Most people think that the Red Bull guy Felix Baumgartner holds the skydiving record. But this is not the case.
The real record-holder is Alan Eustace. In 2014, at age 58, the Google engineer rode a helium-filled balloon into the stratosphere and then fell back to Earth from 135,890 feet. Eustace’s fall lasted 4 minutes and 27 seconds, and he broke the sound barrier, reaching a max speed of 822 mph. And now, in a very rare appearance, Eustace has come on the podcast to discuss his adventure.
Baumgartner, who dropped from 128,852 feet, received tons of attention because Red Bull turned his jump into a media spectacle. Eustace, by contrast, came up with the plan for his jump and spacesuit at his kitchen table, paid for a small team to help him build his suit and then did his skydive with just a single reporter there as a witness.
This all fits with Eustace’s personality. He’s quite private and just goes about his work.
It took several months of begging to get Eustace on the show, and I don’t think he’s ever discussed his skydive in this type of detail before.
In this episode, we get into what drove a 58-year-old man to want to chase this feat, the rich history of stratosphere jumping and Eustace’s remarkable career as one of the key Google engineers who built the modern internet. We also hear Eustace’s thoughts on AI and his latest quest to search the ocean floor.
(I apologize for saying that Eustace jumped from space in the episode. It was the stratosphere. I was excited.)
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Timestamps (they link out to YouTube)
00:00 Intro
03:26 Chasing Alan Eustace
07:42 Rocket Sleds and Seatbelts
10:38 Why Build a Capsule?
13:00 Kittinger’s Three Jumps
18:11 The Idea Takes Hold
21:07 Elon’s Mars Greenhouse
23:18 The Jump That Failed
28:37 Solving the Death Spin
30:07 Racing Red Bull
32:26 One Reporter, No Livestream
34:12 The Kittinger Coincidence
38:26 Not Your Typical Daredevil
40:43 Goodbye Videos for His Kids
44:35 The First Spacesuit Jump
48:37 Two Hours to Space
50:53 Google Earth in Reverse
54:36 Can I Get a Countdown?
58:55 Breaking the Sound Barrier
1:00:08 The Crash Landing
1:02:16 What It Really Cost
1:08:28 The Magic of Gas Balloons
1:10:30 Did the Jump Change Him?
1:17:03 The VLSI Golden Age
1:22:56 Is AI Revolutionary?
1:29:20 The Google Translate Story
1:35:49 The Fall of DEC
1:41:09 Reinventing the Data Center
1:48:51 Impossible to Inevitable
1:51:40 Inside Commonwealth Fusion
1:56:21 Hunting Amelia Earhart
2:03:21 What’s Under the Golden Gate?
