Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1577 - Terry Virts
Uploaded: 2020-12-11T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1577 - Terry Virts' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1577 - Terry Virts' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-11. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1577 - Terry Virts

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Terry.
Joe.
Thanks for doing this, man.
Hey, thanks for having me on.
This is awesome.
You spent 200 days in space in a row.
I did.
My first flight was two weeks.
My second flight was 200 days.
That's insane.
Yeah.
What does that feel like?
The two weeks was not enough.
I got back to Earth, and I was like, man, that was awesome.
I need to go do this again.
And after 200 days, it was awesome, but it was like, all right, I checked the
box, and
I've done everything.
I was a shuttle pilot, station commander.
I did spacewalks.
So I feel like I had a chance to do everything.
I made an IMAX movie while I was up there.
I feel like I had a chance to do everything I wanted to do.
When you did two weeks, is there a recovery period when you return after two
weeks?
Yeah, for sure.
But it's pretty quick.
Like, when you land, I was super dizzy, and I felt like everything was heavy.
I was the last guy out of the shuttle because I was a pilot, and they came in,
all right,
time to get out, Virch.
And I grabbed my helmet, and I was like, be careful.
This thing makes 500 pounds.
Wow.
And that night, I was just like, I wanted someone next to me.
I didn't fall over, but I felt like I was going to.
But after a day or two, I was fine.
But after the long-duration flight, it was like, that first day sucked.
I could do everything.
I could walk around, and they make you do this torture where you have to get on
your stomach
and do, it was like burpees, you know, get up as fast as you can.
They were trying to make you pass out from orthostatic intolerance.
So I could do all that stuff.
I just hated it.
And then the second day was a little bit better.
First day was like a couple bottles of wine.
The second day was like a bottle of wine.
The third day was like a glass or two.
And by a week later, they make you do this balance test where they put you in
this big box.
You can't see anything.
And then they move the box, and you're like, whoa.
And they have force sensors on your feet where if your feet are doing this, you
know,
you have bad balance.
And if your feet go and recover, you're good.
So I did my balance test before flight and after flight.
And after 200 days in space, a week later, my balance score was better than it
was before
I launched, which I couldn't believe.
But I tell you that story just to say that, you know, the human body is amazing.
It can adapt pretty quickly.
That's great.
So what is the, like, from the time you land after 200 days and then when you're
100%,
how much time is that?
So they, there's some rule about driving cars.
Like, they don't want you driving cars for a couple weeks, and the doctor's got
to sign
off before you drive.
Oh, wow.
But like I said, after a week, I was, I had a better balance score.
And after a week, I did 20 pull-ups at the gym.
Really?
I was not 100%, but I was like 90%.
Now, is this because of exercises that they prescribe while you're in space?
Absolutely, yeah.
What kind of stuff do you have to do up there?
So they give you two and a half hours a day.
The Russians learned on Mir that your bone density, it's like a linear
progression down.
You know, about one and a half percent a month, you lose bone density.
One and a half percent a month?
And it's a straight line.
It doesn't, like, bottom out.
And they had a guy up there for 440 days.
He's the most ever time and space in one mission.
So to combat that, we exercise.
And they found that, like, pounding, resistive exercise is what helps your
bones and your
muscles.
So we have a weightlifting machine that's kind of like a Bowflex and a
treadmill and a bike.
And I was religious about those things.
I did them every day except for my three spacewalk days.
And we had this really big emergency where, other than those four days, I
exercise every
day.
And are you sweating up there?
You sweat a lot when you exercise.
And just doing this, you don't sweat at all.
You could wear the same underwear and shirt for weeks and you don't even notice.
But if you have your exercise shirt, after a day, it's, like, drenched and
stinky, like
a stinky Under Armour shirt.
Because there's no circulation of air.
There's not as much.
Well, just like, if you go to the gym and you get after it for an hour, you're
going to
be sweating.
So it's the same thing in space.
But on normal, even if you just walk around throughout the day, you know, you
can tell
you got to wash your clothes.
But in space, you don't.
Like, for some reason, you just don't stink on normal.
Are they giving you, like, merino wool clothes to wear or something?
So we had Under Armour shirts.
Okay.
And after a day or two, it's like, they stink.
And you only got one shirt every two weeks.
Oh, boy.
So those things, they were ripe after a couple days.
So I did this experiment with wool clothes.
Like you said, it was like a New Zealand company.
I forgot the name of it.
And I was kind of worried because I didn't want to, I thought it'd itch, you
know, wool
stuff.
So I wore this thing every day for a month.
Got completely drenched, sweaty every day for a month in it.
And it did not stink at all.
Merino wool is amazing.
It's amazing.
It blew me away.
There's a company called First Light.
My friend Steve Rinell is one of the owners of it.
It's a hunting company.
And most of their clothing, particularly all their base layers and stuff, is
all made out
of merino wool.
And the first time I'd ever worn it was on a hunting trip.
Yeah.
You realize when you go hunting, like, one of the big problems is it's freezing
cold out.
Right.
But you're hiking with a lot of gear, so you sweat.
Right.
And then you have to sit down and you freeze your ass off.
You get hypothermia, yeah.
But you don't with merino wool.
Yeah.
When merino wool is wet, it still keeps you warm.
Right.
And so these guys started making hunting gear out of it.
And it's incredible stuff, because it really doesn't smell.
