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You know, the way they ended up finding the funding is just a classic tale of the unexpected.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with journalist and author, Julian Guthrie, on her new book, How to Build a Spaceship.
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You should listen to this episode if you want to learn about the types of habits and backgrounds highly successful folks have in the fields of space, engineering, aviation, and many others, why it s crucial to be relentless in your pursuit of your vision, and how to stay focused on the task at hand in the face of consistent rejection.
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We re glad to have you with us here today at AOC, so enjoy this one with Julian Guthrie.
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And by the way, if you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the Art of Charm toolbox.
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That s where we discuss things like reading body language and nonverbal communication, the science of attraction, negotiation techniques, networking, mentorship, influence, persuasion, all that stuff that we teach here at the Art of Charm.
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If you re in the US, you can text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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Also, at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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Alright, let s talk to Julian Guthrie.
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So my first question for you, actually, Julian, is how do you get access to these people?
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Because your first book was with Larry Ellison from Oracle, and now you ve got the Peter Diamandis.
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I wanna know what you re gonna work on next, of course, but how are you able to get in touch with these folks?
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Because I ll tell you, there s a lot of people on the internet that are trying to ask questions to these people and getting kind of stonewalled.
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What makes you so special?
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Well, I think it s all about persistence, I really do, and then
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you know, coming at a person in kind of circling the wagons.
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And if you get no response or even a no from, say, Larry Ellison, who is notoriously difficult to get a hold of.
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He s the co-founder, as you said, of Oracle Corporation.
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You know, I didn t hear a response from him for months, you know, when I was going after him to write my last book, The Billionaire and the Mechanic.
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And so then I went to the chief marketing officer of Oracle.
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I went to people who knew Larry Ellison and I, you know, just persisted and persisted.
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And then someone told me, you have to email him at this time of night.
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That s the only time he reads his own emails.
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So I d wake up at 1 a.m.
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and I d email him.
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And so I learned little tricks in terms of when to reach him, how to reach him, you know, short brevity, you know, with the emails.
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So that was one case with Peter.
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I did a front page profile on him for the San Francisco Chronicle.
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It was for Peter Diamandis.
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And we just really hit it off.
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And I love this story of the X Prize.
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And so that one wasn t difficult.
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But, you know, with people like also Richard Branson or Stephen Hawking, Richard wrote the forward to my new book and Stephen Hawking wrote the afterward.
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You know, there it s a matter of introduction.
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Find somebody who knows that person or someone close to that person and don t take no for an answer.
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and persist and be really forthright and show how heartfelt you are, sincere you are, and how much you love what you re doing and love the project and why it s important.
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So that s kind of how I went about, how I go about getting people.
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I, you know, I m lucky because I do these projects that I am so passionate about and I believe in and they have a good message.
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And so it s not the hardest sell.
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But it is just a matter of getting their attention.
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Do you think that a lot of it is your background?
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You have a proven track record of journalism with the San Francisco Chronicle.
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It is.
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It s your reputation, right?
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You work on something assiduously.
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You re at it, you know, every day for many years.
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I was at the San Francisco Chronicle for 20 years until last year.
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And you build up story by story with you, you know, interview by interview with Peter Diamandis, business by business.
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He s founded many, many companies.
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So, you do these things step by step.
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You know, your goal is to get better at whatever it is you re doing.
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And so, that has helped me develop, you know, a reputation as someone who is very devoted to getting the facts right, getting the story right, and also, though, who is trustworthy.
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You know, I m not going to double-cross anyone.
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People trust me with a lot of secrets.
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When someone tells me it s off the record, it s genuinely off the record.
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So, it s just being forthright.
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And it is
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in your career, whatever your career is, it s doing things step by step and not skipping any of those steps.
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And that ultimately does pay off.
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Why do people tell journalists things that are supposed to be off the record?
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That is something I totally don t understand because their whole job is to make the record.
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So what part does telling somebody something off the record play?
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Well, there are sometimes these asides, you know, where Larry Ellison is talking to me about something private, maybe a family member.
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And, you know, the story of parenting is relevant, but he doesn t want to reveal something about his son or daughter, let s say.
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So there s some context there.
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Peter Diamandis, you know, one of the reasons he really trusted me once he had done the profile for the San Francisco Chronicle, you know, during that reporting period, he had told me something about Planetary Resources, which is this asteroid mining company that he helped found.
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and he told me the name of the spacecraft and which asteroid they were going after.
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And while this sounds really far out, and it is really far out, he then called me back and he said, oh, I overstepped.
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I wasn t supposed to tell you the name of that particular asteroid because I guess there s some competition to go after this asteroid.
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I love this stuff.
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It s so out there and so wonderful.
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And so I said, no problem.
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I don t need that detail for the story.
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And that really also helped him to trust me
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You know, with this bigger story, which really tells the story of his life and this greater cast of characters.
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But again, it s trust.
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So much of what we do, what you do, what I do, is about developing that trust and keeping a sense of priorities.
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You know, what s my objective here with this story?
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You know, I want to do a great story.
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I want to tell it factually.
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If someone has very valid reasons for a little detail that is not instrumental to my story, if that person doesn t want that in there, I m going to respect that.
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Yeah, that seems a great way to build trust to get the other things that you do need for the story that make more sense.
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So it seems like with journalism, as it is with any relationship, it s more about the long game.
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You could easily burn Peter Diamandis and write some cool, like, tech-crunch front page, Peter Diamandis and planetary...
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Resources.
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Yeah, they re going after C-130X5 asteroid and then it s like, whoa, and then nobody wants to talk to you ever again, but at least you got this little feather in your cap with the top of TechCrunch or what, I don t know, some space.com news website, but it would burn you.
