Pablo Torre Finds Out - Mission, Possible: The Otherworldly Optimism of Senator Mark Kelly

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

He was an astronaut. Then his wife, Rep. Gabby Giffords, survived an act of political gun violence. Now, he's a U.S. Senator tinkering his way around the "stupid sh*t" inside Washington's machine. Can Mark Kelly convince his colleagues to look past corporate money in order to save lives? And could Charlie Kirk's killing lead to progress? Also: twins with mustaches, a first date on death row, an accidental Obama nickname... and the correct pronunciation of acetaminophen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. If you're a child in the United States, the most likely reason you are going to lose your life is you're going to get shot. Right after this ad. The podcast is largely going to be Senator Mark Kelly watching us try to fix a chair. Fixed. There it is. Amazing. Are we rolling? Can we just make sure?

Yep, very good. Awesome. Let's keep the chair engineering part in. Help them with that side. All right. Be comfortable. This side. Yeah, I got it. There's just a little bit.

There it is. It just look like shit. I just like how I'm advising the astronaut. Look, your headsets a bit off. Your headsets just. I don't know if you've been familiar with how to wear this complicated engineering. I've warned a lot of complicated engineering. Put my phone on airplane mode.

Let me do that too. Camera there. there, but just look at me and we have multiple angles and we'll clean up as we need to. I always like doing these with the headsets on and the audio sounds good. I agree. You brought a notebook. I did, but I'm not going to use it. I just had it. You're just peacocking with your... I just, you know, I'll fidget with a pen maybe. I don't need it. Well, I was going to ask, I've had people in this chair who are notebook people. Is that something that you use to organize your thoughts?

It is a psychological crutch, Senator. Why do you carry that around? Sometimes I don't take a lot of notes, but I do in meetings and stuff that I could later, you know, go to my staff and say, hey, we need to do, you know, these few things. It also sometimes helps me pay attention. Yeah. You know, and I'm trying to take, you know, notes in, like, long, if you got a lot, a lot of meetings, long day.

And I have a bunch of them. Like, I have a stack of them now from being in this job. for five years about that, you know, about like a foot and a half high. How many, how many of those are just doodles? I don't have many doodles in here, but I do have, I do have sometimes, like, quotes,

like people say stupid things. Yeah, I want that. I want Mark Kelly's log of stupid shit people have said to him. Stupid shit, like, you know, people in the Senate sometimes say. You know, I got in here, like, talk to our governor about a road

that needs to be open, like up by the Grand Canyon, would be an example of like, these businesses are struggling. Right. Because of the fire on the North Rim. And I talked to these business owners and about talking to like, you know, the governor about some of these issues. The degree of just like stuff that your brain needs to manage in your capacity now is Senator.

And by the way, I'm going to call you Senator, not captive. Call me anything. All right. Mark. That's fine. That's the thing about this job that, I mean, I obviously expected it. But in my previous jobs, whether, you know, if I'm flying airplanes in the Navy off of an aircraft carrier, right, I got basically one thing I need to know how to do well. And then later as a test pilot, bigger world of aerospace engineering and evaluation of airplanes and, you know, understanding a lot of technical stuff.

And then as an astronaut, you know, science engineering, the operation of a very complex machine. But then you get to the Senate. And it's like every issue that you could possibly face in the world is part of your job. A complex machine of a different kind. It's like all the machines. It's like all the things, all the issues, all the time now. It's like anybody can ask you a question about any issue at any time. Right. That's why I consider it very dangerous for you to be here. You're an authority, allegedly, on so many things, and I could ask you anything. And the first question, and I have for you, where the fuck did your mustache go?

That's a good question. You used to have a mustache. I had one for a long time. You know, it's in the Navy. As a pilot in the Navy, that's kind of what you do, right? You get them, you're in your 20s, in your flying cool airplanes,

and then everybody gets a mustache. So I got the mustache, my brother got the mustache. And then in 1996, we both were selected to be astronauts. So now we're working in the same office with all these people at NASA, and we're identical twins. I was going to say, it's very funny and confusing to imagine Scott Kelly, Captain Scott Kelly, and Captain Mark Kelly.

