Key Skills for Building an Impactful Company w/Matt Kuta
Episode Overview
Join us in this gripping episode of Making Better, featuring the intrepid Matt Kuta. From F-15 pilot to space company pioneer, Kuta delves into his transition to founding Voyager space, sharing invaluable lessons on decision-making, leadership, and the thrilling venture of constructing Starlab, a commercial successor to the International Space Station. Discover how his military and financial expertise fuse in the forging of a space industry titan and his vision of unifying humanity through the "overview effect." Eager to learn how to navigate the space industry's value chain and scale a business beyond its core technology? Buckle up for a journey into strategic risk-taking and the power of mentorship with host, Matt Gjertsen. 🚀💫
Check out this video on the Overview Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQsgGCXdAlY
Watch this video to hear William Shatner’s message after returning from space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URY71UOEn4U
Noise by Daniel Kahneman: https://a.co/d/6jBcoLs
About Matt Kuta
Matt Kuta is the President and Co-Founder of Voyager Space. He started his career as an F-15 pilot in the U.S. Air Force where he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the highest combat aviation medal awarded by the U.S. military. After leaving the military, Matt entered private equity at Goldman Sachs before moving into the space sector, becoming the founding Executive Director for Space for Humanity. In 2019, he co-founded Voyager Space to focus on building the foundation of a profitable space ecosystem.
You can connect with Matt through:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattkuta/
Voyager Space: https://voyagerspace.com/
Full Transcript
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Matt Kuta [00:00:00]:
When I used to fly the F 15, the F 15 had a max G limit of nine G's, nine times the force of gravity. When you get to nine G's, it's a solid tone. It's basically beep. And you're like, all right, like, I'm Max performing the jet. But if you pull just a little bit more, you overshoot it more frequently. You would hear this tone. Your helmet go, beepoo, beepoo, beepoo. You're like, oh, man, I just overgee the jet.
Matt Kuta [00:00:26]:
If you overgee every once in a while, that means that you're taking a risk, right? And if you weren't taking risk, you're not going to generate those venture capital equity returns that folks want.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:36]:
Hello, and welcome to the making better podcast. My name is Matt Jurtson, founder of Better everyday Studios, and I am so excited you are with us today. In the world, there are generally two kinds of people. There are those who take the world as it is, and there are those who choose to make it better. On this show, we talk to those who make the second choice, whether they are looking to improve themselves, their teams, or their organizations. Our goal is to give you actionable insights of how to improve your own performance and the performance of those around you, hopefully with a little bit of inspiration thrown in as well. Our guest today is Matt Kuda. Matt and I have actually known each other for over 20 years.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:19]:
We were a freshman at the US Air Force Academy. Together, we both became pilots. And though his career is much more distinguished than mine, we are both very passionate about space. Matt is a decorated F 15 pilot, having been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the US military's highest combat aviation medal. After leaving the air force, Matt went into private equity at Goldman Sachs before getting into space. As the founding executive director for space for Humanity in 2019, he cofounded Voyager space to focus on building the foundation of a profitable space ecosystem. In this episode, we talk about how to tell if you have enough information to make a decision, the key pillars of merging organizational cultures and some of the key skills needed for any organization to grow, whether you are a solopreneur or a billion dollar company. But before we get into the discussion, I want to remind you to like and subscribe this episode.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:15]:
And if you were already subscribed, then please share this episode with at least one other person. Because after all, that is how we grow. I can't tell you how much it means to me. So with that, let's get into the discussion with Matt Kuda.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:31]:
So, Matt, I can't believe it. We've known each other for over 20 years now, and I don't think when we first met or we have kind of a gap in the middle of that, I don't know if I ever knew you were super interested in space. So how did you wind up in the spacewalt?
Matt Kuta [00:02:48]:
Yeah, actually when I was real little, I lived in Denver, and this is before the Internet, really. And I used to read the newspaper, and it was the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, and there was this article I used to remember I was at maybe like fifth grade or something. It was about Motorola and how they were using satellites, I guess, for communication or something. I don't remember exactly, but I remember it was Motorola in space, and we had these little yellow sticky notes. And I wrote on a sticky note that I gave to my mom that said, when I grow up, I want to fly satellites. And funny enough, my mom actually still has that sticky note. And I didn't end up flying satellites. I ended up flying the F 15 in the air force.
