Spending 213 Days In Space Does THIS To You | Astronaut Terry Virts (PT. 1)

Most people dream of being an astronaut. Terry Virts actually lived it. In this episode, Ryan sits down with former NASA astronaut and USAF F-16 Pilot Terry Virts to talk about the brutal selection process to become an astronaut, why thrill seekers don’t make good astronauts, and the dangerous loss of ethics in government leadership. At 17, Terry Virts joined the Air Force and went on to become an F-16 fighter pilot and test pilot. He has flown combat missions over Iraq, tested the world’s fastest jets and commanded the International Space Station. He’s orbited Earth 3,400 times and has spent 213 days in space total. His military decorations include the NASA Space Flight Medal, Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Air Medal, Aerial Achievement Medal, NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, Air Force Commendation Medal, et al. He retired from NASA in August 2016 and is currently running for U. S. Senate from Texas. Follow Terry on Instagram @Astro_Terry https://www.instagram.com/astro_terry/and you can learn more about his campaign at https://www.terryvirts.com/ 📕 Grab signed copies of How to Astronaut: An Insider’s Guide To Leaving Planet Earth https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=terry+virts* by Terry Virts at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/, Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic, TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

• 0:50Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My voice is a little tired. I just today, just finished recording the audiobook for Wisdom Takes Work. So you can preorder that, dailystoic.com/preorder if you want all the cool bonuses and stuff, including signed manuscript pages from the edits that I did on the draft, the final draft of the book that I just read for the audiobook. So I put off doing this intro a little bit because I knew I wanted to open with a little riff from one of my other books. So I'm basically doing a little extra audiobook here for you, but it very much pertains to this week's episode.

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  In "The Obstacle Is The Way," I wrote about controlling your emotions, which I'll riff for you now. "When America raced to send the first men into space, they trained astronauts in one skill more than any other: the art of not panicking. When people panic, they make mistakes. They override systems. They disregard procedures. They ignore rules. They deviate from the plan. They become unresponsive and stop thinking clearly. They react not just to what they need to react to, but to the survival hormones that are coursing through their veins." Welcome to the source of most of our problems down here on Earth. Everything's planned, and then when something goes wrong, the first thing we do is trade in that plan for an emotional freakout.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  Some of us almost crave sounding the alarm because it's easier than dealing with whatever is staring us in the face. But at 150 miles above the Earth in a spaceship smaller than a VW, this is death, panic is suicide. So panic has to be trained out, not that it goes easily. Before the first launch, NASA recreated the fateful day for astronauts over and over, step by step, hundreds of times, from what they'd have for breakfast to the ride to the airfield. Slowly, in a graded series of exposures, the astronauts were introduced to every sight and sound of the experience of their firing into space. They did it so many times that it became as natural and familiar as breathing. They practiced all the way through, holding nothing back but the liftoff itself,

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  making sure to solve for every variable and to remove all certainty. Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority. It is a release valve. With enough exposure, you can adapt out those perfectly ordinary, even innate fears that are bred mostly from unfamiliarity. Unfortunately, unfamiliarity is a simple fix, which makes it possible to increase our tolerance for stress. John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit Earth, spent nearly a day in space trying to keep his heart rate under 100 beats per minute. That's not a man who's simply sitting at the controls, but a man in control of his emotions, a man who has properly cultivated what Tom Wolfe calls "the right stuff."

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  But you, you confront a client or a stranger on the street and your heart is liable to burst out of your chest, or you're called on to address a crowd and your stomach crashes through the floor. It's time to realize that this is a luxury, an indulgence of our lesser self. In space, the difference between life and death lies in emotional regulation. Hitting the wrong button, reading the instrument panels incorrectly, engaging a sequence too early, none of these could have been afforded on a successful Apollo mission. The consequences were too great. Thus, the question for astronauts was not, "How skilled a pilot are you?" But can you keep an even strain? Can you fight the urge to panic and instead focus on only what you can change on the task at hand? The Greeks had a few words for this, "Apathia," "Ataraxia," we might

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  call it, stillness. It goes on, but it's something my guest today is an expert on because he's an astronaut. Terry Virts joined the Air Force and at 17, went to the academy, and then went on to be an F-16 fighter pilot and a test pilot. He flew combat missions over Iraq, tested the world's fastest jets, commanded the International Space Station. He orbited the Earth, not once, not for a day, but something like 3,000 times. He spent 213 days in space. He's won basically every NASA and Air Force medal you can think of. He's just an incredible person. And now he's running for Senate here in Texas. I'm glad he is running. You can learn more about his campaign. You can donate. You can

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  register to vote, as everyone should, wherever you live in this country. But definitely, if you're in Texas, you can check all that out at terryvirts.com. You can follow him on Instagram, @astro_terry. I know he is not running against John Cornyn, but I will tell you, when that whole nonsense with the Naval Academy happened, I emailed him and John Cornyn sent me a reply, a form reply, where he just listed all the things he's done to support Pete Hegseth, inarguably our worst Secretary of Defense, perhaps of all time, but certainly in the last several decades. We need new leadership. And one

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  of the things Terry talks about quite movingly in this interview was his experience in space with some Russian cosmonauts and how, you know, not everyone looks down from space and wants to help people. And I'm so glad that that someone who did is now running. And I think you will really like this episode. It is not overtly political. It's mostly about these philosophical concepts, and I think you'll really like it.

