“I Can’t Just Sit Back and Watch Anymore” | Astronaut Terry Virts on Courage, Ethics, & Politics (PT. 2)

In today’s Part 2 episode with astronaut and Senate candidate Terry Virts, Ryan and Terry talk about the difference between physical and moral courage, why so many leaders fail the test of honor, and what it truly means to serve your country. They discuss the hard truths about politics in Texas and refusing to stay silent when the stakes are highest. 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 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 by Terry Virts at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/📚 Books mentioned: The Second Mountain by David Brooks Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content coming soon: dailystoic.com/premium📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: 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, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My voice is a little sore, as I told you in the last episode, as I just finished several weeks of recording the audiobook of Wisdom Takes Work, which you can now preorder. Anywhere you preorder audiobooks, you can grab the bonuses at dailystoic.com/preorder, including signed pages from the recording of the audiobook, where I was still making last-minute notes, much to the chagrin of my publisher. It doesn't matter where you order it from, but you can claim those bonuses at dailystoic.com/preorder. But the Daily Stoic is the only place you can get the signed and numbered first editions of the book. All that at dailystoic.com/preorder. Anyways, I opened part one of this episode,

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  reading something from The Obstacle. But that is not the only time I have mentioned space in my books. 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. In 1971, the astronaut Edgar Mitchell was launched into space. From 239,000 miles up, he stared down at the tiny blue marble that is our planet and felt something wash over him. It was, he said later, "an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it."

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  So far away, the squabbles of Earth suddenly seemed petty. The differences between nations and races fell away. The false urgency of trivial problems disappeared. What was left was a sense of connectedness and compassion for everyone and everything. All Mitchell could think of when he looked at the planet from the quiet, weightless cabin of his spaceship was grabbing every selfish politician by the neck and pulling them up here to point and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch." Not that he was angry, on the contrary, he was the calmest and most serene he'd ever been. He wanted them, the leaders, the people who are supposed to work on behalf of their fellow citizens, to have the same realization he was having.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  The realization that we are all one, that we are all in this together, and that this fact is the only thing that truly matters. Now, I wanted to read that today because my guest is someone who has literally seen that view. You think about a handful of people who have ever actually seen Earth from space, who have gotten what Marcus Aurelius calls the bird's eye view, but from a distance that even gotten what Marcus Aurelius calls Plato's view, but from a view that Plato couldn't have imagined. You know, Marcus Aurelius talks about looking up at the stars and seeing yourself running with them. My guest today, Terry Virts, has done literally just that.

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  I was reading the New York Times back in June and I saw this headline, "Former Astronaut Launches Texas Senate Run by Hitting Both Parties." I've never had an astronaut on the podcast, let alone running for Senate, so I was very excited to invite Terry to come to Bastrop. He joined the air. Force at 17 and became an F-16 fighter pilot and test pilot. He flew combat missions over Iraq, tested the world's fastest jets, commanded the International Space Station. His military decorations include the NASA Space Flight Medal, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Air Medal, the Aerial Achievement Medal, the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, the Air Force Commendation Medal, and on and on and on. He retired from NASA in August 2016.

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  And let's go briefly back to the idea of what Edgar Mitchell is talking about, right? He's looking at Earth and becoming intensely dissatisfied with the dysfunction and the selfishness and the myopia of the politicians of the world. And now he's saying this in 1971, but arguably it's gotten worse and nowhere is it worse than Texas, right? I mean, one of our senators is Ted Cruz, one of the worst senators that there is, maybe one of the worst that there has ever been, not just an unlikable person, but I would argue a treasonous individual who has done absolutely nothing for this state.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  In fact, most famously runs away from this state when we need him most. As you know, I was in Greece this summer on vacation with my family because I'm not a US senator and Ted Cruz was there at the same time. Actually, we, he were at the Acropolis one day after another, but Ted Cruz hopped on that plane after the terrible floods killed all those people here in Texas. So it's been a long time since Texas had great senatorial leadership. And I think Terry is awesome. I'm glad he is running. And there's a couple of books I've been recommending a lot at the bookstore. Rutger Bregman, a guest on the podcast recently, his book Moral Ambition, then The Second Mountain by David Brooks.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  These are about how, after you've succeeded in life, how do you give back? What do you do with your energy, your ambition, your time, your energy? What do you direct your career at? And this is exactly what Terry Virts has done. In today's episode, we dive more into his decision to run for Senate, why the military needs ethics, why he thinks the Democratic Party needs as much reform as the Republican Party, and why moral courage is harder than physical courage. We have not been served well by our politicians here in Texas, and I think Terry is a fresh voice, certainly someone who's put his money where his mouth is, been of service to his country, put his ass on the line for it. He's not going to run away when there's a ice storm or a flood.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  And he's going to be there helping people as he has done all of his careers. He knows what it means to be a leader, knows what it means to be a person of integrity. He is not a bootlicking little bitch like Ted Cruz, nor is he a corrupt, philanderer, liar, alleged criminal like Ken Paxton, who's also running for Senate in Texas. He's a great dude and you can check out more about his campaign, www.terryvirts.com. You can follow him on Instagram at AstroTerry. I can't wait for you to listen to it. And a lot of philosophical themes. I was really inspired to talk to him and to meet him, and I hope you like it. Enjoy.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  Let me through how someone can be brave under fire.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  Or can go into space and take all those risks. And then they're like, I don't know, someone might say some mean tweets about me if I disagree with this. Or I might have a tougher reelection bid if I say something about it.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  This is what makes my head explode. There's some, look, some people are just a hardcore crazy MAGA person. I can actually respect them. They at least believe what they believe. There's a lot of folks right here in the great state of Texas that I might or might not be running against that know the right thing. They know the thing that they should do, and yet they still choose to do the other thing.

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Because they put party and self over country. And that's unacceptable. That's just completely unacceptable. If you really believe something, good. I can, AOC, I can respect her. I don't agree with her policies, but she is who she is. I respect that. But the people who know better and don't do it. And I think the fear of getting shot is one thing. A lot of people can't get over that. Some people can face that. But the fear of getting ostracized, maybe that's a, I don't know where the Maslow's hierarchy fear is in your brain, but. People do not like to get ostracized. If you quit your religion, you know, you get, or if you're at West Point, the, for the honor code at West Point back in the 1800s, you would get silenced. So if you cheated on a test or something, your entire, nobody

• 8:46Speaker 01

  would talk to you for four years and very few young men could handle that.

