretty thick book. But I loved it. I was really enjoying the book and I was excited. So I made a big deal to go in his office and like read in the waiting room and make sure that he saw me reading it because I wanted to impress him and he literally walks up to me and he takes his pen and he pushes the book back so he can see the cover and he's like he rises eyes like nice and then pushes the butt so he can see the text and he goes, oh, you're reading it in English. Yeah. Better than the original French. And I was like, come on. And what what it did right is that he kept sort of demonstrating to me that like my worldview about excellence was much too narrow. You know what I mean? He kept like widening my brain like you are thinking too small. You should be thinking about reading this in French. And I was like, yeah, but then I have to learn French. He's like, yeah, come on. What's going on? So I'm going to keep bringing us back to this first. Let's call it 20 seconds, right? Because this is sort of what I want to talk about a little bit because as the premise once again, the reminder audience, really what we're talking about is and I've talked about this before but it's
the moment where the resident picks up the scalpel for the first time to operate on the kid, right? The moment that the police officer, the first time ever draws their weapon, all of us in society depend on their ability for everything to come together in that moment, right? And if they don't, well, we read the news, we know what happens when it doesn't work out. And so I think between us and between the people in the mission critical team community, if we could get better at the first 10 seconds, the implications are extraordinary, right? So just to review what we've talked about is so far, we've talked about this idea of automation of behavior, automation of knowledge, which is to say, know the equipment so that you know where everything is and why it works. Know your own, where your own stuff is. So if your hand has to reach for a tool, you already know where it is, you already have comfort doing that, right? And then I'm going to now introduce this concept of situational awareness. Most people know this, but just as a reminder, this research was originally made famous by Micah Enzli and situational awareness. A lot of people don't know is actually comes in four degrees. Level one is awareness of self. Level two is awareness of context. Level three is the ability to anticipate future events. And then the other level is zero, which is task saturation. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because this leads us to the question of shared situational awareness, which is going to lead me into my next question to you, which is one of the reasons that we work with mission critical teams and not mission critical individuals is because of the necessary requirement to have shared situational awareness. So what I want to introduce in this conversation for the first 20 seconds, it's not just what's going on in your brain, what's going on your heart, your hands and your legs, but what's going on in the immediate surroundings in terms of your teammates, how you're working with them or not, how we get tunnel vision, how we open back that out to reconnect with people. So just if you could riff on that for a minute. The first thing that comes to mind on that is I work at a very unique place at NASA where we have our small teams in the spacecraft orbiting the earth or heading out to the moon, but we also have that large team on the ground and mission control. I know you're very familiar with our operations there, but one of the neatest things about being an operator at NASA is that you have to not only keep your very small team in the spacecraft aligned, you have to keep the entire mission control team on the ground aligned. And being a pilot my whole life where all I'm truly thinking about is me, my aircraft, me, my aircraft, getting here to NASA and expanding that out and understanding I got to keep myself in my machine aligned and the crew and the mission control team on the ground and what it's done for me personally is I don't want to say it slowed me down on an operational sense, Preston, but it has slowed me down on, okay, there is a fire in the cabin. We are in procedure 2.301, step 3, and we are closing this valve. And in maybe that took me two more seconds than reaching up and closing the valve, but in that one moment, the whole team is aligned. And if my co-pilot in the spacecraft is like, wait, that's not the right valve. They now have a chance to save our lives right there instead of me just reaching up and closing the valve. So for me, that has been very eye opening here where it is a truly shared responsibility, but because it is, it makes all of us much better operating as much safer because you have a chance to say, that's not right, we can go a different direction. I don't know if that resonates with you, but that was the first thing that came to my mind there. Yeah, so I appreciate that example, because as you know, we've had Chris Cassidy and Drew Morgan on the show, and we've talked about, and I always forget his name, I'm so sorry, the Italian astronaut who had his helmet start to fill with water. Look, a par mitato, I just saw him before I came up here and got on this call with you. Someday, I have to actually meet Luke up because I talk about him all the time, and I've never actually met him. But what's interesting about this, and I have often talked to Holly Riding's and yourself and Chris and Drew and others about is this idea of temporal constraints, which is to say that certain systems are built with the assumption that we have time, and that time and complexity will work in a kind of synchrony and it will be okay. There are certain situations much like this one, unanticipated one, ambiguous ones where you have both urgency and criticality and ambiguity, where you've got to as a leader in that first 10 seconds of the crisis, right? You've got to balance exactly what you're talking about, which is the shared situational awareness of everyone involved, and the bottom line, which is everybody has to keep breathing, right? And there's always that balance, right? And I'm sure as a test pilot, there were moments where you could communicate, and there was moments where, no, I need to allow my body to do what I know it's supposed to do. Is that a fair summation? 