Matt Kuta [00:03:46]:
But as a fighter pilot, you used a lot of space based assets and imagery, navigation, communication. And so after that, I decided I should go ahead and start a space company.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:01]:
Yeah, I think that's an incredible story. I think I have a somewhat similar story, but not nearly that dramatic since you actually went out and started a company. But in terms of this idea of wanting to be in space for a while, I think that happens with a lot of people. So how did you make that transition? Because after the air Force, you went into investment for a little bit, and then how did Voyager kind of come to be?
Matt Kuta [00:04:29]:
Yeah, good question. After I left the air Force and flying, I wanted to do something completely different than aviation, government, national security, military, and I wanted to learn about business. So I went, got my MBA at Duke Business school, and through multiple terms of events, I ended up working on the private equity investment team at Goldman Sachs and their global headquarters in New York City. We had an $8 billion fund. I was on the investment team, and we were just making different types of private investments. And I learned a lot about to call it the concepts of value creation, how capital flows throughout a system, from either a pension fund or endowments funds to managers to companies and back again. So it was a great place to learn. Great team.
Matt Kuta [00:05:41]:
And once I kind of was there and I felt like I kind of learned generally some of those foundational concepts, I really wanted to build something, and I started thinking about what was I good at? And I'm like, well, despite wanting to get far away from national security and aerospace and defense. I did it for many years, but now I kind of had this newfound tool and a toolkit of business, I guess you could say, in capital allocation and capital market knowledge. So I thought why not try to combine those two things together? And aviation. While I flew the F 15 and I fly in lots of aircraft now for business, it seemed a little bit older, like it kind of had already been had. And space to me was like the future. I think it's acyclical, it's recession resistant. I think it's a megatrend. From a national security perspective, it's the ultimate high ground.
Matt Kuta [00:06:50]:
And so I thought about marrying up an exciting industry with a lot of growth prospects. With my prior military background and then my time at Goldman Sachs, I decided to leave the Goldman investment team in New York City and move to Denver and started Voyager.
Matt Gjertsen [00:07:12]:
Yeah, definitely one of the centers for space in the US at least makes sense to relocate for something like that. And then you've acquired a lot of companies since you started it. Has there been a specific kind of strategy? I'm sure there's been a strategy to that acquisition. I don't know what's kind of been your guiding star for what you're trying to achieve.
Matt Kuta [00:07:38]:
Yeah, we've acquired seven operating companies in a little over four years. And space is not a traditional private equity or strategic I don't think it's primed for, call it those types of acquisitions. And the reason why is private equity, which I respect, I used to do it at Goldman. A lot of the space companies do not generate the free cash flow characteristics that would make it terribly compelling for a PE investment. And then there's a lot of smaller and middle market. Lower middle market space companies that have a lot of capability. Their technology is proven out, they have assets in space that work, but they're ran by a technologist or they're not terribly knowledgeable on how to scale the business in certain ways. So they'll likely never produce within the current construct of that leadership venture capital returns.
Matt Kuta [00:08:52]:
So I call it new space purgatory. There's these companies that are in this lower middle market that are generating revenue, profitable, have assets in space that have a lot of track record and heritage and there's not many buyers for them. Additionally, call it a strategic acquirer, like a strategic being. Lockheed. A lot of these founders that started these smaller companies, they left those companies to start their space company. And for them selling and going back to work as a director or vice president is not really culturally, like something they'd probably be terribly interested in. It's not a win for them. Use the example of imagine Elon Musk working as a vice president at Honeywell.