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  See, you'd think physical courage would be harder than moral courage.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think it is.

• 8:54Ryan Holiday?

  I don't think so either.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  No. A lot of guys, I boxed when I was a cadet. A lot of guys can jump in and getting hit is not fun, but getting ostracized or being talked bad about is, man, people don't like that.

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, and you can always, I think you can always rationalize that I'm not actually being cowardly here. I'm not actually defunct to duty. I'm saving myself for some future conflict.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Right. This isn't great, but we have, we need, our party needs to stay and I'll, I'll do some other good. And that's a slippery slope.

• 9:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  It's not even slippery. It's like ice, ice covered steel, 90 degree slope. But you know, once you go down that path.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  It's an insidious lie.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Like, look, and there, there are some people who you want to still be there at the last possible moment to be like, no, no, this is, this is the hardest of the hard red lines and I gotta stop you.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Mike Pence?

• 9:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. But you, you are lying to yourself when you tell yourself you're that person.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  Right? And that's what Seneca was doing. Seneca was saying, hey, you know, if I don't speak up, if I don't condemn, if I don't stop Nero from killing his mother, you know? He kept saying, you know, if I get involved now, I'll be replaced by someone worse and things will be really bad. But you stay and you stay and you stay, and it gets bad anyway. Right? And you are not the indispensable man who needs to compromise every principle to stay in power. Like, and by the way, if everyone thinks that, then we're all just watching passively. We're all passengers to go to your metaphor as the ship's going down and any one of us could grab the wheel and maybe do something.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  The bridge is out, the train is headed towards the bridge that's out and somebody needs to stop the train.

• 10:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  It feels like everybody's just riding along on the train right now.

• 10:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, I remember I was talking to Kinzinger about this and he said, because it's been my experience talking to a number of elected representatives is, is they'll passively talk to you about it, too. They're like, somebody should do something. And it's like, you're one of 500. You're one of 100. And Kinzinger was saying, it's like, people in Congress think there's a super Congress.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:06Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, there's somebody else. This is literally what you were elected to do.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  The impeachment. Okay, we saw what happened on January 6. Clearly, that's wrong. It shouldn't happen. And so many Republicans, we have former Navy SEAL here in Texas, voted that that's okay, rationalizing somehow that, well, you know, and now here we are, right? Like, you have to do the right thing when it's time to do the right thing.

• 11:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  If you don't, you might not have that opportunity again.

• 11:32Ryan Holiday?

  But I think what people tell themselves, and maybe you could, you could relate to this, as someone who wanted to do something so badly, right? It's like, my, my whole dream is to be, I don't know, Chairman of the Federal Reserve. My whole dream is to be the head of the CIA. Like, you tell yourself, hey, I've been working my whole life to get this thing. And not only if I speak up, so it's these two competing things. It's like, if I speak up, I'm out.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:00Ryan Holiday?

  And then also, if I get on board, maybe it actually gets me where I want to go faster. So it's the, it's the fear of losing the thing that you crave desperately that makes you compromise on your principle. And then also the temptation of, of a shot at the thing, which maybe, deep down, you understand you're actually not qualified for, like, I don't know, who's ever in charge of the FBI right now or something, right? It's, it's a fast track for a thing that, under ordinary circumstances, you'd have had no shot in hell at. And so that's the wicked sort of carrot and the stick that, that gets people in line with something that, under ordinary circumstances, they'd see quite clearly.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  But there's a lot of movies about that. What was the John Grisham novel, The Firm? This is a tales old time, is going back to Seneca, where people compromise themselves to get the thing they want. It never works out. How many people in Magaland, everything Trump touches dies. And I hate to make this too political. But how many people have been, how did it work out for Mike Pence?

• 12:56Ryan Holiday?

  How did it work out for Elon Musk?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  You know, Elon Musk, Nikki Haley, and is Marco Rubio ever, can he even talk to his dad at Thanksgiving? Like the, to compromise and sell your soul like that?

• 13:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  It doesn't work out in the long run.

• 13:09Ryan Holiday?

  It does not, but the temptation is always there.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And it always will. In the year 2500, whoever's sitting at this podcast table, they're going to be talking about the, whatever events of the day, you know, people are going to be tempted to sell out.

• 13:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  To get the thing they want. And that when they finally get it, it's not going to be what they thought it would be. And it'll be short-lived.

• 13:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  And then when it, and then when it ends, you know, you're going to have to live with.

• 13:34Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so how, so I imagine that they talked to you about this when you were at the academy.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:39Ryan Holiday?

  Like this is the timeless thing for, for officers. It's the timeless thing for, for anyone in a position of leadership. But it's only really in the academy where they're, where they're explicitly training you for command and leadership.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  It was awesome. I mean, I had never been exposed to that. I never talked about ethics or any of that stuff. And um, my kids went to civilian college and they never, right? They, they don't, this is all foreign to them.

• 14:05Ryan Holiday?

  The academies and sports are kind of the only two places that really build character in that way. And then in sports, there's obviously just the raging hypocrisy on top of it, you know?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but at least there's like accountability and discipline and working hard and whatever. So there, I think sports are great, but.

• 14:24Ryan Holiday?

  I just mean at the collegiate level, like the, the coach tells a nice story about, you know, character and selflessness and whatever, and they're the highest paid employee of the state.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  I know, I know. I used to love college sports and it's just hard with uh, looking at their payroll and yeah, but uh,

• 14:39Ryan Holiday?

  They're stealing signs.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  We would, at the Air Force Academy, we had something called M, whatever. It was like a daily ethics class. And we would go through um, situations like cadets won't lie, cheat or steal. I think most people know that's the anarcho. We also had something that was called a toleration clause or tolerate anyone who does. And they added that on and that's a tough one.

• 15:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Like it's one thing to not lie, cheat or steal. It's another thing to turn your buddy in for.

• 15:04Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  And I went to the French Air Force Academy.

• 15:06Ryan Holiday?

  Loyalties there.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  I went to the French Air Force Academy for exchange and they would never in a zillion years ever consider about, consider turning their classmate in. It was like, it was them against the academy.

• 15:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  And actually, that was kind of good in some ways, but the toleration clause is important because we see that in our government now.

• 15:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  How many people who know better tolerate really bad things in this government? And that's, you know what? We had four years to talk about it.