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  So obviously, a lot of people want to be astronauts, right? So it's a process of winnowing, right? Like eliminating the people they don't want to be astronauts, basically, right? This selection process, what do you, they basically have the access to the best and the brightest of a generation, right? What are they looking for? And I guess I'm more interested in what are they, what are they selecting out of the pool?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  So my last job as an astronaut was to help go through thousands, I forgot how many thousands of applicants. And the good thing for NASA is that there's no shortage of talent. Like, they don't have to advertise, they don't have to spend money on YouTube to advertise. And I was going through the engineers, I'm a fighter pilot, but I was looking at the engineer category because there were so many. And everybody had Python and everybody had been a senior engineer. It was literally the same resume over and over. So what we were looking for was something that made you stand out. Like, remember that there was one lady who had been a NASCAR mechanic? And we do a lot, half of what I did was mechanic work.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  So I was like, all right, take a look at her. You know, people who have operational experience, so pilots, even if you're not a pilot, even if you're just an engineer, you really need to have a private pilot's license. And because that's the best training that you can do. What I didn't want was thrill seekers. Like, I don't, I don't want the wingsuiters jumping off the mountains and stuff. I want people who can do mountain climbing professionally, or who can scuba dive, you know?

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Seriously, but the thrill seekers, that's not who you want to be in space with. So you're right, there's a winnowing process. You go through all these interviews. And kind of the end of it is you show up at NASA for an in-person interview.

• 7:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  And they go from 10s of thousands down to, you know, 20 people at a time. Everybody's competent, like they're, everybody's a smart, good by that point. You're just looking for who you want to spend six months stuck in a can with.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  And so we used to go to this bar called PD's, it's shut down now. And you can drink all you want.

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  And you can, they give you all the rope you need to hang yourself with. And so they're, they want us, here's things, they want to hear you say stuff. You know, that's how they winnow you out. Because when you're in an interview, you're going to be nice and professional. And you, you know, one of the things, Ryan, when I was there, I was so excited, I was the youngest guy. Everybody told me I had no chance of getting picked, you're too, you don't have any experience. I was just excited to be there. So I went and I talked to the secretary who had set up my plane reservations. And I was like, this is so cool. I'm here. And the guy that drove us around in the bus, like I would hang out and like, I can't believe I'm whatever. I was nice to them. And I found out later that they asked the secretaries.

• 8:54Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  They asked the bus driver.

• 8:56Ryan Holiday?

  They do that in the NFL, too. They, they, they interview the drivers that take them like to and from the combine, to and from the team meetings, because they want to see who you are when you're not.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  When you're not on.

• 9:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. But the real lesson in life isn't to act better.

• 9:11Ryan Holiday?

  It's not just to increase how much you're performing.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 9:14Ryan Holiday?

  It's supposed to be a window into your character.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so that's when nobody's looking. That's when your character comes out.

• 9:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the, the book that I'm working on now, a big section about it is, is about the naval academy during World War II. And I'm just fascinated by the fact that so they spent this huge process trying to get all the best boys in the country at that time. As soon as they're accepted, it's about how do they get rid of as many of them as possible, right? Like, they're subjecting them to these stress tests and this unrelenting set of standards. And it's all about now, we want to find some way to ship you out of here. Not because they don't want officers. And this was like the, we most desperately need officers. Never before and never again. And yet they're trying to see, do you actually have what it takes to do this thing?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. The whole process of selecting people and is an interesting one. And what you need to be a naval officer is different than what you need to be an astronaut is different than what you need to be a philosopher.

• 10:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  So.

• 10:16Ryan Holiday?

  Is there a big difference between what they need to be a fighter pilot and what you need to be an astronaut, other than like your knowledge of physics?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  It's when people say, what are you? I think of myself as a fighter pilot more than I do astronaut. But fighter pilots can be kind of rough. Like, we're not necessarily trained to be super, you know, friendly. We're funny and good looking and humble. But so there's a lot more edge on fighter pilots. So being able to think under pressure and do dangerous things, that's the same. But when you're an astronaut, you also have to, you know, work well with others. And you're in a civilian environment and you, and I flew with the Russians. And so there's a lot of those other softer skills that I think are, are more important. When you're a fighter pilot, your job is to kill people and break things, right?

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. So I was gonna say, as a fighter pilot, you quite literally need a killer instinct. And. As it currently stands, that's the opposite of what you want in an astronaut.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  You would need a survival. Yeah. So there's, you know, there's some overlap, but as an astronaut, you need a few more.