And they look the same. Twins. Yeah. So the problem that that presented was every day at work. And we lived this as kids, but then we kind of separated for a while. And then we're back together. We're at NASA, at the Johnson Space Center in the astronaut office. and every single day

somebody would call me Scott and somebody would call him Mark and you'd have to correct him and it gets really annoying so my brother eventually said well the hell with this shaved off his mustache to differentiate ourselves

so we didn't have to deal with that anymore and that went on from about 1997 to after I left NASA but then when my brother was getting ready to go into space for a year in 2016 I was like now's my opportunity here and I was actually trying to mess with people because so on the day he went to launch I shaved my mustache off so people would think that maybe that was me that went into space for a year and then he stayed on earth

so that was the moment on his launch date for a year in space in 2016 I shaved by and off. And I was like, eh, I'll just leave it. Well, just to clarify, though, basically what you're saying is your brother went to space, left the earth in your care, and you decided to immediately just start pranking. That was the goal, but nobody fell for it. You're growing up, identical twins. Your parents did what? They were both police officers in New Jersey. Right.

30 minutes from here, West Orange. West Orange, okay. So West Orange's finest are trying to solve. one of their great... Thomas Edison had his factory in Westard, so don't get... Hey. About the finest thing.

As someone who is born and raised and remains forever, a New York elitist, I can only look down my nose at the struggle that your parents had in discerning you and your brother, which is which. I was the original, and my brother was the cheap copy six minutes later. Yeah, many are saying. That's what they say. Now, the whole notion of, hey, you've done this in the time that you guys almost freaky Fridayed, the International Space Station. Right.

Your brother thinks what of your station in life? What does he think of you being in politics? What does he think of you being this guy now? I never asked him. I think he's glad I'm in this job. and I think he believes that I bring a certain kind of thought process to the, to government that not everybody has. Not many engineers. I was going to ask.

And like the Senate out of 100 people, I think there are three engineers, me, have a master's degree in aeronautical engineering, undergrad in marine engineering, which is like power plant engineering. Alex Padilla has a bachelor's degree, I think, in aeronautical engineering. and Martin Heinrich, who is a mechanical engineer. That's it, as far as I know. It feels like in your notebook there's a list of people who know what the fuck science is, and it's not a very long list. Not a long list. In Congress that makes these decisions that impact every single American's life.

There have been a number of times where I've listened to some of my colleagues, and I'm like, man, you guys, you have no idea what's going on with this. You don't know what you're talking about. That's happened. I'm not going to tell you who. Yeah. No, I was going to say, I've been hearing people try to pronounce acetametaphon this week,

and I'm like, I don't know if this is going to go great. First, effective immediately, the FDA will be notifying physicians at the use of, well, let's see how we say that. Acetaminopin. Acetaminopin. Is that okay? which is basically commonly known as Tylenol during pregnancy can be associated with a very increased risk of autism.

Donald Trump finds out is a very different podcast. It is full of revelations every single day. I think you either believe in science and you listen to scientists and you rely on solid scientific research. You shouldn't really pick and choose, and you shouldn't go with your feelings. I think the president said, well, I feel like this is like the right thing to do. That's not the answer. The MMR, I think, should be taken separately.

This is based on what I feel. Science doesn't care if you don't believe in science. It's still a real thing, right? So it's good to put, you know, good researchers on problems, you know, look at things for an extended period of time, have a big cohort that is part of your experiment and then follow the data. I've seen from this administration, they don't really care about the science and the data. And that's dangerous. I think that's going to hurt some people, especially with things like vaccines. Well, I think that the scientific method, a big part of it in my understanding is that when you don't like the data, you just fire the person who collects the data.

And you hire somebody who's not a scientist. to run our entire health system. No, not a medical doctor, not a scientist. Let's just get like a guy. A nation of guys. That's what it says. I believe in our constitution. How did you and your wife, representative of Gabby Giffords,

how did you guys meet? We met on a trip to China about 20 years ago, 22 years ago, something like that. It was like a young leader's forum, a bunch of people from the United States, a bunch from China. And the whole idea is find some mid-career people. On our side, it was some folks in government or the military, folks from business, the arts.

Guy named Damien Wetzel, who runs Juilliard, who was a ballet dancer, was part of our group. Architect that I was out to dinner with last night, Greg Pascorelli, who runs an architecture firm called Shop. But this was over 20 years ago. She was a state senator. astronaut and then similar people on the Chinese side and it's kind of trying to build some you know relationships and in the in the movie of your meet cute is it electric i mean it was actually the second trip a year later that gabby asked me to go on a date she asked you she asked me on a date what's up with that captain our first date was the florence state prison

death row she said she needed somebody to come with her kind of halfway between Tucson and Phoenix and I and and she said nobody really wants to go with me to visit death row and I'm like I'm in sounds cool so that was our that was our first date did you know it was a date I did not I found out later she she didn't tell me that until later she had she had an angle So I'm getting a very sharp picture of what your dynamic is like already. I have her as the person who is frankly taking a leadership role, and you are a coward so far in the story. She was the one who wanted to get to know each other a little bit better and no better place, right, than a prison. I mean, you guys presumably you stay in touch, you go on actual dates that are mutually disclosed.