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But a lot of people are willing to do that, however, to do the kind of deep work that you do, which is
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hang out with Larry Ellison and Peter Diamandis on spaceships and boats and whatever other vehicles these guys are building, you have to play the long game.
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Well, you do, and there was a lot that Peter Diamandis entrusted me with with the reporting of this book.
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He actually exhumed 25 years worth of his personal journals, his diaries, in effect, that no one has ever seen, and he hasn t seen in decades.
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Because I said, I want to get past the Peter Diamandis that people think they know or know.
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And I want to learn about this, you know, wide eyed kid who was growing up with this seemingly crazy dream.
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And, you know, I want to know about the hardships.
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I want to know about the struggles because people see the successes.
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But, you know, what went into this?
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We all know that, you know, achieving these milestones or breakthroughs or starting businesses, all of these things
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you know, are really grueling.
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And so Peter sent me 25 years of his diaries, basically.
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And I went through, I spent an entire month going through those.
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And I put like a thousand post-its on these pages.
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And I was so moved by this very raw look at his life and how many times he failed.
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before he succeeded.
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I mean, it was even though I knew what the outcome was, I was rooting for this kid, you know, starting as a teenager.
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And, you know, there are just great messages in his story about perseverance.
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And this guy who just got knocked down time and again, was told no time and again, was rejected time and again, and seemingly failed in his missions and yet kept at it.
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And so I was reading these journals.
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I was really pretty odd.
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First, he was a true space geek like I had never met before.
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He had to get off planet.
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You know, I mean, it s just like his in his marrow, his mission.
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And so I was fascinated by that because I m not a space geek.
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And I didn t before this book hang out with a lot of them.
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And I was just like, wow, this is fascinating how it s just in his mind.
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He has to do this.
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But going back to your point, you know, there s a lot in those journals
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It was very revealing as well.
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And so I had to be aware that, you know, I m not writing a scandalous sort of book, but there s a lot in there that, you know, as it would there would be in anyone s diary where you have to treat it, you know, with respect.
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And so, again, he entrusted me with that.
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And those diaries, those journals were super helpful in just my understanding who he is.
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And speaking of space geeks, this book, at first I thought, oh, this is gonna be solely for space geeks, I m not sure if this is gonna be for me, but it turned out to be kind of a, in a way, an everyman story, as much as it might not seem like one involving spaceships and millions of dollars, but it involves having a huge dream that seems inconquerable.
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just impossible and going after it in a way that actually makes sense.
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Not just some sort of follow your passion, it s all good, everything comes together in the end, but a real story with a lot of details and trials and tribulations and injuries and people getting hurt slash killed doing what they need to do to get to space and running out of money.
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I mean, it s the story of every business only we re dealing with space and death.
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Yeah, that s neat to hear.
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That s how I see it as well.
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I mean, I see it as something
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that will appeal to parents, to kids of, you know, really from about the fifth grade up.
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It s really finding a home among STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math programs, educators, and then into the entrepreneurial side of things.
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And it is, it s just about, you know, there s aviation community, there s the space community, and then there s the engineering side of things.
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But I love the story just for the underlying themes of
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Find your dream.
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If you re a parent, recognize that dream in your kids, even if it s not the one you see for them.
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Get them building stuff, making stuff with their own hands.
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All the individuals in this book who went on to make history started out, found their passion early on, whether it was rocketry or building model planes, and they just kept at it, and they never let go of that passion.
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Or for the startup, the business person,
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you know, struggling to launch something, you know, here s a story.
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It s kind of this how-to manual on how to achieve a seemingly impossible dream.
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In this case, it was to get to space privately, to do in small teams what only three of the world s largest governments, China, U.S., and the then Soviet Union had done before, but to do this in really small and scrappy teams.
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And there are super cool messages in that.
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Follow your passion.
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Don t give up.
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Things that may seem like a cliche, but you see them play out in this book in real concrete ways that you can almost try to replicate in whatever it is that you are doing.
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And I certainly feel I m a pretty tenacious person, but I feel I am inspired by the story, you know, and I feel more emboldened even.
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because I have written this story and because I know what was achieved and I know how difficult it was to do what Peter and this whole cast of great band of renegades, you know, people kind of working off the grid, these outliers, you know, who had so much talent and they were incentivized in the right way to go after this $10 million prize.
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And it was even more than the prize, though.
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It was a shared dream.
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So there are a lot of great lessons and I m super proud of the book.
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And yeah, I think it s got, you know, it has a great home with the space aficionados and dreamers.
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But way beyond that, you know, I tell people, you know, it has an appeal there, but I think it is for the every man, you know, the parents, the kids, anybody who s, you know, trying to do something great or maybe set aside.
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a dream they had in youth and childhood and can pick it up again and be like, oh my gosh, look what was achieved and just take this moment, these themes that are very inspiring and run with it.
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One of the things that you mentioned was follow your passion sounds like a cliche, but you see it play out.
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But doesn t that lean a little bit towards survivorship bias?
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Because there s probably people that you researched for this that tried to participate in the X Prize, didn t even come close, went bankrupt, not a happy ending.
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Some of the parties that you did follow, oh, this person works for this space company, this Romanian guy moves here, this other guy, da-da-da.
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But like, for example, John Carmack, CEO of Oculus, who was participating in this, he found bureaucracy to be so stifling, he just went, eh, to hell with this and moved on to greener pastures for him.
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There have to be parties that you researched that you came across where the story just wasn t interesting because it nosedived into the dirt, figuratively or literally, and that was the end of it.
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Yeah, it s neat that you mentioned John Carmack.
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So he, of course, is a legend in the world of video games.
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And there are all these legends in my story in terms of in their own world.
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Burt Rutan, a legend in the world of aviation design.
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He has more planes in the Smithsonian today than just about any aircraft designer in history.
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You know, Peter has done amazing things.