• 11:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  A few more softer skills.

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  And what about risk? Both require a certain risk tolerance.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  And, and yet, uh, maybe in an astronaut, you want a slightly more risk aversion? I don't know.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  It's not so much aversion as it is smartness. Like, the only way to be safe in a space program is to not launch. If you don't launch, you won't blow up on the rocket.

• 11:32Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  We used to say that as a fighter pilot, the only way to have, be safe is to not fly.

• 11:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  So you need to look at risk smartly. And if there's risk that you can buy down, that you can get rid of, you, you get rid of it. And then there's some things that you can't buy down and you just have, have to be willing to accept it. But you want to make sure that you are actively accepting those risks. And if it's something that you don't want to be surprised.

• 11:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Like during Challenger and Columbia, I teach, uh, at Harvard Business School about risk. And the Columbia and Challenger accidents, the vehicles were talking to us. We knew that on Challenger, we knew there was problems with O-rings. On Columbia, we knew there was problems with foam. And those were the two technical reasons why both of the shuttles blew up. But it was really a human reason. Like engineers were talking, the managers had time, budget and schedule pressure, and so they ignored that risk. So for risk, you have to be smart about it.

• 12:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, people think entrepreneurs are sort of risk junkies.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:40Ryan Holiday?

  But it's really about the one big risk, and then you're looking to mitigate all the other risks from there.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:47Ryan Holiday?

  If, if you're going all in, all the time.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:49Ryan Holiday?

  It is guaranteed that you will go bust.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Right. And if that going bust kills you.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Then that's bad. If the going bust, you know, as long as you're not going dying, then you're, then you can accept those risks. But risk isn't, we could, we could talk for an hour about, yeah.

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Without risk, there's no reward, right? In the stock market, flying jets, whatever it is. But the risk junkie is a real thing. Like, that's why I said, when I'm, when I'm choosing an astronaut, I don't want the guy doing wingsuiting.

• 13:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  If you're doing wingsuiting, you're gonna die.

• 13:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  If you're doing free solo on Yosemite, you have a limited lifespan. Like, maybe you'll do it once and get lucky, but you know, so, um.

• 13:27Ryan Holiday?

  And at the most, you'll kill yourself.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Which is not the worst thing, right? If you're flying an airliner, you might kill a whole airplane full of people if you're doing stupid things. So it's being smart about risk and being realistic about risk and also understanding statistics. We have this chart at NASA where you look at how severe something might be

• 13:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  and how often it happens. If something happens every time you fly, but it doesn't matter, you know, it's on one corner of that chart. If something happens often and it kills you dead, it's on the extreme corner of the chart.

• 13:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  You're not going to fly in that risk. So if you can, I think an exercise that we did at NASA and is valuable anywhere, just sit down and brainstorm. What are all the things that might go wrong? It's not a perfect scientific thing, but you can look at all your risks. And then the things that are in the one corner of the chart, you have to get rid of the, it happens often and it kills you dead. You have to get rid of those things. If it doesn't happen ever and it doesn't matter, then don't spend any time or money on that. And so going through that discipline process can help you figure out what risks you deal with, what risks you accept and what's, what's not acceptable.

• 14:33Ryan Holiday?

  Well, one of the Stoic exercises, the Latin word for it is premeditatio malorum, which is basically like a pre-mortem. So you think about all the things that could go wrong.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 14:42Ryan Holiday?

  And Seneca, who talks about this in, you know, 2000 years ago, he's talking about this, like you're about to travel by ship. He's like, look, it could be attacked by pirates. There could be a storm.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:51Ryan Holiday?

  There could be delays. You could go into quarantine. I think sometimes people take this as, okay, that's depressing. You're missing the point. Some people think that it's, it's an excuse for not going.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:02Ryan Holiday?

  Also missing the point.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:03Ryan Holiday?

  It's what's your plan if X, Y, and Z happens? And you're never going to be able to plan for everything, but even planning for something adjacent to this thing is what's, how prepared are you for it not to go your way? Because it almost certainly is not going to go your way.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Seneca was doing NASA risk management 2000 years ago. Eisenhower has a quote, I think it's spectacular. Plans are useless.

• 15:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  But planning is essential.

• 15:28Ryan Holiday?

  I think it's plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Planning is, yeah.

• 15:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Whatever. I'm a loose quote.

• 15:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  That's the fighter pilot quote of it, but it's true. Like the, the mental discipline of sitting down with a team, what might go wrong? What are the odds of that happening? You know? Going through that exercise, but then what's Mike Tyson?

• 15:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  You know, no plan survives getting punched in the, you know, once you get punched in the face, the plans are out the door. It's a very true thing. It's true for VC, for tech startups. It's true for a lot of things in life.

• 15:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think I heard Chris Hadfield talk about this. He says astronauts aren't braver than other people. They're just meticulously prepared.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Or dumber, but anyway, yeah.

