Hey true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and

conversation. The right stuff. You hear those three words and you know we're talking about the

space race. We're talking about military test pilots and astronauts, the kind of people who stare down a challenge who find their limits and then push right past them not just brave and brilliant but something more something beyond what regular mortals are capable of the right stuff means a kind of intelligence that's sharp and

clear. It's a mind perfectly balanced on the edge of a blade. Only that kind of mind could survive

a perilous voyage made entirely of unknowns. A journey flung into the void,

the view out the tiny porthole of earth itself.

And you sitting in that tin can,

like Bowie's Major Tom,

far, far above the world.

Earth, our earth,

but so small, so distant, so unreal, a lesser mind would

break. Only the best of us have the right stuff. Only a handful of us have the right stuff.

A few of the people who took that journey came back different. In time,

they found a way to describe it. To say out loud something a lot of us don't want to hear and

definitely don't want to believe. It's too much. It's too crazy. It's too impossible. And yet, maybe we should be listening to the

astronauts. And they got a small beam of light against the air. Real, one, real, right? Real weird. Weird.

Stuff.

Back in 2019, kids in the U.S., the U.K. and China were surveyed to see how many of them

wanted to be an astronaut when they grow up.

And the results were not awesome.

In the U.S. and the U.K, the majority of the kids said they wanted to be

YouTubers. In China, more than half the kids in the survey wanted to be astronauts. Try your

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