100% fair in the aviation community. We always say aviate, navigate, communicate. So, you absolutely must be flying the aircraft safely before you can navigate the aircraft, and then you must be navigating the aircraft safely before you can communicate to external sources. It's just a quick way that pilots break down like, okay, this is the priority right now. I have to keep the airplane flying. Once the airplane is safely flying, now I can worry about where my airplane is and where I'm going, and then I can communicate out to the rest of the world. And so, I do think that's a very quick iterative process. There's a fire over there. I'm safe. Let's start communicating and figuring out what we're going to do. So, I think as a human you do that. Right. Vice, I'm on fire. Right. My crew may have to put the fire out that is on me. Right. So, that's sort of the point, right? There's a fire over there is handled differently than I am on fire. Nothing I'm about to say is critical. It's just the language I used to describe this. One of the things I so admire about mission control, and as you know, I'm a huge fan of that organization and that group, is because of the sheer complexity that they manage so efficiently. It is mind blowing to me the number of moving parts and humans involved in that and how they're able to just keep the train on the track so regularly. But what that requires in what's classically called a high reliability organization is tightly coupled systems. And so, if you look at that, and if you look at the ability that the machine must keep moving the way it's moving, and if it's not, we have to fix the machine and fix the machine. And I'm going to contrast that. And technically, that would be considered a conventional mindset, which is to say we're going to be heavily loaded on systems. I don't mean conventional in a bad way. I mean that in a they're focused on predictability. And the opposite is test pilot, Navy seal, you know, whatever, special operations because in that world, contingency planning is great and is very helpful for training. But they actually have to build a lot of capacity in which to respond to whatever shows up that no one could have predicted because they're dealing with such unordered problem set that there's just a lot of improv. And so why I'm bringing all this up to you is because your job, as you described it earlier, is not only are you creating shared situational awareness, but you're creating shared situational awareness between people who have a mindset built around, let's maintain the stability of the systems. And people who have a mindset, let's just react to whatever emergent event happens in the most efficient and effective way. And those don't always align, right? Because of urgency and criticality. And so as you navigate those two worlds, once again, a huge value in both, they're just different necessarily. How do you think about navigating and communicating between those worlds? That's absolutely right. And oftentimes when there's this huge emergency in my life that I have seen is there is one phrase that is uttered by one person that brings everything instantaneously together. And I'm thinking of the commercial airliner that went down in the Hudson. And there was one statement said over the radio that just aligned everybody, which is we're going in the Hudson. And one that was said, every single person turned focus. The air traffic controllers did. The copilot did. The flight attendants did. It's like, okay. And I just think about all those times, the hair is standing up on the back of my neck, like all those times where it's been right on the border. There's always been, with a successful outcome, there's always been that one moment where some person says one phrase, they take immediate leadership, whether they're the boss or not. They take immediate leadership. Command one phrase and everybody instantly aligns to that. It's a wild thing. Yeah. And it's that feeling, right? When you're feeling like you're going to fall into the pool, but you're fighting falling in the pool. And then there's a moment you realize, no, I'm going in. And then you just commit to it and you go to the pool and everything gets easier. But there's all that chaos and scrambling where you're like, I don't want to fall the ball. You're like, oh, no, I'm going in. Okay. Now commit to the pool. And I think it's that same kind of a feeling. I'm going to start sharing that with everybody. It's going to be, we're going in the pool. Yeah. Like when you have that moment of spasig out, it's like, no, I don't want this right now. And it's like, well, guess what? Let's bring this to you. So let's go. Let's go. Right. That's perfect. I often say to people who are going through emotional distress that talking about emotions is a lot like throwing up when you're drunk. You just feel better afterwards. Let's just let's just throw up now. Whatever it is, just throw up now. Like, are you upset? What's happening? You're angry. Let's just let's just throw up. Get all the emotions out now to a puddle. We'll clean it up. And I'm not what I said. I'm not what it's a quiet day on a team. After you've completed your operation, I bet it feels really good to throw up right there. Just get everything out there on the table. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons we talk about this idea of narrative inquiry, which is just tell the story, not like from just tell the story as you understand it. And there's clarity between you and the team around that. So my next thing I'm going to introduce around this, we're still in that first 10 seconds. We've talked about
