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So December 7th, 1972, that was the last time humans landed on the moon, the Apollo 17 mission. Among the reasons astronauts haven't returned is because we thought we discovered most of what we needed to. And the second is that it's really, really expensive.
But it turns out neither of these things is as true today. The moon may contain vast deposits of important minerals. And getting to the moon could cost a fraction of the amount it did, adjusted for inflation, of course, back in 1972. Steve Altomis is an entrepreneur who wants to make all of this happen.
He founded a company called Intuitive Machines that plans to commercialize space exploration, particularly on the moon. Steve spent most of his career at NASA, and while he loved it, he was also frustrated
SPEAKER_00: by the bureaucracy and what he felt was the lack of ambition. And I was just getting frustrated because here I was in charge of an organization that was essentially the NFL of engineering, right? Imagine just a premier engineering organization. Yeah, the best. Yeah. So we're like a Ferrari running at idle. And I really wanted to step on the gas and see what we could do. And not be entangled in a bureaucracy that was forced through legislative direction to
SPEAKER_01:
kind of dither and just study capabilities.
Yeah. This was 2013, I think you left. And again, not in any way to blame any particular administration because NASA budgets were just
like progressively cut over years. But I think during this time, the Obama administration really cut down on NASA's budget significantly.
SPEAKER_00: And so presumably, I mean, you had all these highly talented engineers, but there wasn't
really, you were limited with what you could do. Exactly right. The moon was a four letter word at the time. We've been there in Apollo. We don't need to go back. And so, I came home for dinner one Friday evening and I told my son, NASA is just not
SPEAKER_00: going anywhere. And he said, dad, you never talk bad about NASA.
What's the matter? And I told him and he said, well, what are you going to do about it?
And so he and I came up with an idea to put a walking robot on the moon in 1000 days.
You and your son did? Yeah. He went upstairs, made a video of a robot on the moon looking back at earth saying, you know, I see you in sign language. Like an animated video? Yeah, an animated video. And so I took it to work on Monday and showed my divisions and said, let's go do something amazing. Unleash our minds from these imposed constraints and do something that just shocks everybody
SPEAKER_00:
and put a walking robot on the moon in 1000 days. We went ahead and built a lunar lander testbed for flying on earth and we built a walking robot. We flew the walking robot to space station and we flew the lander by itself about 37 times successfully, launched it from earth and landed it on a simulated lunar landscape
SPEAKER_01:
at Kennedy Space Center at the shuttle landing facility.
SPEAKER_00: Right. Just to be clear, you did not land a robot on the moon, just to be clear. No, the farthest we got with that robot was to deliver it to International Space Station
where it walked up and down the space station cleaning the ductwork.
Yeah, still pretty cool. And that was the beginning of Intuitive Machines. That was where a true sense of entrepreneurship came from. And I subsequently left the agency to form Intuitive Machines in 2013, realizing that
SPEAKER_01:
you had to take control of your environment to make an impact and one person was absolutely capable of changing the world. So what was the idea of Intuitive Machines? I mean, at that point SpaceX was formed and certainly successful and you got Blue Origin, a bunch of other private companies.
SPEAKER_00: What was Intuitive Machines' place in what was beginning to be a crowded environment? So the agency was still, and the executive branch and the legislature were still about a capabilities-driven architecture with no plan to go back to the moon. And so there was no real thirst to go after NASA work or to do space flight work. So we formed ourselves kind of as a think tank. And what we did was we stepped outside the gate of Johnson Space Center, which is here in Houston, and we said, what are the industries in and around us? Well, it's mainly oil and gas. Oil and gas, yeah. Healthcare, the Texas Medical Center is one of the largest medical centers in the world. And aerospace, right outside of Johnson Space Center. So let's solve intractable problems in those three industries using our human space flight engineering techniques and methodologies and practices, which are highly refined. And that was the genesis. That's all I had was like that idea. And I struck a deal with my co-founder, Cam Gaffarian, and we shook hands over a dinner meeting. He says, Stephen, it would be a shame if the music in your head was never played.
SPEAKER_01:
Let's go do this. I'll support you. I'll invest in you.
