Senator Mark Kelly on Stoicism, Space, and Staying Calm Under Pressure

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast.

“One of the things I think that the stoic understood was that the pressure reveals, like”

who you are when things are awesome when things are calm, it doesn't say that much. But what about when you're under strain, what about when the world is falling apart, what about when you're under attack, literally, and figuratively, what about when you're being accused of something untrue or unjust when you are the victim of injustice, what about when you're stuck in traffic, what about when you're isolated and lonely, what about

when tragedy strikes, right? That's where stoicism comes in, that's where discipline comes in, that's where all the virtues come in, right? Courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. And there are some people who are tested more than others, right? We're trying to land an aircraft carrier at night and middle of the ocean knowing that everyone is watching and every landing is going to be graded in by the way, the real failing grade

is in an efforts, dying in a fiery crash, what about being shot into space, what about

being attacked by the most powerful person in the world, what about a deranged maniac

trying to murder the woman that you love? How do you come back from that? How do you

“get through that? That's why I was really excited to talk to today's guest senator,”

Mark Kelly, might be how you know him. I first met him many, many years ago when he was captain, Mark Kelly, or astronaut, Mark Kelly, he's been all those things retired. Navy captain, combat pilot, test pilot, NASA astronaut, husband, father, and now United States senator, she flew 39 combat missions during the Gulf War. He locked thousands of hours and more than 50 aircraft, you completed more than 375 carrier landings. He flew four space missions

commanding two of them. He stood up in this unique moment in American history and taken some heat, taken some pressure for it. It's currently the enemy of the president of the United States, Secretary of Defense. So in today's episode, I wanted to ask him about that. I asked him what it means to operate under real pressure, talked about anxiety, talked about ego, talked about pausing, one of the things he says in today's episode, a lesson from NASA when you don't know what to do,

don't do anything, take a beat, think, don't make the problem worse. We talked quite a bit about Mark's to really talk about the overview effect, the fragility of our planet, the responsibilities of public service, and of course, animal jams, stalked him. Because whether you're flying a jet, commanding a space shuttle serving in the Senate, or just trying to get through personal tragedy, the question is the same. Can you stay steady? Can you stay humble? Can you do the right thing

“when the pressure is real? And that's what this conversation is about, I think it's worth mentioning,”

his incredible wife, former Congressman Gabby Giverds, who was shot in an assassination attempt

in 2011. Kelly retired from the Navy in NASA that year to nurse his wife back to health, and they have both become incredible activists in both continued public service in their own ways. And she's just an incredible woman, and I think that's worth calling out as well. It's also worth saying, Mark Kelly is the author of a Children's Book series called Masternot. He also co-wrote two books with his wife, Gabby, a story of courage and hope. And enough,

our fight to keep America safe from gun violence, you can follow Senator Kelly on Instagram at Sen Mark Kelly. That's Mark with a K. Anyways, you're going to like this episode. Maybe you've been hearing the buzz about live shopping lately. I know I have, and it makes sense. Like, people are already on their phones, they're hanging out, they're looking for stuff to do. So why wouldn't business want to meet people where they're at? If you're hoping for people to

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so I was going to tell you about it. It was a, do you remember Renaissance weekends? It was one of those,

it's so New Year's in Charleston. I think this would have been like 2011 or 2012. Okay, so was it before Gabby got shot or after? I think so, I think before, because it was days before in 2011 we were there. The last only went to was in 2012, a year after she got shot.

“It was, I think before, I think it was before, because what I remember, this, my wife and I,”

we weren't married yet, but we were starting to think about having a family, and I remember you, you had very, like maybe, pre-teen or teen daughters, and I remember you had your hands full. Yeah, and it was like, he's an astronaut, and he has his hands full with these kids. What are we signing off for it? I have thought about that every once in a while in the years since, that was my memory of meeting you. I was just with my daughter Claudia at a thing,

who's at the McCain Sedona Forum, and a woman came up to us who used to go, she says same thing. You wouldn't remember, but at the Renaissance weekend thing, and her son was my daughter's age.

Got it, and we basically had the same conversation about how, because my kids in 2011, you know,

was 15 years, she was 15. Yeah, so at a 15-year-old, then a 13-year-old there. Yeah, and they loved going to that thing. Yeah, it was probably 11.30 at night, they're getting to stay. It was craziness, you know, and there's kids in there and I hope to, it was probably incredibly fun for them, actually. Okay, this is what that's like. That is what it's like. And kids are great, and it's so much fun. And for me, even as when they were teenagers,

it's all great until like one of them takes the card, doesn't come back for 24 hours. You're like, why did I do this? But then you have grandkids, which is the best. My nine-year-old, he's about to turn 10. He told me he's a pre-teen, and I was like, oh, okay, now it's real. Like, I mean, it's technically, I guess, technically, true, but I was like, oh, man, okay, so it's about to get, it's about to get real. To see think he gets like more privileges or something.

“What he says, I think he, I think he just occurred to him the math of it just became real.”

She just tell him that get you nothing. Yeah, because it actually gets you less. I'm going to watch you more like a hawk now because you're going to start doing things that you recognize that. Yes, totally. Yeah. The other person I met at that one that I was one of the cool encounters in my life was Jim Lovell was, I mean, I don't know if he was a bat one or another one, but I found myself sitting at a dinner table with him. Was this real life? This is crazy. Yeah,

I mean, Apollo 13, Commander. Yeah. Went around the moon. I think on Apollo 10 as well, a guy, you know, got to know a little bit. Yeah, I got to NASA to the astronaut office long after he was gone. Sure. But I did get to meet him a number of times and he's one of those guys. I looked up to when I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah, I think probably your latest and probably things are all they all know each other. And then you probably all done. We don't. Yeah. No, but I knew Neil Armstrong

pretty well. I knew Buzz Aldrin pretty well. John Glenn. I got to sit next between John Glenn and Neil Armstrong at a dinner once. After I was an astronaut. Yeah. But other than my four space flights, that was probably the next biggest cool thing for me is that dinner and it was on the 50th anniversary of John Glenn's first flight. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I really didn't get a picture. Didn't happen then. Well, I thought it would be too weird. Yeah. To like ask for a selfie with John Glenn and Neil Armstrong

sitting at the dinner table, but I do kind of regret it. Well, in in the right stuff, the line that

I've just always struck by is Tom Wolf points out that like John Glenn's heart rate never goes

“above 100 during the the thing. And I asked him, well, I was like, could that possibly be true?”