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Eric Lindbergh, you know, the grandson of Charles Lindbergh.
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His story within the story is great.
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John Carmack
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So he was a legend in the world of video games, had done Quake and Doom and all sorts of cool stuff.
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Today, he s the CTO of Oculus Rift.
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But he thought he could apply what he knew about writing code for games and apply it to Rocketry.
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And they worked super fast.
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They iterated.
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They had an all-volunteer team.
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And as you read in the book, you know, they were meeting Tuesdays and Saturdays and they got an amazing amount of hardware actually built and tested in a crazy
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amount of time.
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I mean, very little time.
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And, you know, they had crashes and they had failures, but they were moving so fast in what they were doing.
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And again, it was all volunteer team working two days a week.
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So John, when I interviewed him for the book, when I interviewed him in Texas, you know, he s immersed in the virtual reality stuff right now and he s determined to get that into the mainstream and get all the bugs worked out.
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But he said, you know, he s going to come back to rocketry.
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He loves it.
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He s got the bug.
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He s not giving up on that.
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And he and Elon Musk have a funny back and forth sometimes where Elon s trying to recruit him to SpaceX.
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And I mean, John s just a genius, period.
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But he wants to get back into rocketry.
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The people that I really focused on in the book, there were something like 24 teams from
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a dozen countries that went after this $10 million prize put forth by Peter Diamandis for the first privately built and flown rocket that could go to the startup space.
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But I really focused on the teams that built hardware and that went past the proposal place where they were building stuff, they were testing, they were hot firing engines, they were digging ditches, they were actually doing the work.
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I focused on those people and all those people would never say that they regretted any of it because they re so passionate.
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They really took risks and they advanced in some way, whether incrementally or big steps, you know, their own careers as it related to space.
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Pablo de Leon, who was in Argentina and founded this team there, you know, his colleagues ridiculed him and they re like, you re never going to win this.
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And I think he got something like $50,000
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in donations, which is nothing when you re building rockets.
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And, you know, he tested and he flew and today he s a professor of aeronautics and he s designing these very cool spacesuits for SpaceX and for NASA and for Boeing, I think.
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And the Romanian guy you referenced, Dimitri Popescu, he is one of my favorite stories in the book.
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He was an engineering student when he heard about the XPRIZE and he drops out of school, much to his parents  dismay.
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He s determined to build a rocket, and he gets his wife on board reluctantly, but then they re building, you know, this rocket with this volunteer team in his father-in-law s backyard in the outskirts of Bucharest.
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You know, and he s literally, he does not know what he s doing, this team, and they re putting their lives at risk, and they ve got engine explosions, and they end up launching the largest private rocket ever flown from
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Romania and same thing happened with the guy Steve Bennett in the UK.
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You know, people ridiculed him.
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He dropped out of his, you know, he had a steady job at Colgate Toothpaste Factory in England and a steady paying job and he left that and maxed out every credit card and was practically living in his car to build and fly this private rocket.
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And he ended up doing that and again flying the largest private rocket ever flown from the UK mainland.
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So there are all these stories of
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No, they didn t win the prize, but wow, in their minds they won the prize.
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And they were all rooting for each other, you know, and Burt Rutan steps into the scene and in the Mojave
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Desert, so cool.
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Badlands of the Mojave, you know, 30 people working on the secret spaceship program there.
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And, you know, he gets the funding, besides having the genius in aviation, which he thinks, can this apply to space?
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Can I take what I ve learned in aviation and just, you know, move it out to space?
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And that was obviously a huge risk, a huge question, a lot of doubts around it.
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But he had the secret backing by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
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You know, there are all these people who are gunning for this $10 million prize, but they just had this shared dream.
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They had this shared dream.
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They had this disappointment in NASA or in governmental space programs, whether in the UK or in Romania or in Argentina or in the United States.
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And they just wanted to advance that cause.
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The guy from the UK, for example, where is he now, though?
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Does he still live in his car?
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No, so he s not.
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You know, he risked literally everything.
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You know, his wife was going to divorce him.
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You know, he s trying to pay for the kids.
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He s maxed out everything.
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And you re like, this is crazy.
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And, you know, he s living off the credit cards and just to build this rocket.
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And he does so.
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And it s a big success.
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You know, he still struggles.
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He ends up getting financing through a multimillionaire over in the UK.
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And so he s building rockets today.
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And he has this very large and respected educational outreach program now where he brings
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rocketry to schools all across England.
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And he s still building rockets.
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And he is still with the goal of building a man s private spaceship.
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He s very hard at work.
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I think his company is called Starship Enterprises in the UK.
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Steve Bennett.
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Another great story, you know, just sacrifices and passion and risking a ton and seeing great successes along the way.
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But, you know, having this goal, which is really, really hard.
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but being unrelenting.
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I mean, really cool stuff.
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I mean, to me, the best of the human spirit.
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What I love about this story is it combines human bravery and scrappiness and innovation with technological breakthroughs.
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I don t know.
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I gravitate toward those combinations in stories and science, a lot of tech.
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But then there s the human drama, which pulls the thread that runs through and is the strongest to me and is the most important to me as a storyteller.
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Now, Dimitri Popescu, who is in Romania, it seems like he talks to this cosmonaut from Romania, kind of a national hero, and the guy says, yeah, yeah, you re doing great things, and then kind of turns around and says, ah, these guys are not doing anything special, they re never getting to space, nobody pay any attention to them.
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What do you think s happening there?
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I mean, sure, there s probably some ego and some jealousy, but what do you think actually happened there?
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Because that seemed like a really weird, underhanded chop at the knees.
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Yeah, you re absolutely right.
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That s a good observation.