We did. Yeah, like we went to dinner that night, and then, you know, and then after that, it was, I'd wound up seeing her every couple weeks for a while. And then I would say probably six months in, it was like kind of a real relationship. Right. I mean, just for those who are unfamiliar with Gabby Giffords and her political trajectory. Right. This is a supernova in American politics. Not just the Democrats, but the independents, the Republicans, the Greens, the Libertarians and the Beavirons.

My fiancé, Mark Kelly, my parents. Yeah, there was a magazine. And there was a, she had this whole page talking about her. She ran her family's tire and automotive business. She was in the state house. Now she's in the state Senate. Maybe someday she'll run for Congress. And in the corner, in the lower left or right corner,

there was another little article about a state senator from, Illinois, Barack Obama, on the same page. But like the smaller real estate. The smaller. Oh, yeah. He got the little corner. She got the whole page. Also receiving votes.

Yes. She got the whole page. He got the little corner. And so the date for people who don't know was January 8th, 2011. And you, that day, were where doing what? I was in Houston, Texas. It was a Saturday morning. I was training for what was going to be my fourth space shuttle mission.

My second mission is the commander. It was also going to be the last flight of space shuttle endeavor, which is a pretty big deal to get picked for one of the last shuttle flights. You know, it's kind of sad that space shuttle is going to be retired. You know, it's an incredible vehicle. I mean, there's never been anything like it. So it was a Saturday morning. I was at home with my kids, Claudia and Claire. And I was talking to Claudia about something, some dude.

And I get a call from Gabby's chief of staff. And I pick up the phone and she says, Mark, I don't know how to tell you this, but Gabby's been shot. Updating our top story now, a gunman shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several others today at an outdoor event in Tucson, Arizona. Congresswoman Giffords is a Democrat just beginning her third term in the house. She is 40 years old and the wife of astronaut Mark Kelly. And the immediate thing that goes through my head is, okay, what do we do now? She's probably like shot in the arm or the shoulder or something was what was running through my mind. She didn't have much information. We hung up. I put the phone down.

at a pool table in the house. I remember putting it on the pool table. And then a few minutes later, I thought to myself, did I really just get that call? And I walked back over and I pick up the phone to see that I had this incoming call. I was like, this is like crazy.

And then either she called me back or I called her back. It's disputed. After all these years, I'm not sure. But then when I spoke to her again, a few minutes later, she says, okay, she's been shot in the head. And that is really like the gut punch,

much more significant. Now you know at that moment that both of our lives have changed forever. I called us for assistance. I'm assuming they're quite 10-6 at this point. We've been informed Gabriel Giffords is involved. Multiple parties out on the sidewalk. I believe I'm here in county rolling up right now.

And then I have to figure out how am I going to get to Tucson in a hurry, had a friend with a private airplane, so we get eventually like an hour later I'm on his airplane. And the airplane had TV on it, we're flying to Tucson. And then CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, all pronounce are dead. Hello, I'm Martin Savage, CNN Center in Atlanta. We are following breaking news coming out of Tucson, Arizona. Jamie, have one very reliable source on Capitol Hill

confirming that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has died. I just, I mean, it is just so devastating. Like, your world is just crumbled. And I go into the bathroom. My kids say that's the first time they've ever seen me, like, really shaken and broken up. And I got up and walked into the bathroom. And then 30 minutes later. Is anybody injured?

Did you say Gabrielle Gifford was hit? She's hit. Okay. She's breathing. She was breathing. They say, nope, made a mistake. She's still alive. Can you explain what it feels like to be told via every national news network

that your wife has been killed only to then discover? Yeah, you don't know, right? And you're still stuck on an airplane. You've got an hour of flight. You've got to land. You've got to get there. And it wasn't until I got into the hospital, into the room with a trauma surgeon, a guy named Peter Reeves.

former Navy trauma surgeon, but he said something like, I'm not going to allow her to die. He's that kind of doctor? That's what I would like. That's what you like. My spouse's doctor to tell me. Yeah. And what happened to Charlie Kirk brought me back to that day. And I just, I mean, I really feel for Erica Kirk and how horrible this has been for her.