Like, how could it not be pounding out of his chest? And he's like, I mean, you've just done it so many times, then unless something's going wrong, this is this is normal. You mean when he was strapped into the rocket ship before launch? We're just just in the course of the mission. Did you never get this? Oh, yeah. Thank you for adrenaline. Yeah. I think it's different for different people. We've done EKGs on even shuttle crew members, I think. I never wore one. Yeah.

But I think they did for some, you know, some data. And I've heard of folks that feel like, you know, their heart is rapidly beating. I thought about that on my four missions. And I think my

in the commander, you're turning a lot of stuff on. You got to make sure things go well. And you

“could mess it up where the launch is going to stop. Yeah. And then it's like you wasted, you know,”

millions of dollars worth of fuel and all your guests up to come back the next day. And it's going to be kind of embarrassing. So you're worried about that. Yeah. You're also worried about getting blown up a little bit. Did you have techniques for calming yourself down? No. No, I probably should of. I don't think they would work on me. Yeah. I generally don't get worked up about things all that much. So I used to fly airplanes off of an aircraft carrier. I've almost gotten shot

down a number of times that I'm missile blow up next to my airplane. Almost flew into the ground,

you know, two or three times because of me. Yeah. Like screwing it up pilot air. Yeah, pilot air.

Yeah. You know, once in Korea, I got really close. So other things lately just don't get, I don't get to work that ever. I would imagine landing on a carrier at night sort of level sets what scary. And yeah, that's scary. Yeah. And you know, if somebody would do, you know, have the, you know, EKGME measure in my heart rate for that. Yeah. That's really high because it's a hard thing to do. It's hard to do well. It feels like like they've done studies of like what it means

to actually hit like a pitcher's fastball. Like you have like 400 milliseconds to decide like it to decide with impossible. You're going to sweat if you can do it. Yeah. A carrier landing

strikes me as almost on like if I hadn't seen videos of people doing it and described it to me,

I would say that's not possible. Yeah. Yeah. I would, I would have thought so myself until I had to do it. Yeah. Eventually it gets to the point where in the daytime you get comfortable. Yeah. Doing it. And you can, you know, you feel like a can be successful at this at night. It's a controlled crash and you're just like you just hold on. You know, I don't know, you know, what, what frequency you're, you know, our brains are operating on in that moment. But the stick movement and the

throttle movement can be just kind of, kind of nuts. Yeah. I mean, you're in an enormous thing hitting ministerial target in the middle of the ocean. Yeah. And if you, if you land short, the ramp strike is a high probability. Yeah. And then you're dead. And, and almost, well, I thought it was, I was reading about this. It's like that they don't even refer to it as landing. They call it like recovering the aircraft. Yes. Strikes me as illustrative of like, you know, we're snatching victory from the

jaws of defeat every time. Yeah. It's the recovery, the launch, the recovery. Yeah. And you got to get all these airplanes aboard in the short period of time. You just, you know, then you got to move them, you know, you're moving them around on the deck. And what we call it physically, the event

“is we call it a trap. Yeah. Which is, I think about it is a weird way to say it because a trap”

is usually like your, you're going to, you know, capture an animal. Yeah. But the event of landing on the aircraft carrier, that's a trap. Is that because you're being snagged by the wire? And that's the trap? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have a hook. There's a wire. I've done that. Well, 375 times, something like that. Does it get any easier? Not at night. Yeah. Day time it does. Just because you can at least see what's happening. It's just scary at night. I mean, it's just, you're, you know,

you're, especially if there's no horizon. Yeah. You know, you're, you know, you're flying initially on instruments. So you're flying an ILS approach. And then you get to 3/4 of a mile. And then you transition to the light system, the meatball, the Fresnel lens on the deck. And it's a very high gain task. A lot of inputs. Yeah. You get wiped off. Maybe if you're, if you're, if it's not looking good, I used to be a landing signals officer as well, standing on the side of the ship.

One of the airplanes are coming aboard and you're talking to a. Yeah. Right. And you're, tell it, you know, you're giving them suggestions. You know, you might say like, you know, your little high, you know, don't fly through it, a power, power, power, wave off or right for line up or don't settle, you know, then. So you've got this cadence of talking somebody through this landing, you get wiped off for your bolter, which is means the wire, or the cook doesn't catch the wire.

“You go airborne again. You come around again. You might bolter again. Now you need to gas.”

Now you got to go to the tanker. It's embarrassing. You know, that's called, um, especially if you have to go to the tanker multiple times, uh, a night in the barrel is what we call it. You had your night in the barrel. Uh, and sometimes you're doing this in what we call blue

Yeah, because they're like, you, you don't have the stuff tonight. It's too fatty here. You're not, and, and they're only certain people that can fly during blue water ops. Yeah. And then you're,

“if it's blue water ops, there's the extra anxiety at night that you have to get aboard the ship.”

Right. You know, if things start to go really south on somebody, they'll bring the barricade.

So then there's no boltering. That's to catch you. Yeah. Like, if it got really bad, I never,

I don't remember anybody ever being having their night in the barrel, where they rigged the barricade on our ship. So it's a, it's an uncommon thing, but it does happen. Yeah. And you know, everyone is watching it. As after you've missed another watch and everyone's starting to watch every one of the ready rooms, everybody's, you know, watching, then you did your guy go around and around. They know who it is. Yeah. And, you know, I guess some people are cheering

on. And then there's, you know, probably a little depending on who the person is, a little bit of that shed and Freud there. Maybe they're batting on it. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. And I was fascinated to learn