• 16:04Ryan Holiday?

  What his thing was, the reason you have to be prepared, this is my favorite part of the quote, he says, because he's like, something will go wrong and there's a bunch of things you can do.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:12Ryan Holiday?

  And he says, but you always have to be aware, there's no problem so bad that you cannot make it worse.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:18Ryan Holiday?

  And that that's really kind of what it is too. So it's the surprise.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:22Ryan Holiday?

  That'll kill you. And then it's the impulsive reaction to the surprise that will make a, a bad problem into a fatal one.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. We used to say, I was a pilot on the space shuttle. There's no emergency that the pilot can't make worse with one switch throw. And as an air force pilot, we have these three steps that every pilot learns. Maintain aircraft control, step one. Step two is analyze the situation. And step three is take appropriate action. So the first thing you do is like fly the jet and don't hit the ground.

• 16:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  And then the second thing you do is think about it. And then the third thing you do is take, you know, push the button.

• 16:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  So you don't push the button until step three. And that's a good maintain aircraft control, analyze the situation and take appropriate action is a good way to go about life.

• 17:08Ryan Holiday?

  Is that what most of the astronaut, I assume to a certain degree, the, the pilot training is about is just exposing you to simulations or high stress simulations over and over and over again to sort of disabuse you of the impulse to just press the button or, or jerk the wheel or freak out just so you're like, you're not going to be cool under pressure if you've not spent a lot of time under pressure.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So that's why at NASA, we had a T38, which is like a mini fighter jet, training fighter jet. And that was the best training we did. In space, you're not flying a T38. You, the physical stick and rudder skills are, you don't use them, but the mental staying cool under pressure, staying, thinking ahead of the jet, you know, that mental discipline was super important. And the other thing. They put you in these simulators that are awful. I talk about that in my book, but they give you five million malfunctions and they're all smart. Like if they fail that computer in this electrical bus and that hydraulic, then you know, they fail all the things that are the worst case scenario to put you under pressure because you just can't imagine what it's like to ride on a four million pound rocket

• 18:16Speaker 01

  going 25 times the speed of sound. That's a stress that you can't simulate.

• 18:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Even a T-38 doesn't do that. So they try, they simulate the stress by in the simulator, but giving you some pretty intense stress.

• 18:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Is really important when you're an astronaut or when you're a business leader or you know, whatever you're doing.

• 18:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, like Jim Lovell who just died.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Just passed away.

• 18:39Ryan Holiday?

  Ninety percent of it is probably in the just not freaking out when the cascade of problems.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:47Ryan Holiday?

  Begins.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  I had, I was flying over Iraq back in the day and my wingman, we were in F-16s, which is single engine, single seat, single engine. And my wingman called me and said, head north and the wingman never, ever, ever, ever says anything on the radio and he certainly doesn't tell the flight we about to do. So I knew something was up and I rejoined on him and there was smoke coming out.

• 19:07Ryan Holiday?

  Of your engine?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Oil was leaking. If you're in a car and your oil starts leaking, pull over and turn the engine off because it's about to seize. Can't do that in an F-16 over Iraq.

• 19:17Ryan Holiday?

  At what, 20,000 feet or something?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we probably, we were probably 20 or 25,000 feet. So he made it back. It was incredibly tense moment. Barely glided in, the engine eventually seized, but while we were flying back, I told him some jokes and I had literally, I was an evaluator. So the week before that, I had just given him an evaluation on engine outlandings. And I, I dinged him on it. Like I gave him a bad grade because he messed it up. So as we were, as we were coming in, like his engine's out. He's wondering if he's going to have to eject over this ice filled sea by Iran. I'm like, hey dude, we'll count this for your next emergency simulator. So try and use a little bit of humor.

• 19:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  In the emergency, that's the way I deal with things. I try and keep things low, low stress.

• 20:01Ryan Holiday?

  So how much different is the margin for error? In a fighter jet versus space, like, do you feel you're like, oh, it's much, the air is much thinner up here? Kind of like in the sense that if you screw up, no one's coming to get you.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Once you're in orbit, things are pretty chill. Like, look, if a meteor goes through the spaceship, you're gonna die. There's nothing you can do about that.

• 20:25Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  But you're not, it's during launch and landing that's a really dangerous time. So there are things that you can do that can kill you, but while you're in space, most of the things that can kill you are just gonna come out of the blue. So, but I was also there for seven months, so you can't be like on the edge of death every second for seven months. You know, you have to have some thing. Although on my last flight, we went through this period where the alarm was going off every day. And alarms go off periodically. The Russians have terrible smoke detectors and they false alarms all the time. We get a fire alarm like every week or two. So that's normal. There's always something going on. But we went through a page like every day, multiple times.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  So I used humor. I had a little yellow sticky and I had a cautions, warnings, emergencies and smells. Something was on fire and we were smelling smoke. And so we were just like ticking off the things to try and use humor to deal with it. But I remember after about a month of like every day, I remember thinking, all right, that's enough. I'm done with the emergencies. Did you ever see The Right Stuff?

