As Above, So Below | How Seeing Earth From Space Changes You (with Astronaut Mark Kelly)

We need to take a step back from problems, arguments, and frustrations. To look at the bigger picture. Watch the full episode with Senator and Astronaut Mark Kelly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf-K7cEpuyI here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf-K7cEpuyI Check out Astronaut Terry Virts' full episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DulrZh0wdA0 on The Daily Stoic Podcast onApple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spending-213-days-in-space-does-this-to-you-astronaut/id1430315931?i=1000724698187,Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/7kkAntXlqXjsnxrHjOks1R, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DulrZh0wdA0 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail -- Wealthfront’s high-yield cash account: https://www.wealthfront.com/stoic This experience may not be representative of other Wealthfront clients, and there is no guarantee of future performance or success. Experiences will vary. Ryan Holiday, who’s a client of Wealthfront, receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage for paid testimonials in his podcast, creating a conflict of interest. More details available via the referral link. The Direct Deposit Plus Investing Program from Wealthfront Advisers LLC and Wealthfront Brokerage LLC provides eligible clients a 0.25% APY increase above the base APY on eligible Cash Account balances (up to an overall boosted rate of 4.30% for a limited time when including the three month 0.75% APY boost for new clients) when you direct deposit $1,000 a month, plus open, fund, and maintain an investing account. Wealthfront may change or end the program at any time and determine eligibility at its discretion. Terms apply. Full details at wealthfront.com/promo-terms. The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC ("Wealthfront Brokerage"), Member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The Annual Percentage Yield ("APY") on cash deposits as of January 30, 2026, is representative, requires no minimum, and may change at any time. References to the APY for the Wealthfront Cash Account, including any APY increase, are to the APY paid by insured depository institutions that participate in our cash sweep program (the "Program Banks”). Wealthfront Brokerage does not pay interest. Wealthfront Brokerage sweeps cash balances to Program Banks, where they earn the variable APY. Instant and same-day withdrawals use the Real-Time Payments (RTP) network or FedNow service. Transfers may be limited by your receiving institution, daily caps, or participating entities. New Cash Account deposits have a 2–4 day hold before transfer. Wealthfront does not charge fees for these services, but receiving institutions may impose an RTP or FedNow Fee. Processing times may vary.. Fees & Eligibility requirements may apply to certain checking features. Investment advisory services are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Securities investments are not bank deposits, bank-guaranteed or FDIC-insured, and may lose value. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  As above, so below. From the window of an airplane, everything looks small. From the window of a spaceship, as two astronauts have told us on the Daily Stoic Podcast, you can check out our episode with Terry Verz and Mark Kelly. From the window of an airplane, borders and distinctions fall away. From the top of the Acropolis where Marcus Aurelius once stood, you can see the rhythm and the interconnected of life. As he says, herds and 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.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  This is the power of perspective. Seeing from above, we're reminded of what matters, what's made up, what we look like. But this is not just a trick of the eye. It is a truth. From a distance, we can see more clearly than we can when we're caught up in it, what's actually going on below. And that's why we need to take a step back from problems, arguments, and frustrations, to look at the bigger picture, to escape the narrow lens through which we see when we're in the heat of the moment. We have to rise above it if we want to see clearly. And I seriously, I loved the interview with Terry Verz. I love the interview with Mark Kelly. I think both of them were really good. I'll link to those in today's show notes.

• 1:43Ryan Holiday?

  If you're looking for something more in-depth on Stoicism, Mark Kelly actually kind of helped inspire this email because he pointed out that, you know, seeing things from a little bit of a view, it's only a fraction of what Marcus could even contemplate, bird's eye view. But he was saying, think of the view from the space shuttle. So that's what inspired this. And I think you'll really like both those episodes.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  One morning I went for a 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.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Is there any evidence of Marcus Aurelius actually going to Greece?

• 2:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Oh, there is. Okay.

• 2:30Ryan Holiday?

  And also traveled.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Like, I mean, he traveled a lot.

• 2:32Ryan Holiday?

  Dies in Vienna, writes in Budapest.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  A lot of time in Germany.

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  It's crazy. Like, when you, 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 the communications at that time.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  And then he spent a lot of time outside of Rome.

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Like on the road.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  And camps and fighting wars and.

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  Almost all of it.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  And yeah, he said, there's another line of meditation. He says, "Life is warfare and a journey far from home." And I think he means that literally and figuratively.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  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 that, like not that high. I mean.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Probably some.

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  Some mountain.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Probably some mountain in, near Vienna, right?

• 3:19Ryan Holiday?

  Or yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Northern, what's now northern Italy, maybe in the Alps.

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  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 that view out of space.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  He probably didn't, he probably thought the earth was flat.

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Marcus Aurelius was almost certainly a flat-earther.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Certainly his son was.

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. He had some other problems.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he had a lot of problems. Yeah. So when, you know, I remember the first time I saw the earth as a big round ball.

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Just floating there in this blackness. And the, you know, the, your initial reaction, I think for most of us is like, holy shit.

• 4:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  I mean, we, we live on an island in our solar system and there's like, there's no place else to go.

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  You know, we're all not like, you know, moving to Mars someday. That's not like the reality for any of us.

• 4:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Any of us that matters. And yeah, I know like Elon wants to put this like thinks, you know, civilization is gonna, human civilization is gonna one day colonize Mars. You know, he said it was gonna happen by 2022. That didn't happen.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  I think he believed, he said it was no question it would happen by then.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, no question. We're gonna have people living on Mars and they're gonna stay and we're gonna eventually have an atmosphere and a blow up nuclear weapons in 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. Well, also nobody else, no other species, dinosaurs, were not engineering themselves out of a problem.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. What if we just didn't screw it up here?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  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 a place that we want to move to. We want to go and explore. We want to come back.

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  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 to 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.

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  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 and 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 sense that he's trying to, by zooming out, going like, these borders are made up. Like, 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 doesn't exist or doesn't matter and isn't.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Well, they might not also, they might not have the same legal obligation either.

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And by the way, you can't see any of those borders from space.

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  With one exception.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  Great Wall?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  No, that's a whole, the Chinese like to say, it's the only thing you can see from space.

• 6:47Ryan Holiday?

  What is it?

• 6:47Speaker 01

  That'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.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  And why I say during the day is because at night, you sort of see.

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  North and South Korea.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Yes, and the United States and Canada. I'm not even looking at you, in the United States, you're like, huh, I wonder if the Canadians need more electricity. But the reason it looks like that.

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Is because most of the Canadian population live within a hundred miles of the US border.

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Like all 20 million of them basically live on the US border.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. Canada goes way up.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  It does.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  And nobody's there.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Nobody's there.

• 7:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Canada and Australia are kind of like that.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  It's wild to look at at night. I mean, Pyongyang looks like an island in an ocean because there's, nobody else has 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.