Now communication, we've talked about not just you, but the team around you. We've talked about automation of technology and of gear. So the next thing I want to talk about is this idea of joint cognition, which you brought up before, which is a big topic right now, which is human machine learning. And so you've got the actual machine learning. You've got the computers and sensors that are gathering data and making algorithmic decisions. And then you've got the human and they're interfacing. And I'll give you some two really quick examples to get your thoughts. So right now, the F1 race car and the F-35 plane are soft, I'm going to say this wrong, but they're like software dependent or software dominant. I forget what the right term is. Do you know what the right term is? No, I do not, but I understand exactly what you're saying. So basically, they're learning. And so you have so many sensors that after every race, after every flight, the supercomputers take all the data that it's learned and it changes the configuration of the vehicle. Here's the problem. Humans and our ability, and I'm asking you as a pilot, you have habits. And it takes a while to learn those habits. That's not a, oh, I'm now going to be left handed kind of a situation. It doesn't work that way. It takes a while. And so you can accidentally, in trying to make your vehicle more efficient, actually create a situation where the humans habits are contradicting, right? The best interest of their vehicle kind of a thing. So I'll just lay that there because that's a coming problem. We're talking to some deep researchers now about this because this problem is not going away. It's getting real. And so I guess as a pilot, as an astronaut, when you think about this idea of joint cognition of human machine learning together, adapting together, what are your thoughts? Oh, that's a scary world. I am fairly progressive. So I think on the surface, my thoughts are as a human, I kind of like those nuances. So like, okay, so I'm not sure we're allowed to say that I own a Tesla, but I own a Tesla. And I love to use the autopilot. And I think it's doing the same thing. I think it's learning. And every once in a while, this turn that it always has a problem with when I'm driving to work a few days ago, it did the turn perfectly. And I was ecstatic. I was actually sharing in the car. I was like, yeah, you did it. You nailed it. And so you know, happy that the car had finally after a year of taking this turn wrong and me in our sitting and taking over control, it nailed it. And now it nails it every time. And so I think on the surface, it's terrifying. I think when we actually get into it, I think we'll have to see how it is going. But we should not underestimate just how incredibly good our minds are. Just these little nuances, but it's like, what are off a duck's back? I think we just will look at it and go, oh, the machine did a little better. Okay, I don't monitor that as much. And or, you know, the bad case would be obviously, if it's making the wrong decision. And now we have to turn off the automation there and take over complete control. I always as a human want some way out. I want an ejection seat, or I want a way to take automation out of a system instantaneously if I need to, because I think it can go bad. So obviously, double as sword. But I, from where I sit, I kind of cherish those little moments when I watch a computer learn something and do it better. So let me ask you this is you brought it up and I'll just dig into it. Let's take that for a second. Have you ever had to eject from a plane? Luckily, I have not had to eject from a plane. I've come close, but I've never ejected. Is that always your choice? Or is there ever situation where the plane makes that choice for you? Used to always be your choice. But now there are scenarios where I think they determine that I fail you're going to curse so quickly that they need an auto ejection capability in the aircraft. And I think that is of the fleet right now. That is in military aircraft to some degree. And how do you feel about that? Yeah, that on the surface is pretty scary. You need to, I guess you just need to get comfortable with that on the surface and see that it actually works the way we intended to work and that I guess you never want that to mess up, right? I mean, you never ever ever want to be flying around in your airplane and be ejected. Right. You didn't need to be ejected. Yeah, that would be a bad day. That would be a really bad day. But when I look around, every rocket I've written on has automatic and board situation. However, and on one rocket, but every rocket that we have in the arsenal right now, you know, that we have auto-aboard situations. And there are moments where the vehicle has determined this is not a safe vehicle to be on any longer. And so you're getting off of it, whether you want to or not and you can't override that. Yeah. And so there, I do think there are moments where the reaction time of a human, it couldn't save your life. So then do we want to try to save the human's life? And chances are, usually, yes, we would like to try to do that and we can institute these automated systems. So, you know, right now, I know that some of the engineers at some of the private space companies are heavily biased towards bias, maybe the wrong words, automation of controls, right? And I have as a person who trains humans, I've got a lot of reservations about that only because I've I've met the humans and they are nut jobs, all of them, including me. And so automation, and I've also met a lot of machines and I've yet to meet one that doesn't break. And so the idea that you'd have a machine fully in control or remote fully in control of all systems makes me cautious. But just like your Tesla example, I'm also keenly aware that there's a bunch of things that they would do better at. So for example, the research is really clear that AI does a better job of diagnosing certain ailments among humans than humans do. And so I'm all for that. Like, I do not need a human involved in something. We're not as good as they are. Good. But I bring all this up for the obvious reason that as you think about your career, which still has a lot of runway left in astronauts, and you're flying on craft that will have various levels of automation. How do you think about that? You still as a human, you still want a way out. I always think I want a way out. I actually think this is exactly what we've been talking about for an hour, which is no matter how good the software engineer is, there is going to be some failure mode that somebody didn't think of. And that some computer won't learn as quickly as this crazy human mind can figure its way out. So give us a chance to fight our way out of this failure mode. So NASA hits the table pretty hard with human ratings requirements. And the fundamental thing of that is it always gives you a way to save your life if you need to at the end of the day. Obviously, we're playing with huge forces and sometimes it doesn't work out that way. But you always want to give the human an out. And I think you always need a way