• 21:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  The Right Stuff?

• 21:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  When they were doing the astronaut selection and they put that guy in the thing and he was all stressed out. And it wasn't nearly that bad, but it was kind of like that moment in The Right Stuff, like, all right, that's enough emergencies.

• 21:36Ryan Holiday?

  When they're probably trying to see what I took from the sort of, they're trying to see, do you break under that kind of pressure? Because it's like, whatever we're gonna train you for, it's, you probably can't simulate being subjected to

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:49Ryan Holiday?

  a month of consecutive false alarms.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:52Ryan Holiday?

  So they're trying to find analog tests that they can do on Earth to go, how does this person respond to all sorts of zaps? And, you know, smacks, so they don't, you know, break.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  It's hard to simulate that stuff, like the stress of being on a rocket. There's just nothing, you can't, you can't simulate being weightless on Earth for more than a Few seconds.

• 22:15Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  On, we have an airplane, we call it the vomit comet that you push over and you get 20 seconds of weightlessness, but yeah, the stuff in space is hard to simulate. So, um, stress is, is important part of that.

• 22:29Ryan Holiday?

  So did you always want to be a fighter pilot then? Was that, like you said, that's what you identify with? Is that, was that the dream?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanted to be an astronaut and a pilot. Like I love those things. So I literally, when I was a little kid, I had an F-16 poster, the old YF-16. It was a red, white and blue, the original F-16 from the seventies. I had that poster above my bed and I had a space shuttle poster though. They used to paint them all white. So I had like the original Columbia poster on my bed when I was a kid and I was lucky. I got to do the thing. I got to do my dream, you know, most, most people don't get to do that. So.

• 23:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you did. Did it seem possible to you or was it like it was a dream in the way that kids dream of being a rock star, but they, they don't, there's not actually a viable path to get there.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. My son in kindergarten, they go, what do you want to be? And he said he wanted to be an ice cream man. Which is a pretty good dream for any kindergarten boy.

• 23:20Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  You know, as I was growing up, I'd be like, I want to be an astronaut. And everybody's like, oh, that's nice. You should be an accountant, you know, something like that. So I just kind of smiled and ignored them. And, and then when I was 13, a family friend said, you need to read the right stuff. And so I read that book. It's an amazing book. It's a great movie also. And it talked about how the early guys had been fighter pilots and then test pilots and then astronauts. And I didn't know how to be an astronaut and like, nobody in my family was an astronaut. So I said, that's what I'm going to do. And that's, that was the path that I ended up taking. A lot of luck involved also, but having that path, like mapping that out is an important step. When I do motivational speaking, I have this thing, I say, don't tell yourself no. So whatever the dream you have, if you want to be a doctor, don't, don't tell yourself no, there's a lot of work.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  You gotta go to college and you gotta get good grades and you gotta do all these things. But the first step and a lot of people I think don't. Do this is don't tell yourself no. That's the most important step.

• 24:17Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and this can be the power of reading because very few of us, you know, our parents' friends aren't astronauts, right? And so, so sometimes it's, it's reading or movies where you go, oh, this is like a, this is a process. This is like, there actually is a resume that a reasonable person could put together that qualify, it's not an easy resume.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:37Ryan Holiday?

  But it's, hey, if you do this, you know, it's, it's kind of that winnowing in reverse, right? It's like you do that, you go, hey, the majority of all presidents have been lawyers. So like going to law school is a good first step.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:51Ryan Holiday?

  To putting yourself in a position to be in contention.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:55Ryan Holiday?

  And so you read something and go, oh yeah, these guys, they, they got drafted, or they went to the, one of the service academies and then they were, suddenly they were miles closer to doing the thing than the vast majority of the population.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the first step, you have to take that step to put yourself in that pool of people. If you want to be an actor, you gotta move to Los Angeles, you know, and starve and probably fail, but unless you do that first step, you'll definitely fail.

• 25:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. If, if you don't, if you don't put yourself in contention, it's not going to happen, which is probably deep down why most people don't decide to enlist or move to LA is that not being in contention is also a way to not fail at said dream. Because you didn't actually try.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  It hurts to fail.

• 25:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  It hurts to fail. And I failed at a lot of things, but I, I'm like, I gotta give it a try. And then you, and then you can be honest with yourself. And then you can live with yourself when, when you're old, sitting in the old folks' home, you can go, yeah, I gave it a shot.

• 25:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:06Ryan Holiday?

  So you're one of the handful of people who have ever left Earth.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:10Ryan Holiday?

  So like when I look at that blue marble photo. It's just a photo to me, but you've, you've seen Earth from that view. What does that do to a person?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  I think it depends on the person. It transformed me. I mean, Earth is a beautiful planet. I helped work on an IMAX movie called A Beautiful Planet.