“that every landing. So you did just did 300 plus, everyone, you get a grade. Yes, grade it on all”

of them. Yeah. Now, this has gotten, I'll become a lot different. Okay. Now, lately, over the last

decade or so, because of advances in the systems, even on like an F-18, the thing called magic carpet, which helps you fly the airplane in a way that keeps you on glides slow, much more easily. I went out to the ship a couple years ago in the backseat of the F-18. And I was the guy in the front was a navy lieutenant. And he was just talking through this. And he would say even when he's on the ball, which is behind the ship at a half a mile, he says he can look around and see where people are walking

around on the flight deck, not a thing. And when I was back in the day, when I was, and I'm sure I was doing it like that. I mean, aren't the LSOs called paddles? Because they used to just do it with like using paddles. Yeah. But yeah, we didn't do it paddles. We did it over the radio. We have a thing called a pickle. We're to we can wave them off. You know, red lights come on on the front outlands and people have to go around. But they've improved these systems. So the boarding rate now is

really high. It's very rare that somebody bolters or they get wiped off. And what that's allowed us to do in the navy is we've just transitioned to where people don't even go to the ship before they get their wings anymore. They're going to go to their fleet airplane. And we have to do a lot less practice. It used to be so much time and energy and effort to train the cruise up to be able to operate off the ship. It's gotten a lot easier. And what that means, they can focus on

the mission more, right? Which is often the strike mission of, you know, dropping bombs or the fighter mission of countering an enemy air threat. So we're now much more effective. Naval Air Force because of it becoming easier to land on the ship. Right. Right. Yeah, Dave Burke, who is an LSOs reading about him. And he was saying that it says something about the culture of the navy that every landing is graded. And the best grade you can get is okay. That's right. Now you can get an

okay underlined. But there's no such thing as perfection. There's no such thing as the other line, which is very rare. Yeah. That's perfection. Right. And then an okay. And then fair. And then a no grade. Yeah. And was there anything this is done this and dating by this long time ago, I was in L.A. So below, uh, there was something below a no grade, but it was, no grades bad. Yeah. But it's a, it's a brutal scale like it's. And then it's, and then it's displayed in the

ready room. Yes. So everybody sees the grades. Yeah. Required under naval rules for aviation that the grades be displayed. So everybody knows who's doing the best and who's doing the worst. And that worst guy doesn't want to be the worst guy next week. And that's creating a culture of excellence and competition and and hard work. Yeah. And just, you know, you're just going to

grind through it and always try to get better. Yeah. Because everybody's going to see your grade.

“And the okay was, uh, green, uh, fair was yellow and no grade was white. I can't remember what”

okay underlined was. That was a really good pass. You're gonna get one of those? I don't think so. Right. Yeah. It's probably one of those. Was usually F.A. teens got them. I flew the A6 intruder. Yeah. It's a little harder to to land on the ship. Interesting. Yeah. It must be hard to do something so difficult that even as you get really good at it, it's still so like you're never going to feel like I've got this. And yet if you don't feel like you've got it, it probably makes

of those three things must be interesting. Yeah. I think it's also good to always have a little

“bit of anxiety about it. I think you're, you know, when you plot like performance and anxiety,”

sometimes your performance goes up if you're more anxious about it. Yeah. And you know, you're not. And it's always good, you know, you don't want somebody who has such an ego that they think they're good at something. Yeah. I think we see this at very high levels in our government right now. Yes. You know, somebody who thinks that they've got this. Yes. They're not intimidated by the task or they're not humbled before the task because they probably should be.

Yeah. That's right. I think it's always good to have people knowing that they're never

going to never going to reach the place that they want to get to. Yeah. You know, that's going

to mean that they're going to continually try to improve, um, and make some better. But if they ever think they actually got there, if they have that kind of ego, and they think, man, I got this.

“Yeah. Then they're going to get worse. Floyd Patterson, the boxer, he went into one fight that”

he lost and he said he knew who was going to lose as soon as he stepped in the ring because he didn't have any nerves. Wow. Which meant he, he hadn't taken it seriously and he just, it was this sort of stomach churning moment of realizing that he had, he had taken some things for granted and that the other person hadn't. Yep. I used to feel that way, you know, around the ship. Like during the day, if I'm flying at night, I'd have that knot in my stomach the entire day. Yeah.

A little bit with the space shuttle. You know, when you're going out there, you're driving out to the launch pad. You get that like little bit of a knot in your stomach. Yeah. Because you know, this is like game time. I got to get this right. I can't screw it up. It's a side of respect to the thing. Yeah. You know, and if you don't have it, it's probably ego and a kind of finger to the gods.

“And they're going to make you pay for it. That's right. The big hammer is coming down on you.”

Yeah. Yeah. Pride goes before the fall. As soon as you think you've got it, you're about to learn the part of it that you don't have. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll tell you what with this space shuttle, especially. Yeah. There was, you know, something hiding around the corner that was about to kill you all the time. Well, I can imagine at least with fighter jets. A lot of people have done a lot of flights. Right. So there's a lot more data about what can go wrong. You have millions of cumulative

human hours doing this thing. Yeah. And even though we've been going to space and surprisingly long time, we haven't done it that much and not that many people have done it. Yeah. I mean, I flew the 108th, 121st, 124th, and 134th white of the space shuttle. That in a chess program. Yeah. For an airplane, think of about like a Boeing, you know, the Boeing triple seven. Yeah. That is in the beginning, the infancy of a test program. Right. And the last space shuttle flight

was the one after my last one, the 135 times. So yeah. I mean, I mean, it's one of the reasons I heard test pilots for this job. Right. By the time we ended the space shuttle program, there was still a lot. We did not understand about it. Yeah. I mean, you went to test pilot school. I mean, those pilots have thousands of hours in these jets. Yeah. And yeah, to be the 108th flight period period is like I obviously every plane has a hundred and eight flight, but that was like

so long. Yeah. And it took us in the space shuttle. The first flight was in 1981. My that hundred and eight flight was in 2001, 20 years later. Yeah. And to go to fly the next 30 flights took another decade. Yeah. We didn't fly a lot. Yeah. It's expensive. And also took a lot to get the space shuttle orbiter ready for a mission. Yeah. You basically take it all apart and put it back together every time, which might not have been the smartest thing to do. If there's something that goes wrong

every 10,000 times, like no one knows what that thing is because it's never happened because they

haven't done it 10,000 times. Well, that's the thing about probabilistic risk assessment is when you're not, you're not doing a lot of them. You don't really know what the risk is, especially not until you start having some problems. Yeah. But without the without the repetition, you don't have the problems. Yeah. So the risk is still a very uncertain. Right. It's an unknown unknown, because you don't even know. Yeah. So you have the you have the sum and then you have the

things that we've never even conceived of happening. Yeah. We were okay with the known unknowns. Yes.

mapping this stuff out like, you know, the probability of it happening and the risk like is it,

you know, is it catastrophic? You know, so you try to then you always got to focus in the in the very

likely and catastrophic, you know, quarter of the box. Yeah. You know, the unlikely, uneventful stuff. You can, you know, sort of let that go. But even the unlikely catastrophic, you had a focus right there because of the consequences. You talked about some of the things that have gone wrong on your flights, space, and, and otherwise, those are things that you prepared mentally for like you roughly knew what to do,

or what do you do when everything is so fun. On the space shuttle, we train a lot, thousands of hours.