to put the machine on pause, even if just for a second so that the human can think through it. I mean, I probably think we get through that in the next 50, 100 years, maybe 10 years, technologies moving fast. But why would we ever want to take the human completely out of the loop? I guess you would want to if you're on a subway or you'd want to if you're just running through your day-to-day life or cooking a meal, sure. But when you're doing those life or death moment situations, I think you'd always want the human to have some vote in what's going on. So we've been talking about this idea of the first 10 seconds and all the things we need to consider when preparing someone for that moment. They're preparing ourselves for that moment. And I've been on the record a number of times saying that I'm a strong believer that NASA should create an Academy of Astronauts and Academy of Flight Directors that we actually need some structured ways to actually grow these individuals in a meaningful way based on all the things that we've learned because of the rise in private space. And a whole bunch of other reasons it just really makes sense. Having said that, if you were hypothetically to design such a program, right? To design such a program for astronauts, you are going to be working in both very sequence checklist kind of environments, but also some like, I just don't know what's on the other side of this door moments. What are some of the things that you'd want to make sure was in that curriculum? And you can answer that in any way you want. It's very hard to not be influenced by the environment that I live in. So let's just look at a few things that we do right now as astronauts. So we spend a lot of time in simulators going through procedural step, procedural step, procedural step, learning the systems, learning the machines. So I do think that our brains are very structured in that step-by-step, a thoughtful approach. So that has to be an element of it. You know, somebody a complicated piece of furniture and have them build it and just make sure they're they're keen on following those steps. I also think you need to thrive in a team size that you need to thrive in. So generally that's going to be a fairly small team, but you have to be able to live in isolation with other people. You just all have to understand harmony and how to communicate. And you know, something that you're doing, Preston, that you're not trying to annoy me with might annoy me. Like clicking your ballpoint pen 100 times every day after six months, that could drive somebody truly crazy. So you have to understand how to communicate in those small team environments. And then I don't want to use a crossfit phrase, but get comfortable being uncomfortable. I think that's really the last element. So learning a foreign language, going out and flying an airplane, going and you know jumping out of an airplane or living underwater or rock climbing, you know, put yourself in a position where one of the most formative lessons I ever learned as an astronaut was standing in front of a team, getting ready to climb the cliff, and I couldn't do it. I was like, no, I can't do that. I do not have the capacity. I know what is up there. We want, but we do not need. That objective is not required for our mission success. And so let we are going to turn around and we're going to find a different path. It was hugely developmental for me. So it was the first time I ever said no to anything of my life, but it was I've got myself to a point where I was physically at my point.
I could not possibly move on. We had to turn around. I think that was very formative for me. Yeah, there's a couple of different things there, right? Because this concept of the beginner's mind, you said get comfortable being uncomfortable learning something new. I think that the beginner's mind is a habit. It's a muscle. And we have to exercise it all the time. So my wife and I, people know about us every year, we choose something to suck at, right? And something new. And so for the last couple of years, it's been sailing and we're still sucking at it. But we're having a lot of fun learning about how to be better at it. But it means you're going to make a lot of mistakes. You're going to have moments like, oh my god, I'm an idiot. But there's something about that muscle, which allows you to do some things. Other people who are just confident and who's succeeding all the time can't do. Would you agree with that? Or there was a word you said in there, oh my god, we suck. I think being humble and understanding that it's OK to not be good for a few minutes is really important. But to just be able to say, hey, I just really sucked at that. And I will see people-- I think the operators that I have the most personal difficulty working with are somebody who clearly messed something up and then said that that was a correct-- yeah, I did that great. I don't need to do that better. Oh, boy. Those are the people that scare me the most. But the people that-- even if they nailed something, and they're like, oh, I could have done that better. Here are the things I did wrong. Those operators I have found are the people that I just absolutely cling to. Those people who can say, I suck. I was humbled by that. Even though I did it OK, and we got the job done, I could have done these 15 things better next time. And I'm always looking to learn. So that was a great little moment right there. Yeah, and I think there's a couple of things you talk about, right? Paul Petzold, who went on to found National Auditor Leadership School in the Worms Education Association and other things. Paul had this expression about-- or this concept called expedition behavior-- that many, many people know that you've referenced just now. And this idea that after the person who hitting their ballpoint pen or brushing their teeth their own way for a long period of time will get to you, part of that is realizing you might be the person. You might be the person right doing your pen. And if you don't have understanding that at any given time, you're part of the problem, right? Then you are part of the problem. And so to your point about humility, it's the recognition that if there is to be bad or good, you're a contributor to both. In a small team environment, I think you could even go further. And you could say, all the time, I'm annoying somebody else. Yeah, that's