The following is an edited transcript of a 41-minute interview conducted in the fourth-floor “decompression suite” of a private wellness campus outside Sedona, three days after the subject’s billionaire space flight. The subject is the founder of a last-mile logistics platform. He requested that a breathwork coach named Autumn remain in the room. He has asked that we not use his name, and then said his name four times.
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“I saw the whole thing. The whole ball.”
FRIED OCEAN: Walk me through the eleven minutes.
SUBJECT: So the engine cuts out and there’s this silence. And I’m floating. And I’m looking down at Earth — no borders, right, no lines, just this blue marble — and something in me just released. Like a hand opening. I understood that we’re all one organism.
FO: And how long did that last?
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SUBJECT: Eleven minutes.
FO: I mean after.
SUBJECT: Oh. Right. No.
FO: No?
SUBJECT: Nothing carried over. I checked. First thing I did on the tarmac was open my phone and I felt exactly the same amount of contempt for my brother-in-law as I did before liftoff. Identical amount. Maybe slightly more, because he texted “safe travels!” with an exclamation point, which is a thing he does.
The pre-flight inventory
FO: Before you went up, you told an investor podcast that the flight would, quote, “resolve some things.” What things?
SUBJECT: The four a.m. thing. I wake up at four a.m. with my heart going and I can hear my own blood. I did the cold plunge, I did the peptides, I did the shaman in Tulum who turned out to be from Delaware. I did a silent retreat where I talked the entire time. My longevity guy said my biological age was thirty-one and my “spiritual load-bearing capacity” was, quote, “a folding chair.” So I looked at the overview effect. Astronauts come back changed. That’s documented.
FO: And your heart still goes at four a.m.
SUBJECT: Like a bird in a coffee can.
FO: What did the seat cost?
SUBJECT: One point four. Plus the suit. The suit’s sixty grand and it’s not even a real suit, it’s a windbreaker with intention.
FO: Let’s do an inventory. Your divorce.
SUBJECT: Ongoing. Space did not touch it. If anything her attorney used the flight as an exhibit.
FO: Your mother.
SUBJECT: I have not called her. I was going to call her from orbit — that was the plan, that was going to be the moment, me weeping to my mom from the edge of the atmosphere — and instead I spent the entire weightless portion trying to get a clean shot of my own face with the curvature behind it. Forty-one photos. I looked at them on the drive home. In every single one I look like a man being told about a fee.
FO: The layoffs.
SUBJECT: Four hundred and six people, and I want to be clear, I recorded that video before the flight, so you can’t hold the post-flight me responsible for the pre-flight me.
FO: The video was titled “Gravity.”
SUBJECT: That was marketing’s call.
FO: Did anything change? Anything at all?
SUBJECT: I don’t like ceilings now. That’s real. Ceilings feel personal.
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FO: Autumn, you’ve worked with him fourteen months. Any change?
AUTUMN: He holds his breath more.
SUBJECT: That’s a technique.
AUTUMN: It’s not one I taught him.
FO: Would you go again?
SUBJECT: They’ve got a longer flight now. Twenty-two minutes, two orbits, they let you sleep up there. And I know — I know — that eleven minutes cured me of nothing, and I’m sitting here telling you that twice as long might do it. That’s insane. I’m aware that’s insane. But that’s the whole thing, isn’t it. Nobody’s ever sold me a product that worked and I keep buying the bigger one.
FO: What’s the four a.m. thought? When your heart’s going. What’s the actual thought?
SUBJECT: That everyone who loves me is on payroll.
He looked at the ceiling for a while, and then he did not like that, so he looked at his phone.