“I have about six thousand hours of flight time. I think I stopped counting at some point.”

I probably have as much time in the space shuttle simulator. Yeah. You know, we just spend a ton of time over, you know, from me over 15 years, practicing almost every possible scenario of multiple malfunctions in different systems and in the space shuttle because of the required redundancy to make sure you don't, you know, system failure doesn't kill you. This stuff gets really complex. Yeah. And then you go to fly the vehicle and the accidents we've had with

Challenger and Columbia. You know, those were, you know, Challenger accident, nothing you can do about. Yeah. Columbia accident, nothing you could have really done about it. I mean, something falls off on lift off, puts a hole in the wing. The vehicle disintegrates on entry. But we've had other problems in space. On my first launch, we got a master alarm, done lift off. I remember correctly.

“I think it was a had to do with an RCS jet, one of the reaction control system jets. On my third”

flight, where I was, I was a commander. This is something we never trained for was one of the solid

rocket boosters. They're designed to burn. So they're solid propellant. You can't turn them off. They're designed to burn out exactly the same time. They're poured to very high tolerances in Ogden, Utah at a company called Thia call. And they're supposed to flame out two minutes and five seconds into the lift off, flame out at the same time. Well, in our case, one got to chamber pressure of zero before the other one and the space shuttle started rolling.

And you know, not even, yeah, not even thrust started rolling and yawning. And I was about to hit the button to take over manually to then try to correct this and then I gave it another second. And then we got back in to me. It seemed like we were about to kind of go at a control. Yeah.

And then it corrected itself when we're fine. Never practiced that simulator in those thousands of

hours. So that was one of the unknown unknowns. But practicing all that stuff in the simulator is giving you the metaskill of not freaking out, not overreacted. Like really what you'd practiced for is the wait and see that you did there. Yeah. Instead of perhaps you could have made it worse by immediately asserting manual control. Could have, but I'm pretty good at flying things. So I would have been fine. Yeah. There's a quote I heard from the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield

and he says there's no problem in space so bad that you can't make it worse. That is true. Yeah. Yeah. Chris Kraft was the first flight director and then was the head of flight crew operations. You see him in a lot of like movies, Apollo 13. And you know, those he had this saying,

“I think it was him. When you don't know what to do, don't do anything. Yeah. And then I've used that.”

Yeah. You know, through my career, even sometimes my political career is that take a beat. Let's think about this. Just don't jump to some conclusion. Yeah. Yeah. I do long. Try to figure it out. Yeah. You know, there's some things that require like an immediate response, like space shuttles about to go out of control. And there's others, you know, that you can wait on. You could think about. You can reflect on every decision should not require the same

amount of contemplation and reflection. Some do. Some you can, let's think about this for a week. Yeah. I know it knowing the difference of what requires that sort of immediate concrete action. Yeah. And then what it requires a little bit of restraint. Yeah. You know, you're over a rack and the missile's coming at you. You know, much time to think about it. Yeah. You know, so, yeah. So I've, you know, I think about that a little bit. It might be my new job here. Well,

but that meditations. This is meditations. I've curious what you thought. I'm going to read you

these quick passages because it sounds like he has. I wonder if it's jized with your, I don't think he went to space. Yeah. And that's there's a buried space ship somewhere under Rome. Now we're going to get him to conspiracy theory, director. Okay. These are all in book seven, three and a row. So I wonder what he's doing as he's deciding at this thought. He says, to watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them, to keep constantly in mind how the

elements altered into one another, thoughts like this wash off the mud of life below. And then

“the next one is his Plato has it right. If you want to talk about people, you need to look down”

on earth from above. Herds, armies, farms, weddings, divorces, births, deaths, noisy courtrooms,

desert places, all the foreign peoples, holidays, days of mourning, market days, all mixed together a harmony of opposites. And in the last one he says, look at the past, empire, succeeding empire, and from from that extrapolate the future, the same thing, no escape from the rhythm of events, which is why observing life for 40 years is as good as a thousand. Would you really see anything new? Then he actually has there some more here. But it strikes me as very similar to what I've heard

astronauts talk about, with what they call the overview effect. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, imagine if Marcus Aurelius knew that we were one galaxy in a universe of two trillion galaxies, right? Probably wouldn't had changed, you know, his view on this, but he certainly realized that to some extent were kind of insignificant in the big picture, referencing the stars, and how things are going to happen, that or whether it's over a thousand years or 40 years,

things are going to happen that are, you know, just the way it is outside of our control. Yeah. And, you know, in there, I haven't read all of meditations, but I've read pieces of it. You know, there are then there are things that we can, you know, have an effect on. Yeah. But, you know, we're seeing history repeat itself. We've seen that through a couple thousand years of history. One morning I went for run, we were in Greece, and I got

up sort of to the top of the Acropolis, and I'm looking down, and you go, this is probably what he's talking about. Like this he's seeing so much of the civilized world. Is there any evidence of Marcus Aurelius actually going to Greece? Yeah. But there is. Okay. And also travel, like I mean, he traveled a lot. Dies in Vienna, rice and a lot of time in Germany. It's crazy. Like when you realize how big the Roman Empire was, it sort of blows your mind that one human being was responsible

for all this given communication. And then he spent a lot of time outside of Rome, like on the road. Yes, in camps and fighting wars and almost all of it. Yes. And yeah, there's another line of

“meditations says life is warfare and a journey far from home. And I think he means that literally”

and figuratively. Yes. But yeah, you get the sense like that bird's eye view that he's taking. I mean, how high up could he have really ever gotten? Like not like not that high. I mean, I'm probably some, some mountain in near Vienna, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Northern. What's now Northern Italy? Maybe in the Alps. Yeah. What the ancients would have, how much it would have blown their mind to see like the blue marble photograph? Or to know that a human was on the, like

taking well first of all out of space. He probably didn't, he probably thought the earth was flat.

