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

There are some situations where panic is not an option. In today’s episode, Ryan talks with Senator Mark Kelly about what his years as a Navy pilot, test pilot, and NASA astronaut taught him about fear, focus, humility, and staying calm under pressure. They discuss the lessons of spaceflight, the danger of ego in high-stakes moments, Marcus Aurelius’ “view from above,” and what real leadership requires in today’s world. Senator Mark Kelly is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. Before entering public service, he served as a U. S. Navy combat pilot, test pilot, and captain. He was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1996 and flew four space shuttle missions: STS-108, STS-121, STS-124, and STS-134, commanding the final two. Over the course of his NASA career, he spent more than 54 days in space. After his wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in an assassination attempt in 2011, Kelly retired from the Navy and NASA later that year. He was elected to the U. S. Senate in 2020 in the special election for the seat once held by Senator John McCain, and was reelected to a full term in 2022. 👉 Follow Senator Mark Kelly on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/senmarkkelly/?hl=en, TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@captmarkkelly, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/SenMarkKelly, Substack https://senmarkkellyaz.substack.com/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPOTM2NjE5NzQzMzkyNDU5AAGnUyggNvVPwn-H80MpGUwlIEZ7m5-F9HoY0MBrxAriAb6FwTw3LvOzWyHr0iE_aem_lgpTBY6ehGq3pKU79KwwVg&utm_id=97760_v0_s00_e0_tv3&_src_ref=l.instagram.com, and learn more on his website https://www.kelly.senate.gov/ 📚 Check out Senator Mark Kelly’s books: Mousetronaut https://www.amazon.com/Mousetronaut-Based-Partially-Story-Wiseman/dp/1442458240book series Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope https://www.amazon.com/Gabby-Story-Courage-Gabrielle-Giffords/dp/1451661061 Enough: Our Fight to Keep America Safe From Gun Violence https://www.amazon.com/Enough-Fight-Keep-America-Violence/dp/1476750076 🎟️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 toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel 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 athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 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.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of the things I think that the Stoics 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?

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  Courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. And there are some people who are tested more than others, right? When you're trying to land an aircraft carrier at night in the middle of the ocean, knowing that everyone is watching and every landing is going to be graded. And by the way, the real failing grade isn't an F. It's a diring and 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.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  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. He flew 39 combat missions during the Gulf War. He logged thousands of hours in more than 50 aircraft. He completed more than 375 carrier landings. He flew four space missions, commanding two of them. And he has stood up in this unique moment in American history and taken some heat, taken some pressure for it. He's currently the enemy of the President of the

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  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 talk quite a bit about Mark Cereles, talk about the overview effect, the fragility of our planet, the responsibilities of public service, and of course Admiral James Stockdale. 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

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  it's worth mentioning his incredible wife, former Congressman Gabby Giffords, who was shot in an assassination attempt in 2011. Kelly retired from the Navy and NASA that year to nurse his wife back to health, and they have both become incredible activists and both continued public service in their own ways. And she is 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 Maustronaut. 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 SenMarkKelly. That's

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  Mark with a K. Anyways, you're gonna like this episode. We've met once before. I don't, you would have no memory of this, but it had an impact on me, so I was gonna tell you about it. It was a, do you remember Renaissance weekends? It was one of those. 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.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  The last one we went to was in 2012, a year after she got shot.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  It was, it was, I think before, I think it was before, because what I remember this, my wife and I, we weren't married yet, we were, 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.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  And I was like, he's an astronaut and he has his hands full.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, with these kids.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  What are we signing up for? And I have thought about that every once in a while in the years since, that, that was my memory of meeting you.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  I was just with my daughter Claudia at a thing, it was 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. Uh, and her son was my daughter's age.

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  Got it.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  And, uh, we basically had the same conversation. About how, because my kids in 2011, you know, was 15 years, so she was, she was 15.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  So I had a 15 year old and a 13 year old there.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  And they loved going to that thing.

• 5:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it was probably 11:30 at night, they're getting to stay out, it was craziness, you know, and there's kids and they're in a hotel. It was probably incredibly fun for them, but I just remember, okay, this is what that's like.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  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 car, doesn't come back for 24 hours. You're like, why did I do this? But then you have grandkids, which is the best.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  My nine year old is about to turn 10, he told me he's a pre-teen. And I was like, oh, okay, now it's, 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.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Does he think he gets like more privileges or something?

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know what he thinks, I think he, I think it just occurred to him, the math of it just became real.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Just tell him that gets you nothing.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's a guy who gets you less, I'm gonna watch you more like a hawk now. Because, because you're gonna start doing things that actually consequences.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  That.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, totally.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  The other person I met at that one that I, was one of the cool encounters in my life was Jim Lovell was not, I don't know if he was at that one or another one, but I found myself sitting at a dinner table with him. And I was, why is this real life? This is crazy.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Apollo 13, Commander.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Went around the moon, I think on Apollo 10 as well. A guy I, you know, got to know a little bit.

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  I got to NASA, to the astronaut office, long after he was gone.

• 6:57Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah. I think probably your layperson probably thinks, oh, they all know each other and then you probably all don't.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  We don't.