Matt Kuta [00:09:47]:
It's kind of funny just to think about not nearly as wealthy, but equally as creative in their ideas, I'd say so. The other thing with space is it's not a traditional free cash flow aggregation. Throw some leverage on it, and then flip it to the next highest EBITDA buyer of the private equity chain. The way to really create value in space is more supply chain economics, where you should be moving up the supply chain, becoming more capable, winning business that is more valuable. And the reason the primes control 80% of the economics is because they're the most capable. The problem is they're large organizations, hundreds of thousands employed, not terribly fast moving. And you have a lot of these smaller companies that are very nimble, very creative, have very exciting technologies, have a lot of ambition, but they're frequently undercapitalized. So when we think through Voyager, it's like, how do you kind of combine the best of both worlds? A company that's ambitious, that also has the capability.
Matt Kuta [00:11:01]:
So what we were doing was strategically assembling core parts of the supply chain in house, operationally integrating that within an operating company model. We have two business segments, and with the goal to move up the value chain so that we could be prime capable, that we could win a prime contract. And then at that time, when you're at the top of the value chain, now, you're the one who's dictating the pricing and the buy versus sell and trickle down margin economics. And so far, that's proven out quite well. We won our first prime contract after being in business for like, two and a half years. It was a significant one, which is to build the private replacement of the International Space Station. As a matter of fact, the strategy was strategically assembling core parts of the space station supply chain with the anticipation and the hope that we would have enough credibility and capability in house to be selected as a prime contractor to do a program of that scope.
Matt Gjertsen [00:12:13]:
Yeah, that's awesome. That makes a lot of sense. And just to break it down a little bit, for some of the folks listening who maybe don't know what prime is or have never been involved in this kind of stuff, and just to make sure I'm understanding you as well, I think a lot of startups in the space area, in particular, they wanted to go build a really great on orbit thruster, like a really great single engine problem is that the end buyer, like they call it, NASA, isn't looking to buy a thruster. They're looking to buy a whole spacecraft. And so they need to contract out to a prime. That's like, theoretically, who says we're going to build you a spacecraft? And then they either have assets inside their company that do it, or they go subcontract out to other companies that do it. And so it makes sense. This whole idea kind of moving up the food chain or moving up the supply chain is how you, because every layer of subcontracting, I'm guessing, pulls out just like a little bit of profit.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:13]:
A little bit of profit. And so it makes it harder and harder for, as you said, control your pricing, for you to have enough profit margin to really be of value as an organization, because the layers above you are taking it. Is that kind of understanding?
Matt Kuta [00:13:30]:
Yeah, you explained it well.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:33]:
So then one thing that you hit on there that I found really interesting at the beginning, and this doesn't need to be specific to your acquisition when you talk about a lot of these startups, because you're right. I've seen so many of these really cool companies that are doing like, they're doing little hopper spacecraft and stuff like that at a small scale, and they exist for years or even decades without really accomplishing, really being able to grow and build beyond kind of the capital or just like moving up the chain. Are there other specific skills that you've seen that a lot of organizations need to develop in order for them to grow? Because like you said, I think a lot of times it's a technical founder who's really in this one thing. What are the common missing components between them and, say, a SpaceX or a rocket lab or a company that is able to grow think.
Matt Kuta [00:14:35]:
I mean, there's a couple things, right? So these smaller companies that have this technology, to your point, SpaceX was not created as a company to build a single rocket motor. It's a company to replace the space shuttle, right. And to take it to another level, it's a transportation company, transporting humans and cargo to space. In order to build a transport aircraft, to transport humans and cargo to space, you need a lot of different technologies, right? So I think a little bit it rests on what is the ambition of that founder. For them, building the world's greatest thruster might be that which is perfectly fine. Thrusters are very important. Likely the ability, though, to take a company that's doing just a thruster, just as a hypothetical example, their ability to scale and grow their market cap is limited. It's capped out to a certain point, right? So part of it's like, what's the ambition? Is the company looking to build a thing, a specific thing, or are they looking to really create almost a new market or be a platform of many things that then unlock something that didn't previously exist? Another thing that I see is a lot of these times, these companies don't understand how to access capital.