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And there were experiences like this in Argentina as well, and to a certain degree in the UK, where the government was supposed to be doing these things, you know, according to either, you know, what the government was being paid for, the governmental space program, such as in Romania, you know, they were supposed to be developing manned rocketry and manned rockets, you know, worthy of flying men, women,
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up to the start of space and beyond, and they were not doing that.
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So, here comes this 20-something kid who hasn t even finished engineering school, is very audacious, and is building rockets.
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And word starts getting out, you know, it starts in this, you know, backyard in Bucharest, and, you know, the rocket is actually starting to be built.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the Romanian cosmonaut, Dimitru Pernario,
2
SPEAKER_00
yeah, he was very friendly to Dimitru Propescu, young engineering student at first.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then, you know, once Dimitru starts to actually build things, then the Romanian Space Agency is taking notice of this.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think, you know, behind the scenes, somebody was needling them like, hey, you know, you re getting all this money for doing this.
2
SPEAKER_00
It got very hostile between, you know, Dimitru and his team of volunteers, you know, students,
2
SPEAKER_00
and the Romanian Space Agency and the Romanian Space Agency, the head of it, Prunario, he, you know, was sending emails actually saying, this was after 9-11 in the United States, they could be likened to what they re doing could be considered something that could be aiding terrorists because they were building these rockets.
2
SPEAKER_00
Dimitru, the engineering student and his volunteer team, they were actually for some time very nervous of
2
SPEAKER_00
the Romanian government cracking down on what they were doing or, you know, they were living in fear for a period.
2
SPEAKER_00
It got very hostile and, you know, Dimitru Popescu today is in New Mexico and he has an aerospace company called Arca and they are doing super cool things.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s an amazing story unto itself.
2
SPEAKER_03
When I read this, I was like, that cosmonaut dude is spreading a bunch of government cash to his crony friends, and they re not doing anything, because they go, well, space is hard and expensive.
2
SPEAKER_03
And everyone just goes, yeah, probably.
2
SPEAKER_03
And since it s not a major national goal, there s not a whole lot of spotlight on it.
2
SPEAKER_03
And then when these students start doing it, they go, what happened to all your money?
2
SPEAKER_03
And they re probably really worried that someone s going to look into it and find that he bought a house in Greece with it.
2
SPEAKER_03
I don t have any evidence for that, but I have lived in Eastern Bloc places where that s just kind of what people do when they work for the government, is they figure out a way to skim off some cream.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, probably.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think that s what Dimitri, the student, was dealing with.
2
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, you think about the courage he had to continue.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, when you have not only the challenge, just the engineering challenge of building a rocket, you know, privately and trying to
2
SPEAKER_00
At some point, his goal was to send someone up in it.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, you ve got that challenge, period.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then you have not just a lack of support.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s one thing that s passive, but you have open hostility and you re dealing with that.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you re a student and, you know, your parents, your family members, your friends, everybody thinks you re nuts.
2
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, he persisted, you know, going back to this whole perseverance thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, he was passionate about it and it was his dream and he was unrelenting.
2
SPEAKER_00
when he had all of these people against him.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, I mean, Peter Diamandis had all of these people against him, too.
2
SPEAKER_00
So there s a theme here, I guess.
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2
SPEAKER_03
It seems strange to me that Peter finished medical school.
2
SPEAKER_03
That just seems bizarre.
2
SPEAKER_03
Was it just because of his family wanting him to be a doctor?
2
SPEAKER_03
It seemed like that s what it said in the book, but I almost can t believe it.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s like, why would you go through all of that just to be like, finished medical school, all right, now on to rocket.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s almost contra to what a lot of these big players say, which is focus only on what you re doing, don t get distractions.
2
SPEAKER_03
I mean, talk about a distraction, you re going to medical school.
3
SPEAKER_01
for God s sake.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was and I read it was interesting reading his private journals because he had you know half dozen of them were from the medical school days and I was reading this you know there were some places where he was totally fascinated you know like when he was doing cranial dissections and he was intrigued by you know the brain and he was you know and you can see how that would be absolutely fascinating where you re getting an inside look literally at you know the human body and the brain and
3
SPEAKER_00
the inner working.
3
SPEAKER_00
So he was interested in that.
3
SPEAKER_00
But most of it was, oh my God, how am I in the journals was, I just have to get through with this to get back to my love of space.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, my heart, you know, and mind are in space.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I am here in medical school.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he was at Harvard Medical School.
3
SPEAKER_00
He had gotten in.
3
SPEAKER_00
He d gone to MIT earlier.
3
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, he was on this dual track.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, his parents, Greek immigrants, his father, you know, was his own success story.
3
SPEAKER_00
of coming to America and finding his way and becoming a respected physician.
3
SPEAKER_00
And in the Greek tradition, they wanted, you know, the eldest son, Peter, to follow in his father s footsteps.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he was, you know, from early childhood, they would say, there s the next Dr. Diamandis.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so he was on that track.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he was a good boy.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, he wanted to please his parents, but his heart and love was always space.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he went to Harvard, yes, to please his parents to, you know, check.
3
SPEAKER_00
But he also had
3
SPEAKER_00
another kind of ulterior motive there, which was very space geeky.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s so incredible that you would go to Harvard, you would go through medical school there trying to please his parents, but he also had this idea that maybe what he learned there would help him live long enough, would, you know, teach him something about longevity so he could live long enough just so he could get to space.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, it s this thinking that shows, you know, his obsession that, yes, he s doing it largely for his parents, but, oh, well, this could be helpful.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the third part of it was there was still a hope in his mind that he might become an astronaut for NASA.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if you were to fight or pilot a test pilot, you know, the best way to get into the astronaut corps was to have a medical degree.
3
SPEAKER_00
He had these different agendas with medical school, but it does show, you know,
3
SPEAKER_00
an interesting side to him, for sure, and to go to all that work, but to never practice medicine.