right. It's not getting to a level where it's a problem. And so just having that expedition behavior, I didn't know if we would get to National Auditor Leadership School here. You know I'm a huge fan. I've learned a ton from them. But I've learned a ton because they take you out and put you in an environment where you're not comfortable. And where you have to admit failure and you have to think things differently, it's a great moment. And just understanding that at all points in time, I have the capacity to annoy somebody else in a small team and understand that I'm be able to adapt is very critical. But I think one of the things that I want to say for my military friends, and this is something gets lost on them because when I talk about wilderness expeditions, they're like, yep, I got it. We do this all the time. And I was like, actually, you don't. And I'll describe it this way. So we're in Antarctica with a group of MBAs. It comes up to me this huge eight foot tall military triathlete type. And he comes up to me and he goes, press it. I'll be honest with you, I just don't feel like I'm getting my money's worth. And I was like, oh really? Say more. And he was like, it's just not that challenging. And I was like, you mean you're not being physically challenged? And he's like, yeah. And I was like, can I ask you a question? He's like, yeah, I was like, where's your team? He's like, what? I was like, where's your team? This is a team-based learning environment. You don't have people with you. So like literally the reason you're here, right? Is to lead a team. And you're failing at it because your team is nowhere to be found. And this person literally their eyes went wide and go, oh, got it. It hadn't occurred to them because their whole world had been personal challenge, physical suffering. And they thought that was the point. No, the point is there is a small Asian woman who's annoying the crap out of you that you want to avoid. And so you came to complain to me rather than trying to figure out how to partner with her because she's five times smarter than you are. That is totally awesome. I just told the new astronaut class that we hired in 2021. He said, if you find yourself in first place, you need to look over your right and left shoulder because you might have left a trail of destruction behind you. First place, it means something for many people in their life. But in that small team, if you're coming in first, there's something you're leaving behind. And it's critical to turn behind you and help those others. God, it's so important, right? That concept of what are your goals and what are your biases? Because sometimes I know folks that have done that and they just haven't been paying attention. They've been sort of, they lock into there. What will get me through this exercise? They think they're in an old exercise rather than in this one. And they sabotage themselves not intentionally, but based on old habits. So good. That's so true. And I think society as a whole is just changing. And the inclusivity of just everything now is critical. And I think I see it in NASA. I see it with my friends who are still in the military. We truly are out for one another now. I think way more than 20 years ago when I first joined the military, which was, how can I possibly make myself the most successful human being here? Now, it absolutely has shifted to the team success is where we place our value. It's a great shift. But what's interesting about it right now, I'm talking, I'll put my university hat on it. One of the problems that universities have done is that they've taken this inclusivity thing to a point where we're including everyone. And the problem with that is that if somebody is on the team lagging because they have a victim mentality, that's actually not OK. That's actually a problem. And so I don't actually want to include that. I actually want to say, nope, you're not a victim. You've made some choices that put you in this moment. What can we do to get you up in front of the group? Get you into the middle of the pack. I'm not actually not going to accept this. I'm not going to include victimhood. It's not good for you. It's not good for me. It's not part of our value system. And being explicit about that with everyone and allowing them to decide, is it really early important? That is awesome. And you said a phrase in there that I love. How can we help you? What do you need to do? What do we need to do to help you? There's a lot of good learning going on around that right now. I definitely agree with you. I mean, not everybody's going to win. Not everybody's going to succeed. And there are limits. And you need to be able to cut people who don't have the character that is required to do some of the things that these small teams are doing. Agreed. And going back to something you said just a minute ago about-- I've got some friends that have talked to me about the fact that one of the things that almost destroyed their career was this idea of perfection. And so this idea that first 10 minutes, man, I'm going to crush this. And then they make a series of very reasonable errors and not huge errors, just like they drop a pencil or whatever. Are they stutter-stepped? And all of a sudden, in their head, they're like, oh, I'm just a trainer. I've embarrassed myself. I've let down my team. And it's crushing. And so when you think about that-- because let's just talk about it. You go in a motion for a second. We'll go back to that space station example you gave. Not only is this happening in your head, but you are aware of people are watching. And so talk a little bit about that pressure. The thing that I did in my life with the highest internal pressure was my first space walk where I was out with another-- it was my first one. So I was a rookie space walker. And I was out with a German thoccanologist Alex Kirsten. He was a rookie as well. And I put a tremendous amount of stress on myself and on Alex that we had to get this done, and we had to do it correctly. But I am far from a perfectionist. So if I mess something up, I have no problem fessing up there. And towards the end of that space walk, there was something that I physically did not have the strength to do. And Alex just came over. He had a lot more strength than me. He did the connector. And we were able to move on. So I just think that the ability to say, wow, I suck