And what that felt like for me on January 2011, what she went through now. in our case gabby survived i mean these kids gonna spend their whole lives they wouldn't even they're so young they're probably not even to have memories of their dad i mean how awful is that yeah and charlie kirk and i didn't agree on hardly anything he was a constituent he was a constituent yep and i would and we've got i would help him as a constituent and and um but politically we're like on different islands but one thing I did agree with was his right to be there talking about issues that he cared about, I would fight. I'd go to war to defend his right to do that. And you lived your life in the service of that very, I would say, increasingly endangered premise as well.

The thing that your wife was doing, by the way, for those who aren't familiar with just what she was up to. She was speaking to her constituents. A series of meetings called Congress on Your Corner. Standing outside of a safe way where people would line up to talk to her. Kind of similar to what Charlie Kirk was doing, smaller scale, but she was a member of Congress and just talking to people individually about what do they care about and what problems do they have that she can help solve. She'd have staff members there to support, you know, this event. vent and get people's information. And yeah, it's all, you know, it's about freedom of speech and listening to your constituents.

Yes, being accessible as a person working in American politics in the way that American politics was ultimately, I thought, designed to enable. And just the details on this, I mean, it was a point blank range. Oh, about this distance. Yeah. This table, you and me, above her left eye, six people were killed by the gun. including a U.S. District Court judge, the gunman used a semi-automatic pistol with a 33-round magazine. Yeah, Glock. Same exact gun I flew in combat with. Glock 9mm, but a high-capacity magazine. So the gun with the magazine, it looks like a oozy because the magazine sticks out the bottom of the pistol grip.

And had Gabi or Gabrielle, I guess? Yeah, I used to call her Gabrielle. The way that changed was... As many of you are aware, earlier today, a number of people were shot in Tucson, Arizona. That day, President Obama goes to the podium in the White House. Gabby Giffords was... And says, Gabby Giffords. He starts to say Gabrielle, he stops halfway and says, Gabby Giffords. And after that, everybody called her Gabby.

So even I changed eventually. So what you're saying is that the dude with the inset on the National Journal page changed her name. changed her name. Changed the name of the person with the big spread. Yes. Before that, I think the only, her mom and dad called her Gabby

and their sister. Yeah, but almost everybody else called her Gabrielle. Like on her signs, it was Gabrielle Gaffords or staff and even me. Well, the question of like how one and how one's identities reoriented after something like this, the name being just one, of course,

feature of the evolution here. But truly, like, the question of had this been contemplated, this possibility, an attempted political assassination, had she thought about that prior to it happening? She was worried about it. There was an incident where a guy shows up at one of her events and rather agitated. Gun falls out of his waistband and falls on the floor. He was not intending to do anything.

but it was rather startling that this guy brought a gun to her events. So she was starting to get worried. There were threats. This was also at a time where there were, like, heightened political tensions and we were divided. It was 2011, more than halfway through the first Obama administration. We had the financial crisis in, like, 2008, we're kind of on the tail end of that. But we were rather divided. politically. It's gotten worse since then. And I think Gabby was the first, as far as we could tell,

the first female politician in our country that somebody tried to assassinate, like somebody in Congress. And it got a lot of, you know, a lot of attention. And six people died, including a nine-year-old girl, Christina Taylor Green, who was born on 9-11, 2001. She would have been 24. years old this this month and had like very high-minded ideas about service and democracy and just wanted to meet her congresswoman right the type of it was just there to talk to gabby yes we want them to care we want them to show up but i'll tell you what a good thing would be is to get people off the phones you know doing the politics on social media the way you know it's just like a lot of bias, you get fed your own opinion, you don't really see the other side, and it seems like

the algorithms just push us further and further away. No question. No question. So it'd be better to do it in person. I do want to get to the premise of your wife survives. And the brain surgery, the piece of the skull, could you just explain? Yeah, so she got shot right above her eye, left side, affects her right side of her body, so she's paralyzed. She can't really move her arm. She can move her right leg a little bit. She's got vision issues to the right. She still has like seven bullet fragments, you know, in her head.

And they had to, because about the size of my hand, you know, the skull was damaged enough that they eventually had to replace it with a prosthetic skull. They did that, by the way, while I was in space on the space shuttle. Of course. She had to have her final brain started. On the day, actually literally at the time I was rendezvousing with the International Space Station, and as a commander of the space shuttle, you have to fly the space shuttle manually to the space station. You got to get in front of it, and then you've got to fly it within a couple inches of the space station, the accuracy.