3
SPEAKER_00
He was never intending to practice medicine.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of like, well, I want to go to space, but that might take a while.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let me cure aging by going to medical school first so that then I can buy myself enough time to then go to space.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of like
3
SPEAKER_01
Elon Musk in a way where it s like, all right, so we need to be around on Earth long enough so that we can get to space and colonize Mars.
3
SPEAKER_01
And in order to do that, we ve got to slow down global warming.
3
SPEAKER_01
What s the biggest polluter?
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, cars.
3
SPEAKER_01
All right, let s invent an electric car that pollutes less and then that ll help fund everything.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just like, what?
3
SPEAKER_01
And the solar city, it s crazy how big these people think.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s a brilliant observation on your part, a parallel.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a whole different way.
3
SPEAKER_00
It is a really interesting way of thinking.
3
SPEAKER_00
of looking at the world and looking at your place in it and how you get there.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, it s a seemingly indirect path, but one thing just led to the other.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Elon, I interviewed him for the book and there are a number of these fly on the wall scenes where, you know, Peter is meeting in this quest to fund this prize.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s very funny.
3
SPEAKER_00
He, as you read, he announces the prize, $10 million prize in May, 1996, and he s got
3
SPEAKER_00
20 astronauts with him, and he s got the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, he s got Burt Rutan and, you know, the head of NASA.
3
SPEAKER_00
He doesn t have the 10 million, whoops, but he believes he s going to get it, you know, and he goes off on this quest to fundraise and, you know, to make it happen however he could.
3
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, he didn t have the money when he started, but he had the vision, you know, just knocking on every single door imaginable.
3
SPEAKER_00
And one of those doors was Elon Musk.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he met with him in around 2001 when Elon had just cashed out or was cashing out of PayPal, which he d co-founded.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so you see this super cool scene where Peter is meeting with Elon and a fellow, an entrepreneur named Adeo Ressi, really interesting guy.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Elon is just starting to think about getting into space.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Peter has never thought of anything else.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so it s almost like Peter, you know, was the elder statesman at that point.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, he s only 10 years older.
3
SPEAKER_00
I guess that s significant enough.
3
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, and they re sitting down and they re talking about this.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Peter is trying to get funding for the XPRIZE.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Elon is thinking just about Mars.
3
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He s like, we ve been to the moon, check, been there, done that.
3
SPEAKER_00
We got to go to Mars.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, it s a very cool scene, you know, where you get a first glimpse of Elon.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s another scene in the book where
3
SPEAKER_00
Peter s meeting with Jeff Bezos to ask for funding.
3
SPEAKER_00
Jeff, of course, being the co-founder of Amazon.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Peter s asking Jeff to fund the X Prize.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Jeff is like, no, but this was around 2000 as well.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m planning on everything I make through Amazon, I m going to put into space.
3
SPEAKER_00
And today that s proven very much true.
3
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, he s got Blue Origin and it s doing phenomenal things.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Elon with SpaceX is doing phenomenal things in space.
3
SPEAKER_00
You see another scene where Peter Diamandis is meeting with Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Peter s like, I know he s going to fund it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I know he s going to fund it.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, he s the rebel billionaire.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, we re all about being rebels.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he loves space, allegedly.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Richard Branson doesn t fund it.
3
SPEAKER_00
But you again get to kind of again be this fly on the wall where you re meeting with these really fascinating people.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s just the beginning of this talk.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s this turning point, this inflection point.
3
SPEAKER_00
where space is beginning to go from governmental control to private industry.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a really neat turning point in this story in history where you see that happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
He got rejected, what, 150 times, asking for $10 million, which is a lot, but not so much that you d think, oh, this is impossible, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And yet, 150 no s.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s, by any measure, that s a lot of rejection.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, after maybe 20, 30 times, you d be like, jeez, I mean, you know, whether it s, if I m submitting a book proposal and I get rejected 20 times, I d be like, oh, this is probably not gonna work.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, not after doing this story now,
3
SPEAKER_00
or you have a business venture that you re trying to get funded, or you re a high school student trying to launch something, whatever it is, and you re told no five times.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re like, this is not looking good.
3
SPEAKER_00
Ten times, this is really not looking good.
3
SPEAKER_00
Peter, over 150 times, and he s getting these meetings with CEOs of big corporations.
3
SPEAKER_00
Repeatedly, they re all asking him the same questions.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re asking, why isn t NASA doing this?
3
SPEAKER_00
And what if someone gets killed?
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, I don t want my company logo Ford or Rolex or.
3
SPEAKER_00
FedEx or whatever it is on the side of a rocket that may explode.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, how good is that gonna look?
3
SPEAKER_00
So.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like the logo plunge through like someone s roof and you just see the flames and on the flames it s like sponsored by Rolex.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
General Motors.
3
SPEAKER_01
He was doing this before all these thousands and thousands of dotcom billionaires.
3
SPEAKER_01
Jason says, yeah, people tip ten million dollars nowadays.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
You could have asked a bunch of other people that weren t rich back then because they were in elementary school.
3
SPEAKER_01
or middle school or something, high school, those guys now, if you needed $10 million for an XPRIZE now, and this is what he is doing at the XPRIZE, he s going, all right, how many XPRIZES do you want to fund?
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, okay, here s a few million from Zuckerberg, you know, whoever, because people are funding this, probably it s the friggin  tax write-off at this point for half these guys, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, but you know, at that time, there was also not
3
SPEAKER_00
the crowdfunding sources that we have today, you know, with Kickstarter, with Indiegogo, with GoFundMe, with a range of these.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so he was doing this incentive prize, you know, largely without the Internet and trying to spread the word and trying to galvanize people.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he had galvanized, you know, was successful through the media.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was a huge media story.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, the XPRIZE, the teams that were going after it.
3
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, he was meeting one-on-one with these CEOs and told, you know, no time and again.