Matt Kuta [00:16:22]:
And as companies ebb and flow with their ideas and they pivot whatever they were going to do, maybe they're going to build thrusters and they build this, then they build that. If they understand how to access capital, it will help them get market feedback. And it's very valuable for them to know, like, well, there's no market for this type of thing, but there's a market for that type of thing. And I see it sometimes the technologist founder gets emotionally attached to the technology as opposed to thinking, is there an actual market for this besides building maybe a one off for a demo mission, which is great, right? A customer needs that. But investors are going to ask, well, what happens after this one demo mission, right? Is there a tail of operations kind of a thing? And then probably the last thing I would say that we see frequently is this is a little bit detailed, but companies that raise capital end up getting a convoluted cap structure where they have differing prioritizations among share classes. A is contradicting to the B, which doesn't work with the guys who came in before the A, and then there's a convertible note, and then the founders have a preferred share, but then the C has this, and next thing you know, you end up tying up the company's ability to access future capital into this gordian knot. So I think it's very important for founders who aren't knowledgeable on topics like that to get a lot of advice and mentorship from folks that are knowledgeable or have done it and have to be prepared to walk away from investment money because otherwise it might be helpful today. But in three years, it turns out, could have been a disastrous thing.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:23]:
Yeah, it's interesting just sitting from my own perspective of trying to build my own business on a very different, several orders of magnitude different scale. But how many of those same kinds of things apply in terms of in my world, which is in learning development and a lot of people listening are instructional designers and in that world just thinking through what do end buyers? Are you creating a whole solution for people or are you offering just like tools to any solution, and those have different values in the market or even kind of, to your last point about the cap table, obviously, there's no cap table for a company like mine or for an individual person. But you do still tie yourself up into different financial arrangements that make it easier or harder for your company to pivot. Maybe you have your own company, but you're also subcontracting with somebody and subcontracting with them. You have an agreement that says you're not going to go after certain people or after certain kinds of companies. And so kind of to any level of scale in terms of a business, it still makes sense of just that same idea, as you said, of where are you at, kind of in the value chain. What's the solution that you're offering to people, and how are you keeping your operations under control in such a way that you can pivot and change in ways that make sense for the organization to move forward and you're not tying yourself down. So it's interesting, I think, how.
Matt Kuta [00:19:57]:
Some.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:57]:
Of those same kind of lessons or rules apply to every level, from the individual who's trying to be their own solopreneur all the way up to these massive companies.
Matt Kuta [00:20:10]:
Yeah. One thing we always try to do is maintain optionality, and it sounds a little bit oxymoronic, but be decisive while also delaying making a decision as long as possible. That gives you some optionality, but you also don't want to take forever to make decisions. So it's always a fine line, right. Of have I gathered enough data to make an informed decision and maintain optionality, or am I being indecisive? Right.
Matt Gjertsen [00:20:46]:
Yeah. To go a little bit deeper on that. How do you think about that? Because I was listening to a podcast just earlier today that talked about so many of these decisions. There's not like an A or B or right or wrong. It's a spectrum of when you decide you have enough information, are there any check that you have in your mind to try to figure out exactly what you said? Am I being decisive or am I waiting too long?
Matt Kuta [00:21:13]:
I don't have a checklist, I guess you could say. But for decisions that are important, I don't always, but I frequently do a few things. One, I like to talk to people one on one. It might take a little bit longer. Let's say there's five executives that are involved in a very large, important opportunity or decision. And instead of me talking to them all at once, I typically like to talk to them individually. It's not like an interrogation. It's like, hey, let's catch up for 20 minutes, and I'll just kind of have a casual conversation to understand how they're thinking.
Matt Kuta [00:21:56]:
Because what I find is frequently there's always one person who seems to be a bit more outspoken and a bit quieter, but when I talk to them individually, it's less about them. They're not talking about each other. They're giving me their honest view of this project, let's say, and then I'll just try to fuse that data based off kind of calibrate. There's some people on my team who are very pessimistic, and some people on my team are very optimistic. And some people view it through the lens of, I'm a finance guy or a contracts guy, and I like to get all their different viewpoints, if I can, before I make a decision. If I don't do it individually and it's more of a group meeting, I typically don't talk much, if at all, and I kind of let them talk. And so I can hear everything, because I note that if I end up talking, then folks stop talking. And then Charlie Munger, who was Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway, he talked a lot about mental models, which I'm a fan of, and the one mental model, which I think is probably the easiest, but I find it useful all the time, whether it's in making a decision or negotiations with a counterparty, is thinking about things from the opposite direction, whether it's like, the opposite counterparty or like, okay, if we make this offer or proposal to a customer and think through a couple of different ways, that they would respond, kind of counter negotiate to me, and then I typically will think, okay, then how would I then respond to them in an opposite fashion.