And you're both going at 17,500 miles an hour around the Earth. So that surgery happened while I was doing your own. surgery that yes and then she was in the hospital for six months going through you know this extensive rehab she still does rehab today yeah 14 years later speech therapy and physical therapy and because you don't ever fully recover from that kind of injury most people don't survive I mean thank god she survived oh it's shocking to go and for me to again I was aware of this generally but not specifically researching this and now I'm looking at what she had to overcome and it is insane. It's kind of nuts.

It's almostically. Yeah. No. Yeah. I mean, 90% of people that have that kind of injury and 95% die and most don't recover to a point where you can have a decent quality of life and work and accomplish things. Right. But she did because she's tough. I mean, she doesn't, she does not.

quit she is not a quitter she doesn't give up she doesn't think a lot about what happened it's not not a lot of like poor me you know this horrible thing happened to me she's like okay this is the situation she is a public servant at the highest level it's one of it's actually good for me you know she understands how hard this job is serving in congress being in the u.s senate and i've got like the most supportive spouse i think of any member of congress and it's because she's done the job. So she knows what it's like. I was looking at the timeline to that point. And, I mean, it was less than two years after she gets shot in the head. And it's December 12th, 2012. It's Newtown, Connecticut. And of course, what we know is seared into our brains, if you pay

any degree of attention, it's 20 children between six and seven, six educators, the shooter's mother, the shooter himself, all of these people die. are killed. It's just over a year after Gabby Gabriel gets shot, she gives a speech. And I want to play that speech and watch it together because I hadn't seen this before. For Democrats and Republicans, speaking is difficult, but I need to say something important. Violence is a big problem. Too many children are dying. Too many children.

We must do something. It will be hard. But the time is now. You must act. Be bold. Be courageous. Americans are counting on you. Thank you.

She can deliver the goods. I mean, powerful. This is now the mission. This is the defining mission of your household. Yeah, mine and hers at the time. I mean, right after that, well, I think we already started an organization to focus on this issue of gun violence. Makes our country stand out in the worst of waste.

No other developed country has this problem. England, France, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, none. It is uniquely an American problem. And I am a supporter of the Second Amendment. I mean, I have firearms. People have the right to defend themselves and our families. And if you want to have, now anyway, if you want to have a gun for hunting or target practice, if you're a responsible person, you should be able to own a firearm.

Yes. But if you're a felon, If you're a domestic abuser, if you're dangerously mentally ill, of course you shouldn't have a gun and it shouldn't be easy for you to get one. But the laws in our country make it easy for those people to get a gun. If you can't pass the background check, go to the gun show where you don't have to do a background check or just buy one from somebody you meet on the street. No background check required. These are ridiculous laws we have in this country. and that's what that was about.

Yes. To try to convince that that was the Senate Judiciary Committee. Some of my colleagues today were in that meeting. I testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I'm probably one of the few people in the Senate that actually testified in front of the Senate as well. We aren't here as victims. We're speaking to you today as Americans.

We're a lot like many of our fellow citizens following this debate about gun violence. were moderates. Gabby was a Republican long before she was a Democrat. We're both gun owners, and we take that right and the responsibilities that come with it very seriously. And we watch with horror when the news breaks to yet another tragic shooting. And we got close.

We got some Republicans to vote on this mansion to me background check bill to require background checks before you buy a gun. We also had some Democrats voted against it. Yeah. Still pissed off at those people. Yeah. They're in that notebook too, I bet. Not this one.

It's an old one. We got close. We did not get it across the finish line. But Gabby and I started an organization called Giffords and have been doing this as a mission for over a decade now and have made a lot of progress in states, like 750 pieces of legislation passed in over 30 states. And this is her mission clearly for like the rest of her life. She wants to save the lives of kids. Used to be in our country that, especially teenagers,

the most likely reason they would die would be a car accident. Well, cars got safer and we changed laws and that has gone gradually down. gun violence has gone up. Now the most likely reason, if you're a teenager in the United States or a kid, actually if you're a child in the United States, the most likely reason you are going to lose your life is you're going to get shot. But then universal background checks, as you alluded to, failed. Assault weapons ban, failed. High capacity magazine ban. Failed. And federally. Federally. Yeah. federally. Among the people who were there to listen and take stock of yet the latest tragedy that instructs them as to why this need not be a left or right thing.