Maybe Marcus Aurelius was almost certainly a flat earther. Certainly his son was. Yes. Yeah, some other problems. Yeah, he had a lot of problems. Yes. So when, you know, I remember the first time I saw the earth is a big round ball just floating there in this blackness.

“And the, you know, your initial reaction, I think, for most of it, this is like the holy shed.”

Yes. I mean, we live on an island in our solar system and there's like there's no place else to go. Yeah. You know, we're all not like, you know, moving to Mars someday. That's not like the reality for any of us. Yeah. Any of us that matters. And yeah, I know like Elon wants to put this, like, thinks, you know, civilization is going to human civilization is going to one day colonize Mars. You know, he said it was going to happen by 2022. That didn't happen.

I think it really is that it was no question it would happen by then. Yes. Yeah. No question. We're going to have people living on Mars and they're going to stay and we're going to eventually have an atmosphere and a bloke nuclear weapons and the Martian atmosphere. And by the way, we need this because a single planet species doesn't survive because that's the history of species on earth.

Yeah. What if we just didn't screw it up here? Yeah. Just don't screw it up here. It's always

going to be easier to survive on earth regardless of what happens, including the big rock or the, you know, the worst pandemic. It's always going to be easier to survive on earth. Mars is a shit planet. It is not not the place that we want to move to. We want to go and explore. We want to come back. Yeah. But you really do get this sense that kind of the almost the insignificance of, you know, the, the universe is 13.9 billion years old. We think, by the way, we don't know for sure.

May have been around a lot longer. We're figuring out more all the time about astrophysics about the nature of existence. But my, you know, my four trips of space. I really, you know, kind of a deep-seated view that we have to do a better job taking care of this place. There's no, there's no other option. Yeah. And it's, it's interesting because he talks about this as the emperor of Rome, this idea that we're all sort of citizens of this larger thing. We're all

citizens of this world. Then we have these obligations and responsibilities to each other. Now, of course, as the, the head of state of this thing, he has certain obligations and responsibilities and priorities. But you do get the sensities trying to, by zooming out, going like these borders are made up. Like, yeah. And again, you have a legal obligation to enforce them, but it doesn't mean that the person on the other side of that border has the same zester doesn't matter and isn't. Well, they might not

also, they may not have the same legal obligation either. Yeah. And by the way, you can't see any of those borders. Yes, space. Yes. With one exception. Great. Well, no, that's a whole Chinese, like to say,

“it's the only thing you can see from space. What is it? It's bullshit. The only border you”

actually see that's not a river is the southern part of Israel. Because on one side, it's desert. The other side, you know, it's cultivated land. Right. So there's a straight line. And that's the only place I can think of that you physically can see a border during the day. Yeah. And why I say during the day is because at night, you sort of see North and South Korea, yes, and the United States of Canada. I don't know if you look at it, you're in the United States. You're like, when the Canadians need more

electricity. But the reason it looks like that is because most of the Canadian population live within

100 miles of the U.S. border. Right. Like, all 20 million of them basically live on the U.S. border.

Yeah. Yeah. Canada goes way out. It does. And nobody's there. Nobody's there. Yeah. Canada and Australia are kind of like that. It's wild to look at at night. I mean, young young looks like an island in an ocean. Because there's nobody else's have lights in North Korea. And then you, you know, you fly over places like Times Square, fly over New York City, the brightest spot on Earth.

“And I think second would probably be the strip in Vegas and then in the middle of Tokyo would probably”

be my top three bright spots on Earth. Well, and then to go to Marcus's point about history, I mean, what is interesting is that 100 years ago, that wouldn't have been the case. No, 150 years ago wouldn't have been the case. Like, I mean, dear parts of Texas here that less than 100 years ago didn't have electricity. Yeah. And so to think about how, you know, in the big clock of all of human history, what a tiny sliver a lot of these things we take for granted actually are 120 years ago,

Arizona was in a state. Yeah. Very few people live there. Yeah. A lot of native tribes,

things change and they're changing fast right now. Yeah. And it's going to be, you know, amazing

thing to watch, you know, what happens in the next, you know, couple decades. You could look at everything that's happening in the world and be really excited. You could look at everything that's happening in the world and be absolutely horrified. Yeah. Kind of somewhere in the middle probably

“is the the right view. I think there are a lot of people out there that are very anxious. Yeah,”

apprehensive about the future, about whether they're going to have a job, whether if you're a young person, whether you're going to be able to afford a place to live, you know, whether you're going to afford a family, you know, these are issues that weigh on me. You know, a lot in my job, because I'm you know, supposed to be trying to figure out ways to fix this. If you're 21 right now, what have you seen work really well in your lifetime? You've kind of seen people screw it up over

and over and over again, largely at your expense. Not so much at their expense, but at your expense. Yeah. Often the same people. Yeah. Crash the car get back in. Yeah. Crash again is the same same guy. Yeah. Put it on the tab. Yep. Put it on the grandkids tab. Yep. 39 trillion. You know,

we've got to address some of these problems in our country, in a serious way. Yeah. We have an election

coming up. You know, my my hope is people see that. And, you know, you've got to at some point you got to take the keys away from grandpa. Yes. It's it's not fair. It's a lot to put on a generation and yet there's no alternative. Do you know what I mean? Like ignoring it's not going to make it go away. No, we can't. It is it is not going to go away. And then at the same time, we have with innovation and technology, we have things that are going to change rapidly.

Yeah. You know, AI is going to replace people in, you know, certain jobs. We'll have a demand for other jobs that people have an option. We got to how do you figure out a way to make sure these folks a loss of job have the training and know about these other things that they

“could do. Yeah. And what do we do for people that are just displaced and don't have an option?”