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  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, I think the 50th anniversary of John Glenn's first flight.

• 7:35Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I remember.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  And I didn't get a picture.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  Didn't happen then.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Well, I thought it would be too weird.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  To like ask for a selfie with John Glenn and Neil Armstrong sitting at the dinner table, but I do kind of regret it.

• 7:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, in, in the right stuff, the line that I was always struck by is Tom Wolf points out that like John Glenn's heart rate never goes above a hundred during the, the thing. And I asked Jim Lovell, I was like, could that possibly be true? Like, how could his, how could it not be pounding out of his chest? And he was like, I mean, you've just done it so many times that unless something's going wrong, this is, this is normal.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  You mean when he was strapped into the rocket ship before launch?

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, just, just in the course of the mission that he never gets the spike of adrenaline.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think it's different for different people. You know, we, we've done EKGs on even shuttle crew members, I think. I never wore one.

• 8:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  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 heart rate was up a little bit.

• 8:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  More about like, don't, don't screw this up.

• 8:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Cause as a pilot and the commander, you're turning a lot of stuff on. You gotta make sure things go well and you could mess it up where the launch is gonna stop.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  And then it's like you wasted, you know, millions of dollars worth of fuel and all your guests have to come back the next day and it's gonna be kind of embarrassing. So you're worried about that.

• 9:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  You're also worried about getting blown up a little bit.

• 9:14Ryan Holiday?

  Did you have techniques for calming yourself down?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  No. No, I probably should have. I don't think they would work on me.

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  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 at a missile blow up next to my airplane. Almost flew into the ground, you know, two or three times because of me.

• 9:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Like screwing it up.

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  Pilot error.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, pilot error.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  You know, once in Korea, I got really close. So other things lately just don't get, I don't get too worked up.

• 9:53Ryan Holiday?

  I would imagine landing on a carrier at night sort of level sets what's scary and.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's scary, by the way. And, you know, if somebody would, you know, have the, you know, EKG on me, measuring my heart rate for that. That's really high because it's a hard thing to do. And it's hard to do well.

• 10:11Ryan Holiday?

  It feels like, like they've, 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.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  To decide whether you're going to swing.

• 10:22Ryan Holiday?

  That a human can do it. A carrier landing strikes me as almost on, like if I hadn't seen videos of people doing it. And you described it to me, I would say that's not possible.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I would, I would have thought so myself until I had to do it.

• 10:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Eventually it gets to the point where in the daytime you get comfortable.

• 10:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Doing it and you can, you know, you feel like, hey, I can be successful at this. At night, it's a controlled crash and you're just like, you're just holding on. You know, I don't know, you know, what, what frequency your, 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.

• 11:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I mean, you're in an enormous thing, hitting a miniscule target in the middle of the ocean.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you, if you land short, the ramp strike is a high probability.

• 11:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  And then you're dead.

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:23Ryan Holiday?

  Strikes me as illustrative of like, no, we're snatching victory from the jaws of defeat every time.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the recovery, the launch, the recovery.

• 11:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  And you gotta get all these airplanes aboard in a short period of time. You just, you know, then you gotta 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.

• 11:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Uh, which is now that I think about it as a weird way to say it, cause a trap is usually like you're, you're gonna, you know, capture an animal.

• 11:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  But the event of landing on the aircraft carrier, that's a trap.

• 12:01Ryan Holiday?

  Is that because you're being snagged by the wire and that's the trap?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. You have a hook. There's a wire. I've done that, uh, 375 times, something like that.

• 12:12Ryan Holiday?

  Does it get any easier?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Not at night.

• 12:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Daytime it does.

• 12:17Ryan Holiday?

  Just because you can at least see what's happening?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  It's just scary at night. I mean, it's just, you know, you're, especially if there's no horizon.

• 12:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  You know, you're, you know, you're flying initially on instruments. So you're flying an ILS approach. And then you get to three quarters of a mile and then you transition to the, the light system. The meatball, the Fresnel lens on the deck and it's a very high gain task. A lot of inputs.

• 12:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  You get waved off. Maybe if you're screw, 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 when other airplanes are coming aboard and you're talking to them.

• 12:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Right. And you're telling, you know, you're giving them, um, suggestions, you know, you might say like, um, you know, you're a little high, you know, don't fly through it, uh, power, power, power, wave off or right for lineup. Or, uh, don't settle, you know, the, so you're, you've got this cadence of talking somebody through this landing. You get waved off or you bolter, which is means the wire, the cook doesn't catch the wire. You go airborne again. You come around again. You might bolter again. Now you need the gas. Now you gotta go to the tanker. It's embarrassing. You know, and that's called, um, especially if you have to go to the tanker multiple times.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  A night in the barrel is what we call it. You had your night in the barrel.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  And sometimes you're doing this in what we call blue water ops, which means there's no divert.

• 13:51Ryan Holiday?

  You can't go land on a runway somewhere.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:54Ryan Holiday?

  Cause they're like, you don't have the stuff tonight. Get out of here.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  You're not, and they're only certain people that can fly during blue water ops.

• 14:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:07Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  You know, if things start to go really south on somebody, they'll rig the barricade. So then there's no boltering.

• 14:14Ryan Holiday?