And it brings you invariably to 2020. We're going to skip over yet more mass shootings, get more deaths, but to get to 2020, and it turns out that you're going to run for office. And that's why tonight it's not about celebrating. Tonight is about getting to work. Now, some of you watching tonight did not vote for me. And that's okay. I'm going to be your senator too.

Yeah, I didn't want to. I would have much preferred Gabby being in the Senate and she would have been. And it would not have ever been a thing that I would have done. But it wasn't because of this issue that I did this. You know, it's part of it. And it's a problem I would. really, really like to solve. I'll put it way at the top of the list. And I know how to solve it. It's less about the specific laws around firearms. It's about campaign finance reform.

Yes. That's how you fix this. Oh, the whole notion. You fix that system. Special interests. Yeah. Special interests of ruin in this country. Why isn't that more obvious to Americans that this is a problem that is being exacerbated and funded by corporations. Whether it's the oil, oil industry, the gun industry, we have a just a system of injecting massive amounts of money into our political system to fund campaigns. Some of it comes from grassroots donors. That's a good thing. I think people should be able to support candidates.

But when it's dark money, money you can't even track. that comes from corporations and people through things like 501C4s. We often think SuperPack, SuperPacks disclosed, 501C4, social advocacy organizations. The money is often hidden, but also affects elections. I think people often run for office for the right reasons. They want to serve our country. They want to make change. Maybe a specific issue.

Maybe it's more broad. Then once they get there, you see a lot of people think, well, the country. will fall apart if I lose my job as a U.S. House member. So I have to make decisions. This isn't me. I mean, I make decisions all the time. Probably not in the best interest of me in a further election. But you see people that make decisions based solely on whether or not they think it'll help them or hurt them in the next election. And that's where they go wrong. And just because the psychology, I want to explain, you know, one of my favorite shows I'm watching lately is Andor the Star Wars show. And basically it's about- I heard that's really good.

It's amazing, and it's basically the most accessible metaphor for American politics. That's not about politics explicitly, but it is about just how people make decisions to do fundamentally horrific things, but justify it to themselves. Yeah. And what you just establish is what I've been thinking about is I watch television in both fictionalized and non-fictionalized forms, which is there seems to be a theory that a lot of these politicians who are in the pocket of the NRA that they have in which, if, if, you're a lot of, you know, that they have in which, if, I'm not in this role, things will be worse. And therefore, all is permitted to get me to remain in power. 100%. There's a bunch of them that thinks the country will fall apart if they lose their house seat or their Senate seat. Country's not going to be much different if they lose. I was going to say. Yeah, we're running the experiment of what it's like with you in it. So they're putting themselves before the country. You should never do that. The country should always come first.

So you should always make decisions in these jobs based on what, and we might disagree. I mean, I'll disagree with some of my colleagues on what I think the best decision is to build a better country, but it should be about the nation first, not themselves as an individual. But the one thing we should do is get the massive amount of money, especially corporate money, out of the political system. Yeah, the whole question here. And then you fix not only this problem, you can fix a lot of other problems. You fix the climate change problem. But it just seems to me like from a purely what is in the middle of the Venn diagram between

a lot of the rhetoric we're hearing from the right in its most philosophical form and what the left says they want is getting power back into the hands of actual Americans as opposed to the engineered financial instruments that have been corrupting the country that we say we want to save. It just feels like it's popular. It would be popular, Senator. I think it's popular. It's still hard to get done. And I talked to some of my Republican colleagues about this and they get it. They're like, you know, why do we have these big giant, you know, super PACs involved in all this? And I'm like, well, why don't we get rid of them? And they're like, well, it's complicated. I don't know if now is the right time. Oh, well, there's, some of them are not as bad as others.

And nobody, not a lot of people want to hang it out there against big moneyed organization. Right. Yeah, I mean, I will. I mean, I wish we could have the vote tomorrow, just abolish them. Same. I'm looking at just the polling data, by the way, speaking to the mechanism of, you know. Yeah, it probably doesn't poll well. Oh, my God. And by the way, just on the question of after Charlie Kirk's killing, this is a poll taken for Desiree News and University of Utah. 30% of Americans now support stricter gun laws, including 26% of American men. Only 30%? Are you sure that's right? That doesn't have changed their minds. Oh, have changed their minds.

