Part 3 - The Big Picture: Anousheh Ansari’s Vision At XPRIZE Foundation

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. And so when you got up there, what was the first and your major impression about, you know, you get into unique situations or where there's a lot of pressure, a lot of new things coming at you, fast and furious, meeting new people. A lot of times it feels surreal and it's hard to feel like, take a while to settle down where you can really feel like you can absorb what's happening to you when you're up. Especially if you're looking out the window, you see the Earth and you're flying, barreling through space and all that. Just getting familiar with the space station had to be quite an adjustment, let's just say.

Absolutely. It was not only an adjustment, but it was a very emotional experience as well. Because here I was. My entire life I had focused on this big dream I had in front of me, and I was living it. I was living my dream. And I knew it was limited time. I only had nine days on station and then I would go back to my ordinary life. And just being there and being able to see our planets, our Earth from space was such a profound experience of realizing we live on this planet that looks nothing like those maps you see in geography courses. There is no big black line separating us or different colors that says this is this country and this is that country. You could not tell the countries apart. And this realization that we're all one inhabitants of one home we call planet Earth becomes so real and profound that you wish you could take this message and propagate it across the world. Because we would live different lives, we would do things differently if we had that realization. And it really changed me as well in terms of when you're up there, you only see big picture and you realize that little things occupy a lot of your mind, space. And you spend a lot of time thinking about little things, but the most important things are you don't spend enough time on it. So if we switch that and spend 80% of our time on big picture things, important things in our lives, and only 20% on the noise of life, you would accomplish so much more and live such a satisfying life. And that was a lesson for me. When I came back, I decided that I'm going to do my best to spend 80% of my time on important things in life for me and only 20% on noise. And that has helped me really focus what I do, what I spend my time on, and be happier with what I accomplish.

When you're an entrepreneur or any kind of leader, there's a lot of loneliness to the job because you have to evaluate, you have to think, you have to plan, you're interacting with a lot of people, but you have to kind of withdraw and evaluate. And so when you're up there on the space station, how much time was there a lot of time where you're by yourself, had time to think, or is it constantly interacting with other people on these experiments and things like that?

No, you actually do have a lot of time by yourself. So except the morning where we all come together and talk to the ground station to get instruction. And then in the evening when you come together, usually people are working on their projects the rest of the day. And unless you're working with someone else on the project, you wouldn't necessarily interact with everyone all the time. Which for me also it was good because it gave me time to do a reflection on the experience and try to take it all in. I spent some time just floating over the big window and watching the Earth and just trying to imagine what's going on in the minds of people who are working and living on Earth. And I was in this sort of out of body experience, watching over them, looking at the date line where the night and day line moves across the globe and thinking some people are going to sleep and some people are just waking up on the other side. So all those things that you don't get to see in your daily life when you're living it on Earth was just such a fascinating and unique experience that I just took it all in and tried to memorize them.

How do you stay on schedule up there? Because there's no, I guess you got clocks or watches or. So how do you stay on schedule? And did the time go very fast or slow or just. Or normal?

For me, the time went really fast because I knew my time was limited. So I wanted to cherish every moment. But you have a clock basically, and they adjust the clock based on either Houston time or Moscow time, depending on where the launch the. The crew is joining you on. Right. So, so it, you basically you have a schedule. It tells you what time you eat breakfast, what time you do your experiment, what time you talk to ground station, what time you sleep, all that. So your schedule is preset and you pretty much stick to it. Sometimes repairs and experiments throw the schedule off, but pretty much everything is set and you Just follow the clock and do what you need to do.

Now there's a crew that went up there and supposedly they went to deliver something or whatever and deliver the groceries or something. And then something went wrong with the module was supposed to take them back. And so all of a sudden they're up there for another three, four, five, six months. I guess you kind of relive that when you were like, what would I do if I was in that kind of situation. Do you think they were happy that they got to stay up there that much longer? Do you think they were, do you think they were like upset or they. How do you think they reacted to that and how are they? What do you think they're thinking now?

So I happen to know one of them, Sunita Williams, and I can tell you that she probably was happy to stay longer. She loves being in space. She ran, actually she's the first person who ran the Boston Marathon on Space station. So as it was going on here on Earth, she ran the Boston Mansion on the treadmill on the space station.

Wow.

Yeah, wow. So she loves being in space and I'm sure she enjoyed it. It's hard on the family though, if you think about your family members. Just having someone in space is difficult enough. And then if you plan things around having your mom or dad or your loved one back in certain time, and now they say they're like, they can't be back for another six months. And I know that disrupts a lot of family life. So it's harder on the family than it is on the people on station, especially if they know that it's just waiting and then they will come back safely. Now if it's a situation where their lives is at stake, then it would be of course, very stressful. But in this scenario, they knew that they will just come back on this separate mission, which they did.

Now when you came back, did they have to. Your taxi that came to get you to take you back to Earth, was it attached the whole time or was it, did it show up to come get you at a certain time?

That's a great question. So I flew with my two crewmates on the Soyuz and then the previous crew, two of the members of the previous crew were finishing their six month mission and they were supposed to come back. So basically I switched seat and I went back on the other Soyuz that was there that carried the previous crew up. So we, I came back with Jeff Williams and Pavel Benakaratov from the Space station.

Now when you went back, did you splash into the ocean, or did they have a soft landing?