• 15:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  And when the freshmen come in, they're going to make mistakes. You don't expect the freshman to be perfect. By the time you're a senior, you're expected to be perfect and because you're about to be an officer and um, that time of talking and not everything's black and white.

• 15:45Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  And I came away from my space flights thinking like, I used to be a very black and white guy when I was younger and now I kind of see things. There are things that are black and white. There is right and wrong, but there's a lot of gray areas in life in general, so. But it was important to have four years to talk about that and you had, you could talk about it with senior officers and they'd go, hey, this happened and that happened and, most people don't get that. So that was an experience I I treasured. I wish more kids had that.

• 16:11Ryan Holiday?

  Well, then and now people wrestle with like, what is this? Aren't we just supposed to make them like big and strong and fast?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Lethal.

• 16:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, lethal. They gotta be a warfighter. Well, first off, you know, the F-16 is doing most of the work, you know? Like, what you want is the brain inside and and you want the person who's able to think about, you know, where this bomb is going and why is it going there and and all of that? And so I was telling you about the book I'm working on. I'm working on a book about Stockdale right now.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 16:41Ryan Holiday?

  And you think about, he says, you know, we're basically dropped in this hellhole. We have to, the orders, he says, were were laughably insufficient, you know, name, rank, serial number.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:51Ryan Holiday?

  That's something that someone in in Washington came up with.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  That ruins a lot of men, unfortunately.

• 16:57Ryan Holiday?

  And so he's like, we had to come up with a civilization, a code, a system, that was both ethical and practical, given the realities of our situation. And and so it's precisely these kinds of vexing dilemmas that people are. Find themselves in. And again, most of them are not combat related. I think I had Alexander Vindman on the podcast. You go, you think about here, here's a person trained in this same system. And then he hears something that he, again, you can disagree with whether what happened was right or wrong. But what matters is that he, it raised concerns for him. And do you want a military officer who then has civilian sort of adjacent roles or political

• 17:41Ryan Holiday?

  role? Do you want them to experience something that's profoundly unnerving and then go, well, that's what's going on? Or do you want them just to be guided by their conscience? That's exactly what you want to build in if you see the services as the training grounds for, you know, generations of leaders in civil, in business and politics in communities.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  When you don't have that, you have My Lai. Or unfortunately, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are multiple bad things that went badly. My Lai was a massacre in Vietnam that got covered up. So, and I kind of laugh. A lot of people are like, well, I have my gun. So I'm that, that's what keeps us free in America. I'm like, dude, you have an AR-15? They have F-15s. Yes. Like, your gun's not going to win against the army. So you want the military to have ethics. Yes. You need those leaders to be doing the right thing. And right now, we're just taking a sledgehammer to the foundation. Every day, that sledgehammer is hitting the brick. And the good news is, we have a really strong foundation. Yes. But it won't last forever. So we need to stop hitting it with a sledgehammer and start to rebuild it, I think.

• 18:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. You, you don't want people who are just following orders. You want people who are able to parse and understand orders. And then you want that because that is also a check on the people giving the orders.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  You want people loyal to the Constitution?

• 18:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And not one man?

• 19:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  I have friends who got, went through the Doge process, and they had this horrendous 20 minute loyalty test. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election? Will you support this? And it was like humiliating loyalty tests. And unfortunately, there's thousands of senior government workers who all passed that loyalty test. And that's terrifying.

• 19:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And you are ejecting people who, who failed said loyalty test, but are hyper competent individuals who, again, these are the things we learned the hard way. We learned how dysfunctional and inefficient a political administrative state was.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I saw that in space. Flying over the Korean Peninsula.

• 19:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  You see South Korea at nighttime, lights, beautiful, bright, vibrant, democracy, capitalists. North Korea is a black hole.

• 19:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  There's a little white dot where Pyongyang, you can see a system where everybody salutes the dear leader and there's no ethics and you can see a system where there's competition and you know.

• 20:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  I could see what you, exactly what you just said, I could see from space.

• 20:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you talked about Russia and Ukraine. You, if you have a military that is based on telling the leader what they want to hear.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:25Ryan Holiday?

  You get what was clearly, again, the rightness or wrongness of it, clearly a false picture presented to Vladimir Putin on how the invasion would go, right? So just from a tactical and strategic standpoint.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:41Ryan Holiday?

  A government that cannot tell its leaders the truth for fear of their personal safety.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:47Ryan Holiday?

  Right? It's going to go amazing. We have the best military in the world. It's full of neo Nazis over there. Then, then.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  They'll fold in three days.

• 20:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, then you bump into reality.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:58Ryan Holiday?

  And that is, we've had that at different points in American history too. Nobody told the American president the truth in Vietnam. And the American president didn't want to hear the truth in Vietnam also.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:11Ryan Holiday?

  And, and that's why we ended up where we ended up. And we fed, you know, a generation of young men into a meat grinder for basically no reason.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  I, when I was a cadet, I struggled with Vietnam so much because I was like, what would I do?

• 21:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  And my, I would serve my country, but I would hate it. I would have been, I would have tried to, you know, stop it. Did you see Ken Burns Vietnam?

• 21:32Ryan Holiday?

  I've interviewed him too.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  God, that's amazing.

• 21:34Ryan Holiday?

  He's the best.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  I'm so jealous.

• 21:35Ryan Holiday?

  We're also both not allowed to speak at the Naval Academy. Both of us had our invitations rescinded.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Because of recent thing. My commander on my first space shuttle flight was a Navy grad and I was Air Force. We were always, and I went back to Bancroft Hall at the Naval Academy and I got a standing ovation. It was so cool. I was there, I was at Naval Academy two days ago, having crab cakes on the Severn River. I was at a family funeral, but anyway.

• 21:57Ryan Holiday?

  Not so good.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. In Vietnam, Ken Burns Vietnam documentary, amazing documentary. He had, he had audio from Truman, from Truman through Nixon. And every single president was like, yeah, this is going badly, but we're gonna have to pretend it's going well. Like every single president, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, they all lied about Vietnam.

• 22:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, you go to the idea of moral, physical courage. Part of the reason they didn't want to drop out or withdraw is they didn't want to take, be accused.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  They didn't want to be the one, yeah.