How are they going to afford their lives? So we have to think about that. And then the energy demand is is just guy rocketing right now. What do you do when the political institutions have proven themselves to not be up to these tasks over and over and over again and to not work and to not necessarily show themselves as reflecting the will of the people like I just thought about this this week because it was just announced that I live out here in rural Texas and like Amazon

just bought 1,300 acres and they want to build a data center. Right. And that's not why people moved out to where you, yeah, right where I look like how close 10 minutes? Yeah, like, I mean, you, well, 10 minutes, you're probably okay. If you're like two minutes, are you going to walk outside and there's going to be like 60 decibels of noise noise, light pollution, traffic, also just killing rates is is your electric bill going to double because of this data center.

Well, and then illustration of the other problem we have, it's like, they were going to build a housing development and Amazon came in bought out the housing development and said, no, no, we're going to put a data center. So it could have been 2,000 houses, but desperately need instead,

it's going to be this. And and I remember going like my first thought was like, well, I obviously

don't want to say I want to get involved and not make it happen and then going like, even if everyone around you doesn't want it, can the political system, can the representatives who are supposed

“to listen to the will, will that system actually work? And I think a lot of the frustration people”

have is that like I see so much of our problem is that like the political system which are founders designed to be responsive to the people, to the people. It isn't doing that and then that energy has to find other places to go. Well, in some cases, like in Arizona, we had the same issue happen. In one case, I think it was in Chandler and the other was in Tucson where Gabby and I live where the data center came in, they wanted the you know, build there and they didn't get approved.

Yeah, because the people didn't want it. Right. And if the people don't want it, it shouldn't go there. Yes, they should find another place. Right. Now I'm trying to address that issue with my job in the Senate with legislation to try to set the conditions where the community can benefit the data center company can benefit because we're not going to, this technology is not going to go away. Right. And we want to be the leaders. We don't want the Chinese to be the leaders. There's an

advantage to us as a nation and as a country and all of us should be able to benefit. We don't want like the top 1% to be the people to benefit from this. That has gone sideways on us too long. But so we've got to you know, make you know smarter decisions here. Yeah. But your community shouldn't get stuck with this data center. People don't want it. There's some place in the country that will be happy to have that data center. Yeah. They need to go there. Yeah.

And I mean, just watching some of these things play out as I've lived here over the last decade or so is you're like, you know, they wanted to build some. I forget what it was like a trash facility or something. And then all of a sudden the people were like, well, why won't the Texas Environmental Commission do something about it? And it's like the one that you neutered and gutted because you you thought that's big government. It's like, look, I get being somewhat suspicious of big

government. I want government messing with my life. But at the same time, if you don't have

institutions that can do things, then you basically only have corporations who can do things.

And they don't care that much about regular people. They're job isn't to care about people, job is care about shareholder value. We're seeing that a lot at the federal level too. Not just here. I mean, I just got into it with the EPA administrator over a smelter in Arizona that

“emits, I think it was 12 tons of lead into the atmosphere every year and it has a elementary school”

that's a couple miles away. You could see the smelter from the elementary school and the there's

they didn't do it. They asked for a waiver because this administration set up a process that didn't

“exist before where they could send a letter to the EPA that then just went right to the White”

House. Straight line just passed through EPA doesn't get a say and then Donald Trump could decide whether or not to approve the waiver. The White House decides and the waiver was approved. The thing that cleans out the lead and arsenic didn't get put in. And then these kids have to, you know, breathe that breathe this in. Now I've had conversations now with the company that owns the mine and the smelter and they're going to try to work with us to come up with a solution because we

can't have these kids breathing this. But this is the process that this administration set up. So even though we have an EPA that's tried to protect people's health, not right now in this administration, what comes first is profits and donations. Right. How many people have made donations to, they've joined Mara Logo or they bought into the mean coin or the stable coin or they made donations to mega ink the super pack. And when people make big donations like that,

they generally expect something for it. And we're seeing that over and over and over again. Yeah, if it feels like the opportunities for and then the examples of corruption are almost two staggering for people to wrap their heads around. Yeah, it's, it's interesting that that isn't a bigger story. I think folks are just like overwhelmed. Yeah. I mean, the president is

suing the federal government for $50 billion, $50 billion, not million, $50 billion. And he

says the federal government is probably going to settle with him. Right. He is the guy who decides whether or not the federal government settles his $50 billion lawsuit. So he's on both sides of the lawsuit. I think we call that self dealing for that. Yeah. I think there's a word. There's a couple words for that. Yeah. So he'll make the decision whether or not to settle and he'll probably settle for maybe he settles for, I don't know, $30 billion because he's a reasonable

man. Does he want to steal too much? Yeah. I mean, that's $30 billion from the taxpayer

“into his bank account. Yeah. That's what he's looking to do. Can we stop him? I mean, we're going to”

try right now. We don't have the, you know, the levers to do that. Right. And certainly this Department of Justice is just like they just do what he wants. Yeah, at this point. Yeah. I do

think that was clearly the big miss of the founders is that they assumed that there would always

be the check of personal honor and virtue in the highest levels of leadership. They should not deceive of it. Virtue, a little bit of wisdom, shame, a little bit of shame, a little bit of temperance. They assumed those things. Yeah. They assumed most leaders would be like Marcus Arelius. Yeah. Or George Washington. But they did also, in the federalist papers, but they also wrote about the fear that at some point somebody would come along and could just flip this whole thing upside down.

Yeah. We have checks and balances. I don't know if you saw King Charles's beach to the joint session of Congress a couple weeks ago. So we gave this speech and he was good speech. 25 minutes touched on a lot of points, made some jokes. At one point he talks about the importance of checks and balances. Yeah. And I was shocked because everybody in the chamber was clapping. Yeah. And I'm thinking to myself, you guys are the checks and balances. Some of you guys over there

are not doing the checks and balance part of the job. Yeah. I mean, we're trying, but we're in the minority. Right. I mean, it's really the majority. You know, has has to step up and really speak truth to power and tell a leader, whether it's a president or the CEO of the company, you got to tell somebody when, you know, what they're doing doesn't make any sense or they're off track or, you know, you just can't do this. Yeah. You might not agree with you on everything.