There you go. You have increased their desire to see stricter gun laws. Is it time to just pass the Charlie Kirk Gun Control Act? The cruel poetry of all of this is telling me is that here was a guy who said, quote, it's worth a cost of some gun deaths to protect the Second Amendment. He said, quote, if our mom. money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children? Well, a lot of schools do now because kids get shot in schools all the time.

It wasn't like that when I was a kid. We worried in the 1970s and 80s about nuclear war, especially living in New Jersey. I think about that a lot. I was after the whole duck and cover thing. Yeah. But then decades later, kids in school practice for mass shootings. walking through the front door with semi-automatic assault rifles. Does that make kids safer? Having an armed guard? Having an armed guard, doing these drills. I'm just wondering if the answer to this threat to our children is more weapons.

The good guys with a gun theory. I would say in general, the good guy with the gun theory probably doesn't work well. Usually from all the data shows where there are more firearms, more people get. it's shot and more people get killed. But I would say if you had the right security guard, well-trained on the right day, and things happened a certain way, yeah, I think, you know, the right guy, retired cop who's like on top of things could stop a really bad thing from happening. Sure. It's unfortunate we live in a world where there has to be security guards. And what are we going to do? We're to put them everywhere. Every football game, every place. It's just the logical.

And the whole good guy with the gun thing doesn't, like the citizen carrying a firearm going to save the day, doesn't generally work really well because now you have, you get into any kind of conflict. If there's a gun involved, somebody often gets shot. Well, it speaks to the larger, like, what's the pushback from those who are saying, hey, it's not even worth expanding the political capital on these regulations that Senator Kelly is proposing because it's not going to. to work. Well, if you could save one kid's life and I could tell you that states that have stronger gun laws, fewer people get shot, fewer people die. You just have to look around the country. These numbers are published by... There you go with your numbers. The numbers, the data. I mean, it varies a lot if you could cut the death rate down by, you know, something like 80% if you strengthen your gun laws in a state. So that's why Giffords has been focused on that in the absence of

being able to do strong federal legislation. But ultimately, I mean, if you really want to tackle this, it would be good to have universal background checks. Red flag laws where somebody can say, hey, you know, my brother-in-laws seems to have lost his mind lately and has a couple firearms. We should at least temporarily get those guns out of their hands. You see so many times when some, like this happens, family members around the person knew. And they often say, well, I wish we could have done something about it. Because I contemplate Utah state legislature recently allowing for open and concealed carry without a permit on college campuses. And I'm looking at, of course, the Mouser 98 bolt action rifle that was used by Charlie Kirk's killer. It was his grandfather's.

I am left contemplating how, what you experience. while watching the television on that jet and then seeing your wife survive was the most definitional, the most cinematic near-death experience that a politician working for our government can have. And I also now am wondering, you know, as an astronaut,

when you get so far up and you see how small we are, something happens to your almost literal perspective. Can you explain just like how all of these perspectives that you've accumulated kind of like shape how you think about this? I think for everybody it might be a little bit different. I mean, for me, seeing the earth as a round, let me say that again, round for anybody's doubting out there, round ball, floating in the blackness of space, literally an island. in our solar system. And we have no place else to go, right?

You know, Elon wants to go to Mars. I think it's a good idea to go to Mars. We're not living on Mars. Mars is a sh**ty planet to live on. Literally can't sustain life, I'm told. Yeah, I mean, think we got carbon dioxide problems? I mean, we have less than 1% carbon dioxide. How many carbon credits do we need to offset Mars?

You're talking about over 98% carbon dioxide in that atmosphere. Seems like a bad business. But you see this island in our solar. system and we've got no other place to go and you look down and you don't see borders between countries and you get this strong sense how we are all in this together and then you look at the like how thin the atmosphere is that's like a holy crap moment that you're like looking you're like wow it's like a looks like a contact lens on an eyeball really thin think about this for a second runway at laguardia it's probably 10, 12,000 feet long.

If you put that up on its end, 10,000 feet is about half the atmosphere, molecule-wise, about half. It's like nothing. People look up and think, oh, we have this big giant thing that protects us from the vacuum of space and from solar radiation and gamma radiation. It's rather thin. And we don't do a very good job taking care of it. It's hard, I imagine, to be an optimist, given that perspective in one way. And yet, everything I read about you and your wife and the mission you are on now demands optimism. Well, I'm also just inherently like an optimist, right?