• 26:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Perfectly titled. It's just, you can't imagine how beautiful it was. I felt like. I was seeing creation from God's point of view. It was like it was a spiritual thing. The planet is just amazing. And I would have spent my whole time. When I got back, they told me that I took more pictures than any other astronaut. I took over 300,000 still photos. And to help make the IMAX movie. But unfortunately, you gotta work. Like the reason you're up there. So there's a lot of science, which I love the science. I loved working on the space station. But what I really loved was looking out the window and trying to share it. And the pictures are great. I grew up looking at astronaut pictures, but it's just not the same. There's an emotional thing that happens when you look out the window. There was one moment where I was looking out and I was like, hey,

• 27:14Speaker 01

  like that's Earth over there. That's my planet and I'm not on my planet. It's pretty profound.

• 27:18Ryan Holiday?

  What is the difference? Cause I was thinking about this the other day. My wife and I, we were down in Florida in the Panhandle and we were watching the sunset over the beach. And we were sort of like, we're trying to take a picture of it and we're kind of going like this. And you're like, it's not even close. Like just the difference between photo and eyesight wasn't even close. So I can't imagine the difference between Earth from space while you're in space or photo of Earth from space.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Right. A friend of mine is doing a space photography exhibit in Europe right now. 130 of my pictures and they're on these giant, beautiful printed on metal, you know, pictures that mostly I took, some other astronauts took too. Near Munich right now is in Austria. And it's the best I've seen, like in terms of just walking through. It's the best experience of experiencing space, but it's still not the same. It just doesn't come. On my first flight, I installed a cupola. It's a seven windowed module. It's about the size of this table. And then there's six windows on the side. And it's on the bottom of the space station. So, so when you float up into it, you're looking up at Earth, right? And it feels like you're out in space. I mean, there's like the big window above you and all these things.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  On the space shuttle, it was amazing. It's like an airliner. Like I was an airline pilot, you know, there's windows up there for the pilots to look out. And it's cool. So it's like driving through the Rockies. Or the hill country in the, in your minivan, you're looking out the window, the blue bonnets look nice. But when you park and you get out, it's a lot cooler. You're experiencing it. So the cupola was like that. It's the difference between looking out your minivan window at something and then getting out and walking through the mountains or whatever.

• 28:57Ryan Holiday?

  Cause there's a name for astronauts looking at Earth from space. It's called the overview effect.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:02Ryan Holiday?

  Right. And it, it supposedly like just changes you spiritually, politically,

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:09Ryan Holiday?

  socially. Why do you think?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  I think it depends on the person.

• 29:13Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  I gotta be honest.

• 29:14Ryan Holiday?

  What does that mean?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  So some people have empathy. They have an open heart. They're willing to change. Like I've changed my views on some important things. I don't think if Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin went into space, they would come back some enlightened, you know, human being.

• 29:30Ryan Holiday?

  I could have all that.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. How do, how do I conquer? Let me go invade the moon or whatever. Or, yeah.

• 29:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  So I think it depends on the person. I think the types of people who are astronauts are generally good human beings and you know, they come back. But here's a terrible story. I'll, I'll tell this. I was up there and I flew with three different cosmonauts. On, on different missions and they, the three of those came back and some other cosmonauts I didn't fly with did the same thing. They joined Putin's party, supporting the war in Ukraine.

• 29:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  These men and women know better. Look, are Americans like obsessing about invading Russia and all? That's the propaganda that they hear. Of course we're not. We don't care about Russia.

• 30:08Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  So these people were willing to support this evil, even, even having spent months in space. So.

• 30:15Ryan Holiday?

  Right. So you're, you're up in space and you're seeing that, that borders are an illusion.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:21Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Like, yeah, like this belongs to all the people that were all equal in this sense. And then you go home and you're like, this country deserves to conquer and subjugate that country that you're missing. You missed the lesson of the overview effect.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Anton Shkuplerov. I flew with him on the Soyuz. I have pictures on my phone with me and him together. He came back and he was like, Kareem Nash, Kareem Nash, which means Crimea is ours. He was just so big about that. I spent seven months in space with this guy.

• 30:49Ryan Holiday?

  There's a beautiful passage in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. So he's the most powerful man in the world. And he talks about, he says, you know, to understand people, you have to take Plato's view. And he says, you know, Plato's view, we could take this to mean like climb up to the top of the Acropolis and look down at what was then, you know, most of the developed world.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  The known world, yeah.

• 31:09Ryan Holiday?

  And but like, you just think about in the ancient world, other than getting on top of a mountain, which was pretty difficult.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:15Ryan Holiday?

  You're not going to get that many views, right? So, so, you know, they can't, they don't even have what the average person has today, which is like an airplane or think about what was the tallest building the emperor of Rome got into? Maybe three, four stories?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:31Ryan Holiday?