• 22:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. So they did the, for fear of looking cowardly, they did the cowardly thing. And then they forced other people to go do incredibly brave, terrifying, dangerous.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  So profound, for fear of looking cowardly, they did the cowardly thing. That was profound. I was in McDonald's, I posted about this, I was in McDonald's, my Saturday morning tradition, getting a Mcgriddle. And there was a Vietnam guy sitting there by himself. So we were talking with him and he just started talking and talking and about all his experience. And then another Vietnam, you know, these guys who are there, Vietnam, and I always thank them. Cause my uncle made a point and he was there and he called himself a draft dodger. He joined the Air Force. So that was his way of dodging the draft. So he didn't have to go in the Army. And he was traumatized until the day he died, getting, he was on an Air Force base, but they got shelled. So the men that went to Vietnam went through a lot and then they got back and they got treated like dirt.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  And it wasn't their fault that the president sucked at the time.

• 23:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  So we need, if you see a Vietnam vet, tell them thank you. And I introduced these two guys to McDonald's and they were like, oh, 66. And I was there for Tet and it was awesome to see this camaraderie.

• 23:35Ryan Holiday?

  H R McMaster in his book on Vietnam, which is fascinating. He says, the interesting thing about it is like, a lot of the generals thought we weren't being tough enough in Vietnam. And then others came to think that we, it was unwinnable and we needed to withdraw. And he said, but the remarkable thing is not a single member of the Joint Chiefs throughout the entire conflict resigned in protest. Exactly the same dilemma we're talking about. One of them was asked, you know, why didn't you resign? And he said, well, if I resigned, it would have been a news story for three days. And then I just would have been another ex-soldier. And yet, if everyone thinks that way, what happens is you are continuing to rubber stamp

• 24:17Ryan Holiday?

  and approve something that you are in a lone, you amongst a few others are in a position to influence the course of.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  So I think we've, what we've determined, Ryan, is that people will always do this. Very, very few people will stand up and do the right thing with moral courage. And most people will go along with it and save their bacon. I just read a great book about Churchill, The Splendid and the Vile.

• 24:43Ryan Holiday?

  Ooh.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Amazing book. Amazing book. You know, and Americans think, well, we won World War II, we'll always do the right thing. It was our manifest destiny. God, God had to, no, we got lucky. Had a lot of things not happened, we would have lost World War II. We had Father Coughlin. We had fascists in America, we had the Nazi thing at Madison Square Garden. We were not preordained to win that thing. Until on December 6, 1941, most Americans didn't want to get, we were happy to let England, you know, get smashed. It was like a Christmas story where the kids out there and all the other kids just run away. They're not willing to help out their buddy. That's just human nature. So we, I think we need.

• 25:21Ryan Holiday?

  It was the moral courage of a handful of individuals that started the stampede that eventually led to the right thing.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  FDR knew the right thing and he was just trying to hang on because most of Congress didn't, and he, he knew the right thing. And anyway, it's just some, we need to be aware of that. And I don't, I don't know what the answer is.

• 25:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  But one of these days, we're going to go down the wrong path and it's not going to be recoverable.

• 25:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  You know, so we need, we need to try and avoid that.

• 25:47Ryan Holiday?

  There's serious consequence, I think this isn't pretend. This, just because a lot of this plays out on the internet or on cable news shows, doesn't mean that it doesn't have real consequences.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:59Ryan Holiday?

  Like, a bunch of kids are dead because people decided to treat the federal government like a distressed company you could raid and sell off.

• 26:10Ryan Holiday?

  Off the parts, right? Or that it was an internet startup that you could move fast and break things. You broke something and

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Millions of lives.

• 26:20Ryan Holiday?

  And, and, and, and those are just the tangible ones that happened right now. You are, you're gutting our public health. You are making us unprepared for disasters. You are all these things that we take for granted. And the federal government is not perfect and America is not perfect. But it is the result of a lot of hard won battles and decisions. Most of them learned from painful trial and error. And you are, you're fucking with the inheritance of my children and generations of children.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Right. In the air force, we have a lot of rules and we would always say those rules were written in blood. Right. Somebody would die and then we would have a new rule, like don't fly under bridges or whatever.

• 27:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Somebody didn't label a gun properly and someone got shot or an explosive went out, that all these things, these safety. It's like that, that famous picture of the plane where with all the bullet holes in it, you know? Like all the things, these are all the things we've learned under fire and conflict and doing it the wrong way.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so we have a president who is forcing loyalty to himself. He's making press submit. When you make the press submit, that's really bad. He's making universities submit. He's making the military submit. He's making the legal community. When you don't have lawyers, there's no more law.

• 27:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Right? You can't have these people submitting, all those people should be challenging the president and he's forcing them to submit. And guess what? They submit. Tim Cook's at the White House kissing the ring.

• 27:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Who's going to stand up? And if nobody stands up to that, we're going down a really bad path. I read the book, it can't happen here, written in 1936.

• 27:58Ryan Holiday?

  Look, a, a great leader doesn't need submit. They need a certain amount of buy-in from the majority of people, but they actually welcome dissent and they can handle it. You know, like I'm not threatened by immigrants or women or minority groups because I know I'm, I'm good at what I do. Right? I welcome competition. And so There's something inherently weak and insecure about this sort of exclusionary, roll up the ladder, you know, how dare you criticize me? How dare you give me negative information like, wow, you can't handle it?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  As a fighter pilot, the whining and the grievances, oh, my God, that would, that would last about five seconds in a fighter squad. Like you can't whine about stuff.

• 28:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Or you don't have grievance or you get kicked out of the door. So, yeah, it's a, it's a bad situation.

• 28:51Ryan Holiday?

  So talk to me about the decision to run for Senate because I imagine you could have a much easier life as a consultant for a defense contractor, or you could sit on a board, or you could, you could probably run for some much less contentious offices locally. You could do any, no one's making you do this.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  I lost a bet in a bar. This is my joke. Um, you know, the last few cycles I've supported other candidates. I don't have a lot of social media, whatever, you know, if you have a few hundred thousand. And I got to the point where I just couldn't sit by and watch this happen. I see the bridges out.

• 29:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  And I see the trains going full speed ahead towards the bridge that's out. And, uh, there's a, you know, verse to those who much has been given, much will be expected. And I've been given a lot. This country has given me a lot. I feel like I have a unique experience. There's not a lot of folks of my experience between business as a small business owner and the energy industry and being a fighter pilot and astronaut. It's a pretty different thing. And I think in a state like Texas, that resume will play. Most people are not political nerds. Most people are not obsessing over the New York Times and Politico every day. Most people look at a candidate and they're like, I like that guy, or I don't like that gal or whatever.

