The Google Engineer Who Set The Skydiving Record At 58 - EP 83 Alan Eustace

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
Sometimes, there's a man, sometimes there's a man who chooses to skydive from space and hurl himself 135,890 feet towards the ground. And we're speaking to that man today. He's Alan Eustace. He did indeed set the skydive free fall record in 2014 You probably think Felix Baumgartner, the Red Bull guy holds that record. No, it's Alan, and he is a fascinating man. He was, he is a computer scientist. He used to work at Digital Equipment Corporation, which was the hottest computer hardware company in the world once upon a time. And then he went to Google, where I believe he was around employee number 50 and helped build much of the infrastructure that the internet runs on today in all those senses. He is already a remarkable man. But somewhere around, I think it was 2011, 2012, he decided, Alan was a skydiver, he was a pilot. He decided, he thought he could break the freefall record and do it from the edge of space. And he, along with the team, engineered his own system to go up in a balloon and then drop himself from space. Unlike Felix, who did this with Red Bull and all the live streaming and all of that, Alan sought really no attention. He just wanted to do this himself. He is a brilliant, humble, fascinating man. This conversation is, I think, one of the best we've ever done. You're going to enjoy this. You'll hear the whole story of the skydive. And then we get into some computing history where Alan thinks AI is going. He's seen the computing revolution. He's seen the internet revolution. He's a wonderful, thoughtful person to talk about all this. And then now Alan is exploring the ocean.
Some people are just better than others and do wonderful, wonderful things. Alan is such a man. Please leave us a review or a like or anything. Wherever you listen to this podcast, it really helps us out. It helps more people find the show and wonderful conversations like this with Alan Eustace. I had to chase Alan for many months to make this happen. I couldn't be more thrilled that it did happen. I am Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. Off to the edge of space, we go.
Alan, I've been stalking you for months.
You're a guest that I desperately wanted to have out here. I find your life so fascinating. So thank you very much for making time for me. I know you're very busy.

**Alan Eustace** (3:02)
You're welcome. Congratulations on getting through all the armor.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:07)
I did it.
There's many places we could go. Your career spans things I'm so fascinated by. I grew up reporting as a cub reporter on the UNIX wars between Sun and IBM and Compaq and HP. You worked at DEC. By the time I came along, I think Compaq had already sucked DEC up, but I was familiar with Alpha and Vax and all the history on that. Then you get to Google. It's like my favorite time of Google when it reminded me a bit of almost like Sun Microsystems, which was my favorite company to cover, just really getting into computer science and advancing. We're data centers, we're heading, and then you go into a huge passion of mine, which is obviously this jump that you did in 2014 from space and all the history that led up to that. Then now I think you're in the eVTOLs with all this other stuff I've been to. So.

**Alan Eustace** (4:09)
Underwater exploration.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:11)
Yeah.

**Alan Eustace** (4:11)
Autonomous vehicles. Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:13)
I mean, I was going to start us with the jump because it's just such a unique thing. Are you able, if we get there, are you able to talk about some of the work that you're doing today on the underwater vehicles? Okay. Okay. I didn't know if it was stealthy or secret.
Okay. Well, let's do it. Let's do it. We were chatting a little before we started.
I ended up covering, there's a company called WorldView that made these stratospheric balloons. So they would take things way up basically to the edge of space. And I got into this company. I got to go see a launch. There's these two co-founders of the company, Tabor McCallum and Jane Poynter, who I got to know actually when I was doing reporting on the earliest days of SpaceX because they had teamed up with Elon to see if they could put a greenhouse on Mars and grow a plant on Mars. They were always in the space. They were always in the pushing the edge of what's possible. And so they were doing these balloons. You're working at Google at the time, and then you somewhere along the way, you have a desire to see if you could go up in one of these balloons, which we're gonna get into. And then just as a result of doing all this reporting, I got so into the history of what we did to humans to see what the bottom.