  That's to catch you.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And you know, everyone is watching as, after you've missed a couple of times, everyone's starting to watch.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Every one of the ready rooms, everybody's, you know, watching the, your guy go around and around. They know who it is.

• 14:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  And, you know, I guess some people are cheering you on. And then there's, you know, probably a little, depending on who the person is, a little bit of that schadenfreude there.

• 14:51Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe they're betting on it.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Uh, maybe. Yeah. Yeah.

• 14:56Ryan Holiday?

  And, and I was fascinated to learn that every landing, so you did, you did 300 plus, everyone, you get a grade.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Yes. Graded on all of them.

• 15:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Now this has gotten, become a lot different.

• 15:08Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Now lately, over the last decade or so, because of advances in the systems, even on like an F-18, this thing called magic carpet, which helps you fly the airplane in a way that keeps you on glide slope much more easily. I went out to the ship a couple of years ago in the backseat of a 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.

• 15:49Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm sure before that, like, I mean, aren't the LSOs called paddles? Cause they used to just do it with like ping pong paddles. Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  But yeah, we didn't do it with paddles. We did it over the radio. We have a thing called a pickle where we can wave them off. You know, red lights come on on the Fresnel lens 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 waved 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 crews up to be able to operate off the ship. It's gotten a lot easier. What

• 16:40Speaker 01

  that means, they can focus on the mission more.

• 16:43Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Which is often the strike mission of, you know, dropping bombs or the fighter mission of countering enemy air threat. So we're now a much more effective naval air force because of it becoming easier to land on the ship.

• 17:00Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Right. Yeah, Dave Burke, who was in LSO, I was 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.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  That's right. Now you can get an okay underline.

• 17:16Ryan Holiday?

  But there's no such thing as perfection. There's no such thing as really good job.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  The okay underline, which are very rare.

• 17:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  That's perfection.

• 17:24Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  And then an okay, and then fair, and then a no grade.

• 17:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  And was there anything, this is, I'm dating by this, a long time ago, I was in LSO, below a, there was something below a no grade, but it was, no grade's bad.

• 17:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. But it's a brutal scale. Like it's.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  And then it's, and then it's displayed in the ready room.

• 17:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  So everybody sees the grades.

• 17:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:00Ryan Holiday?

  And that's creating a culture of excellence and competition and.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  And hard work.

• 18:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  And just, you know, you're just going to grind through it and always try to get better.

• 18:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Because everybody's going to see your grade. And the okay was green, fair was yellow, and no grade was white. I can't remember what okay underline was. That was a really good pass.

• 18:23Ryan Holiday?

  Do you ever get one of those?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 18:25Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah, it's probably one of those.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  It was usually F-18s got them. I flew the A-6 Intruder.

• 18:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  It's a little harder to land on the ship.

• 18:33Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:35Ryan Holiday?

  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 it hard to do. Like the, the confidence ego line is, and then imposter syndrome, the balancing of those three things must be interesting.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  It's, 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.

• 19:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  And, 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.

• 19:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  I think we see this at very high levels in our government right now.

• 19:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  You know, somebody who thinks that they're, they've got this.

• 19:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. They're not intimidated by the task or they're not humbled before the task as they, they probably should be.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I think it's always good to have people knowing that they're never gonna, never gonna reach the place that they want to get to.

• 19:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  You know, that's gonna mean that they're gonna continuously try to improve. It makes them better, but if they ever think they actually got there, if they have that kind of ego and they think, man, I got this.

• 20:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Then they're gonna get worse.

• 20:06Ryan Holiday?

  Floyd Patterson, the boxer, he went into one fight that he lost and he said he knew he was gonna lose as soon as he stepped in the ring because he didn't have any nerves.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 20:14Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Cause you know, this is like game time. I gotta get this right. I can't screw it up.

• 20:48Ryan Holiday?

  It's a sign of respect to the thing.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:51Ryan Holiday?

  You know, and if you don't have it, it's probably ego and a, and a kind of finger to the gods and they're gonna, they're gonna make you pay for it.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  The big hammer is coming down on you.

• 21:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Pride goeth 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.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And I'll tell you what, with the space shuttle especially.

• 21:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  There was, you know, something hiding around the corner that was about to kill you all the time.

• 21:20Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:35Ryan Holiday?

  And even though we've been going to space a surprisingly long time, we haven't done it that much. And not that many people have done it.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I flew the 108th, 121st, 124th and the 134th flight of the space shuttle. That in a

• 21:51Ryan Holiday?

  test program.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. For an airplane, think of about like a Boeing, you know, the Boeing triple seven.

• 21:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  That is in the beginning, the infancy

• 22:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  of a test program.

• 22:02Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  And the last space shuttle flight was the one after my last one, the 135 times. So yeah, I mean, I mean, that's one of the reasons I hired test pilots for this job.

• 22:15Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  By the time we ended the space shuttle program, there was still a lot we did not understand about it.

• 22:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I mean, you went to test pilot school. I mean, those pilots have thousands of hours in these jets.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:27Ryan Holiday?

  And yeah, to be the 108th flight.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:30Ryan Holiday?

  Period.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Period.

• 22:31Ryan Holiday?

