The Daily Stoic - Senator Mark Kelly on Stoicism, Space, and Staying Calm Under Pressure

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

There are some situations where panic is not an option. In today’s episode, Ryan talks with Senator Mark Kelly about what his years as a Navy pilot, test pilot, and NASA astronaut taught him about fear, focus, humility, and staying calm under pressure. They discuss the lessons of spaceflight, the danger of ego in high-stakes moments, Marcus Aurelius’ “view from above,” and what real leadership requires in today’s world.Senator Mark Kelly is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. Before entering public service, he served as a U.S. Navy combat pilot, test pilot, and captain. He was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1996 and flew four space shuttle missions: STS-108, STS-121, STS-124, and STS-134, commanding the final two. Over the course of his NASA career, he spent more than 54 days in space. After his wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in an assassination attempt in 2011, Kelly retired from the Navy and NASA later that year. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2020 in the special election for the seat once held by Senator John McCain, and was reelected to a full term in 2022.👉 Follow Senator Mark Kelly on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Substack, and learn more on his website📚 Check out Senator Mark Kelly’s books: Mousetronaut book seriesGabby: A Story of Courage and HopeEnough: Our Fight to Keep America Safe From Gun Violence🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 VIDEO EPISODES| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of the things I think that the Stoics understood was that pressure reveals. Like, who you are when things are awesome, when things are calm, it doesn't say that much. But what about when you're under strain? What about when the world is falling apart? What about when you're under attack, literally and figuratively? What about when you're being accused of something untrue or unjust, when you are the victim of an injustice?

What about when you're stuck in traffic? What about when you're isolated and lonely? What about when tragedy strikes? Right. That's where stoicism comes in. That's where discipline comes in. That's where all the virtues come in, right? Courage, discipline, justice.

justice, wisdom. And there are some people who are tested more than others, right? We're trying to land an aircraft carrier at night in the middle of the ocean, knowing that everyone is watching and every landing is going to be graded. And by the way, the real failing grade isn't an F. It's dying and a fiery crash. What about being shot into space? What about being attacked by the most powerful person in the world? What about a deranged maniac trying to murder the woman that you love? How do you come back from that. How do you get through that? That's why I was really excited to talk to today's guest, Senator Mark Kelly. Might be how you know him. I first met him many, many years ago when he was Captain Mark Kelly or astronaut Mark Kelly. He's been all those things. Retire Navy Captain,

combat pilot, test pilot, NASA astronaut, husband, father, and now United States Senator. He flew 39 combat missions during the Gulf War. He logged thousands of hours in more than 50 aircraft. He completed more than 375 carrier landings. He flew four space missions commanding two of them. And he has stood up in this unique moment in American history and taken some heat, taken some pressure for it. It's currently the enemy of the President of the United States, Secretary of Defense. So in today's episode, I wanted to ask him about that. I asked him what it means to operate under real pressure, talked about anxiety, talked about ego, talked about pausing. One of the things he says in today's episode, a lesson from NASA, when you don't know what to do, don't do anything,

take a beat, think, don't make the problem worse. We talk quite a bit about Mark Surrealis. We talk about the overview effect, the fragility of our planet, the responsibilities of public service, and of course, Admiral James Stockdale, because whether you're flying a jet, commanding a space shuttle serving in the Senate or just trying to get through personal tragedy, the question is the same. Can you stay steady? Can you stay humble? Can you do the right thing when the pressure is real? And that's what this conversation is about. I think it's worth mentioning his incredible wife, former Congressman Gabby Giffords, who was shot in an assassination attempt in 2011. Kelly retired from the Navy in NASA that year to nurse his wife back to health, and they have both

become incredible activists in both continued public service in their own ways. And she is just an an incredible woman, and I think that's worth calling out as well. It's also worth saying Mark Kelly is the author of a children's book series called Mousternot. He also co-wrote two books with his wife, Gabby, a story of courage and hope, and enough are fight to keep America safe from gun violence. You can follow Senator Kelly on Instagram at Sen, Mark Kelly. That's Mark a K. Anyways, you're going to like this episode. I just heard this stat that shocked me, given that I hear from the sales staff at my publisher quite a bit. The stat is sales teams spend about 50% of their time on admin work instead of selling,

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For a limited time, our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order at Cheershealth.com slash stoic. We've met once before. I don't, you would have no memory of this, but it had an impact on me, so I was going to tell you about it. It was a, do you remember Renaissance weekends? It was one of those. So New Year's in Charleston, I think. This would have been like 2011 or 2012. Okay, so was it before Gabby got shot or after?