• 30:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  So I think my background will play well in a state like Texas. And I think that we have a lot of great candidates, but I don't think they're going to win in a state like Texas. And if I thought there were, I would just go support them and live the good life that I used to have. But I just didn't see that. So I said, I'm not going to sit around and do nothing. I'm at least going to try. And people say mean things about me and that's fine.

• 30:23Ryan Holiday?

  I, I love Texas. I live here voluntarily. My, I had family here a couple of generations ago, but like I had no ties here. We, my wife and I moved here. I raised my kids here. I live in this small town instead of a big city. I love the people I know. I love my neighbors.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  You got Whataburger.

• 30:39Ryan Holiday?

  You got a Whataburger. I have trouble wrapping my head around how it's even a conversation that we might elect. A literal crook.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 30:52Ryan Holiday?

  Who not just cheats on his wife, but humiliates his wife, forces his wife to sit through his own impeachment trial.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:02Ryan Holiday?

  For the cover up he engaged in, where he somehow managed to not just be a criminal, but also be unfaithful to his wife and merge the two together. This is what he gets impeached for. And it's like, he's a viable candidate. I mean, he's currently holding one of the most important law enforcement offices in this state, but he's a viable candidate for the US Senate. How do we live in this upside down world in Texas? I don't get it.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  I think he's gonna win the nomination. Ken Paxton is gonna be there. John Cornyn is not gonna win that nomination. Here's the problem, and I'm running as a Democrat, and I'm a Democrat. People know how bad Trump is. They know he's a liar. They know he's full of BS. And yet they still trusted him more than they trusted Democrats.

• 31:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  The Democratic Party told America that Joe Biden's not too old. Back in 2016, when he left as vice president, I remember I saw him and I was like, ooh. I'm glad he's like, it's time for Joe to be done. That was in 2016. But we told America he's not too old. We put Kamala, we just hand, we parachuted her in without a primary, and we lectured everybody about democracy. We said, don't worry about if you're against illegal immigration, you're a racist. I've been talking to voters all across Texas. I'm going down to the valley tomorrow. And the Hispanic community on the valley hates illegal immigration, not because they're racist, but because they want people to follow the rules. We told people the economy's fine, the stock market's up. Well, half of Americans don't even own one share of stock, right?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  So people trusted the known liar more than they trusted the Democratic Party. And we need to be honest about that. Trump's underwater on every issue right now. People don't, even on immigration and the economy, they don't like Donald Trump. And on every issue, they like Democrats even less. So we need to be honest about that. We need to have a debrief. What I've been in a fighter squadron or as an astronaut, we have a debrief after a thing.

• 32:51Ryan Holiday?

  What went wrong?

• 32:52Speaker 01

  In the 24 election, what debrief have you seen? What national leaders have you seen? Chuck Schumer is still leading our party.

• 32:58Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  I'll say it right now. Chuck Schumer needs to go.

• 33:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, that that goes to our conversation about being a man or woman of honor. When you shit the bed.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:07Ryan Holiday?

  Or when things go bad on your watch. We have lost the ability. We've lost the cultural expectation that you resign in shame when you fuck up. Not that you need to be driven from public life forever.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:19Ryan Holiday?

  You should be, you should be humiliated and sent into exile, but you should go. I guess I messed up. I'm sorry.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we have messed up like. And unless, look, you go to war with the army you have. And the army we have is two party system. We have Democrats or Republicans. So either you vote Republican or Democrat. And today, it's not Mitt Romney, George H. W. Bush Republican Party. That party is dead. It is, it's a disaster. It's a path to fascism. So you either vote for that or you vote for the Democratic Party and they're a train wreck too. And so what I'm, what I'm hoping to do is bring some Renaissance to the Democratic Party, some.

• 33:54Ryan Holiday?

  What do you think about this? So I live on, I live on a ranch out here. I live on a dirt road.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:58Ryan Holiday?

  So if the road was 60 feet wide, it could be taken over by the county and the county have to take care of it. Very deliberately, someone set it up as 50 feet.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:05Ryan Holiday?

  So it'll never be taken over the county.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:07Ryan Holiday?

  And so it means it's, it's all of our responsibility and that we have no, none of our neighbors will come together and form an HOA. So it's a voluntary.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  It's very Texas.

• 34:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and it's, it's wonderful and terrible.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:20Ryan Holiday?

  Right? There's like a hippie commune on my, on this long street. There's ranchers, there's a bunch of people living in trailers. There's people with Trump flags, all very different political beliefs.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Sounds like Austin.

• 34:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, but we come together and we have to take care of this road. We volunteer and contribute.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:37Ryan Holiday?

  Each, I saw one of my neighbors out there with a tractor like three days ago, right? I think about this guy who's out there fixing it with his tractor voluntarily doing, solving a collective action problem on his own, right? He drives that tractor back to his house with a Trump flag in front of it. And I sometimes go, if Trump or Paxton or Ted Cruz lived on this street. Do you think they would be contributing? Do you think they'd be a good neighbor? And so that's something I've always just struggled with is like, you see these people who, who on a personal level have these values and live their life by a certain code. And yet, time and time again, they support and forgive

• 35:21Ryan Holiday?

  people who, who not just don't live by that code, but make a mockery of that code.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  They're actively evil in some cases.

• 35:30Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, we know what Ted Cruz does when there's a problem. If he gets on the first flight and goes as far away as possible. I mean, that's what, to me, is so interesting about the Ted Cruz thing. It's not just that he got on a flight when his fellow Texans were freezing. I actually don't need him there handing out water. He probably is unpleasant to be around and not very helpful. It's that he didn't even, for all his years in Washington, he didn't even think, there's probably some people I can call. Like, he didn't, he, he, he doesn't even know how the levers of power work to get anything done.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  So here's the really terrible thing. A couple of months ago, Ted Cruz is the most hated guy. Al Franken.

• 36:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Has the funniest thing. He's like, you know, when I was a senator, I liked Ted Cruz more than most of my fellow senators. And that's saying a lot because I hated Ted Cruz. So Democrat just lost Ted Cruz by almost 10 points. And he's running again.

• 36:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  A couple of months later. Like, guys, we need to win because there's a threat to the republic.

• 36:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  And we need to win and we need to get better. Like, what works in a liberal district here in Austin is not going to work statewide. This is Texas.