Let's go build this company. All right. So the idea was to develop capabilities to land material or humans specifically on the
SPEAKER_00:
moon. Is that what you were aiming to do? At the time, no, it actually wasn't. What we were trying to do was to provide solutions for those industries. And so we were inventing, we had 24 inventions in the first five years of the company. We had four ventures that were spinning out of the company. We were just producing things. One of them was a long range over the horizon fixed wing drone, a 55 pound class drone that
could avoid traffic in the airspace and fly over the horizon for pipeline inspections. Well, that all was well and good. And we were kind of bouncing on the bottom somewhat, single digit millions revenue, not really gaining traction with any of the inventions. We found it difficult to work in the healthcare industry and to provide medical devices in that institutional bureaucracy of healthcare. We had trouble breaking into oil and gas and the drones were restricted by the FAA.
The regulations weren't allowing them to fly in the airspace. Where it turned, Guy, was in 2018, the National Security Council and the National Space Council declared that the moon was now of strategic interest. China was coming on strong and the US needed to set the norms and behaviors of how we live and work in space to be more peaceful and more civilian focused. And so they created a directive that said, let's return humans to the moon in a sustainable
SPEAKER_01: way. And that was in 2018. What you're talking about is the United States government obviously looking at what China was doing, they did eventually land a spacecraft on the moon in 2019. India would follow suit in a couple years after that. So presumably the US government is thinking, if other countries are going to start making
SPEAKER_00: claims on the moon here, we better get back into this space. Yeah, exactly. The Chinese were ramping up their program and having success after success after success,
SPEAKER_01:
converting the moon, landing on the far side of the moon, roving on the moon, returning
a sample from the moon, those kinds of things. So you at this point now start to shift your focus on figuring out how to get a lander onto the moon. Let's kind of talk a little bit about so many things to talk about, the cost, the associated costs, the complexity. But I want to just go right to the jugular here. Why? What is it about? I mean, we've been to the moon.
Anyone who goes to the Air and Space Museum can touch that moon rock. It's amazing and inspiring. But from what I gathered, even going to the Air and Space Museum, is that we've gathered
SPEAKER_00:
pretty much everything we need to gather. We've gathered the rock samples. We know what the atmosphere is like. And there really isn't that much left to learn about the moon. Is that wrong? Think about trying to describe what the planet Earth looks like from those handful of missions where you have just small, small excursions away from your lander. You know nothing about the planet Earth at that point. You don't know oceans. You don't know terrain. You don't know mountains and desert. You know where you landed from a very, like looking through a straw, very small amount of knowledge. Right. I think that's where we are now.
For all of the moon rocks that we brought back in the history of humanity, there's only 360 kilograms of material.
SPEAKER_00: There are so many unknowns about the moon. How much water ice is entrained in the soil? Where are the rare metals and minerals that have bombarded the moon for a billion years?
SPEAKER_01:
What are those and what are the constituents of the moon? Is it a source of rare materials for us back on Earth?
And that information, you have to gather that by having a physical presence there in some
SPEAKER_00: capacity.
You can't gather that through satellites or other orbiting equipment? Well certainly from Earth and from satellites in and around the vicinity of the moon, you can gather imagery data that can tell you, hey, let's go to the South Pole. The South Pole looks like it has an incredible amount of water ice entrained in the soil.
Let's go see if it's actually there. How much water is there? Can we make drinking water from that? Can we make propellants, liquid oxygen from that? Can we make consumables for humans from that?
SPEAKER_01: So you can get some idea. Then the question is, do you want to take the next step and actually go explore on the surface? We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more on why going to the moon
is worth it and how collaboration with SpaceX is making it all possible. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
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That's H-E-R-O dot C-O to save 10% today. Hey everyone, so I've been working with Miro over the last year to help me get a better sense of what you, my listeners, are thinking. They've sponsored quite a few episodes of this show, and it's just an amazing tool for collaboration and working with teams, and so far, we've been really happy with what we're seeing. If you haven't heard of it, Miro is this incredible online workspace. Our team uses Miro for a lot of our own brainstorms and processes, and I think it's super useful to try it out if you want to build something great with your team. Now, I want to talk about a part of Miro that many of you probably have never heard of before. It's called the Miroverse. Sometimes, starting work on an online visual workspace can feel overwhelming, but with Miroverse, you can select pre-made boards for pretty much any use case. It saves you the hassle of building from scratch. And what's really cool is that a new template has just been added. This time for me! We partnered with the folks over at Miro to create a How to Build a Podcast Miroverse template to help kickstart your journey to making a podcast. Go to Miro.com slash H-I-B-T to check out our Miroverse template for yourself.