I think so. I think before. Because it was days before in 2011 we were there. The last one we went to was in 2012, a year after she got shot. It was, I think before. I think it was before. Because what I remember, this is, my wife and I, we weren't married yet, but we were starting to think about having a family.

And I remember you had very, like maybe preteen or teen daughters. And I remember you had your hands full. And I was like, he's an astronaut and he has his hands full. Yeah, with these kids. What are we signing up for it? And I have thought about that every once in a while in the years since. That was my memory of meeting you. I was just with my daughter, Claudia, at a thing.

It was at the McCain-Sadona Forum. And a woman came up to us who used to go. she says same thing. You wouldn't remember, but at the Renaissance weekend thing. And her son was my daughter's age. Got it. And we basically had the same conversation about how, because my kids in 2011, you know, was 15 years. So she was 15 year old and a 13 year old there. Yeah. And they loved going to that thing. Yeah, it was probably 1130 at night. They're getting to stay out. It was craziness, you know, and there's kids and they're in a hotel. It was probably incredibly fun for them. But I just remember, okay, this is what that's like.

That is what it's like. And kids are great, and it's so much fun. And for me, even as when they were teenagers, it's all great until like one of them takes the car, doesn't come back for 24 hours. You're like, why did I do this? But then you have grandkids, which is the best. My nine-year-old, he's about to turn 10. He told me he's a pre-teen. And I was like, oh, okay, now it's, it's, it's,

real. Like, I mean, it's technically, I guess technically true, but I was like, oh, man, okay, so it's about to get, it's about to get real. Does he think he gets like more privileges or something when he's a preteen? I think he, I think he just occurred to him, the math of it, just became real. Just tell him that gets you nothing. Yeah. It actually gets you less. I'm going to watch you more like a hawk now because you're going to start doing things that actually recognize that. Yes, totally. Yeah. The other person I met at that one that was one of the cool encounters my life was Jim Lovell was not I don't know if he was at that one or another one but I found myself sitting at a dinner table with him and was this real life this is crazy yeah I mean

Apollo 13 commander yeah uh went around the moon I think on Apollo 10 as well a guy I uh you know got to know a little bit yeah I got to NASA to the astronaut office long after he was gone sure but I did get to meet him a number of times and he's one of those guys I looked up to when I was a kid yeah Yeah, I think your layperson probably thinks, oh, they all know each other. And you probably all don't. We don't. Yeah. No, but I knew Neil Armstrong pretty well.

I knew Buzz Aldrin pretty well. John Glenn, I got to sit next between John Glenn and Neil Armstrong at a dinner once after I was an astronaut. Yeah. But other than my four space flights, that was probably the next biggest cool thing for me is that dinner. and it was on the 50th, I think the 50th anniversary of John Glenn's first light. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I remember.

And I didn't get a picture. Didn't happen then. Well, I thought it would be too weird. Yeah. To like ask for a selfie with John Glenn and Neil Armstrong sitting at the dinner table, but I do kind of regret it. Well, in the right stuff, the line that I was always struck by is Tom Wolfe points out that like John Glenn's heart rate never goes above 100 during the thing. And I asked Jim Love while, I was like, could. that possibly be true? Like, how could it not be pounding out of his chest? And he was like,

I mean, you've just done it so many times that unless something's going wrong, this is, this is normal. You mean when he was strapped into the rocket ship before launch? Well, just in the course of the mission, did he never get the spike of adrenaline? Yeah, I think it's different for different people. You know, we've done EKGs on even shuttle crew members, I think. I never wore one. Yeah. But I think. think they did for some, you know, some data. And I've heard of folks that feel like, you know, their heart is rapidly beating. I thought about that on my four missions. And I think my heart rate was up a little bit. Yeah. More about like, don't, don't screw this up. Yeah. Because as a pilot and the

commander, you're turning a lot of stuff on. You got to make sure things go well. And you could mess it up where the launch is going to stop. Yeah. And then it's like you wasted, you know, millions of dollars worth of fuel and all your guests up to come back the next day and it's going to be kind of embarrassing. So you're worried about that. Yeah. You're also worried about getting blown up a little bit. Did you have techniques for calming yourself down? No. No, I probably should have. I don't think they would work on me. Yeah. I generally don't get worked up about things, all that much. much. So I used to fly airplanes off of an aircraft carrier. I've almost gotten shot down a number of

times at a missile blow up next to my airplane, almost flew into the ground, you know, two or three times because of me. Yeah. Like screwing it up. Pilot error. Yeah, pilot error. Yeah. You know, once in Korea, I got really close. So other things lately just don't get, I don't get too worth that. I would imagine landing on a carrier at night sort of level sets what's scary. and normal. Yeah, and that's scary, by the way. And, you know, if somebody would, you know, have the, you know, EKGM on me measure in my heart rate for that, that's really high.