  Is like, I, obviously every plane has a 108th flight, but that was like so long ago.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it took us, uh, in the space shuttle, the first flight was in 1981. My, that 108th flight was in 2001, 20 years later.

• 22:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  And to go to fly the next 30 flights took another decade.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  We didn't fly a lot.

• 22:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  It's expensive. It also took a lot to get the space shuttle orbiter ready for a mission.

• 23:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  You basically take it all apart and put it back together every time, which might not have been the smartest thing to do.

• 23:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, 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.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  But without the, uh, without the repetition, you don't have the problems.

• 23:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  So the risk is still very uncertain.

• 23:39Ryan Holiday?

  Right. It's an unknown unknown because you don't even know.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:42Ryan Holiday?

  So you have the, you have the sum and then you have the, the things that we've never even conceived of happening.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  We were okay with the known unknowns.

• 23:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  The unknown unknowns.

• 23:51Ryan Holiday?

  Those are the ones that keep you up at night.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yes. Uh, and so you're always like 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, you always got to focus in the, in the very likely and catastrophic, you know, uh, quarter of the box.

• 24:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  You know, the unlikely, uneventful stuff, you can, you know, sort of let that go. But even the unlikely catastrophic, you had to focus.

• 24:24Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  There because of the consequences.

• 24:37Ryan Holiday?

  You talked about some of the things that have gone wrong on your flights, space and, and, and otherwise, those are things that you prepared mentally for, like you, you roughly knew what to do or what do you do when everything is?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  So.

• 24:51Ryan Holiday?

  Fallen apart.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  In the space shuttle, we train a lot, thousands of hours. I have, I have about 6,000 hours of flight time. I think I stopped counting at some point. Um, I probably have as much time in the space shuttle simulator.

• 25:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  You know, we just spend a ton of time over, you know, for 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 it. Yeah. Columbia accident, nothing you could have really done about it. I mean, if something falls off on liftoff, puts a hole in the wing, the vehicle disintegrates on entry. But we've had other problems in space.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  On my first launch, we got a master alarm on liftoff. If 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, 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 Thiocol. And they're supposed to flame out two minutes and five seconds into the liftoff, flame out at the same time. Well, in our case, one, one got to chamber pressure of zero before the other one

• 26:34Speaker 01

  and the space shuttle started rolling and yawing. That's not even. Yeah, not, not even thrust, started rolling and yawing. 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 out of control. Yeah. And then it corrected itself and we were fine. Never practice that in your simulator in those thousands of hours. So that was one of the unknown unknowns.

• 27:04Ryan Holiday?

  But practicing all that stuff in the simulator is giving you the meta-skill of not freaking out, not overreacting. Like, really what you practiced for is the wait and see that you did there.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:16Ryan Holiday?

  Instead of, perhaps you could have made it worse by immediately asserting manual control.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Could have, but I'm pretty good at flying things, so I, it would have been fine.

• 27:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. There's a quote I heard from the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, where he says, "There's no problem in space so bad that you can't make it worse."

• 27:31Speaker 01

  That is true.

• 27:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  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, he had this saying, I think it was him, "When you don't know what to do, don't do anything."

• 27:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  And I've used that.

• 27:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  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."

• 28:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:04Ryan Holiday?

  Not too long.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Try to figure it out.

• 28:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  You know, and there's some things that require like an immediate, you know, response, like, you know, space shuttle's about to go out of control. And there's others, you know, that you can, you can wait on, you can think about, you can reflect on. Every decision should not require the same amount of contemplation.

• 28:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  And reflection. Some do, some you can, let's, you know, let's think about this for a week.

• 28:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, knowing the difference of what requires that sort of immediate.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:37Ryan Holiday?

  Concrete action.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:39Ryan Holiday?

  And then what it requires a little bit of restraint.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, you're over a rack and the missile's coming at you? You don't have much time to think about it.

• 28:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  You know, so, um, yeah, so I've, you know, I think about that a little bit in my, in my new job here.

• 28:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, okay, so as far as I know, Mark Schreelis never goes to space. Maybe, maybe we, but.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Is that meditations?

• 29:01Ryan Holiday?

  This is meditations. I'm curious what you thought. I'm gonna read you these quick passages, because it sounds like he has. I wonder if it jives with your.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  I don't think he went to space.

• 29:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, probably not.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Unless there's some buried spaceship somewhere under Rome.

• 29:14Ryan Holiday?

  Now we're gonna get in the conspiracy theory territory. Okay, these are all in book seven, three in a row. So I wonder what he's doing as he's deciding this thoughts. He says, "To watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them, to keep constantly in mind how the elements alter into one another, thoughts like this wash off the mud of life below." And then the next one, he says, "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 then the last one, he says, "Look at the past, empire succeeding empire, and from

• 29:58Ryan Holiday?

  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?" And then actually, there's 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.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think, I mean, imagine if Marcus Aurelius knew that we were one galaxy in a universe of two trillion galaxies.

• 30:29Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Probably wouldn't have changed, you know, his view on this, but he certainly realized that to some extent, we're kind of insignificant.

• 30:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  In the big picture. He's referencing the stars and how things are gonna happen that are, whether it's over a thousand years or 40 years, things are gonna happen that are, you know, just the way it is, outside of our control.