That is a one thing. Do not do that. Yeah. They're not doing a lot of that. Yeah. And it's really disturbing. What is it? Is it a belief that someone else will do it? I was talking to Adam Kensinger one time and he said it's like Congress believes there's a super Congress. Some people think we have like a giant buttonwagon like present stop things. Yeah. There's no

“button. Yeah. I think it is that this president he's got full control over the base of the”

Republican party in a way that no president in my lifetime has ever had, Democrat a Republican. Yeah.

that against anybody that he perceives as a political foe or enemy. I mean, he's doing it to me. Yeah. Sure. And right now, I said something he didn't like. He said I should be hanged, executed, prosecuted, tried to throw me in jail. The indictment didn't work. Who knows if he's going to try again. Then they tried to reduce me in rank and take away my pension. So I suit Pete Hexess. So this, you know, I I have no problem fighting back. Yeah. And I'm not going to give up

and because there's a lot at stake here. Sure. You know, first amendment rights of two million

“retired service members. But what I think is there's a lot of members of Congress in his party.”

That just know that he can end their careers. Right. And they think their career is pretty valuable to them. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. You know, none of us should think we matter so much that the world comes to an end if we lose our job in the United States Congress. The problem is there are a lot of people that think they are so important. Yeah. That our country would collapse if they were not there. And that is not true. Yeah. Country will have the same problems that

has right now. It will recover if, you know, Rando, you know, Senator from whatever state, you know, is no longer in his seat. There's only a one-term Senator instead of a two-term Senator. Yeah. I mean, it's not going to, it's not going to matter. So they shouldn't. And isn't that the point of the six-year term? Is that you? Yeah, it was a public matter.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You can make decisions based on, always make the decision based on

what's right, which is what I always try to do. And I never wanted this job anyway. I had a great job. And my wife gets shot in the head. And then she resigns. And then I find myself in a position where before the election in 2018, a woman comes up to me. It was like I had to get out the vote rally. And she says, "Hey, my son is down syndrome. And I'm terrified. He's going to lose his health insurance. Would you please consider running for the U.S. Senate?" Without that conversation,

I would not be in the Senate right now. And that was November 2018. So this was not something I ever wanted to do. And then I, you know, ran in 2020, ran again in 2022. And, you know, here I am, you know, just trying to solve some of these problems that we have. What's a reminder that this isn't

“a game. I think that's the other problem. Is that everyone is like, yeah, it's bad. Yeah, I disagree.”

But like, there's consequences for gutting USAID. There's consequences for cutting off health care. There's consequences for these consequences for going to war with Iran, if no strategic goal, with no plan. Yeah, with no way to get it. And now the president finds himself in a really tough spot trying to figure out how you get out of this. We have 13 dead Americans. We got other people were injured. We got thousands of innocent Iranians that have been killed, including at least 150

kids in a school. And the president's trying to figure out like, what do I do? It didn't think the straight of her moves is going to be closed. So gas prices are really, really high. It was a woman that we helped her daughter get her health care back. After she got kicked off of Medicaid, kid gets kicked off of Medicaid. And shouldn't have been. And it was all at the beginning, doing all that dose stuff. And got her back on what we call it Medicaid in Arizona's called

access, got her back on it. She sent me a text a couple of weeks ago. And just really sort of felt like it was she was in a panic because she says now she can't afford to drive her kid to get the cancer treatments because the round trip is 300 miles and she can't afford to put gas in the car. Right. So we're trying to figure out, you know, get her get her some help here. But how many

“people across her country are experiencing the same thing? Yeah, I think to the average person you”

hear, okay, now they're moving ships here. And that just feels like these set pieces. But they're

sailors on those ships. Right. And they have family, like the tragedy of war ultimately is that

these are human beings being moved around to get a little negotiation leverage or to send a point to make a signal. I'm writing about Vietnam right now. I actually wanted to ask you about this. I feel like the perfect person will give me some insight on this. So I'm writing about doing a book on Admiral Stockdale. Oh, so who I knew? Oh, well now I have one of them. I went on a trip with them to Switzerland once. When I was a test pilot. Okay. You know, he was part of the

STTP society of experimental test pilots. Yes, right. Because he went and taught at test pilot school. Yeah, as I did. Yeah. I was an instructor there before I was an astronaut. Well, I'll tell you

August 2nd, he's up on a crusader flight. And it gets flown over in South China Sea. Hey, one of our ships is being attacked. So he flies over there. And he sees the PT boats.

People don't think that the density and the goal of talking happened. The first day it did.

Yeah. There was a really, wasn't a big attack. But there's an attack. And then he, he flies back. There's two days between. And then on the fourth, he's the airway commander at this point. Yes. And so then the second incident in the golf economy fly out there. There's nothing there.

“He says, we were shooting at ghosts or something like that, right?”

Oh, there's nothing there. And then so he lands back later that night. And when he wakes up the next day, they go, hey, we're leading the strikes tomorrow. The, the reprisal strikes. And then as he says, reprisal for what? Right. So he, so, so it's this complicated insight. I'm trying to wrap my head around both the mindset and the responsibility, the obligation. So he gets ordered to lead a strike,

but basically the beginning of the Vietnam War over, they're not illegal orders because the

president can give these orders. But the pretext for them is he has some insight that they're fundamentally flawed. But how do you think about a dilemma like that for someone in his position? Well, I mean, for him, I mean, it becomes a bigger question that often a guy even in his role as an airway commander, not up to him to decide what country we go to war against and what country we don't. Yes. Right. The decision to use combat power to achieve some larger geopolitical

outcome or purpose relies with the president. It's a civilian decision. Civilian relies with the president.

“And that is struggle that I think, you know, people in Admiral Stockdale's at this time captain,”

Stockdale, probably. Yeah, I think. Yeah, maybe captain. Yeah, probably captain. You know, has to, has to deal with it's something we all have to deal with. Right. Everybody who, you know, puts on the uniform and, you know, like me, I dropped bombs 30, you know, something times. I flew 39 combat missions. You know, I, you know, sunk ships. I, you know, bomb buildings and tanks.