Because it's a hard thing to do. It's hard to do well. It feels like, like, they've done studies of, like, what it means to actually hit, like, a pitcher's fastball. Like, you have, like, 400 milliseconds to decide. Like, it seems impossible that a human can do it. Yeah. A carrier landing strikes me as almost un, like, if I hadn't seen,

videos of people doing it and you described it to me, I would say that's not possible. Yeah. Yeah, I would have thought so myself until I had to do it. Yeah. Eventually it gets to the point where in the daytime, you get comfortable doing it and you can, you know, you feel like, hey, I can be successful at this. At night, it's a controlled crash and you're just like, you're just holding on. You know, I don't know what frequency your, you know, our brains are operating on in that moment. But the stick movement and the throttle movement can be just kind of nuts. Yeah, I mean, you're in an enormous thing hitting a minuscule target in the middle of the ocean. Yeah.

And if you land short, the ramp strike is a high probability. Yeah. And then you're dead. And almost, well, I thought it was, I was reading about this. It's like that they don't even refer to it as landing. They call it like recovering the air. strikes me as illustrative of like, no, no, we're snatching victory from the jaws of defeat every time. Yeah, it's the recovery, the launch, the recovery. Yeah. And you got to get all these

airplanes aboard in the short period of time. You just, you know, then you got to move them, you know, you're moving them around on the deck. And what we call it physically, the event is we call it a trap. Yeah. Which is, now that I think about it as a weird way to say it, because a trap is usually like you're going to, you know, capture an animal. Yeah. But the event of landing on the aircraft carrier, that's a trap. Is that because you're being snagged by the wire and that's the trap? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You have a hook. There's a wire. I've done that, I don't know, 375 times, something like that. Does it get any easier? Not at night. Yeah.

Daytime it does. Just because you can at least see what's happening? It's just scary at night. I mean, it's just, you know, you're, especially if there's no horizon. Yeah. You know, you're flying initially on instruments, so you're flying an ILS approach, and then you get to three quarters of a mile, and then you transition to the light system, the meatball, the Fresnel lens on the deck, and it's a very high gain task, a lot of inputs.

Yeah. You get waved off. Maybe if you're, if it's not looking good, I used to be a landing signals officer. as well standing on the side of the ship when other airplanes are coming aboard and you're talking to it. Yeah. Right?

And you're telling, you know, you're giving them suggestions. You know, you might say like, you know, you're a little high, you know, don't fly through it. Power, power, wave off or right for lineup. Or don't settle. You know, so you've got this cadence of talking somebody through this landing.

you get waved off or you're bolter, which means the wire or the cook doesn't catch the wire, you go airborne again, you come around again, you might bolter again, now you need the gas. Now you've got to go to the tanker. It's embarrassing. You know, that's called, especially if you have to go to the tanker multiple times, a night in the barrel is what we call it.

You had your night in the barrel. And sometimes you're doing this in what we call blue water ops, which means there's no divert. You can't go land on a runway somewhere. Yeah. Because they're like, you don't have the stuff tonight. It's too far. You're not.

And there are only certain people that can fly during Blue Water Ops. Yeah. And then if it's Blue Water Ops, there's the extra anxiety at night that you have to get aboard the ship. Right. You know, if things start to go really south on somebody, they'll rig the barricade. So then there's no bultoring. That's to catch you. Yeah.

Like it got really bad. I never. I don't remember anybody ever being having their night in the barrel where they rigged the barricade on our ship. So it's an uncommon thing, but it does happen. Yeah, and you know everyone is watching. After you've missed a couple times, everyone's starting to watch. Every one of the ready rooms, everybody's, you know, watching then your guy go around and around. They know who it is.

Yeah. And, you know, I guess some people are cheering yawn. And then there's, you know, probably a little depending on who the person is, a little bit of that Shadenfreude there. Maybe they're betting on it? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. And I was fascinated to learn that every landing, so you just did 300 plus, everyone, you get a grade.

Yes, graded on all of them. Yeah. Now, this has gotten become a lot different. Okay. Now lately over the last decade or so because of advances in. the systems, even on like an F-18, this thing called magic carpet, which helps you fly the airplane in a way that keeps you on glides slope much more easily. I went out to the ship a couple years ago in the backseat of F-18, and the guy in the front was a Navy lieutenant, and he was just talking

through this, and he would say, even when he's on the ball, which is behind the ship, at a half a mile, He says he can look around and see where people are walking around on the flight deck. Not a thing. And when I was back in the day when I was doing this. And I'm sure before that, like, I mean, aren't the LSOs called paddles? Because they used to just do it with like pin called paddles. Yeah. But, yeah, we didn't do it with paddles.