is really important in just about everything we do. And you can have those moments, even in unbelievably successful space walk on a $100 billion orbiting laboratory where you really didn't hurt the equipment at all. But you can still have-- you need to have those moments of being humble and asking for help and getting a teammate over that can do something. And I don't know. That kind of misses the mark on the question you asked. But that was the first thing that came to my mind. No, I think it's really fair. I just think that as you mature, as you're younger, you're just trying to learn the dance steps, right? You're just-- you just want to do better at your job. That's all you're thinking about. And you've got a whole team around you. But as you start to step up into the role that you're talking about, which is no longer training or assistant. But now you're the lead. And there's a pivot that has to happen or you will destroy yourself. You will literally destroy yourself. You have to gain a certain amount of tolerance for the fact that you're going to be 95%. You're just not going to get to 100 because you've never seen it before. And you're going to have to make peace with that 5%. Gosh, I really have to think about that. For a second, I was thinking about when you're flying an airplane, the first few years, you are just tacitrated and keeping that airplane up in the air. And then one day, a friend of mine said, oh, hey, did you see that they painted a huge sign on this warehouse that says fly Navy? And I'm like, wait, you actually looked out at that. That houses in your fly. Like, there's no way you have the capacity to do that. But as you fly for a little bit longer, you start to realize, oh, now I have all of this other capacity. But man, I don't look at that as a team 90% over time. I just look at it as, as my situational awareness has grown, I find it really fun to watch.
somebody who's lagging behind a little bit because they're junior and giving them the rope, they need giving them the snack, accepting that they aren't where you are because I know where I used to be. And what I have found is usually those people junior to me, they're way further along than where I was at their stage and their development. So usually I love that. I don't mind being pulled back on the team a little bit by a junior person who is learning, but there are moments where you have to tell them, okay, just stop right now, we have to get this done and then we'll pick you up and pull you back in. - 100%. And you know, the great surgeons I've watched have been brilliant at that because what they'll say is patient comes first, but we're a teaching hospital. And at some point this surgeon's gonna be by themselves. So I've gotta always balance, make sure we do no harm and we increase the patient and allowing the person to learn. And that's a very fine line. And so as the attending physicians will, as I'll watch them, they've had a little briefing, some better than others about the fact that if you're a resident physician or surgeon, you might just get moved out of the way for a moment while they fix a mistake you're about to make or have made. And then you'll get pulled back in and you've gotta actually just take that on the chin and not allow it to affect your performance. So to your point, right, when you turn to that person and go, man, you're gonna have to put a pen in this for a second 'cause we gotta keep the train moving, but we'll come back in that moment, right? In their head, depending on who they are, that could be catastrophic failure, right? - That is so true. - That could crater them right there. - Right there. And this is what I'm getting at, which is if you're gonna survive these situations, you've gotta have absolute faith in the team that you're working with. So if I'm your understudy and you say, "Hey, pricey, gotta pin in that, we gotta go to this next thing." I've gotta just 100% believe that read has not lost confidence in me and that we're just gonna go to the next thing, right? I can't in my head to be like, "Oh, this is it, this is the end of read, we'll never allow me to get near this thing again." - I love that side, but I also have to say to the person saying, "Put a pen in it, you also need to know when that moment is," 'cause I'm a bit over-controlling, so that's something I've been working on. And I think my instinct is to say, "Put a pen in it too soon." And I learned a lot when my 16 year old started driving. And I would drive with her and before she drove by herself, I would drive with her and I was a little bit worried of how is this going to go. But man, the first time I let her go out and drive on her own, go to the grocery store and come back, I saw a totally different human walk through the house, confident, I got the job done. And after a few days, just a few days of her driving by herself, her ability was just an order of magnitude improved 'cause I wasn't there negative anymore. - Right, it's also expectation management, right? So I think you might have heard me tell this story before, but when I was at Wilderness Guide, we were biking down with road bikes down all of New Jersey, down the coast of New Jersey. And we end up staying overnight at a youth residential center, which is enclosed facilities, right? And there happened to be a riot going on when we arrived, right? And so kids are throwing furniture out the second floor window, my kids are camping in the woods, they're losing their minds, I'm losing my mind. And the head of this facility comes walking up with two cups of coffee and a smile on his face. And I'm like, oh, they've broken this guy mentally, right? Like he's coming to poison me and bury the bodies. That's what's going on right now. So he walks up to me and he heads with the coffee. He's like, how's everything? And I'm behind him, like it is, it looks like the worst parts of some movies. And I go, are you kidding? He was like, no, I'm not kidding, how are you? And I'm like, dude, I think we're in the middle of a riot. He was like, oh no, it's a Thursday. I was like, but aren't you frustrated? He was like, no, Preston, you were hired to work with Juvenile delinquents. They're not juvenile delinquents because they got along with everyone. Don't get frustrated because they do the thing. You were told they did. - That was awesome. - Right? And he was like, that's why we have chain-linked fence. We