3
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, he just couldn t get there.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, it was just like, God, he d get enough money to keep, you know, this small team and they were all doing other things.
3
SPEAKER_00
No one was getting rich of this.
3
SPEAKER_00
People were barely getting paid.
3
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, sometimes it would be down to just Peter and, you know, another
3
SPEAKER_00
key guy, Greg Marienk, where they d be the only, you know, guys left standing who were keeping this dream going, this dream of the X Prize.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, the way they ended up finding the funding is just a classic tale of the unexpected.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, I think it s, it s great, you know, and it is a story of like, don t give up and keep knocking on those doors and you may not get your funding from expected avenues.
3
SPEAKER_00
So go to these kind of, think creatively, think outside
4
SPEAKER_01
the box.
4
SPEAKER_01
The story is all about that.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, try solutions that are unexpected and try to outsource problems that you have to the outliers.
4
SPEAKER_01
There is great power in crowdsourcing and this was a model of that before, you know, the term was as ubiquitous as it is today.
4
SPEAKER_00
The backbone for me, for Peter, was illustrated when, aside from all of his perseverance, but even in medical school, I can t remember, he got sick or something, or he was too busy starting a space university, or competing, and all these different things, that he missed some days dissecting a pig, and he was like, I m gonna fail, so they steal the pig so that he can practice, and that was kind of a cardinal offense, according to the professor, knowing that
4
SPEAKER_00
most of the time pig fetuses get, you know, chopped up and served to people as a prank or something like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
And he s doing it to practice.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that professor, he cops to it and he says, look, I took it.
4
SPEAKER_00
I know I might get expelled from school, but I did it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I don t know if a lot of people would do that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you think he would have done that if he wasn t going to get turned in by his friend?
4
SPEAKER_00
Or do you think he did it because he s an upstanding guy?
4
SPEAKER_01
That s so funny.
4
SPEAKER_01
I love that fetal pig story, actually.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think we all have a fetal pig story in our own lives.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but I got away with it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Never got caught.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Gosh, it s where you cut corners.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in this case, it was Peter who, yeah, he did get sick and he had everything on the line.
4
SPEAKER_01
This was earlier in the story.
4
SPEAKER_01
This was when he was still at Hamilton before he transfers to MIT and he s dreaming of going to MIT and leaving Hamilton.
4
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t the place for him.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he gets sick and he, so much of his biology class depends on this final fetal pig dissection examination.
4
SPEAKER_01
So he puts the fetal pig into this bag and absconds with it and he s found out and he goes to the woods and buries it.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s a hysterical story.
4
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, he s living in fear and you just, we ve all had something like, oh God, is it over?
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, is my future over?
4
SPEAKER_01
Have I done something really, really dumb here?
4
SPEAKER_01
I didn t have bad intentions.
4
SPEAKER_01
But, you know, he actually, Peter called his dad and said, dad, he was just ashen and shaken.
4
SPEAKER_01
He said, this is what I ve done and I m just going to go and plead for mercy.
4
SPEAKER_01
And his dad said, well, he gave him some strategy that was very, very helpful.
4
SPEAKER_01
And Peter did go and he turned himself in.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s a matter of Peter, you know, had very good guidance.
4
SPEAKER_01
He had a good, strong backbone.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, he s an ethical guy.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I think it was this was the best avenue to take.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, I have to fess up.
4
SPEAKER_01
And and he did.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the professor, you know, showed him mercy.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I interviewed that professor about that moment.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he s like, I m so glad he didn t remember, but he was so glad that he did that to give Peter that chance because they had such a strict honor code that Peter literally could have been expelled.
4
SPEAKER_01
And
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, from that, going back to something I said earlier, and that is you don t miss any steps.
4
SPEAKER_01
You don t skip any steps along the way.
4
SPEAKER_01
And Peter, that was like, OK, I am not skipping a step along the way from here on out.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, I m going to be as assiduous and as conscientious as I can be.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it was a great lesson for him.
4
SPEAKER_00
What about the books that these guys are reading?
4
SPEAKER_00
It seems like you know all these people really well.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re reading their journals.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re talking with some of these top guys, like Larry Ellison, DMN, Burutan.
4
SPEAKER_00
What are these guys reading?
4
SPEAKER_00
Where do these guys have their major influences?
4
SPEAKER_00
Did you see any commonalities between the things that they re taking in?
4
SPEAKER_01
Hmm, that s a really interesting point.
4
SPEAKER_01
They are driven more internally rather than by external influences.
4
SPEAKER_01
That may be the difference there.
4
SPEAKER_01
where as much of the world is guided by, you know, the influences of maybe what you read or what you expose to.
4
SPEAKER_01
There was something, you know, Larry Ellison with Burt Rutan, certainly with Peter Diamandis, with Richard Branson, with this woman in the story, Anusha Ansari, it s a great character, Eric Lindbergh, where they were driven by, it seems like something that was just in their DNA, in their marrow.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, in Peter s case, it was to get to space.
4
SPEAKER_01
In Bert s case, it was to build planes.
4
SPEAKER_01
In Richard Branson s case, it was to shake up, you know, business industry and to do things that are profitable, but that are also really, really fun.
4
SPEAKER_01
For Larry Ellison, he s a guy who just wanted to work for himself, so he needed to come up with a company where he could do that, which is pretty funny.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I think there s that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Although Peter, an interesting story.
4
SPEAKER_01
So he came up with the idea for the X Prize.
4
SPEAKER_01
by reading a book, The Spirit of St.
4
SPEAKER_01
Louis by Charles Lindbergh.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he s reading this book and he s like, wow, I always thought Lindbergh flew as a stunt, but wow, now I m reading that Lindbergh flew to win a $25,000 prize that had been set forward by a fellow named Raymond Orteg in the 1920s.