• 30:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  But, you know, we're seeing history repeat itself.

• 31:11Ryan Holiday?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  We've seen that through a couple thousand years of history.

• 31:16Ryan 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.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:24Ryan Holiday?

  He's seeing so much of the civilized world.

• 31:28Speaker 01

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

• 31:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Oh, there is. Okay.

• 31:33Ryan Holiday?

  And also traveled.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, he traveled a lot.

• 31:35Ryan Holiday?

  Dies in Vienna, writes in Budapest.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Spent a lot of time in Germany.

• 31:39Ryan Holiday?

  It's crazy. Like, when you, when you realize how big the Roman Empire was,

• 31:45Ryan Holiday?

  it, it sort of blows your mind.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:47Ryan Holiday?

  That one human being was responsible for all this, given the communications.

• 31:50Speaker 01

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

• 31:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Like on the road.

• 31:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  In camps and fighting wars and.

• 31:58Ryan Holiday?

  Almost all of it.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:00Ryan 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.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:08Ryan Holiday?

  But yeah, you, 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.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Probably some.

• 32:20Ryan Holiday?

  Some mountain?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Probably some mountain in, near Vienna, right?

• 32:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:24Speaker 01

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

• 32:26Ryan 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.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Well, first of all.

• 32:36Ryan Holiday?

  Out of space.

• 32:37Speaker 01

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

• 32:41Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  He, Marcus Aurelius was almost certainly a flat-earther.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Certainly his son was.

• 32:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. He had some other problems.

• 32:52Speaker 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.

• 32:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 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.

• 33:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 33:08Speaker 01

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

• 33:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 01

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

• 33:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 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.

• 33:35Ryan Holiday?

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

• 33:38Speaker 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, we're gonna 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.

• 34:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, what if we just didn't screw it up here?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, just don't screw it up here. It's always gonna be easier to survive on Earth regardless of what happens, including the big rock.

• 34:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Or the, you know, the worst pandemic. It's always gonna be easier to survive on Earth. Mars is a shit planet. It is not, not a place that we wanna move to. We wanna go and explore. We wanna come back.

• 34:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  But you really do get this sense that kind of the, almost the insignificance of, you know, 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.

• 35:00Ryan 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.

• 35:34Speaker 01

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

• 35:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 01

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

• 35:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  With one exception.

• 35:44Ryan Holiday?

  Great Wall?

• 35:45Speaker 01

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

• 35:50Ryan Holiday?

  What is it then?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  That's bullshit. The only border you actually see that's not a river is the southern part of Israel.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Because on one side, it's desert.

• 36:00Ryan Holiday?

  Ah.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  The other side, you know, it's cultivated land.

• 36:04Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 36:05Speaker 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.

• 36:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:15Speaker 01

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

• 36:21Ryan Holiday?

  North and South Korea.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Yes, and the United States and Canada.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Sometimes when you're looking at the United States, you're like, huh, what if the Canadians need more electricity? But the reason it looks like that.

• 36:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Is because most of the Canadian population live within 100 miles of the US border.

• 36:39Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Like, all 20 million of them.

• 36:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Basically live on the US border.

• 36:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. Canada goes way out.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  It does.

• 36:44Ryan Holiday?

  And nobody's there.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Nobody's there.

• 36:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Canada and Australia are kind of like that.

• 36:49Speaker 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.

• 37:17Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 37:23Ryan Holiday?

  150 years ago, wouldn't have been the case. Like, I mean, there are parts of Texas here that less than 100 years ago didn't have electricity.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:31Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so to think about how, you know, in the big clock of all of human history.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:38Ryan Holiday?

  What a tiny sliver a lot of these things we take for granted actually are.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  120 years ago, Arizona wasn't a state.

• 37:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Very few people lived there.

• 37:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  A lot of native tribes. Things change and they're changing fast right now.

• 37:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  And it's gonna be a, you know, amazing thing to watch. You know, what happens in the next, you know, couple decades.

• 38:01Ryan Holiday?

  You, 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.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's kind of somewhere in the middle, probably, is the, the right view.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  I think there are a lot of people out there that are very anxious.

• 38:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  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 can 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.

• 38:35Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, often the same people.

• 38:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Crash the car, get back in, crash again.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, same, same guy.

• 38:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Put it on the tab.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:57Ryan Holiday?

  Put it on the grandkids tab.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Yep, 39 trillion, you know, and people don't seem to care that it could be 50 trillion.

• 39:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  In what decade, actually less than that? We got to address some of these problems in our country in a serious way.

• 39:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  You know, we have an election coming up, you know, my, my hope is people see that. And, um, you know, you got to, at some point, you got to take the keys away from grandpa.

• 39:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, it's, it's not fair. It, uh, it's a lot to put on a generation and yet there's no alternative. Do you know what I mean? Like, uh, ignoring it's not going to make it go away.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  No, we can't, um, 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.

• 39:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  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 that lost their job have the training and know about these other things that they could do?

• 40:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  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? We got to think about that. And then the energy demand is, is just skyrocketing right now.

• 40:16Ryan Holiday?

  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, 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 the country.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, right where I live.

• 40:42Ryan Holiday?