actually know this. Why are you getting frustrated? This is the problem of the kids right now. It's the problem for you. And it was like this moment where I was like, oh, there's some truth to that. - We were talking about this like 30 minutes ago. That's where you're surrounded by a guy. And all of a sudden, he changed your whole perspective. - That's right. He gave you a lesson that you now carry with your entire life. And you need those people around. Those people that can just consume all of that. They've been there, right? That guy's been there. He's consumed it. He's seen it at a different level. And now you're the new guy coming in. And he's like, Preston, I don't understand. This is just a normal day. - Yeah. So as we start to land the plane on this team cast, right? As we start to bring this to a close, and it's been amazing this conversation. I want to sort of just review some of the things we've talked about. And what I'm going to lead to is a question that goes back to this question of curriculum. Right? Is it we've talked about the role of communication, a small team dynamics of recovering from error, of competence, of rate of learning. We've talked about the cultural aspects, the social aspects, the intellectual and the physical, right? And so when you put all that together for a small team dynamic to go over in any scenario, where you're going to an unordered problem set in an ambiguous environment with high criticality and high urgency, and you're not going to get a runway. You're going to jump out of the plane, you're immediately fleet freefollowed, right? So you better figure it out, right? Or you're launching into space and there is no pause button. And you've got six months or a year to train some humans to do this. And I was going to design a new system and Monday to develop to train a brand new astronaut selection process. What are the sort of top three things you want to make sure like you just can't not do these three things? Oh wow, the first thing hearing your preamble to that that comes into my mind is you must be in a small team outside in nature because that is the only thing that has no predictability in my mind. You just do not know what is an insect bite can kill you. You can eat the wrong thing. A thunderstorm can come in and hurt you that way. Like there is an unpredictability in nature that I thrive in that environment. I think aviation has a lot of that. So I would need that unpredictability of being outdoors doing something where there's not six humans determining how to hurt you. There's nature, which now we really have to solve problems. So I would want to be in a totally foreign environment trying to solve problems in nature. If that for me would be absolutely critical. And what would come in with that is you would learn your team. Yeah. You would learn the strengths and weaknesses of each member of your team right there. Then the other thing that I would want to do is I would want whatever app we're going to go do. I would want to work with that same team and rehearse that operation a couple of dozen times with some failures thrown into it so that I can start to see, okay, who is going to take situational leadership? Who is the team leader? How are my follower skills? How are the follower skills in my team? And then where are disciplines and where are our discipline breakdowns? I probably need to think about this a lot more but on the surface, if I had kind of those two elements, I think our team would just understand each other. And you know what we'd also have? We'd also have some funny stories. That's right. We could just come back and fall back on and break the ice when we're in the thick of it. But I think those are the things that kind of initial choreography would set the right tone. Yeah, we talk a lot in Michigan critical teams about a shared narrative, right? A building a shared positive narrative among the team. This is increasingly complicated with the emergence of what we call tactical swarms, which is there's a real privilege to work together as a team that you get to know each other. But suddenly a new astronaut shows up that you've got to work with. And I know this is something that happens to you. And so the question is, let's talk me through that. All these same situation, all these same variables are in play. Now there's a brand new actor that none of you have worked together and maybe they have an abrasive personality I'm making that part up. But maybe there's something about them you just not weren't ready for. What do you do there? I think you really have to rely on your expeditionary behavior skills and we do see this all the time. You could take, I mean, I don't want to put names in there, but I could take somebody who I truly think is one of the finest astronauts I have ever met. And you take six other astronauts who are exceptional and you put them on a small team for six months and then have that one person pop into that team and it changes everything about that team. That's right. So I've been putting a huge emphasis, well, I'm not the chief astronaut anymore, but what I was, I was putting a huge emphasis on these, we have these four person really jailed teams launching on SpaceX vehicles. And we have one American astronaut launching on Russian Soyuz vehicles. And I have not ever once said the onus is on the one. The onus is on the four person small team that is totally jailed to do everything they can to successfully integrate this one person. Because that's the only way it is going to work. - I'm a well-known that I'm a huge fan of Air Force Special Operations. And specifically PJs, I have a long history with them and they've been very kind to me over the years. One of the things that makes them truly unique is that unlike almost every other team that trains as an intact squadron, PJs train as a loose squadron that will deploy independently and have to be absorbed into other teams, which means that their currency is peer acceptance because they can be the best paramedic in the world. But if they have an allergic reaction by the receiving team, they're no good to America. And so what's really interesting is that when you talk about their selection process, they talk about the fact that like yes, and you passed 100% of that stuff, and you can't be a jerk. You're gonna have to find a way to blend your way into a new team all the time. - That resonates.