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I'm Guy Raz. Here's more from my conversation with Steve Altomis, co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Machines.
I guess my question is, and I'm not pushing back to be difficult, I'm just really curious. Because part of me is like, well, if this was really critical, you would think that these missions wouldn't have stopped in 1972, that they would continue on. I mean, they're very expensive, you know, maybe $100 billion. That's what NASA estimated to put a man or woman back on the moon today. But so do we know there are rare earth minerals? I mean, you mentioned this idea of the moon being bombarded for billions of years, which
SPEAKER_00: makes sense. But at the same time, like so has Earth. The moon is much smaller than the Earth. So like, I mean, how often does it get hit by stuff? Well, it's, you know, you could see all the pockmarks on the moon with the naked eye, right? It's not a telescope. It's just Swiss cheese. But you know, if we think about mining, at the rate that we consume rare earth minerals and materials, we now have pristine areas that would have to be strip mined to find the last bastion of materials that we're looking for. We don't want to do that. We don't want to destroy our Earth.
SPEAKER_01: So if there's an alternate source, mining on the moon can become a real source of commerce for us as a planet. And again, you're working on this. It hasn't happened yet, because I think the only countries that have landed besides the
US and Russia are India and China.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that India and China are the only countries that have landed anything on the moon since the year 2000, if I'm not mistaken. No, you're correct. The very recent history, it's only been India and China.
SPEAKER_01:
India being the latest and you saw the recent Russian mission to the moon failed on the
way. That failed. Yeah. And I read something like 45% of attempts of crash and burn. So why is it so hard?
I mean, if the United States did it, you know, multiple times in the 60s and late 60s and
early 70s, we know the terrain.
SPEAKER_00:
I mean, why is it so hard to land something successfully on the moon? Why do they crash so often? It's an incredible challenge to go to the moon when you transition from flying highly dynamic environment of flying from Earth through the atmosphere into space and then capturing
into the moon, orbiting the moon, descending down to a surface that's not defined by sea
level. It's a very mountainous terrain with craters and there's no navigation.
And so what you have to do with no pilot in command, have the ability to navigate on your own to carry everything with you, you need to sort out where the surface is. We have kind of a mean surface of the moon, a general idea of what the surface of the moon reference line is.
SPEAKER_01:
But if you land on a crater.
You're dead. You're either a rock, a slope.
So that's part of the challenge. So all right, in 2019, NASA awarded three companies, private companies, contracts to
build robotic lunar landers.
Your company, Intuitive, was one of them. And you obviously have been building it and testing it.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, where do you test it? Do you like to, I don't know, like Hawaii?
Like where do you, just what kind of rocky surface do you look for? So what we do is right here in Houston, we have been building the NovaSea Lunar Lander, which is about 2000 kilograms, stands about 14 feet high, maybe six or seven feet diameter. And we make everything basically vertically integrated as a company. There's a few items that we purchase, but the bulk of them we manufacture in house. We actually additively manufacture or 3D print our own engines.
SPEAKER_01:
And then we test them right here. We're on Spaceport Houston, the Ellington Airport.
I'm looking at a photo of the NovaSea, and it may be an old photo, but it's interesting because it doesn't look that different from, you know, lunar landers of the 60s and 70s. I mean, it has sort of the same shape, sort of a vertical kind of, you know, cylinder with like tent pole legs.
And I'm sure it's much more sophisticated.