We did it over the radio. And we have a thing called a pickle, where we can wave them off. You know, red lights come on on the Fresnel lens and people have to go around. But they've improved these systems. So the boarding right now is really high. It's very rare that somebody bolters or they get waved off. And what that's allowed us to do in the Navy is we've just transitioned to where people don't even go to the ship before they get their wings anymore. They're going to go to their fleet airplane and we have to do a lot less practice. It used to be so much time and energy and effort to train the crews up to be able operate off the ship. It's gotten a lot easier. And what that means, They can focus on the mission more, which is often the strike mission of, you know, dropping bombs or the fighter mission of countering enemy air threat. So we're now much more effective naval air force because of it becoming easier to land on the ship. Right. Right. Yeah, Dave Burke, who was in LSO, I was reading about him and he was saying that it says something about the culture of the Navy that every landing is great.

and the best grade you can get is okay. That's right. No, you can get an okay underline. But there's no such thing as perfection. There's no such thing as a really good job. The okay underline, which are very rare, that's perfection. Right. And then an okay and then fair and then a no grade.

Yeah. And was there anything, this is dating by this long time ago. I was an LSO below a, there was something below a no grade, but it was no grades bad. Yeah. But it's a brutal scale. And then it's displayed in the ready room. Yes.

So everybody sees the grades. Yeah. Required under naval rules for aviation that the grades be displayed. So everybody knows who's doing the best and who's doing the worst. And that worst guy doesn't want to be the worst guy next week. And that's creating a culture of excellence and competition and hard work. Yeah. And just, you know, you're just going to grind through it and always try to get better.

Yeah. Because everybody's going to see your grade. And the okay was green. Fair was yellow and no grade was white. I can't remember what OK underline was. That was a really good pass. Do you ever get one of those? I don't think so.

Right. Yeah, it's probably one of those. It was usually F-18s got them. I flew the A6 intruder. It's a little harder to land on the ship. Interesting. Yeah. It must be hard to do something so difficult that you,

even as you get really good at it, it's still so, like, you're never going to feel like I've got this. And yet if you don't feel like you've got it, it probably makes it hard to do. Like the confidence ego line is, and then imposter syndrome, the balancing of those three things must be interesting. I think it's also good to always have a little bit of anxiety about it. I think your, you know, when you plot like performance and anxiety, sometimes your performance goes up if you're more anxious about it.

Yeah. And you know you're not. And it's always good. You know, you don't want somebody who has such an ego that they think they're good at something. Yeah. I think we see this at very high levels in our government right now. Yes. You know, somebody who thinks that they're, they've got this.

Yes. They're not intimidated by the task or they're not humbled before the task as they probably should be. Yeah, that's right. I think it's always good to have people knowing that they're never going to, never going to reach the place that they want to get to. Yeah. You know, that's going to mean that they're going to continuously try to improve. It makes them better. But if they ever think they actually got there, if they have that kind of ego and they think, man, I got this.

Yeah. Then they're going to get worse. Floyd Patterson, the boxer, he went into one fight that he lost and he said he knew he was going to lose as soon as he stepped in the ring because he didn't have any nerves. Wow. Which meant he hadn't taken it seriously and he just, it was this sort of stomach churning moment of realizing that he had taken some things for granted and that the other person hadn't. Yep. I used to feel that way, you know, around the ship. Like during the day, if I'm flying at night, I'd have that knot in my stomach the entire day. Yeah. A little bit with the space shuttle. You know, when you're going out there, you're driving out to the launch pad, you get that like a little bit of a knot in your stomach. Yeah. Because you know, this is like game time. I got to get this right. I can't screw it up. It's a sign of respect to the thing. Yeah. You know, and if you don't have it, it's probably ego and a kind of finger to the gods and they're going to make you pay for it. That's right. The big hammer is coming down on you. Yeah. Yeah. Pride go with before the fall.

As soon as you think you've got it, you're about to learn the part of it that you don't have. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll tell you what, with the space shuttle especially. Yeah. There was, you know, something hiding around the corner that was about to kill you all the time. Well, I can imagine at least with fighter jets, a lot of people have done a lot of flights, right? So there's a lot more data about what can go wrong.

You have millions of cumulative human hours doing this thing. Yeah. And even though we've been going to space a surprisingly long time, we haven't done it that much and not that many people have done it. Yeah, I mean, I flew the 108th, 121st, 124th, and the 134th flight of the space shuttle. That in a test program for an airplane, think of about like a Boeing, you know, the Boeing triple seven. Yeah. That is in the beginning, the infancy of a test program. Right.