It's so bizarre.
I sweated, drenching sweat, every day for a month.
And I did that twice, and it didn't smell at all.
It blew me away.
It's weird.
Yeah.
But I guess it's organic.
I mean, the fibers from the wool and just, for whatever reason, it just shakes.
I don't know what scientific analysis they've ever done on it, but they can't
really seem
to do that with synthetics.
They try it with synthetics, but they can't quite get there.
You need a washing machine.
So were you the one who figured that out?
You brought that stuff with you?
Well, I mean, it was like a formal experiment.
You know, NASA said that I was working on mice and doing astronomy and testing
out new
wool fabric.
It was just one of the 250 experiments I did.
But it was a good one to do, because I didn't stink for a couple months, which
was nice.
It was crazy that even in space, merino wool is the way to go.
That's nuts.
Yeah.
I was really worried.
I was afraid it was going to be itchy.
But I got XXL.
I wanted it loose.
I didn't want wool rubbing on me.
But it worked.
It was good.
It doesn't itch.
You think of it as like being like that coarse wool that like your grandfather
wore that makes
you scratchy.
Right.
But no, they get it down to where it feels like cotton.
It's very soft.
They got it figured out, man.
That stuff was awesome.
So when you're using these machines, they're all resistance band machines?
Is that what it is?
Yeah.
So in my book, I have a whole I make fun of the acronyms.
It's A-RED, which is the last acronym for workout machine.
So it uses vacuum.
There's like tubes, like a cylinder.
So instead of compressing the air for your force, you're pulling against a
vacuum.
And you can get the A-RED machine is 600 pounds.
So you can I can't bench or squat 600 pounds, but you can put it on there.
So you could hurt yourself.
It's and the really interesting about these machines is they they're not
attached to the
wall of the station.
They're on like springs and moving devices.
They're called vibration isolation system, because if it was attached, think
about like
running on a treadmill.
That's a lot of pounding, you know, 200 pounds pounding.
And the Earth doesn't really move that much when you do it on Earth.
But in space, there's nothing supporting the space station.
So even though it's a million pounds, the vibration from exercise would
actually start
to knock it out of orbit, not out of orbit, you break it apart, actually, but
really told
us a couple minutes of that will snap it in half.
Yeah, because the whole thing starts to bend and flex.
And if you're doing it in resonance, it's really dangerous.
They've got videos of like the the solar rays and these things are big.
They don't fit in the football field.
They're hundreds of feet.
And they start moving.
And if the astronaut forgets to if they leave the if they forget to use the
vibration system
correctly, the station starts flexing.
And Houston, there's some guy that monitors and like the alarm goes off and
they call you
up. Stop doing what you're doing.
Whoa.
It kind of blew me away at it.
It's a million pound massive spaceship.
But still, there's nothing stopping it.
There's nothing like supporting it.
There's no like frame.
No, it's just floating.
So even the exercise of you running on a treadmill or you doing squats, there's
a lot of if you're
pushing 400 pounds this way, something's pushing 400 pounds that way, right?
So if you're going up and down in the right frequency, it'll it'll snap the
station in half.
So what in this IMAX movie I made A Beautiful Planet, you can see there's a
scene of me running
on the treadmill and my crewmate Samantha doing weightlifting and the machines
are just going
up and down.
I mean, they're moving a lot.
When you're running on a treadmill, how are you locked into place?
Yeah.
Do you have a belt?
No, it's a shoulder pad thing.
So you wear like shoulder pads and there are these bungee cords that hold you
down because
otherwise you'd take one step and you'd go shooting off.
There it is.
Yeah, there you go.
And is it one of those self-propelling treadmills, like an air runner?
Yeah.
There's two ways.
So you can turn, you can do the electric version, which is what we normally do.
And on Sundays, I would do this like four minute sprint crazy workout where you
have to push
it yourself.
And that thing just kicks your ass.
I mean, it's so hard to push on the treadmill.
It was supposed to be 20 seconds of sprint, 10 second rest, 20 seconds, but I
was usually
like 10 seconds of sprint, 20 seconds of rest because four minutes of that, I
would put
one song on and by the end of the song, I was wiped out.
But it's a good, it gets your Achilles and your calf, your lower muscles get to
work out
there.
It works at just like on earth because you're getting pushed down.
So instead of gravity, the bungee cord pulls you down into the machine.
They do.
So when you first start off, all this equipment's hard to use and it's, it
takes some coordination.
So you start off with like probably a hundred pounds of weight or something.
And I worked my way up to, I think it was like 130, 140 pounds.
So it's not a hundred percent of your weight.
Um, but it's, you know, 60 or 70% and, uh, and, and you have to like, get used
to it because
there's all this force up here.
So you're unstable.
So if you lean back a little bit, it'll, it'll snap you, you know, pull you off
the treadmill.
So there's a whole skill with getting used to doing it.
How long does it take you to get used to just sleeping in space?
Yeah.
Sleeping was something that, um, yeah, that's the, that's the treadmill.
See how it's moving and bouncing up and down.
You can see those bungee cords.
Um, that is an old, that's an old video, but it's, you get the idea.
And the moving and bouncing is all just to prevent it from fucking up the space
station.
Yeah.
So it's on these like spring devices.
If that was attached to the station, the station would be doing that.
You can imagine the hatches, right?
They'