And there's always like the, you know, the ethical struggle. Right. Like, is this the, you know,

right thing to do? That's different than the situation that myself and five of my colleagues were outlining. Right. You know, troops about illegal orders or unlawful orders. Members of the military have a responsibility to follow all lawful orders. And, you know, written down in the law of war manual and in the UCMJ, you do not follow illegal orders. Those are the things that are obvious to troops, sailors, you know, soldiers, marines that are

obviously, you know, against the law. They're not the big, like geo-political, you know, questions about, you know, whether we take our country to war against another country. Right. But, you know, any commander is, you know, often going to be, you know, wondering, because he's the guy who has to lead the troops. Yeah. And as an airway commander, you know, he's out front in the first airplane. And he's got to motivate these guys. And often, and has going to have to

explain this stuff. And they're going to ask him questions. And it's his responsibility to motivate him to motivate and inspire and get, you know, get behind, you know, the decisions that are made by our political leaders. Yeah. You know, that's, that's a different thing.

“Yeah. And the thing we were talking about. No, no, I know. It's because I think people,”

your average civilian is probably thinking, well, if you don't agree, just don't, but that's not, if you don't agree, it does not work. Yes. Yeah. If you're agreeing or not agreeing, that's not an option. Yeah. You've got a responsibility. When you swear on oath to defend the Constitution. And when you get sworn into the military, you know, as an officer or a listed person, you know, your responsibility is to follow the orders of your senior officers and the president

of the United States. Now, you know, what happened later in the Vietnam War and my late massacre. Yes. You know, when a company commander tells his troops, we're going to kill everybody. No mercy, no quarter or no quarter. Yeah. What Pete Hague says said, which I questioned him about this on the Senate Armed Services Committee a couple of weeks ago, like, what did you mean? And I'm going to give you another chance because it was asked of him the day before.

When you say no quarter, what that means and it's defined, you know, by the U.S. military, that means you, there are no prisoners. You kill prisoners. I gave him the opportunity to clarify

That's not who we are as a nation. We've never been that way. We can't be the Russians.

“You know, who are brutal and commit war crimes. But, you know, he decided to, you know, stick with”

that. So that's a whole different problem. But no quarter would be an example of an illegal order. We're going to destroy your entire civilization. Yeah. Things like that. That is one too. And by the way, even saying a threat of a war crime. Yes. It's not allowed. Right. Even the threat. Yeah. First of all, doing it is a war crime. You know, destroying an entire civilization would be a war crime genocide. Threatening genocide is also against the law. If you have a large arsenal

nuclear weapons, you say, give me all your stuff where I'm going to drop nuclear weapons. I mean, you haven't committed the war crime yet. But you are using the threat of the war crime. And the uncertainty of whether you'll do it or not to do something illegal. Yeah. That's also just the law. Yeah.

“I'm fascinated with this question that what he must have wrestled with because, you know,”

he was there is incredibly complicated. And I'm sure that takes time to work through this. But to then spend all these years as a prisoner of war as you staying loyal to a country that had, you know, done something imperfect or outright wrong. It makes, it makes what he did in what he went through almost more inconceivable and superhuman. Like that the dark nights of the soul that he must have had, knowing that he is a sort of a pawn in this war that was, you know,

and then as a senior officer, though, at the moment. Yeah. I mean, he did like a, I mean, from what I understand about, you know, him as a POW. I did a fantastic job of leading, you know, all these men from different services. Yeah. And took on that role. Right. You know, as a, as a senior captive, uh, there at the Illinois Hilton, including the guy who I serve in a Senate State, John McCain, who probably was shot down. I don't know, year and a half, year and a half later. Yeah. Um,

but it was an interesting experience to spend, I've spent a couple of days with Admiral Stockdown

his wife in Switzerland and just doing incredible people. Yeah. He, he, he really was a great American.

One writing a book about him doing a biography of Stockdale. Oh, wow. Yeah, including his time as the VP candidate for that. So I'm probably going to fast forward at the end of that, but did you know he, um, at test pilot school, he, uh, he taught John Glenn. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. So John, so John Glenn was a much more experienced pilots because he'd flown him Korean World War II. So he took Stockdale on his first, uh, cross country night flight and then

Stockdale taught him physics because he had a better engineering and math background. Stockdale did. Yeah. Glenn is more of just your sort of, yes, natural pilot that had to, to go to the next level had to kind of learn what I don't think. Yeah. I don't think John Glenn had a, like, a degree in engineering. No, you know, like a service academy or not everybody, but most of the students at the US Navy test pilot school, you know, have, uh, at least a bachelor's degree in engineering or maybe physics,

sometimes math. That's about how deep we go. At least when I was there. Yeah. You know, and I, uh, you know, I, it was, it was a great tour for me because I did get to be like a teacher. Yeah. On not only a flight instructor in, in my case, three different kinds of airplanes teaching all different kinds of things, but actually in the classroom with a piece of chalk, yeah. And I taught classes on like transonic flying qualities like an aerodynamics and, you know, how airplanes, you know,

flight control and performance in that region between about 0.9 and 1.1 mock. That little band where things change, you know, rapidly as you accelerate or decelerate through mock one through the speed of sound. It was a good experience to it. So I understand, I mean, certainly I don't understand what a middle school teacher goes through. But I have a little bit of a sense of what

“it's like to be in a classroom with a piece of chalk in the chalk board. Yeah. I think people maybe”

from top gun and stuff think that the fighter pilots are kind of like these cowboys, just like,

sort of really good at doing this thing. And like it sort of skips over the incredible technical

expertise and mathematical and physics background required to do it at that level. Yeah. A lot of academics behind, especially being a test pilot. Yeah, fighter weapon school, little bit different,

Yeah. The air to air portion of it. Not what I used to do. I was the air to ground guy. Right.

“But at the two test pilot schools, the military ones here, it's, you know, a lot of heavy”

academics, you know, physics, propulsion, engineering, aerodynamics, electronics, electronic warfare,

radar, all that stuff. Yeah. All that woke stuff. Yeah. All that woke stuff. All that

“science, that science stuff. We don't need that. Some people don't believe anymore. Yeah. Yeah.”

Exactly. Yeah. Think about science. Science doesn't care if you don't believe in science.

It's still there. By the way, neither does history, right? Like you can, yes, you can make up

“whatever you want. It doesn't change what happened. It doesn't change some of the sort of iron laws”

and patterns of history. But some people will try to change history. Yeah. They will try really, really hard. They will go all the way to Fulton County, Georgia, and send the director of National Intelligence to try to figure, how do we change the history? Wow. Yeah. You want to go to start? I've got some books for you. Yeah.