And the last space shuttle flight was the one after my last one, the 135 times. So, yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons they hired test pilots for this job. Right. By the time we ended the space shuttle program, there was still a lot we did not understand about it. Yeah, I mean, you went to test pilot school. I mean, those pilots have thousands of hours in these jets. Yeah. And you had to be the 108th flight, period.

Period. Period. It's like, obviously every plane has a 108th flight, but that was like so long ago. Yeah, and it took us in the space shuttle. The first flight was in 1981. My, that 108th flight was in 2001, 20 years later. Yeah. And to go to fly the next 30 flights took another decade. Yeah, we didn't fly a lot.

Yeah. It's expensive. It also took a lot to get the. space shuttle orbiter ready for a mission. Yeah. You basically take it all apart and put it back together every time, which might not have been the smartest thing to do. Yeah, if there's something that goes wrong every 10,000 times, like, no one knows what

that thing is because it's never happened because they haven't done it 10,000 times yet. Well, that's the thing about probabilistic risk assessment is when you're not doing a lot of them. You don't really know what the risk is, especially not until you start having some problems. Yeah. but without the, without the repetition, you don't have the problems. Yeah. So the risk is still very uncertain.

Right. It's an unknown unknown because you don't even know. Yeah. So you have the sum and then you have the things that we've never even conceived of happening. We were okay with the known unknowns. Yes. The unknown unknowns. Those are the ones that scared us.

Yes. And so you're always like mapping this stuff out, like, you know, the probability of it happening and the risk, like, is it, you know, is it catastrophic? You know, so you try to then, you always got to focus in the, in the very likely and catastrophic, you know, quarter of the box. Yeah. You know, the unlikely, uneventful stuff, you can, you know, sort of let that go. But even the unlikely catastrophic, you had to focus there because of the consequences.

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those are things that you prepared mentally for? Like you roughly knew what to do? Or what do you do when everything is falling apart? In the space shuttle, we train a lot, thousands of hours. I have about 6,000 hours of flight time, I think. I stopped counting at some point. I probably have as much time in the space shuttle simulator. Yeah.

You know, we just spend a ton of time over, you know, for me, over 15 years, practicing almost every possible scenario of multiple malfunctions in different systems and in the space shuttle because of the required redundancy to make sure you don't, you know, system failure doesn't kill you. This stuff gets really complex. Yeah. And then you go to fly the vehicle and the accidents we've had with Challenger and Columbia, you know, those were, you know, Challenger accident, nothing you can do about. Yeah. Columbia accident, nothing you could have really done about it. I mean, if something falls off on liftoff, puts a hole in the wing, the vehicle disintegrates on entry. But we've had other problems in space. On my first launch,

we got a master alarm on liftoff. If I remember correctly, I think it had to do with an RCS jet, one of the reaction control system jets. On my third flight where I was a commander, this is something we never trained for, was one of the solid rocket boosters. They're designed to burn. So they're solid propellant, you can't turn them off. They're designed to burn out exactly the same time. They're poured to very high tolerances in Ogden, Utah at a company called Thaacol. And they're supposed to flame out two minutes and five seconds into the liftoff, flame out at the same time. Well, in our case, one got to chamber pressure of zero before the other one and the space shuttle started rolling and yawing. And yawing.

Yeah, not even thrust started rolling and yawing. And I was about to hit the button to take over manually to then try to correct this. And then I gave it another second. And then we got back in. To me, it seemed like we were about to kind of go out of control. Yeah. And then it corrected itself and we were fine. Never practiced that in the simulator in those thousands of hours.

So that was one of the unknown unknowns. But practicing all that stuff in the simulator is giving you. the meta skill of not freaking out, not overreact it. Like, really what you'd practiced for is the weight and see that you did there. Yeah. Instead of, perhaps you could have made it worse by immediately asserting manual control. Could have, but I'm pretty good at flying things. So it would have been fine.

Yeah. There's a quote I heard from the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield where he says, there's no problem in space so bad that you can't make it worse. That is true. Yeah. Yeah. Chris Kraft was the first flight director. and then was the head of flight crew operations.

You see him in a lot of movies Apollo 13. And, you know, he had this saying, I think it was him. When you don't know what to do, don't do anything. And I've used that, you know, through my career, even sometimes my political career, is that take a beat. Let's think about this. Just doesn't just don't jump to some conclusion. Yeah. Yeah.

Not too long. Try to figure it out. Yeah. You know, and there's some things that require like an immediate, you know, response, like, you know, space shuttle's about to go out of control. And there's others, you know, that you can wait on, you can think about, you can reflect on. Every decision should not require the same amount of contemplation and reflection. Some do. Some you can, let's think about this for a week.