Matt Kuta [00:23:53]:
And I find that to be very valuable. And then the last thing that I do, things seem frequently to be very urgent, but most things actually are not urgent. So I do the Eisenhower matrix. I'm old school, I write stuff down, and it's delegate, delete, reschedule, and the fourth one, I'm blinking or do. And it's basically a grid of urgent, not urgent, important, not important. And it really helps me prioritize my time and the things that are important, that are decisions I have to make. Even if I feel like I'm pretty confident on it, typically I'll still sleep on it, and I find myself be able to think more clearly. And sometimes in the morning, I've either calmed down or I've had an interesting idea.
Matt Kuta [00:24:53]:
So on important decisions, I almost always sleep on it.
Matt Gjertsen [00:24:59]:
That's actually one thing that Daniel Kahneman talks a lot about, is delaying the tigens. And the more you can create some kind of distance between your data gathering phase and the actual decision making. Really. In his book, Noise, it really talks about how that really helps improve the quality of decisions, the more you can kind of separate that out. So, makes sense.
Matt Kuta [00:25:23]:
I can see Eris, I think it was Aristotle said. Was it nick of McKin ethics? Maybe. I don't remember exactly what book it was, but that the only good decisions get made when you're on a do. Everyone knows at Voyager, I do a lot of walking, like walking and thinking and that movement, that methodical just step outside into nature. Typically, it allows me to kind of think through all those different data points in kind of a more thoughtful.
Matt Gjertsen [00:25:58]:
That's funny. Travis Talonik, the Uber founder, was famous for that as well. He had a hole in there in the Uber office. There was actually a whole track that he would walk around and talks about how interesting. Sometimes he'd walk multiple marathons a day just thinking. And most of his meetings, he would hold walking.
Matt Kuta [00:26:16]:
Yeah, I do that quite a bit. I didn't know that. It's interesting.
Matt Gjertsen [00:26:22]:
So, stepping away a little bit from you in your decision making process. So, since Voyager has been formed through bringing together all these different companies, and I'm sure it takes time to merge those companies, but I don't know, what are some of the things that you all think about that you think about when it comes to, as you said, these companies all have different founders, different reasons for starting their companies, different goals. What are some of the ways that you think about bringing them together to create kind of a cohesive culture that is Voyager space and isn't just a conglomeration of all these different companies?
Matt Kuta [00:27:02]:
Yeah, it's hard. It's a hard challenge. Particularly if you acquire a company that's been around for a while, right. Because they've developed their own culture and leadership and processes, procedures. There's a couple of things, though. We folk. I mean, culture, people, economics are probably kind of three. Culturally, how do you align their culture with Voyager? I mean, one thing I always tell the team at Voyager is just because we're the acquirer, it doesn't mean that we have monopoly on all the good ideas.
Matt Kuta [00:27:43]:
So let's hear what these folks have to say. I mean, we acquire them for a reason, because we clearly thought it was a great company. Right. But at the same point, fast forward, we want to make sure that we bring them into the Voyager culture. So you have to send example of what that means. We have these things that we recently published called the Ten Voyager principles.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:09]:
But.
Matt Kuta [00:28:09]:
It's not easy, and it takes time. We learned some lessons of the faster you go on cultural transformation. Typically, at least for us, it seems to work less good than versus taking time. People. The old adage, most employees don't work for a company. They work for their boss, or they work for the one person. So trying to have the leadership team on down beat leaders of character and have integrity and set the example of working hard and being, what do you want to show? Do you want to be a bureaucratic organization? So do you want to facilitate leadership for people that always organize a whole bunch of meetings? Do you want to facilitate an entrepreneurial organization? I always tell the story to the team of. When I used to fly the F 15, the F 15 had a max g limit of nine G's, nine times the force of gravity.