  Right? So, so there are going to be the opportunities to look down.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:36Ryan Holiday?

  And see the interconnectedness and the peacefulness of everything. To, to literally take a bird's eye view, those would be exceedingly rare. But he says, you're sort of philosophically, you have to actively kind of take this zoom out view. And you see how trivial most of the things that we fight about, that we argue about, the terrible things we do to each other over this scrap of land or that scrap of land. And that this is sort of an antidote to those kind of imperial ambitions or those desires to compete or even to like, obviously making your mark is important. But also I imagine when you look at Earth from a distance and you get, you get a sense of the billions of years that this has existed.

• 32:21Ryan Holiday?

  You probably stopped going like, what's in my bank account? Or, you know, how do I get more followers on social media? Like the legacy stuff goes away. That's the legacy, the Earth.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Ryan, there's so many things to unpack. Everything you just said was so profound. That was, I could talk for hours about it. You're not worried about what the Kardashians are up to when you're looking at Earth. And I remember thinking, man, Earth's been around for billions of years. It's going to be around for billions of years. So the things that I worry about are probably not. That big of a deal, but there are some things that are important.

• 32:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  What Russia's doing, Ukraine, causing misery is awful. What's happening in Sudan right now? The civil war is awful. I think the pain that AI might be causing to lots of humans on Earth and automation, like we, there are important things.

• 33:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  But most of what we worry about are not important things.

• 33:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  And my crewmate Samantha Christopher, I think she said it best. When you look at Earth, it's a spaceship Earth that's going through the galaxy, right?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  We should all be passengers and not crewmates on that spaceship. You know, so we, we should all like take some ownership.

• 33:25Ryan Holiday?

  We should be crewmates, not passengers.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  We should be crewmates, not passengers. I said it wrong. Yeah, exactly. And, and that's, that's a pretty profound observation that to, to do that. But, you know, and it's so interesting, your podcast, I was listening to your podcast, preparing for this about Seneca. It was having the same problems we had today where you had to brown-nose the emperor and, and tell lies for the emperor. The whole American government is based on a foundation of lies. Everybody who has a serious government job had to say that Trump won the 2020 election.

• 33:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  So literally it's a foundation of lies.

• 33:55Ryan Holiday?

  The Department of Labor and Statistics now has to think about not whether these are the job numbers or not, but whether it will please the emperor or not.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  It's the Ministry of Truth in 1984. And we're living in that today.

• 34:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  I'm reading a book called It Can't Happen Here.

• 34:13Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, Sinclair Lewis.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  It's a tough book to read. It's not my favorite prose, but it's like reading the 2025 news. It is happening here. The, their new, the, the follow-on sequel should be, it is happening here.

• 34:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  So the antidote, I think to, and there's always been bad guys. There's always going to be a man. It's always a man who wants to make his country great again. Ever since Seneca and Nero and whatever.

• 34:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  The antidote to that is democracy, a well functioning democracy with freedom of press, with freedom of speech, with right to assemble and petition the government for a dress. That will keep those men in check.

• 34:50Ryan Holiday?

  When I would say in competing interests, each one doing their job and asserting the prerogatives of their office.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  You mean like a Congress, a president and a judiciary?

• 35:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, that's exactly what I, that's exactly what I mean. And that's why it was designed that way as for a reason that ambition would check ambition. So you don't go, it's what he wants. Let's give him what he wants.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  We were given such a blessing from the founding fathers. They were such wise men. They, they had a lot, they got a lot of things wrong.

• 35:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  You know, with slavery and all that. But think about what a profound.

• 35:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, they understood.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Success.

• 35:25Ryan Holiday?

  They understood human nature.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:26Ryan Holiday?

  And they also understood history.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 35:29Ryan Holiday?

  And, and much of what they were seeking to avoid were sort of timeless figures, which are always with us, demagogues, war mongers.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Always.

• 35:41Ryan Holiday?

  You know, populists, you know, that there's a guy named Catiline who attempts to overthrow the Roman government and it's Cicero and Cato that stop him. And if you don't understand history, if you also just don't understand human psychology, you end up sort of repeating these things.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  The problem, Ryan, throughout human history, some guys with swords could come in and change things.

• 36:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  The power, the overwhelming concentration of power, we've never seen anything like this in tech.

• 36:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Information space, right? Like we all live in these little information echo chambers. And if you're in that echo chamber, you're never going to hear anything from outside that echo chamber. So the amount of power that bad men, that evil men can exercise, I don't think we've ever seen anything like it. And that in the old days, you could have an executive and a legislative and a, and a Supreme Court, and there would be checks and balances and, and you'd have a free press and those checks and balances are tougher and tougher. And that's what worries me.

• 36:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think separate from all that, and I imagine you spent a lot of time thinking about this at the Air Force Academy, because it's what it's all about, you know, it's, they're not just teaching. You engineering and how to drill and stuff. It's primarily character formation because they understand you're going to be in charge of multimillion dollar aircrafts. You're going to be, maybe you'll work at the Pentagon, you're going to be making life and death decisions.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:01Ryan Holiday?