across everything I've ever done. Yeah, I'd say that's an outstanding currency. Pure acceptance, as long as you maintain your integrity and you're good at what you do, pure acceptance is critical on every team. I mean, every time I've done something, I've gone from Navy Squadron and Navy Squadron and when you get to a new squadron, you could say the culture is critical and the culture is critical, but that acceptance into that new organization and understanding that you have to bend to them while they're integrating you and bending to you. That is just amazing. I love to think about that more. Yeah, one thing about nature, obviously I have a huge bias towards nature and one of the things I'll never forget is after four years of leading expeditions and long ones up and down the East Coast and different parts of the country, you have to remember as a modern wilderness guide, noils or whatever, you're bringing really high tech gear with you. You've got good shoes, backpacks, sleep, back tent, all this stuff, right? And I've been doing about three years and I went up to the Adirondex because there was this famous guy that was gonna help me carve a canoe paddle. I still have it, it's amazing. And we got to talking about this and I was telling them 'cause like every young person who had done something to high competency, I was very proud of myself. And I was like, yeah, I've been living in the backwoods and he was like, well, not really. And I was like, no, no, I've been living in the backroom and he stopped and he goes, no, you've been visiting the backcountry. He's like to live in the backcountry means that you're surviving off of the backcountry. You're not bringing food, you're not bringing water, you're not bringing some of this gear, you're going there and you're integrating yourself into the wilderness. Right now you're separate from the wilderness and it literally blew my mind because I've always thought about this like when you're an astronaut or a pilot, there's a part where you're visiting a thing and there's a part where you're integrated into the thing. And I think that these transitions that we go in our own perception and our own knowledge and our own expertise continue to evolve if you allow it to. That's fantastic. He just on the highest level to relate to any common human being would be, go to Paris for a week, go to Paris for three years and get a job in Paris and work in that environment. And they're two totally different. - That's right, that's exactly right. And so what we would usually end these teen casts on is this idea of, we've been talking about this moment, you've been through it a bunch of times we all have where you've trained, you have high competence, you arrive at the thing you've just dreamed about and you just suck for the first of whatever. And so as that person on Monday is gonna leave training and enter the thing and we all know this is gonna be a bit of a yard sale for a little while, right? What advice would you give them? - I think it is just laugh at yourself. I think if you're in a special warrior situation it's a little different, right? You got life or death right there. But the first time you go do something is, you've got to go in with the mindset of, I'm going to start learning the moment this begins. - Yeah. - So the moment that I hit play on this, that is the moment that I'm going to start learning. And I think if you go in with that mindset, you're open to failure, you've got all the things that you've learned over the last years or months or days and you are just totally ready to be humble, take whatever comes at you and do the best you can because you're gonna learn every second of that evolution because you cannot control the variables at that point. - I think it's so brilliant. I think it's a great way to end it, right? Because this idea is that instead of graduating college and thinking, oh, I'm going into the world, I'm supposed to know what I'm doing. Rather graduate college and go, okay, now the learning really begins. And I think that's a great message of anybody who's been in a training and education. So, Reed, I can't thank you enough for taking the time. I know you're incredibly busy. I got my fingers crossed that you'll be one of the people ahead into the moon. I think that's still in the situation. And I just wanna thank you for being here. - It's always a treat and I can't wait to get you back to Houston for our next operation here in Preston. Thanks for your time. - Thank you, sir. - Thank you again for listening to our team cast. For more information about the Mission Critical Team Institute, please go to www.missioncti.com or follow us on LinkedIn or Instagram. If you are a Mission Critical Team that wants more information on our courses, please reach out to our director of operations, Janice Jackson at
[email protected] as J-A-N-E-S-E at missioncti.com. And once again, thank you Janice and thank you to Shelby Road Productions for helping us produce the team cast. Have a great day. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
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