Yeah, knowing the difference of what requires that sort of immediate concrete action and then what it requires a little bit of restraint. Yeah. You know, you're over a rack and the missiles coming at you? You know, how much time to think about it. Yeah. You know, so, yeah, so I've, you know, I think about that a little bit in my new job here. Well, okay, so as far as I know, Mark Srealis never goes to space. Maybe, maybe, but.

Is that meditations? This is meditations. I'm curious what you thought. I'm going to read you these quick passages because it sounds like he has. I wonder if it's jives with your experience. I don't think he went to space. Yeah, probably not. Unless there's some buried spaceship somewhere under Rome.

Now we're going to get in the conspiracy theory territory. Okay. These are all in book seven, three in a row. So I wonder what he's doing as he's deciding. He says, to watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them, to keep constantly in mind how the elements alter into one another. Thoughts like this wash off the mud of life.

below. And then the next one, he says, Plato has it right. If you want to talk about people, you need to look down on earth from above. Herds, armies, farms, weddings, divorces, births, deaths, noisy courtrooms, desert places, all the foreign peoples, holidays, days of morning, market days, all mixed together a harmony of opposites. And then the last one, he says, look at the past, empire succeeding empire, and from that extrapolate the future. The same thing. no escape from the rhythm of events, which is why observing life for 40 years is as good as 1,000.

Would you really see anything new? Actually, there's some more here. But it strikes me as very similar to what I've heard astronauts talk about with what they call the overview effect. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, imagine if Marcus Aurelius knew

that we were one galaxy in a universe of two trillion galaxies, right? Probably wouldn't it. changed, you know, his view on this, but he certainly realized that to some extent we're kind of insignificant in the big picture. He's referencing the stars and how things are going to happen that are, whether it's over a thousand years or 40 years, things are going to happen that are, you know, just the way it is outside of our control. Yeah. And, you know, in there, I haven't read all.

of meditations, but I've read pieces of it. You know, there are, then there are things that we can, you know, have an effect on. Yeah. But, you know, we're seeing history repeat itself. We've seen that through a couple thousand years of history. One morning I went for run, we were in Greece and I got up sort of to the top of the Acropolis and I'm looking down and, you go, this is probably what he's talking about. Like this, he's seeing so much of the civilized world. Is there any evidence of Marcus Aurelius actually going to Greece? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, there is. Okay. And also traveled, like, I mean, he traveled a lot. Dyes in Vienna. He spent a lot of time in Germany. It's crazy. Like, when you, when you realize how big the Roman Empire was, it sort of blows your mind. Yeah. That one human being was responsible for all this, given communication. And then he spent a lot of time outside of Rome. Like on the road.

Yes. And camps and fighting wars and almost all of it. Yes. And yeah, he's, there's a, there's a, another line of meditation, he says life is warfare and a journey far from home. And I think he means that literally and figuratively. Yes. But yeah, you get the sense like that bird's eye view that he's taking. I mean, how high could he have really ever gotten? Like, not that, like, not that high. I mean, probably some mountain.

Probably some mountain in near Vienna, right? Yeah. Yeah. Northern, what's now northern Italy, maybe in the Alps. Yeah. What the ancients would have, how much it would have blown their mind to see, the blue marble photograph or to know that a human was on the, like taking that view out of space. He probably didn't, he probably thought the earth was flat.

Maybe. Marcus Aurelius was almost certainly a flat earther. Certainly his son was. Yes. He had some other problems. Yeah, he had a lot of problems. Yeah. So when, you know, I remember the first time I saw the earth as a big round ball.

Yeah. just floating there in this blackness. And the, you know, your initial reaction, I think for most of us is like, holy shit. Yes. I mean, we live on an island in our solar system and there's like, there's no place else to go. Yeah. You know, we're all not like, you know, moving to Mars someday. That's not like the reality for any of us.

Yeah. Any of us that matters. And yeah, I know like Elon wants to put this like, thinks, you know, civilization is going to, Human civilization is going to one day colonize Mars. He said it was going to happen by 2022. That didn't happen. I think he believed he said it was no question it would happen by then. Yes. Yeah, no question. We're going to have people living on Mars and they're going to stay and we're going to eventually have an atmosphere. We're going to blow up nuclear weapons in the Martian atmosphere. And by the way, we need this because a single planet species doesn't survive because that's the history of species on Earth. Well, also nobody else, no other species. dinosaurs were not engineering themselves out of a problem. Yeah, what if we just didn't screw it up here?

Yeah, just don't screw it up here. It's always going to be easier to survive on Earth, regardless of what happens, including the big rock or the, you know, the worst pandemic. It's always going to be easier to survive on Earth. Mars is a shit planet. It is not a place that we want to move to. We want to go and explore. We want to come back.