• 36:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  What works in the liberal congressional district in Dallas is not going to work statewide. And we have to figure out, we have to be open and honest and say, what's going to win? It's, it's going to be some type of common sense. It's not going to be the traditional old school Democratic Party. Texans have voted, it's been over 30 years since a Democrat won. 30 years.

• 36:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, any statewide office.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  And Richard, I joke, do you remember the Texas land commissioner back in 1994? And people are like, huh? I'm like, yeah, that's the last time a guy won in Texas.

• 37:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Pearl Jam was at the top of the charts. We need to get better because we need to win. The redistricting.

• 37:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  The guys went, and I'm glad these guys were willing to put themselves at risk. And it's cost them money and their families and inconvenience. And I'm glad, I'm glad that there were people willing to do it. To leave, to break quorum, leave and stop the redistricting. Two weeks later, they're back.

• 37:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  And the redistricting is going to happen.

• 37:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  And they're claiming that's a victory.

• 37:26Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  What the hell kind of victory is that?

• 37:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  It delayed it by two weeks and now Gavin Newsom's gonna fight fire with fire and I'm glad Gavin Newsom's gonna fight fire with fire. So now there'll be California voters disenfranchised, just like there's Texas voters. It's like when I was an F-16 pilot, I had the nuke, I was nuclear certified. And I knew if the Russians dropped a nuke on us, they might call me up and ask me to go drop a nuke on that. I was, I trained for that.

• 37:50Ryan Holiday?

  By the way, this is why they train in ethics and

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:53Ryan Holiday?

  Because of the, the weight of the decisions that you

• 37:56Speaker 01

  It was nuclear, I literally had a B-61 dial a disaster, we called it. You could go, you could select the yield. Anyway, retaliating is not a victory. There's no victory in nuclear. It's a mutually assured destruction. You have to do it. Of course you're gonna do it, but there's no victory in that. So what we just did for, we, it was two weeks of performance.

• 38:15Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, and it's always on the

• 38:16Speaker 01

  It was performance.

• 38:16Ryan Holiday?

  It's always on the defensive, right?

• 38:18Speaker 01

  The way to win is to win elections. The way to actually have a victory for Democrats is to actually win an election. We haven't done that for 30 years. So we need to stop having performative politics and actually win elections.

• 38:32Ryan Holiday?

  No, and it's this idea that like, I don't know, I've, I've driven all over the state. You drive through some swaths of Texas and you're like, this is big enough for all of us, man. Like, like we should be inclusive, we should be welcoming. This could be one of the great, I mean, it already is, but I mean, you just, you think of the potential of this place.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:54Ryan Holiday?

  And then you have the people who are currently in charge on this sort of exclusionary, backwards facing, you know, agenda. And it's like, what are, why don't we just talk about all the awesome shit we can do? Let's do some awesome shit.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  You know, I think most Texans are like that.

• 39:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  The problem is we have partisan primaries.

• 39:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  So I, one of the things I want to do is have a democratic reform. We need some serious on a lot of different things. But when you have a partisan primary, the MAGA extremists are gonna let Ken Paxton. And by the way, John Cornyn's no better. The voting record is gonna be exactly the same. Ken Paxton is a lot more prickly and he's took the corruption and Cornyn's a nice grandfather. He's gonna vote the exact way.

• 39:32Ryan Holiday?

  Not a degenerate felon.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  He is not, but he also just said, we're gonna send the FBI to get these guys. And he posted a picture of himself reading Art of the Deal and he's a The problem with Cornyn is, going back an hour, he knows better.

• 39:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  And he still does what's wrong. Ken Paxton is just bad.

• 39:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  John Cornyn knows what's right and wrong, and he chooses actively to not do what's right. That's the problem with Cornyn. So Paxton's going to the primary. And then what I'm, what I hope doesn't happen, what the message I'm trying to do. But Democrats, they might nominate somebody that makes them feel good in the primary and makes them feel sad in November. And what we need to do is nominate somebody who's going to make us feel good in November when we're in the general election.

• 40:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  But the partisan primary system is one of our many problems in this country. We need to.

• 40:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's basically like 3% of the population picks the representative of the whole state.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  And if you're gerrymandered, literally, the other party has nothing to say about it. Because gerrymandering works. Like, it's, it's a really smart way to do things if you want to just have raw power. It works.

• 40:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so slightly positive, more positive as we wrap up. All right, so when you were a kid, kids wanted to be astronauts.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:55Ryan Holiday?

  When I was a kid, kids wanted to be astronauts. My kids want to be YouTubers. How do we build a society in a world where our kids want to do that kind of stuff again?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Part of the problem is, you know, video games and AI and stuff, you can actually see everything, you know, that you can experience things online. It's like you don't have to do them in real life. I'd rather do things in real life than online. A friend of mine raised two teenagers without devices or anything. And you can do that for eight-year-olds, but man, by the time you're in high school.

• 41:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's hard.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  And they made it a deal, like, you'll get a car, you'll get this and that. But they literally, and these kids, I sat down for lunch and they like, they looked at me. And they had a conversation about meaningful adult things while looking at me for an entire lunch. And it was like, oh, my God, you you you raise these kids. Great. I've done a lot of speaking on all seven continents, and I was in Vienna a few years ago. I was in the hall where Beethoven first played his Ninth Symphony. It was like, it was cool. It was amazing. And this thing hit me, so I wrote a I I used to have a blog and I called it the end of genius. Because back then, if you wanted to know some knowledge, you'd have to come and get a book and read about it. And you'd have to actively study. And and now everything's so instant that we don't have to go through the same disciplines

• 42:15Speaker 01

  that people used to do. I don't want to go back to back then. I think you're a lot better. But but there were still some there's some benefits for sitting down, doing some research and writing and thinking as you write an argument on a piece of paper. And with AI, kids don't have to think anymore. I think that's gonna if we think our brains are fried now, just wait till an entire generation grows up without ever having to think and be critical thinking.

• 42:38Ryan Holiday?

  Anything what AI is going to do, an AI world is going to demand from from people is the ability to think critically, because even the best models like hallucinate like 20% of the time. So if you don't know how to people are people who can't separate fact from fiction, misinformation from real information, you know, truth from fantasy. We're already struggling in a society that has trouble doing that.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:03Ryan Holiday?

  If you can't go, no, that doesn't sound right. I don't think that's true. That doesn't make sense. The only way you can get anything good out of AI is if you can engage with it and you have a base of knowledge to bring to it to to even to ask it to do the right things. So again, it comes back to that broad liberal arts education that your kids are gonna need.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Critical thinking. If I was king, every kid would graduate from high school with a class on critical thinking and ethics. Yeah.