4
SPEAKER_01
And Charles Lindbergh was the first man to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, connecting the cities, became the world s most famous man at the time.
4
SPEAKER_01
Peter s reading this is like, wow,
4
SPEAKER_01
Look at how Lindbergh s flight, prompted by this Orteig prize, really jump-started commercial aviation.
4
SPEAKER_01
What if I could do the same for private space flight?
4
SPEAKER_01
What if I could launch an incentive competition to really jump-start this industry?
4
SPEAKER_01
So there is some of that inspiration taken from books, obviously mentors and the like.
4
SPEAKER_01
With these individuals, there s this just strong, almost inexplicable inner drive.
4
SPEAKER_00
Tell us about Bert Rutan.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s not a minor character.
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He s certainly not the main character we see in this book, but the guy s clearly brilliant.
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You mentioned him earlier.
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He has more aircraft designs in the Smithsonian than just about anyone.
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That sounds like a very specific form of genius.
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It is.
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Bert Rutan is a guy who, you know, he s been the same as I see it from childhood to his seventies, where he is today.
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When he was, you know, eight, seven, eight, nine years old, he was raised Seventh-day Adventist and they couldn t do sports on weekends.
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They couldn t do a lot of things.
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So, what he could do was build model planes and his father was a plane geek and his older brother, Dick Rutan, loved planes.
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His sister, you know, would always play the stewardess when you could use that term.
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That s what she aspired to be.
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So, they were just a plane
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centric, plane-focused family.
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But Bert, really interesting story about him.
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So he would never want his mom to buy him the kits for model planes because he never wanted to build something that had already been built.
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He never wanted to follow someone else s instructions.
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You know, in school, it would not be looked favorably, that quality would not be looked upon favorably because he wanted to do something original all the time.
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So his brother would build these kits, these model planes,
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Dick Rutan would build them and fly them and crash them.
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And then Bert would pick up the balsa wood pieces, and he would build something of his own design.
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And they were always these wild, contrarian-looking planes, and they looked highly improbable or dangerous.
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But they were just these model planes.
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And, you know, step by step, again, he began to build bigger model planes, remote control planes.
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He went on by the age of 16 to win
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the Plane Modelers Association top awards where there are thousands of these people who gather of all ages and fly these home-built model planes.
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So that was his passion and that was something again that his parents did nurture and his mom took him all across the state.
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He grew up in Central California and took him to all these model aviation shows and they d have to have trailer and put all these planes in the back and drive.
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So it was this passion that you know his mother
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really nurtured.
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And again, this contrarian approach, he became very well known in the 70s through the 80s for these home-built kits.
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He came up with these kits to build your own airplane basically in your garage.
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I mean, that is reminiscent of, you know, the computer industry, a lot of great things which started in garages.
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So he thought, why can t we build our own planes in our backyards, in our garages?
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So he made these kits and started selling these kits and sold thousands and thousands of them for these planes you could build on your own and fly.
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That sounds really, really dangerous.
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I know it does.
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But for the aviation crowd, it was really embraced.
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And the Federal Aviation Administration has to certify them.
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So he made a great name for himself doing that and then found its composites in the Mojave Desert and built all sorts of cool planes.
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And then in 1986,
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He built this, again, very improbable-looking plane.
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This is how Bert thinks, and this is also why his genius, while specific, is so applicable to all different people, walks of life, ages, industries.
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His story is super inspiring.
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So, in 1986, he builds this crazy-looking, spindly-winged plane called the Voyager.
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And the Voyager, flown by his brother Dick Cretan, who had been to Vietnam and decorated Purple Heart test pilot,
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military pilot flew this Voyager first non-stop, non-refueled flight around the world.
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Huge news.
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This was 1986.
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This was Burt s plane.
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And nobody thought, you know, it could be done.
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It was on the cover of every magazine that year.
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You know, one of the biggest news stories of that year and a true milestone.
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So, you know, Burt is the guy who, again, step by step did it, achieved a milestone with the Voyager.
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He s dreaming of space.
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He d always loved space, loved the story of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and others.
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You know, so he starts to think, why can t I do a high altitude research plane?
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Maybe it will drop launch a rocket.
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And he hears of Diamandis s prize.
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He d already met Paul Allen.
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His genius leads him to come up with, you know, the solution to one of the most vexing problems of modern spaceflight.
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or spaceflight period, manned spaceflight, and that is how to return man and machine safely back through the atmosphere.
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And so he came up with this design that was called the feather, where the wings of the plane actually crazily would just bend in half upon descent to slow the descent and to reorient the craft as it s coming back into the atmosphere.
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And the aerodynamicist told him it was never going to work.
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It was going to result in a fatal spin and he was going to lose his test pilot.
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But, you know, he tested it and his gut instinct
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And all of his years of building planes, designing planes, believing in what he had done, you know, paid off.
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Then these events start to unfold in the Mojave Desert and tens of thousands of people flock to the Mojave Desert to see the world s first private manned space flights.
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And a team of 30 people building this private spaceship in the desert.
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reigniting this dream that people had, you know, who watched NASA, the magic of NASA in the 60s.
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And here it was, this team of 30 people.
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And, you know, it s one of those things that brings tears to people s eyes to talk about it, not to sound hokey, but it was like so cool on so many levels of private versus government, small teams versus corporations or government.
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and off-the-grid outlier types doing this cool maverick stuff, and test pilots straight out of the right stuff, you know, white-knuckling it to the start of space.
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A 63-year-old test pilot, you know, is the first to fly this rocket, the Spaceship One, to the start of space.
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So, Peter Diamandis, you know, watching, biting his nails, but this dream, you know, from which began when he watched the Apollo 11 landing in 1969,
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this dream coming to reality.
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So Bert is one of my favorite characters and by character I mean real life people.