SPEAKER_00: But in terms of the design, are there reasons why that design is not that different? Yeah, so you want to have the lightest weight lander that you can because it takes so much energy to get out of the gravity well of Earth to the Moon and then descend it softly to the surface of the Moon inside its gravity well. So all of that is energy management. You know, our business economics for the lander are to sell payloads at a price per kilogram. So every kilogram of lander mass is one less kilogram of payload mass that we could sell
SPEAKER_01: to make the business profitable. Yeah, let's talk about the business model. I mean, obviously you had to raise a ton of money just to do the research and to build
prototypes. But tell me a little bit about the model. I mean, basically you will sell material that is gathered from the Moon that returns to
SPEAKER_00: Earth? Is that initially how you're going to make money? We've actually diversified to the point where our business model is really to install the infrastructure in and around the Moon to support sustained human presence. So if you think about it like an expeditionary force, the first thing you need to do is land. Then you establish communications. Then you establish navigation to move further away from your lander. And then you start bringing up heavier and heavier cargo. So we built an entire mini Apollo program, if you will, one that you could operate the mission from a mission control.
SPEAKER_00: And then you need a rocket to get you off Earth. And we contract with SpaceX to buy their Falcon 9 rockets. You go on the rocket, yeah. And they take us through that first phase out of the Earth's atmosphere and into space. So now we have the infrastructure to launch and transport our lander to the Moon.
And the first lander takes about 130 kilograms of payload to the surface.
SPEAKER_00: And what's on there? So we put scientific instruments.
SPEAKER_01: These are unmanned, I should be clear. Totally robotic, autonomous missions at this point. They're really precursors to the human missions.
SPEAKER_00: So like rover type things that can basically leave the lander and start to poke around? Yeah. So rovers, hoppers, which is a drone, rocket-pelled drone that can fly 25 kilometers away from the lander. All kinds of items that extend from scientific instruments to commercial sponsorships to art projects to telescopes that stare at the Milky Way.
SPEAKER_00: All of those are payloads that we fly. And we can charge roughly a million dollars a kilogram to take those payloads to the Moon,
SPEAKER_00: whether that's a government payload or a commercial payload. So if you can do that, that's roughly a hundred million dollars plus of revenue that you can generate with each mission to the Moon.
Now you say, okay, how do you fly fixed price to the Moon for less than a hundred million dollars? And you have to figure that out. Yeah. That I think is disruption. The disruption of, you said it earlier, that it costs a hundred billion dollars for Apollo missions and we're trying to land on the Moon for a hundred million dollars. It's orders of magnitude cheaper.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_01: Launch access has become affordable again. SpaceX caused that disruption and it's fantastic for us.
I understand the need to commercialize this because obviously taxpayers cannot finance these missions in perpetuity. So it makes sense that you've got private companies doing it. But I imagine you mentioned you're operating out of Houston, obviously important oil and
gas center of the United States of the world really. Imagine there's an incentive from some of these companies to have some equipment as
part of the payload in order to use it as a way to explore potential for extracting
minerals. How does like, I mean how would it work in terms of like claiming a part of the Moon to extract material?
How do we figure out who owns what? I know that there are international treaties but what happens if your lander discovers
SPEAKER_00: some rare earth mineral in that area, who can claim that? That's a great question and there's very little policy and governance but there is some framework.
So the Outer Space Treaty governs how we live and work in space. But how do we live and work on the Moon? The United States offered to the world an agreement called the Artemis Accords and it's very friendly to allowing commercialization rights of the Moon. So if you land on the Moon you can bring back samples and own those samples per the Artemis Accords. It's not where they belong to the sovereign governments, they can belong to commercial companies. And I think that's important for the future of building a space economy centered around the Moon. And I'm sure there will be a lot of legal opinions when the first samples come back. But technically you don't own the real estate if you land.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_00: It's not the frontier days of the wild wild west where you went out and did plant a flag and you owned the land, the property, the stake staked it out. You land, you own what they call a heritage site. And that means other countries or other companies that want to fly near you, if you're declared as a heritage site, need to coordinate with you before they land and damage any of the equipment that you have there. But you don't own the land or the mineral rights because you've landed there, but what
SPEAKER_01: you cache on the surface and what you bring back can be yours. We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, why Steve is embracing
SPEAKER_01: the possibility of failure as his first lunar launch approaches. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. If you've ever been to Paris in the summer, you know it's packed with tourists and trying to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower could take up the whole day just waiting in line. So this past summer, when I was in Paris with my family, we booked a skip the line tour to the Eiffel Tower through Viator. Viator is a website and app where you can book travel experiences like taking a guided tour of the Roman Colosseum with skip the line access, or hiking down into the beautiful rock formations of Antelope Canyon alongside a Navajo guide.