Yeah. But you really do get this sense. that kind of the almost the insignificance of, you know, the universe is 13.9 billion years old, we think, by the way. We don't know for sure. May have been around a lot longer. We're figuring out more all the time about astrophysics, about the nature of existence. But my, you know, my four trips of space, I really, you know, kind of a deep-seated view that we have to do a better job. taken care of this place. There's no other option. Yeah. And it's interesting because he talks about this as the emperor of Rome, this idea that we're all sort of citizens of this larger thing. We're all citizens of this world and we have these obligations and responsibilities to each other. Now, of course, as the head of state of this thing, he has certain obligations and responsibilities and priorities, but you do get the sense that he's trying to, by zooming out, going like, these borders are made up.

And again, you have a legal obligation to enforce him. But, It doesn't mean that the person on the other side of that border doesn't exist or doesn't matter and isn't. Well, they might not also have, they might not have the same legal obligation either. Yeah. And by the way, you can't see any of those borders in space. Yes. With one exception. Great wall?

No. That's a whole Chinese like to say. It's the only thing you can see from space. What is it? That's bullshit. The only border you actually see that's not a river is the southern part of Israel. because on one side it's desert. The other side, you know, it's cultivated land.

Right. So there's a straight line. And that's the only place I can think of that you physically can see a border during the day. Yeah. And why I say during the day is because at night you sort of see. North and South Korea. Yes. And the United States and Canada.

I'm not looking at you in the United States. You're like, I wonder if the Canadians need more electricity. But the reason it looks like that is because most of the Canadian population live within 100 miles of the U.S. border. Right. Like all 20 million of them basically live on the U.S. border. Yeah, yeah. Canada goes way up. It does. And nobody's there.

Nobody's there. Yeah. Canada and Australia are kind of like that. It's wild to look at it night. I mean, Pyongyang looks like an island in an ocean because there's nobody. else have lights in North Korea. And then you, you know, you fly over places like Times Square, fly over New York City, the brightest spot on Earth. And I think second would probably be the strip in Vegas. And then in the middle of Tokyo would probably be my top three bright spots

on Earth. Well, and then to go to Marcus's point about history, I mean, what is interesting is that 100 years ago, that wouldn't have been the case. Nope. 150 years ago wouldn't have been the case. Like, I mean, there are parts of Texas here that less than 100 years ago didn't have electricity. And so to think about how, you know, in the big clock of all of human history, what a tiny sliver a lot of these things we take for granted actually are. 120 years ago, Arizona was an estate. Yeah. Very few people live there. Yeah. A lot of native tribes. Things change, and they're changing fast right now. Yeah. And it's going to be a, you know, know, amazing thing to watch, you know, what happens in the next, you know, a couple decades.

You could look at everything that's happening in the world and be really excited. You could look at everything that's happening in the world and be absolutely horrified. It's kind of somewhere in the middle probably is the right view. I think there are a lot of people out there that are very anxious, apprehensive about the future, about whether they're going to have a job, whether if you're a young person, whether you're going to be able to afford a place to live. You know, whether you can afford a family. You know, these are issues that weigh on me, you know, a lot in my job because I'm, you know, supposed to be trying to figure out ways to fix this. Yeah, if you're 21 right now, what have you seen work really well in your lifetime?

You've kind of seen people screw it up over and over and over again, largely at your expense. Not so much at their expense, but at your expense. Yeah, often the same people. Yeah. Crash the car, get back in, crash again. Same guy. Yeah. Put it on the tab.

Put it on the grandkids tab. Yep. 39 trillion. You know, people don't seem to care that it could be 50 trillion. Yeah. In what? Decade. Actually, less than that.

We've got to address some of these problems in our country in a serious way. Yeah. You know, we have an election coming up. You know, my hope is people see that. And, you know, you got to some point you got to take the keys away from grandpa. Yes. It's not fair. it's a lot to put on a generation, and yet there's no alternative.

Do you know what I mean? Like ignoring it's not going to make it go away. No, we can't. It is not going to go away. And then at the same time, we have with innovation and technology, we have things that are going to change rapidly. Yeah. You know, AI is going to replace people and, you know, certain jobs. We'll have a demand for other jobs.

that people have an option. We got to how do you figure out a way to make sure these folks that lost their job have the training and know about these other things that they could do? Yeah. And what do we do for people that are just displaced and don't have an option? How are they going to afford their lives? We've got to think about that. And then the energy demand is just skyrocketing right now.

What do you do when the political institutions have proven themselves to not be up to these tasks over and over and over again and to not work and to not necessarily show themselves as reflecting the will of the people. Like, I just thought about this this week because it was just announced I live out here in rural Texas. And like Amazon just bought 1,300 acres and they want to build a data center. Right. And that's not why people moved out to where you live. Yeah, right where I live. Like how close?