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He s just a larger than life figure in every sense of the word and a great story.
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And I love it that his story while well known in aviation circles you walk into any aviation gathering with him and he s a rock star.
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But I mean his story is so interesting I think for a mainstream audience.
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So I hope that
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people who didn t know about him before really grab on to what he s done.
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He has so many cool, amazing lessons for non-aviation types.
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Yeah, it s just kind of an interesting character in the story itself.
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And Jason knows a little bit about him as well.
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And so it just seems like he s underrated, but of course, in his circles, he s the man, of course, well-deserved accolades for the things that he s done.
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I mean, the idea that there s a plane that would reorient itself, even if everything broke, the way that it s designed, it pushes itself into the right position.
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When I heard that, I thought, okay,
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Simple concept, probably really tough to design.
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Wait a minute, why aren t all planes built like that?
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How is that not every single plane, right?
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It just, and it s, it seems like the level of innovation is incredible.
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It is.
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It really is a great story.
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How to make a spaceship is a great story about innovation and these breakthroughs.
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And it does seem simple, right?
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But sometimes, you know, as we know, you know, where when it appears simple, it s like a lot of hard work.
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It s taken so much.
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hard work to get there.
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You know, Steph Curry of the Warriors, he, you know, that three-pointer looks so simple, but how many times, as he practiced it, you know, all of these, you know, whether it s in sports or whether it s in business or whether it s in writing or whether it s in podcasting or, you know, whatever the field, you know, it takes a lot to get to that seemingly simple design.
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And in this case, it was something, again, going back to the power of finding your passion in childhood, it goes back to
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Bert had built these model planes, as I talked about in childhood, and one model plane, it used what s called a de-thermalizer and it would basically, they would have a cotton ball and saltpeter and it would light and it would burn through in flight and it would kick up the tail of this model plane.
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It would be like a rubber band snapping and the tail flips up and it would create, mid-flight, this drag, which you can picture,
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when the tail goes up, creating the drag.
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And so he said he didn t realize that he was drawing on that as a source of inspiration until after the fact.
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But it s a really interesting thing that this plane, this model that he flew in childhood, that it could play out in some way, some significant way, because the wings here, again, bend it up to create the drag.
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And almost in half, it looks like the plane was just broken in half.
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It s a really nutty design.
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in many ways very beautiful but that that could decades later be like your aha moment without even you consciously saying aha.
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You know where it s again going back to don t skip a step every you know iteration along the way is super key.
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One of the things you d recommend is that people make and build things with their own hands and support other people doing the same.
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There s some power in making something from scratch, I suppose.
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Rockets, model planes, whatever.
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Even the video games that you allude to as well.
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What else do you recommend people do?
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You ve studied all these amazing people.
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What else do they have in common that started early that we can look to for either ourselves or our own children?
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Well, like Peter, you know, we talked about Bird and his model planes, but Peter Diamandis was an original rocket boy.
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I mean, this was when you could order explosives online and you could stash them in your closet.
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And kids don t try this at home, but or do you know, I mean, they learned really, really great lessons.
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He and his rocket boyfriends where they were using flying Estes rockets, but they were also doing these homebrew concoctions, you know, preferably do this with an adult supervisor.
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You know, they were learning.
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They were learning about chemistry and they were learning about aerodynamics and they were learning about propulsion and they were passionate about it.
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And they d ride their bikes out to a field and launch these rockets.
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And I think some of that is, you know, I hope it s not lost today because it is such a powerful path.
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And, you know, when you see kids doing this, building anything, even gaming, you know, teach them code, teach them what goes on behind the games, you know, and that is coding.
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get a lot of girls, you know, push girls into the science and the technology and engineering and math.
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There s a great character in the book, individual woman, Anusha Ansari, whose love of science led her to go on to become the world s first private female astronaut.
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She spent 10 days at the International Space Station.
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So I think it s also, you know, it s following that, it s seeing that passion, and it is this sense of purpose, finding your own purpose.
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and not letting go of that, and studying different models.
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You know, Peter took, again, inspiration from the golden age of aviation for a thoroughly modern space flight.
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So I think there s listening to yourself, and then there s looking at what s out there, and then there s just this refusal to let other people tell you that your dream is unattainable.
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You know, if you believe it, you can do it.
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Julian, thank you so much.
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This has been a really fun episode.
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I really appreciate your time.
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Interesting show.
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I mean, there s a lot here.
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She s really spent a lot of time with a lot of high caliber people and dug in.
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I mean, reading their personal journals, I m guessing that she s the only person who s done that besides them and maybe not even them.
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So there s a lot of trust and a lot of rapport built.
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I really can appreciate the amount of work that she must put into these particular books and these particular stories and really doing her homework on everybody.
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If you enjoyed this episode, don t forget to thank Julian on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes, as well as the book, How to Build a Spaceship, and some other resources mentioned here on the show, and some other links and how-to s and bios, et cetera.
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Remember, you can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the show notes for this episode.
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We ll link to the show notes directly on your phone.
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I also post tons of stuff on Twitter.
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A lot of it never makes it to the show.
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Articles, insights, there s a lot of other ways to engage with me and producer Jason there.
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I m at theartofcharm on Twitter.
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Bootcamp s our live program.
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that s at bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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Now remember, we re sold out a few months in advance, so if you re thinking about it, you re curious about what we do here on our live programs, just get in touch with us ASAP, get some info from us, you can plan ahead.
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I also want to encourage you to join our AOC challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or if you re here in the states, you can text charmed.
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to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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The challenge is about improving your networking skills, your connection skills, and inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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I m also doing regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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It ll make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed in the U.S.
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to 33444.
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For the full show notes for this and all previous episodes, head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFilippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website, those are by Robert Fogerty, and I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming, and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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