  And so what they're primarily trying to instill in these officers is one, a broad liberal arts education. So you understand history and humanity, the fundamental values of Western society. And then you're also instilling in them ethics and character and principles.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:18Ryan Holiday?

  So they can make really good decisions under pressure. This idea now that it's like, no, these are warfighters. We gotta, you're, no, what makes the American military great compared to say the Russian military is the education and the values and the independence of our sort of officer ranks.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  The four star nominees now have to meet with Donald Trump.

• 37:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. That's the opposite of what you want.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  That should be terrifying.

• 37:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  That should be terrifying to every American. To politicize our military. Yeah, that should be terrifying, among a mother, a thousand other things. But the Air Force Academy and West Point Navy, not as well, but the Air Force Academy. Of course, I'm giving my guys a lot of time. It was about leadership. I took philosophy. I was a, you know, in every, we used to call them basket weaving majors, but like the English and those majors, they all had to take mechanical engineering and chemistry and physics and calculus. And all the engineers had to take history and, and it was such a great, broad education, but also character training. But I remember my philosophy teacher, you would love him. We learned about John Stuart Mills and the categorical imperative and Immanuel, all that stuff that I forgot about. He was Captain Jones.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  We used to have all military instructors, which was actually really, it was great for undergrad.

• 38:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  For PhDs, you want free thinking, but for undergrad, it was really good. He was super tall. He had no hair. He had giant Coke bottle glasses. Like if he went out in the sun, it would probably burn right through his, and he was so goofy. And he had been on Wheel of Fortune. So he met Vanna White and of course she was like the hot thing back then and we were all super, and he was so funny. And he taught me about philosophy.

• 38:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  You know what he taught me? Two wrongs don't make a right.

• 38:57Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  That is the definition. Of many politicians today.

• 39:00Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  I hear from my Republican friends, well, yeah, we're gerrymandering, but you gerrymander too.

• 39:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Like, guys, you all, we all sat through Captain Jones to, you know, two wrongs don't make a right. And those categorical imperative ends don't justify the means. All these philosophical things I learned as a 19 year old.

• 39:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's what I was going to say. The founders understood that a system that is based around personal liberty had to be checked by a country with character in the people, right? Especially its, its leaders had to be men, and now thankfully, women of high character and principles and honor, who cared about those things more than maintaining the office.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:45Ryan Holiday?

  And you're in a tough spot when you erode that by word and deed. And you end up with, with people who don't understand what it means to be a representative of the people.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Right. Who was the French guy that came here in the 1800s?

• 40:03Ryan Holiday?

  Lafayette.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Lafayette wrote, I forgot the name.

• 40:06Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, you mean Tocqueville?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Alexander Tocqueville, yeah. He wrote the book about America and I think his quote was, America's great because America's good. And his point was like, we had character.

• 40:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Is, and it's, of course, nobody's perfect. Even like Air Force Academy honor code people, everybody makes mistakes. But we at least agree that we should try to be good.

• 40:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  And like, when you make a mistake, you admit it. But that foundation of ethics and morality, I did a, a social media post about ethics recently. Cause it just seems to be disappearing, which

• 40:34Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  frustrates the heck out of me.

• 40:36Ryan Holiday?

  No, I was, uh, when I was writing, so I've been doing this series on the cardinal virtues. So I did courage, which I think people, most people understand. I did discipline, I think most people understand, well, that's good. And then I did it on justice, which is primarily about ethics. And I was talking to this friend of mine who's an, an air force officer, uh, his name's And he went to the Air Force Academy and he was telling me about he'd been a whistleblower a couple of different times in his career. He had to saw a superior officer doing something or he saw something in a program and he sort of had to go public with it. And, you know, we like to celebrate whistleblowers, but it's usually never fun for the whistleblowers. And almost always there's reprisals and consequences, right? And I was asking him, I was like, you know, why did you do it? He's like, Ryan, I went to the Air Force Academy. I swore an oath.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:17Ryan Holiday?

  And I was just like, kind of shocked by the like, the earnestness of like, oh, I believe in these things. I went to this program, the government paid for it, and so I am held to a higher standard. And you go, that's what you want in a leader, someone who says, hey, I, this might be bad for me. This might be unpopular. People might not agree with it, but like, it's my duty to do this thing. And that's what you, that's what leadership really is. That's what character is.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Right. And we've seen today that there's just so few people. It was true during Seneca and Plata. It's just, most people are not willing to put their hide on the line.

• 41:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  And do the right thing. Like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.

• 42:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Kinzinger sat right in that chair.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a good friend of mine, so I'll, I'll give him a hard time. But yeah, I mean, he, he's like one of my heroes. Liz Cheney has more balls than, than the entire GOP male cohort.

• 42:16Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.