Matt Kuta [00:29:14]:
And when you're flying the jet, you have your helmet on. And I don't remember the exact thresholds now, but I think it was when you were about 90% of the maximum g limit in your helmet, in the little headphone, you would hear a little beep. It'd be like, beep, beep, beep, beep. Because when you're flying, you're supposed to be looking outside for the bandit, for the bad guy playing, not looking at your little digital G meter. You're looking outside, you hear the beep, beep, beep, and you know that you can pull the stick a little bit harder because you have about 10% of the G left. And by increasing the G, you decrease your turn radius, which allows you to outmaneuver the other aircraft. When you get to, like, 95% of the G or maybe 99% of the G, it's called the double rate beep burn. It's like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
Matt Kuta [00:30:07]:
And that basically means you better not pull the stick back much further. And when you get to nine G's, it's a solid tone. It's basically beep. And you're like, all right, I'm Max performing the jet, but if you pull just a little bit more, you overshoot it more frequently. You would hear this tone in your helmet. Go be boo, beepoo beep boo. You're like, oh, man, I just overjeed the jet, right? And you come back and land a bunch of paperwork, and you got to work with maintenance and all these things but we used to tell the young wingmen that if you're not overgeeing the jet every once in a while, you're not attempting to max perform the aircraft. So I don't want you to overgo the jet every day.
Matt Kuta [00:30:51]:
That's incompetence. But if you overgee every once in a while, that means that you're taking a risk. Right. I tell that story to the team sometimes when you think about people integration of, listen, I would rather have folks coming to me once a quarter saying, hey, I made this mistake. I was trying to max perform and take a risk and I made this mistake. There's a difference between a mistake and a crime. Right? And let's learn from it. Let's spread that knowledge and then go out and do it again.
Matt Kuta [00:31:21]:
Right. And if you weren't taking risk, you're not going to generate those venture capital equity returns that folks want. Right? And then I think lastly is economics. Right? So from a Voyager perspective, thinking through, how can we allow the key folks that are now part of the Voyager post acquisition to benefit from some of the growth of the company? Think of things like equity incentive plans, stock options, RSus, whatever the companies may have.
Matt Gjertsen [00:31:55]:
Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it. I could definitely go deeper. I love the G story and it's so applicable to so many things in life, even to the point of knowing what's your equivalent in various walks of life? What are the warning signs that you're about to overgo your commitment level or on your calendar or things like that. But one of the first things you mentioned was did you call them principles? The voyager space principles that you call them. How did you come up with those? What was the thought?
Matt Kuta [00:32:35]:
Well, interestingly enough, Nike put out some principles to their employees, like in the 1970s or 80s or something. And it was like a clean sheet with a Nike logo and ten principles. There was no signature. There wasn't a preamble or a conclusion paragraph. It was like, here's the ten principles. And it's not a vision statement, it's not a mission statement. It's more about what does it mean to be an employee at Nike? And I really liked it. And so me and my co founder, Dylan, we put together something very similar.
Matt Kuta [00:33:21]:
From my vantage point as the co founder of the company, if I look at employees and what characteristics would I like to see in employees, what standard would I like to uphold myself to what do I expect and demand of my direct reports? It should be encapsulated in those ten principles.
Matt Gjertsen [00:33:46]:
Yes. Okay. Yeah. Clear expectations. I think that's what's always. And to your point, I think very often in the whole spectrum of principles or values and mission statements, more often than not, I think they tend to get too high level, too watered down, too impactical. And probably the most important thing you can do is make sure that they are something that people can look at and know. How do I make decisions today? How do I act during my day to day? That makes a lot of sense.
Matt Kuta [00:34:20]:
Exactly. That's what it is. It's like, what do you want out of your colleagues?
Matt Gjertsen [00:34:29]:
Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Well, what do you. I guess to kind of close out with a couple of bigger, bigger questions. I mean, I think you already might have mentioned it, but what's the most exciting project that Voyager is working on right now?