• 43:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And so Texas has decided to respond to this existential threat by gutting its public schools.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Here's another thing we need to do is get money out of politics, because Greg Abbott has a mega billionaire.

• 43:38Ryan Holiday?

  It's like one dude decided that.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  He gave him like $10 million or some huge number. 1% of Texans thought that for those who don't know, we're talking about vouchers. They thought that vouchers were important. My kids went to private. School through elementary school. It was great. I paid for it out of my salary. And then they went to public school. And here we are because one man gave millions and millions and millions of dollars. Dan Patrick forces it through the Senate and Senator Paxton, Angela Paxton voted for it.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  And here we are, where the public school is going to get hurt and private schools are going to get built up. And that pub, like I'm a fan, I'm a product of public school.

• 44:16Ryan Holiday?

  Me too.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  It's a huge, hugely important thing. It's what gives kids opportunity.

• 44:21Ryan Holiday?

  Especially in these small towns in Texas.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  They're the ones going to be hurt the worst.

• 44:24Ryan Holiday?

  I know.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  And the, look, there are some really nice, great private schools that are incredible. There's a lot of them that are not incredible and those kids who go to those are not going to be learning any critical thinking. They're going to be taught a very narrow and inaccurate, you know.

• 44:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Information. And so.

• 44:42Ryan Holiday?

  No, no. And it's like, wait, I know $10 million sounds like a lot of money.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:47Ryan Holiday?

  And it is, but it's like, wait, you sold out.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Billions.

• 44:51Ryan Holiday?

  An entire state.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:53Ryan Holiday?

  You know, of millions and millions of people and a, in an education budget of billions. For what? Again, this goes back to, are you or are you not a person of honor? Is this what the people want? Or is this what somebody who has leverage over you wants?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:08Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what Texas politics is, is primarily that these days, unfortunately.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Well, that's the genius of our founding fathers. They gave us this system that had checks and balances.

• 45:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  And we need to make sure that that's strong because there's always going to be people who do the wrong thing. There's always going to be people who don't have honor. So we need to strengthen our checks and balances and our press and those institutions. So there's hope. We just need to get back to doing that and also teaching kids critical thinking. Like you said, that's, that is the most important skill for the future. Most kids aren't going to have it.

• 45:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  I mean, so we need to, that, that's an educational emergency, I think.

• 45:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And I mean, my kids use devices. They, they, they explore these things. They play with AI. But it's like, how do you make them, how do you make them excited to do real things? And there was a New York Times piece that was, it was like the US, a nation of lawyers goes to war with China, a nation of engineers, like we're, we're really good at fighting and arguing over things.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:05Ryan Holiday?

  But what we need to be is that country that sent people to the moon.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Built things.

• 46:09Ryan Holiday?

  Built stuff.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:10Ryan Holiday?

  And, and there is this sort of. You want people who want to do cool stuff in real life.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of that happens in school. You know, when I was in school, reading is what did it for me. The first book I read was as a little kid, I read one of those cardboard books about Apollo. And that's what I was like, oh, this would be cool. I want to be an astronaut. I read the right stuff as a teenager, like reading is what did it for me. I used to read about, I used to read science fiction. I used to read about mountain climbing and, you know, I like adventure. I hated, hated English class, like the all those book, English books, I hated. I was a terrible student and now I'm an author. I've written several books.

• 46:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  But it's about things that I like. So my advice to any parents is man, get your kids reading. Let them read stuff that they like and that they'll enjoy. And there's nothing better, I don't think, that you can do for a kid than reading.

• 46:55Ryan Holiday?

  What I try to do is take that energy.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:57Ryan Holiday?

  That's like, yeah, I want to watch YouTube videos.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:00Ryan Holiday?

  And we watch videos about places and things. And then we go do those places and things.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:06Ryan Holiday?

  You know what I mean?

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:08Ryan Holiday?

  And then whenever my kids want to do stuff in real life, I try to go, am I like on Sunday night? It's like five in the afternoon and my son goes, can we go to Barton Springs? It's like an hour drive from my house. And I wanted to be like, no, you know? And I had to be like, wait, no, I want a kid that likes the outdoors.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:28Ryan Holiday?

  That, that when they have that sense of adventure, there's a voice inside them that says, yes, do it, not don't do it. And here I'm at a crossroad. I can say no and instill the, no, it's too hard. No, it'll take too long. No, it's too cold, whatever. Now I gotta say yes.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Barton Springs is awesome. I used to, I took my kids there when they were little.

• 47:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  The, the, there's some rivers there and there's a golf court, a great golf course.

• 47:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, a little golf course.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:51Ryan Holiday?

  But, but again, also it's like all the things that people love about Texas, not all, but a good chunk of the things that people love about Texas were built by the government they love to shit all over. Do you know what I mean? Like, well.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  The Johnson Space Center.

• 48:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the, the state parks are all built by the WVA. You know, Barton Springs is a crown jewel run by the city of Austin, you know? But, you know, but people just don't think about where these things that they love come from.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:20Ryan Holiday?

  Like they were trying to build a trash. Transfer facility. It was Austin so big. I live out here. They're trying to build like a a transfer facility. Where they're just, you know, they they just take the trash from one city and put it in a smaller city with less power, you know? And I, so we went to this sort of meeting where we're all talking about it and, you know, what's it called? It's the T E Q, whatever, the Texas Environmental Quality, so whatever. Well, the the Environmental Agency that that would be able to be like, hey, actually, trying to build this next to a creek, bad idea. And then, you know, it was interesting to watch these people get upset that this agency was toothless to protect them. And it's like,

• 49:03Ryan Holiday?

  yes, right? All the things that you you want, you think you don't want this thing until you want it.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  How about the floods?

• 49:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, exactly.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  The guy at the National Weather Service, whose job was to warn people was took the early out that Elon Musk gave him. And now we're shutting down weather research and they don't have, I just spent, I went to Ukraine a few times last year, delivering ambulances on humanitarian. Those alarms are, they're, you know, the air raid alarms, they're going off every night. In the worst flooding zone in in the world, they don't have those alarm systems here in Texas for a million bucks.

• 49:39Ryan Holiday?