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SPEAKER_00: Here's more from my conversation with Steve Altomis, whose company is planning to send its first lunar lander to the South Pole of the Moon early next year. OK, let's talk about your launch. I know there have been some scheduled launches that have been nixed. There are a variety of reasons, weather and other challenges. Your next window is, I think, January 2024, right? Yes, we had a launch window in November, but there's priorities going off the launch pad all the time. We have to fit within the manifest of what's going off of launch pad A at Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX has given us a launch date for January 12th of 2024. We have a five-day window to get off. There's only a certain amount of days per month that you can fly to the Moon where it's in the right position to where we can land at our designated landing site. So we're very excited about it. The lander has been ready for some time now, since the end of September. And we will ship it later this month to the Cape for processing.
SPEAKER_01: We'll take Christmas off and get it fine touches to it and get it on its spacecraft adapter and get it encapsulated on the Falcon 9 and get it out to the launch pad, do a rehearsal and launch it on, I think the launch window opens at 11.59 p.m. on January 12th. So when humans were trying to figure out flight, there were a lot of accidents.
SPEAKER_00:
The Wright brothers had a lot of crashes. But over time, they figured out how to successfully land aircraft. As we know, there have been not an insignificant amount of attempts to land on the Moon. But what is the holy grail? What is the thing that humans have to figure out to make it foolproof?
Well it's time. It's time in the seat. It's time, it's flying missions. So I like the idea of a number of shots on goal. The more shots on goal, the more attempts, the more the learning. We're at the edge of an envelope of eking out the performance of a system. You know, think about the early days of Ferrari and racing and how they're on the edge and the limit and the failures they've had and how they've recovered and how the automotive company has come, the automotive industry has come a long way in reliability, the aircraft industry in a long way in reliability. You're seeing through commercial endeavor and innovation, SpaceX come a long way in terms of reliability of the rockets and frequency of flight. It's almost becoming routine as they aim for 100 missions in a single year. So the Moon, we're at our infancy. We've had a handful, like you said, of missions to the Moon. And so in Tutu Machines, as we build our landers, we're building the same lander over and over and over again to make sure it's right and practiced and learning from every attempt. And so every attempt we try, and we have three on the books and adding a fourth here shortly,
SPEAKER_01: those missions will help us understand the performance of the systems and we can adjust
and tweak and redesign and fly another one and adjust and tweak and design and fly another one before we change to another model of lander or another category. And so I hope that that will help improve reliability as we go over and over again to the Moon. So what, I mean, you're talking about moving material to and from the Moon.
And we've had, and this is not a perfect analogy, but we've had companies on the show
SPEAKER_00: that make autonomous vehicles and some of them aren't interested in moving around humans. They just want to move around equipment or be delivery vehicles. Do you think that, I mean, you want to be the first private company to land, you know, to have a lander, successfully land on the Moon.
SPEAKER_00: Do you also want to move human beings to the Moon one day?
Is that part of your plan?
Yes, we actually are in the competition today.
We submitted a proposal to NASA to build their lunar terrain vehicle,
which is the F-150 pickup truck that would take astronauts around the surface of the Moon.
And it's a very interesting and very disruptive kind of procurement that NASA is doing, where we would own the rover and we would use it autonomously and commercially
to move things around the surface of the Moon. But NASA would buy it from us as a service when the astronauts are present. So they would take control of it, they would operate it with astronauts on board, and when the astronauts leave, we would operate it and we would move material and we would move logistics and we would do assembly with the robotic arm and make a business out of it. I think it's really exciting to see the kind of partnerships that we're creating with the government who is now embracing the commercial model and seeing how we blend the federal dollar with the investment dollar to stretch the capabilities of this country and to our speed and execution of moving out into space. And Intuita Machines bid that to develop that.
SPEAKER_00:
And so we will deliver it to the surface if we win, and then we'll defer to NASA
SPEAKER_01: when they want to put their astronauts in it. So it's a really exciting model and I think that's a breakthrough in business.
And you know what it does? It makes us more globally competitive where we no longer have these government-run monolithic programs
that take decades to deploy.