I'm a guy who flew four times on a rocket ship built by the lowest. bitter. You got to be an optimist to do that. Like every time you climb in that thing, you're like, oh man, I hope this goes well. Where did they decide to save the money on this? Exactly. This is what you're contemplating is. Rocketing into space. Yeah, right? I mean, should they have, would have been better if they went for the guy that was going to spend some more, the company that was going to spend a little bit more money. Right. Is the incline of this chair, the only savings that they chose here. No, I'm an optimist. And I think, despite all, of our problems in our political division and weak gun laws and violence in our country. I think the

future of our country is really bright for a number of reasons. One is, you know, I just think like culturally about if we stick with science and engineering, innovation, we've got the best innovators, the best inventors, the best scientists. Now, I'm unhappy this administration is not investing in science. That's temporary. I think we'll get back on track. I think AI is a great opportunity to grow the economy, create more jobs. You often, you know, think about people losing jobs, and that is a risk. I just released a plan on AI, you know, what do we need to do now, to make sure we don't have massive job loss without a plan for what are people going to do next and the issues around, you know, the infrastructure that needs to be built so people's utility

costs don't go up and electricity and water. But I think if we have the right plan, we can use this to solve a ton of problems in medicine and chemistry. Right. Well, just the idea of, like, what you're fundamentally talking about is something that's a through line in this, which is that there are things that are coming our way that we have a choice on how to confront. and what seems to be what science and data and evidence is suggesting is that we should look for a way to regulate such that the people who are the everyday voters of our country are not going to get massively f***ed.

Yeah, left behind. Yeah. By the people who are going to profit off of this in an unregulated economy, which is the story, by the way, of our country. Yeah, we want to nudge this thing in the right direction where we can, our economy. can benefit, but workers can benefit too. We can't leave middle class and working class people behind. If we leave them behind, we're screwed. If people don't have jobs, they don't have money, but if we do this in a way where we can help people and retrain them and maybe have some additional unemployment help to get them to their next career, and we're thoughtful about it, and we have a plan, I think we could get to a place where this could be a huge opportunity,

you know, for us. And if we screw it up, China's going to be ahead of us. Sure. So I think we could screw it up. But I also think if we can do some smart things up front, this could be a win for everybody. The metaphor I often return to is, are we going to react to any number of these crises that confront us as if it is an asteroid about to hit our planet, just throw our hands up and say, I guess this is just how it's going to be. And only yesterday did I realize that this was a question that you have actually, in a literary form, contemplated. I am not endorsing this. Five-year-old Violet, though, is. That is the disclaimer, and journalistically, I must make. This is a book that you wrote. It is called Mous Astronaut Saves

the World, which I read this morning. A rogue asteroid is hurdling towards. the planet. And this crew of mice are called upon to serve their country and their species. And the thing I would like to point to is not even the illustration of the mice. I would like to flip as we're going through and just contemplate the depiction of the president. Because I noticed something as I was doing my research into, what did Senator Kelly used to look like? What did Gabrielle Giffords? What does she? You think she looks a little bit like Gabby? I'm just saying.

Just saying. I'm just saying. Just a little maybe. Just a Madam President in this book suggests that there's an optimistic vision, not only for the role that our smallest among us might play, but truly in just a vision that I don't know if you demanded that the president. Oh, I picked how the president was going to look in that book. I had a sense.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this book is about, I mean, fundamentally. Mentally, it's about, like, you know, using, like, science to solve problems. Yes. It is, it is, dare I say, for all ages in a way that I have never been more depressed to proclaim. I've got another book idea about, like, you know, teaching little kids the skills they would need to be an astronaut someday. Which is all to say that you plan to immediately, as soon as possible, have America's children be more qualified than the people otherwise occupying the chambers.

that you currently are traveling in in the Senate. That would be a big win. You know, a lot of kids, you still hear the astronaut thing from little kids all the time. Yeah. But you know what you also hear a lot from kids as they get older, that they want to be influencers. Oh, God.

Content creators. As someone who resembles that career trajectory, if I may address briefly America's children and with your endorsement, please go to fucking space. We don't need you here. We don't need you here doing. We have enough podcasters, dare I say, Senator.

And read a book and stop the doom scrolling that people do. Except when it comes to this show, in which case you should like and subscribe. Right. And watch at every opportunity. That is Senator Mark Kelly's words. not my own. Captain, Senator, mustache or not. This has been a pleasure.

It's been great. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McRae, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tuminello. Our studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bersick and NGW Post, theme song, as always, by John Bravo,

and we will talk to you next. time.