  Like, how close? 10 minutes?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I mean, well, 10 minutes, you're probably okay. If you're like, 2 minutes, are you gonna walk outside and there's gonna be like 60 decibels of noise?

• 40:53Ryan Holiday?

  Noise, light pollution, traffic, also just-

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Utility rates? Is your electric bill gonna double because of this data center?

• 41:02Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and then illustration of the other problem we have, it's like, hey, we're gonna build a housing development, and Amazon came in, bought out the housing development, and said, no, no, we're gonna put a data center. So it could have been 2,000 houses, which desperately need. Instead, it's gonna be this. And, and I remember going like, my first thought was like, well, obviously, I don't want this. I wanna get involved and not make it happen. And then going like, even if everyone around here doesn't want it, can the political system, can the representatives who are supposed to listen to the will of people, 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 our founders designed to be responsive to the people.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  To the people.

• 41:44Ryan Holiday?

  It isn't doing that, and then that energy has to find other places to go.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Well, in some cases, like in Arizona, we had the same issue happen. 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 to, you know, build there, and the, didn't get approved.

• 42:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Because the people didn't want it.

• 42:05Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  And if the people don't want it, it shouldn't go there.

• 42:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  They should find another place.

• 42:10Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Now, I'm trying to address that issue with, in 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 gonna, this technology's not gonna go away.

• 42:23Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  And we wanna be the leaders, we don't want the Chinese to be the leaders. There's an advantage to us as a nation, as a country, and all of us should be able to benefit. We don't want, like, the top 1% to be the people that benefit from this.

• 42:36Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  That has gone sideways on us too long. But, so we've gotta, you know, make, you know, smarter decisions here.

• 42:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  But, your community shouldn't get stuck with this data center if people don't want it. There is some place in the country that will be happy to- To have that data center.

• 42:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  They need to go there.

• 42:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, 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 don't 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. Their job isn't to care about people. Their job is to care about shareholder value.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  We're seeing that a lot at the federal level, too, not just here. I mean, I just got into it with the, 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 of miles away.

• 43:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  You could see the smelter from the elementary school. And the, there's technology available to clean the lead and arsenic out of the exhaust. And it was rather expensive and 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

• 44:40Speaker 01

  and arsenic didn't get put in. And then these kids have to, you know, breathe, breathe this in. Now I've, 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 Have an EPA that's trying to protect people's health. Not right now in this administration.

• 45:08Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  What comes first is profits and donations.

• 45:12Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  How many people have made donations to they've joined Mar-a-Lago? Or they bought into the meme coin or the stable coin? Or they made donations to MAGA Inc., the super PAC? 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.

• 45:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it feels like the opportunities for and then the examples of corruption are almost too staggering for people to wrap their heads around.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:45Ryan Holiday?

  It's interesting that that isn't a bigger story.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Think folks are just like overwhelmed.

• 45:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:03Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:12Ryan Holiday?

  Think we call that self-dealing? There's a word for that?

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's a word for it. There's a couple of words.

• 46:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  For that.

• 46:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:28Ryan Holiday?

  Doesn't want to steal too much.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's $30 billion from the taxpayer into his bank account.

• 46:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:41Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  And certainly this Department of Justice is just like, they just do what he wants.

• 46:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  At this point.

• 46:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I do think that was clearly the, 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 could not conceive of it.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Virtue, a little bit of wisdom.

• 47:04Ryan Holiday?

  Shame.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  A little bit of shame, a little bit of temperance. They assume those things.

• 47:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  They assumed most leaders would be like Marcus Aurelius.

• 47:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Or George Washington.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  But they did also in the Federalist Papers, but they also wrote about

• 47:25Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  the fear that at some point, somebody would come along and could just flip this whole thing upside down.

• 47:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  We have checks and balances. And I don't know if you saw King Charles's speech to the joint session of Congress a couple of weeks ago. So he gave this speech and he, it was a 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.

• 47:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  And I was shocked because everybody in the chamber was clapping.

• 47:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  And I'm thinking to myself.

• 48:01Ryan Holiday?

  You guys are the checks and balances.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Some of you guys over there are not doing the checks and balance part of the job.

• 48:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  I mean, we're trying, but we're in the minority.

• 48:11Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  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 gotta tell somebody when, you know, what they're doing doesn't make any sense. Or they're off track, or, you know, you, you just can't do this.

• 48:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Even if I agree with you on everything, that is illegal.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  That one thing, do not do that.

• 48:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, right.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  They're not doing a lot of that.

• 48:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  And it's really disturbing.

• 48:41Ryan Holiday?

  What is it? Is it a belief that someone else will do it? I was talking to Adam Kinzinger one time and he said, it's like Congress believes there's a super Congress.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Some people think we have like a giant button we can like press and stop things.

• 48:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  There's no button.

• 48:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  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 or Republican.