  The federal government offered them one.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  No, we don't want, the federal government's evil. We better not take money for an alarm system. So, do I love the government? No. Is the government bloated? Does it need to be? Of course it does. I spent 30 years at NASA and the Air Force. We used to joke that NASA puts the no in innovation, like the, of course, it's bureaucracy. Of course, it needs to be better. But it does some pretty important things.

• 50:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  It does some, like, you know what? I didn't have to worry about polio. Thank God, we have vaccines.

• 50:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  My parents had to worry about that. Their their classmates died from polio.

• 50:11Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know if you've flown into Austin recently, but it's one of the worst airports in the country right now because it is, usually has about 50% of the air traffic controllers it's supposed to have.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Yes. So government is important. Driving on the roads or doing road construction, schools. There's a lot of things that the government does. So they're not all evil. Should it be more efficient? Yes. Should we? Destroy it. And I think at the end of the day, that's what's happening right now.

• 50:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  They're trying, because if you destroy government, who's going to stop the AI companies from

• 50:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  growing and taking over the world? If you're going to destroy government, the IRS, who's going to check up to make sure the rich people are paying their taxes? That's a genius thing for billionaires is to kill the IRS, which they've done very effectively. So

• 50:57Speaker 01

  the problem is, Ryan, most, if you're listening to Fox News and Newsmax and those podcasts, you don't ever hear this.

• 51:03Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  All you hear is about how evil they are and they're going to turn your kids trans. And they're going to put chips in your vaccine. That's all you hear. And that's, so how do we break in?

• 51:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, you're outraged about these other things that are egregious or weird or uncomfortable. It is weird why, you know, I don't know, why was there that weird drag thing at the Olympics?

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:26Ryan Holiday?

  But, but that's not what you should be worried about, right? That's like, so, so we have a media system that's really good at taking fringe things.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:38Ryan Holiday?

  And making people deeply uncomfortable with them where, wow, meanwhile, things that are not weird, but will keep you up. Every time I get on a plane, I have to think, oh, man, like, are there enough air traffic controllers?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:53Ryan Holiday?

  I speak all over the country. So I used to be able to do a lot of, you know, if it's at three in the afternoon, I can leave my house in the morning, get on the airplane, you know, on a Southwest flight, do the thing, fly home that night, see my kids the next morning, right? And, and now it's like, three hour delays are so common.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:11Ryan Holiday?

  More common than they were in the 50s because we fucked up the FAA. Those are the things people should be outraged and upset about. We should, we should ask ourselves why, yeah, other countries without a fraction of the economy, we have, have things like paid leave and have things like.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Family leave. There's one of my, that's something I want to implement. Of course, you should have family leave when you have a baby. When I had my first kid, I was at test pilot school. We literally had him induced on Friday night so I could be back at work on Monday.

• 52:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And by the way, you know who has great schools, great. Benefits, all that stuff, the military.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:46Ryan Holiday?

  You know what I mean? That like it is capable.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  The government can do things right.

• 52:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, when it is a priority and when the people in the system demand that they get those things, they tend to get those things.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Look, government's not the answer to everything and I'm a big private sector fan, but you need to have a functioning, well-run government. And what's happening now is they're destroying it.

• 53:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  And the, and the people they're putting in are sycophants. They're having to pass this egregious loyalty test. People are afraid to do things. My, my neighbor has a, a child in the FBI. And, uh, oh my God, it's bad. It's really bad, the stuff that they're having to do. They were working in political corruption in Florida.

• 53:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  That division got shut down.

• 53:32Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Actually, they were investigating a Democrat.

• 53:35Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Not anymore. That's shut down. No more investigating political corruptions. They got sent to pull immigrants off the street as a like train FBI is not. We have a massive secret police. If ICE budget were a military, I think it'd be the 16th largest military on earth.

• 53:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  It's insane. It can't happen here.

• 53:53Ryan Holiday?

  Again, I live out in the country. There's a lot of different people from a lot of different places.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:58Ryan Holiday?

  And I go, you know, like I was driving down eight, 12, which is this little sort of farm to market road. And this is maybe five or six years ago and, uh, this car kind of swerves and it flips. So me and another guy, we rush out to the car. We break the window. We pull the guy out. He's sort of shaking. He's standing there and then like I see him text something on his phone. And, um, then a few minutes later, another car picks up, pulls up, the car gets in and drives away. And I realized, oh, this guy can't wait around for the police or the paramedics.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:31Ryan Holiday?

  Right? And, you know, some people might take the moral of that story as we have, you know, whatever. To me, the moral of the story is you want to stop people at the border, but once they're here, you want them to be. Not afraid of law enforcement.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:45Ryan Holiday?

  You want them to be functioning members of society.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:47Ryan Holiday?

  You want them, when they see a fire, to call 911.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:51Ryan Holiday?

  You want them, when they get in a car accident, to wait for police. You want...

• 54:55Speaker 01

  When they're being, when they're being beaten by their husband or boyfriend.

• 54:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  And that's in Houston. That's has, unfortunately, there's been some stories where women are getting killed.

• 55:03Ryan Holiday?

  Or if their neighbor is dealing drugs.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:05Ryan Holiday?

  You want them to call the police. You, you, you do not want law enforcement to become politicized because it makes everyone less safe.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  You don't want a mask either.

• 55:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  What the heck is up with Matt? If you're in North Dakota and it's January, all right, wear a mask. But if, you know, unless there's some tactical reason you have to wear a mask, which there almost never is. Get the masks off, man. This is America. I, I was in Moscow in 2012. I was training for a flight and, uh, I was wandering around and there was a giant mob. So I was like, this is weird. There's not usually mobs. So I went over, of course, I should have left, but I went to it. It was Alexei Navalny. He was having a, it was like Beto. He was the Beto of Russia. Yeah. And, um, because Putin was coming back. Remember he did that switch? He switched president and vice president, basically with Dmitry Medvedev. And, um, they, Russians were actually protesting in 2012. That ended, but, uh, the police there were masks.

• 55:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Um, they don't have name tags. So that's what we have here now.

• 56:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  I saw it with my own eyes in Russia and yet that's what we have here now. So that, there's a lot of things that need to change, but that's one of them.

• 56:10Ryan Holiday?

  No, it can't happen here and it is happening here.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  It is hap, it's present tense.

• 56:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  So let's, I think your listeners probably understand that and they're hopefully willing to do, to do things about it.

• 56:21Ryan Holiday?

  All right. You want to go check out some books? I'll show you.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  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.