Matt Kuta [00:34:46]:
I would say probably it's called Starlab, which is the replacement for the International Space Station. We're a prime contractor for that. We're building that in a joint venture with Airbus. And when the ISS is disassembled and deorbited in 2030, what we're building will be a replacement for the ISS. But the difference being an ISS, which is owned by governments, operated by governments, the industry is privatizing the station. So on a go forward basis, Voyager and our investors and our partners will own Starlab for 30 years. And then the customers, in this case governments, research organizations, pharmaceutical companies, entertainment, will pay us as a customer to use it. It's a microgravity laboratory.
Matt Kuta [00:35:46]:
So space station as a service, I guess you could say.
Matt Gjertsen [00:35:49]:
Yeah, so exciting. I mean, we live in this crazy world where that kind of move started with cargo to the space station being commercialized and then crew to the space station. And I mean, now, as of two weeks ago, we now have cargo to the moon as a commercial activity, which is pretty crazy.
Matt Kuta [00:36:14]:
Yes. It's exciting time to be in the space sector, and the technologies will ebb and flow, but from an industrial standpoint, it's not going away.
Matt Gjertsen [00:36:26]:
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, to finish out, this is called the podcast is called the making better podcast. So one thing that I like to kind of end is asking all the guests if you could snap your fingers and change one thing to make the world better. What do you think it should be?
Matt Kuta [00:36:45]:
One thing to make the world better. There's this psychological effect known as the overview effect. Overview effect is a known psychological shift. It's been measured when humans, namely astronauts, look at the earth from the outside in, where they look down from Earth from the space station, and they see the curvature of the earth, and they see the blackness of space. And when they look down, they don't see borders and ethnicity, religion, genders, money. They just see mother Earth. And here on earth, our perspective is typically humans perspective typically is limited by whatever their life experiences have been. So if you never left your neighborhood, your neighborhood is your universe, and you know there's stuff out there, but basically that what drives your decision making.
Matt Kuta [00:37:48]:
And conversely, on the other end spectrum, if you've traveled all over the world and experienced different cultures, your perspective is different than someone who's never left their neighborhood or their city. We'll extrapolate that to space. And for us, this all seems very normal, right? Like our home, the trees, the roads, the rivers, that's all very normal, but in fact, it's incredibly abnormal. If you're in space and you look at the earth, it's like an oasis. And look up and you look away from Earth and you look into space and you realize space is what's normal. That's the 99.9 continuous percent, the black, vacuumless, hot, cold void of nothingness. And that is space. And you look at Earth and it's like this oasis, and you have this overview effect where this is like the only earth that's out there that we have.
Matt Kuta [00:38:53]:
So to me, if I could wave a magic wand with that backdrop, it would be for everyone in the world to experience the overview effect, to realize that this is the only earth we have. There's that old Carl Sagan quote, pale blue dot. Every human that's ever lived and died has happened on this pale blue dot. And every warlord and religious figure and father and husband and wife and son and child has all lived on this earth. And it's not going to change anytime soon. So the sooner everyone would appreciate that. I think that would be the best for everybody.
Matt Gjertsen [00:39:33]:
Such a great sentiment for anybody who wants to see what I think is one of the better visualizations of the overview effect or the effect that it can have. Check out a video of William Shatner after he lands from his ride up in blue origin. And you have this world famous actor who's just brought to tears and unable to form words because of what he saw. So it is definitely a very powerful thing. Well, Matt, I want to thank you so much for your specialty time. It's been really great chatting with you. I always love when I can talk shop about space stuff. Glad we got to relate it to a number of other things as well.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:14]:
I'm sure listeners will get a lot out of kind of hearing that perspective from the top level of what are the things that are important for bringing organizations together, making informed decisions. So thank you so much for being here today.
Matt Kuta [00:40:28]:
Of course. Thanks for having me on. Thank you.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:32]:
Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you liked the discussion, make sure to hit like and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:38]:
As a reminder, if your team is struggling keeping up with the training development demands of your organization, we want to help. Better everyday Studios is a full service instructional design team. They can help you with everything from ideation to actual content creation and delivery. Please reach out to us using the link in the episode notes below.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:58]:
Have a great day.
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