• 49:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Nobody has commanded that type of control over the base. And he is very willing and able to use that against anybody that he perceives as a political foe or enemy.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  I mean, he. Doing it to me. Yeah, sure. You know, 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 sued Pete Hegseth. So this, you know, 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 2 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.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  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. Yeah. 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. The country will have the same problems it has right now. It'll 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 or whatever. Yeah. I mean, it's not gonna, it's not gonna matter. So they shouldn't. And isn't that the point of the six-year term? Is that you have some job security? That's right. You have, yeah.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  You can make decisions based on, always make the decision based on what's right. Right. Which is what I always try to do. And I don't, you know, I never wanted this job anyway. I had a great job. And then 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 at a get out the vote rally. And she says, uh, she says, hey, my son has Down syndrome. And I'm terrified he's going to lose his health insurance. Would you please consider running for the US Senate? Without that conversation, I would not be in the Senate right now. And that was, that was November of 2018. So this was not something I ever wanted to do.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  And then I, you know, ran in 2020, ran again in 2022. And, you know, you know, here I am. You know, just trying to solve some of these problems that we have.

• 51:47Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it'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 healthcare. There's consequences for these decisions.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Consequences for going to war with Iran with no strategic goal, with no plan.

• 52:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  With no way to get it. Now, the president finds himself in a really tough spot.

• 52:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Trying to figure out how you get out of this. We have 13 dead Americans. We got other people who are 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? Didn't think the Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed. So, gas prices are really, really high. There was a woman that we helped her daughter get her healthcare 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 during all that Doge stuff. And got her back on what we call Medicaid in Arizona is called Access. Got her back on it. She sent me a text a couple of weeks ago.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:13Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  So, we're trying to figure out, you know, get her, get her some help here. But how many people across our country are experiencing the same thing?

• 53:22Ryan Holiday?

  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 there are sailors on those ships.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:30Ryan Holiday?

  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 or make a signal. I'm writing about Vietnam right now. Actually, I wanted to ask you about this because I feel like you're the perfect person to give me some insight on this. So, I'm writing about, doing a book on Admiral Stockdale.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Oh, who I knew.

• 53:50Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, well, now I have a million questions.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  I went on a trip with him to Switzerland once when I was a kid. Test pilot.

• 53:55Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  You know, he was part of the, uh, the S C T P, Society of Experimental Test Pilots.

• 54:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, right. Cause he, he, he went and taught at test pilot school.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, as I did.

• 54:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was an instructor there before I was an astronaut.

• 54:07Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'll tell you a funny story about him at test pilot school. Maybe you know, maybe you don't, but, um, so, so, you know, August 2nd, he's up on a crusader flight and gets flown over in South China Sea. Hey, one of our ships is being attacked. So he flies over there and he sees the P T boats. People don't think that, that the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin happened. The first day it did, there was a real, it wasn't a big attack, but there's an attack. And then he flies back, there's two days between, and then on the fourth.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  And he's the air wing commander at this point.

• 54:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And so then the, the second incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, they fly out there, there's nothing there. He, he says, we were shooting at ghosts or something like that. Right? There's nothing there. Um, and then, so he, he lands back later that night and that when he wakes up the next day, they go, hey, we're leading the, the strikes tomorrow, the, the reprisal strikes. And famously says, reprisal for what? Right? So he, so, so it's this complicated incident. I'm trying to wrap my head around both the mindset and the responsibility, the obligation. So he gets ordered to lead a strike, basically the beginning of the Vietnam war over, they're not illegal orders, because the president can give these orders.

• 55:16Ryan Holiday?

  But the pretext for them is he has some insight that they're fundamentally flawed.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:22Ryan Holiday?

  How do you think about a dilemma like that for someone in his position?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, for him, I mean, it becomes a bigger question that often a guy even in his role as an air wing commander, not up to him to decide what country we go to war against. And what country we don't.

• 55:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Right? The, the, the decision to use combat power to achieve some larger geopolitical outcome or purpose relies with the president.

• 55:53Ryan Holiday?

  It's a civilian decision.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  It's civilian, relies with the president. And, and, um, you know, that is, you know, struggle that I think, you know, people in Admiral Stockdale's.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  At this time, Captain Stockdale.

• 56:06Ryan Holiday?

  Commander, yeah, I think, yeah, maybe.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Could have been a commander, probably a captain. You know, has to, has to deal with. It's something we all have to deal with.

• 56:13Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Everybody who, you know, puts on the uniform and, you know, like me, I dropped bombs thirty, you know, something times. I flew thirty-nine combat missions. You know, I, you know, sunk ships. I, you know, bombed buildings and tanks and there's always like the, you know, the ethical struggle.

• 56:34Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Like, is this the, you know, right thing to do? That's different than the, the situation that myself and five of my colleagues were outlining.

• 56:45Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  To troops, sailors, you know, soldiers, Marines, that are obviously, you know, against the law. They're not the big like geopolitical, you know, questions about, you know, whether we take our country to war against another country.

• 57:24Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  And as an air wing commander, you know, he's out front in the first airplane. And he's got to motivate these guys. And often then he's going to have to explain this stuff and they're going to ask him questions. And it's his responsibility to.

• 57:45Ryan Holiday?

  Motivate and inspire them.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Inspire and get, you know, get behind, you know, the decisions that are made by our political leaders.

• 57:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  You know, that's, that's a different thing than the thing we were talking about.

• 57:57Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I know. It's, it's a, because I think people, your, your average civilian is probably thinking, well, if you don't agree, just don't, but that's not, the system would not work.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  It doesn't work.