When you come back with Soyuz, you land on the ground. So we landed in Asana in Kazakhstan, and it was a pretty hard landing, but that's normal for Soyuz. So they don't have a lot of water around the landing area. So it's in Apollo case or right now with SpaceX, you land in water because United States has a lot of body of water around it. But when you do go from Russia, you don't have that.

Is that a high anxiety trip?

Yes, of course. I mean, space is still dangerous and a lot of things can go wrong. You have to accept the fact that things could go wrong and you may lose your life. And I was okay with that. I had written a letter to all my family members before I went up, and I gave it to someone while I was in quarantine. And I said after my launch, please give this to them just in case something happens to me. So you have to be okay with that. And most of the astronauts that I've talked to, they understand the dangers, but they're, they're so dedicated in advancing human space exploration that they're happy to do that. And I just wanted to make sure I feel weightless and I make it to space. If something was to go wrong, I just wanted to make it up there and then if it went wrong, I was okay with it.

Anything else was okay. Now, so you land. Do you go into quarantine when you come back?

Yes. You spend another couple of weeks in quarantine because your immune system gets weak when you're in space. So they want to make sure that you don't get sick by exposing you to other people's germs, basically. So you're recording. You're also. You do a lot of physical therapy because your body becomes weak, your muscles are weak, so walking and doing things, strenuous things, becomes difficult. So you go through sort of a little bit of a training and getting back to normal.

We have to wrap this up. But I'm really curious. How did your family, what did they feel like maybe how you had changed, or did they notice a change in you? What did you hear from them about how they thought the experience impacted you?

I think 2 comments I heard all the time. One was that they never, they've never seen me smile as big as I did that entire year that I trained for it and I was in space. So they could see my happiness visibly on my face. And the second thing, everyone told me, I'm calmer, like you became very zen after your space trip. So I think this realization of I shouldn't worry about the little things and not spend too much energy spending your.

Time on the big things.

Exactly, exactly. It gives you peace of mind.

I mean, what's your life been like since the experience primary thing you've done?

So I did a lot of speaking when I came back and I continue to do speaking especially for students. For example, I'm here in Maryland because I will be speaking at the, you know, elementary school the next couple of days. So I do that. I. I wrote my memoirs to share a lot of my entrepreneurial experience as well as my space experience in My Dream of Stars and My Dream of Stars. My Dream of Stars.

My Dream of Stars.

And I'm now I've been running XPRIZE foundation for the past six years, which I've never worked this hard in my life, but I've never enjoyed it as much. Just trying to use entrepreneurial energy and driving capital and innovation to solve humanity's biggest challenges. It's. It's a way that I feel like I can do this job forever because it's such a success.

What actually are you doing with your time with people in that role to drive it? What do you are actually, where are you making the impact?

So we run three to five year competitions, hundreds of millions of dollars. For example, we have a carbon capture competition is to drive innovations to capture carbon at gigaton level, which is what we need to avoid going over two and a half degree temperature rise. Or we are doing a health span competition which is to extend the healthy life of humans in muscle, cognition and immune systems by 10 years or more. We're running a competition to stop wildfires, to detect fires from space or ground station. And once you detect it, you have to put it out within 10 minutes. We are continuously working on new prizes in education that we're launching next year, new forms of sustainable energy and we're doing one on desalination to scale up desalination solutions so they become affordable and effective in addressing water scarcity issues around the globe. So we have all these active competitions. We've launched half a billion dollars worth of competitions and have been able to leverage it.

Half a billion dollars. Half a billion dollars worth of competition?

Yes. And we've leveraged it 50 times. That's even more important because we leveraged every philanthropic dollar 50 times with outside capital and investment in teams. And we had many successful teams. They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars. We have some unicorns, we had some that went public. So we're really using this entrepreneurial engine and, and focusing that entrepreneurial energy towards solving some of these big problems that we've been stuck with. And that's where X prizes are really effective, the areas where the normal forces haven't solved the problem.

Well, this Ansari X Prize is kind of, it's like, kind of like a Nobel Prize in the sense, but specializing in areas of active competitions in climate change, health, technology, things like that. Right.

And so absolutely we, and we ask people to go build and demonstrate to win. So it's not like a past accomplishment, but it's, we give them a target, very specific target. And we say you have to do these five things and demonstrate that to a group of expert judges. And if they say you accomplish it, you get a big check. And that's how we run the prize.

Well, congratulations. Sounds very well thought out.

Thank you.

And you've already already awarded 81 million to innovators and launched 360 million in active competitions. And I'm sure that number is growing. I'm sure those numbers are way behind. So thanks so much for being on. I wish you all the best. Look forward to having you come back down the road and tell us how some of the success stories from these competitions and who knows, maybe we'll get some of the people that have won your competition. Would love that get on and share their successes. You'll have to make some suggestions to us about who we should get on.

Would love that they have their own story.

Right. It's a matter of spotlighting positive, productive people out there in the world that the spotlight doesn't usually find. And so thanks so much for being on. I always let my guests have the final word to pass on to up and coming leaders and innovators and entrepreneurs. And so do you have any last comment you want to pass on?

Sure. 1. Thank you, Larry, for having me on and inviting other entrepreneurs from XPRIZE to join you. And I will tell all the entrepreneurs out there to dream big and put your energy to work towards something that wakes you up in the morning and drives you to do better and better every day. So I wish you all lots of success.

Thanks so much. And thank you for what you're doing to spur that initiative, those initiatives on. And congratulations on your incredible achievement and the inspiration you provided to so many around the world. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

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