SPEAKER_00: We now have an ability to move with the speed and agility of the U.S. economy, and that's a competitive edge for the United States all day long. Predictions are dangerous, but what's your best prediction for when we're going to have another human on the Moon? I know Blue Origin was selected to lead that mission with NASA, but who knows what that will mean? What's your prediction? 10 years? 20 years? 30 years? Faster than that? Well, SpaceX and Blue Origin both have SpaceX Mission 1 and Blue Origin Mission 2. They want those procurements to land humans on the Moon. I was up on Capitol Hill talking to the appropriators and authorizers and different committees about Artemis. And you know, optimistically, NASA tends to be optimistic about when it can fly and maybe over promises
and then the dollars don't materialize and the hardware doesn't cooperate and they tend to underdeliver and the programs cost more and take a lot longer. And so being realistic as a business, certainly as a public company,
we have to factor in our anticipated best guess of delays that are going to come associated with the Artemis program. And so I think it's 2030 before we see boots on the Moon. Hmm. It's exciting. It's incredibly exciting to be, you know, people as aerospace engineers used to say,
SPEAKER_01: man, it would have been a great time to be alive during the Apollo program. Yeah. And yet today, I think it's the best time to be alive as an aerospace engineer working on returning the United States to the Moon for the first time in 52 years as a commercial company. And the first ever mission to the South Pole of the Moon.
SPEAKER_00:
That's our first one. OK. So if in fact, OK, it launches, the statistics, and again, I'm saying this to make you nervous, but the statistics aren't on your side, right? I mean, I think there hasn't been a single private space company that has landed anything on the Moon since 2000, right? Or in a long time. There has never been a commercial landing on the Moon in history. Never. So Intruder Machines is aiming to be the first. And you're right, 40 to 45% of the missions fail going to the Moon. Yeah. Well aware of that. You know, imagine building a business where you put everything on the line at the moment you light the rocket. And you, right? But there's some thoughts here I have if you'll indulge me. Please. We have three missions to the Moon. Failure is likely, like you indicated. We have now three shots at the Moon. So we are not a company that builds one lander and if it succeeds, we're successful. If it fails, we go under. Right. We have diversified revenue streams. We have revenue from other business lines. The lander is something that we've taken great care to build with a lot of know-how from our days in NASA and in aerospace. And we've been able to go look at all of the people who have stood before us and tried to land on the Moon. And we've in fact looked at every failure that's occurred and thought about that when we built our lander architecture. We've added redundancy in the systems, whether it's dissimilar redundancy or it's multiple strings of redundant things. We've looked at simplicity. We've looked at areas to provide more robustness where there seems to be a number of failures. And so in my mind, I've taken our failure probability to a 75% success rate. So there is still a significant opportunity to fail. But if you think about it, all the work that we've done today, the propulsion testing, the software testing, and then you get to the launch pad and you light the engine and you separate from the launch vehicle, then you commission your engines and fire it for the first time. The further we get towards the Moon, the more success we have. So if we've retired 95% of the risk on our way to the Moon, that's a wild success for us. Even if we don't touch down softly and return NASA's data to them or the commercial data, we have retired significant risk and we've proven the economic model of trying to build the lowest cost lander
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_00: and land on the Moon for less than $100 million and build that in four years is a proven theory then.
SPEAKER_01: And it shows that you can execute.
SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of the way I look at it. You know, embrace the chance of failure and stand in the arena and give it a try.
Awesome, Steve. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Good luck on the launches. We'll be watching. I hope you and all your constituents tune in and hopefully we give you an exciting ride to the Moon. That's Steve Altamis, co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Machines. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with music composed by Ramtin Arablui.
It was edited by John Isabella with research by Carla Estevez. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, JC Howard, Katherine Seifer, Kerry Thompson, Malia Agudelo, Neva Grant and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.
If you like how I built this, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery's podcast, American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, corruption in sports, corporate fraud. Our newest season looks at Aaron Hernandez, a rising pro football star who shocked the sports world when he was arrested for a brutal murder in 2013. Fans, media and Hernandez's own family couldn't understand how a beloved and respected player for the New England Patriots with a 40 million dollar contract could commit such a heinous crime. But there had been warning signs all along the way, and they pointed to a much larger health crisis among current and former NFL players.