• 58:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you don't, agreeing or not agreeing, that's not an option.

• 58:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  You've got a responsibility. When you swear an 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. The Mylai massacre.

• 58:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  You know, when a company commander, you know, tells his troops, we're going to kill everybody.

• 58:41Ryan Holiday?

  No mercy, no quarter.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Or no quarter.

• 58:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  What Pete Hegseth 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 US military, that means you, there are no prisoners. You kill prisoners. I gave him the opportunity to clarify what he meant. He refused to do that.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  So he's stuck with what he said originally, which was no quarter. That's not who we are as a nation. We've never been that way. We can't be the Russians.

• 59:24Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  You know, who are brutal and commit war crimes. But, you know, he decided to, you know, stick with that. So that's, that's a whole.

• 59:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Different problem. But no quarter would be an example of an illegal order.

• 59:40Ryan Holiday?

  We're going to destroy your entire civilization.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:43Ryan Holiday?

  Things like that.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  That is one too. And by the way, even saying a threat of a war crime.

• 59:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Is not allowed.

• 59:51Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Even the threat.

• 59:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  First of all, doing it is, is a war crime. You know, destroying an entire civilization would be a war crime genocide. Threatening genocide is also against the law.

• 1:00:07Ryan Holiday?

  If you have a large arsenal of nuclear weapons, you say, give me all your stuff or I'm going to drop nuclear weapons on you. 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, to do something illegal.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's also against the law.

• 1:00:22Ryan Holiday?

  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 and what he went through almost more. Inconceivable and superhuman, like the dark knights of the soul that he must have had, knowing that he is a sort of a pawn in this war that was, you know.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  And then as a senior officer, though, at the

• 1:01:06Ryan Holiday?

  You can't let any of that on. Yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  I mean, he did like, I mean, from what I understand about, you know, him as a POW. I mean, did a fantastic job of leading, you know, all these men from different services.

• 1:01:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  And took on that role.

• 1:01:21Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  You know, as a, as a senior captive there at the Hanoi Hilton, including the guy who I serve in his sentry, John McCain.

• 1:01:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Who probably was shot down, I don't know, a year and a half, a year and a half later.

• 1:01:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  But it was an interesting experience to spend. I've spent a couple of days with Admiral Stockdale and his wife in Switzerland.

• 1:01:44Ryan Holiday?

  Just two incredible people.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, he, he really was. Yeah. Great American.

• 1:01:48Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, one, one of the best.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  You're writing a book about him?

• 1:01:50Ryan Holiday?

  I'm doing a biography of Stockdale.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Including his time as the VP candidate for Russell.

• 1:01:56Ryan Holiday?

  I'm probably gonna fast forward at the end of that, but did you know he, um, at test pilot school, he, uh, he taught John Glenn.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I did not know that.

• 1:02:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, John, so.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Or maybe I did.

• 1:02:08Ryan Holiday?

  John Glenn was a much more experienced pilot because he'd flown in Korea in World War II. So he took Stockdale on his first cross-country night flight and then Stockdale taught him physics because he had a better engineering and math background.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Stockdale did.

• 1:02:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, Glenn was more of just your sort of.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:26Ryan Holiday?

  Natural pilot that to go to the next level had to kind of learn a bunch of stuff that he didn't know.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  I don't think John Glenn had a, like a degree in engineering.

• 1:02:34Ryan Holiday?

  No, didn't go to like a service academy or anything.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Not everybody, but most of the students at the US Navy Test Pilot School, you know, have a, at least a bachelor's degree in engineering or maybe physics, sometimes math. That's about how deep.

• 1:02:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  We, we go, at least when I was there.

• 1:02:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Not only a flight instructor, in my case, three different kinds of airplanes, teaching all different kinds of things, but actually in a classroom with a piece of chalk.

• 1:03:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  And I taught classes on like transonic flying qualities and aerodynamics. And you know, how airplanes, you know, flight control and performance in that region between about point nine and 1.1 Mach.

• 1:03:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  It's that little band where things change rapidly as you accelerate or decelerate through Mach one, through the speed of sound. It was a good experience to, 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 and the chalkboard.

• 1:03:50Ryan Holiday?

  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, that level.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of academics behind, especially being a test pilot.

• 1:04:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Fighter weapons school, little bit different. They're actually teaching people how to teach at the highest level of, you know, aerial combat.

• 1:04:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  The air to air portion of it, not what I used to do. I was the air to ground guy.

• 1:04:26Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  But at the two test pilot schools, the military ones here, it's a, you know, a lot of heavy academics, you know, physics, propulsion, engineering, aerodynamics, electronics, electronic warfare, radars, all that stuff.

• 1:04:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, all that woke stuff.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, all that woke stuff, all that science, that sciency stuff.

• 1:04:51Ryan Holiday?

  We don't need that.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Some people don't believe anymore.

• 1:04:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the thing about science is, science doesn't care if you don't believe in science. It's still there.

• 1:05:00Ryan Holiday?

  By the way, neither does history, right? Like you can, 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 and.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  But some people will try to change history.

• 1:05:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:05:27Ryan Holiday?

  Wild.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Ryan Holiday?

  You want to go next door? I've got some books for you.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.