10 minutes. Yeah. Like, I mean, well, 10 minutes, you're probably okay. If you're like two minutes, are you going to walk outside and there's going to be like 60 decibels of noise? noise, light pollution, traffic, also just how long- rates? Is your electric bill going to double because of this data center? Well, and then illustration of the other problem we have, it's like, we're going to

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

And I think a lot of the frustration people have is that, like, I see so much of our problem is that like the political system, which are founders designed to be responsive to the people, to the people. It isn't doing that. And then that energy has to find other places to go. Well, in some cases, like in Arizona, we had the same issue happen. one case, I think it was in Chandler and the other was in Tucson where Gabby and I live, where the data center came in, they wanted to, you know, build there and the didn't get approved. Yeah. Because the people didn't want it. Right. And if the people don't want it, it shouldn't go there. Yes. They should find another place. Right. Now, I'm trying to address that issue with my job in the

Senate, with legislation, to try to set the conditions where the community can benefit, the data center company can benefit, because we're not going to, this technology is not going to go away. Right. And we want to be the leaders. We don't want the Chinese to be the leaders. There's an advantage to us as a nation, as a country, and all of us should be able to benefit. We don't want like the top 1% to be the people that benefit from this. That has gone sideways on us too long. But so we've got to, you know, make, you know, smarter decisions here. Yeah. But your community shouldn't get stuck with this data center if people don't want it. There is some place in the country that we're going to be. That we're going to be able to make, you know, that we're going to make smarter. We're going to be able to make. But you know, you know, but you're we're we're will be happy to have that data center. Yeah. They need to go there. Yeah. And, and I mean, just watching some of these things play out as I've lived here over the last decade or so is you're like, you know, they wanted to build some, I forget what it was, like a trash facility or something. And then all of a sudden the people were like, well, why won't the Texas Environmental Commission do something about it? And it's like the one that you neutered and gutted because you thought that's big

government. It's like, look, I get being somewhat suspicious of big government. I don't want government messing with my life. But at the same time, if you don't have. institutions that can do things, then you basically only have corporations who can do things. And they don't care that much about regular people. Their job isn't to care about people. Jobs care about shareholder value. We're seeing that a lot at the federal level, too. Not just here. I mean, I just got into it with the EPA administrator over a smelter in Arizona that emits, I think it was 12 tons of lead into the atmosphere every year. And it has a elementary school that's a couple miles away. You could see the smelter from the elementary school. And there's technology available to clean the lead and arsenic out of the exhaust. And it was rather expensive. And they didn't do it. They asked for a waiver because this administration set up a process that didn't exist. before, where they could send a letter to the EPA that then just went right to the White House,

straight line, just passed through, EPA doesn't get a say, and then Donald Trump could decide whether or not to approve the waiver. The White House decides, and the waiver was approved. The thing that cleans out the lead and arsenic didn't get put in, and then these kids have to, you know, breathe this in. Now, I've had conversations now with. with the company that owns the mine and the smelter. And they're going to try to work with us to come up with a solution because we can't have these kids breathing this. But this is the process that this administration set up. So even though we have an EPA that's trying to protect people's health, not right now in this administration.

What comes first is profits and donations. Right. How many people have made donations to, they've joined Mar-a-Lago, or they bought into the means, or the stable coin, or they made donations to MAGA Inc, the super PAC. And when people make big donations like that, they generally expect something for it. And we're seeing that over and over and over again. Yeah, it feels like the opportunities for and then the examples of corruption are almost too staggering for people to wrap their heads around.

Yeah. Like it's interesting that that isn't a bigger story. I think folks are just like overwhelmed. Yeah. I mean, the president is suing the federal government for $50 billion. $50 billion, not million, $50 billion. And he says the federal government is probably going to settle with him. Right.

He is the guy who decides whether or not the federal government settles his $50 billion lawsuit. So he's on both sides of the lawsuit. I think we call that self-dealing. There's a word for that. Yeah. I think there's a word for it. There's a couple words. Yes. For that. Yeah. So he'll make the decision whether or not to settle. And he'll probably settle for, maybe he settles for, I don't know, $30 billion because he's a reasonable man. Doesn't want to steal too much. Yeah. I mean, that's $30 billion from the taxpayer into his bank account. That's what he's looking to do. Can we stop them? I mean, we're going to try. Right now we don't have the, you know, the levers to do that. Right. And certainly this Department of Justice is just like, They just do what he wants at this point. Yeah, I do think that was clearly the big miss of the founders is that they assumed that there would always be the check of personal honor and virtue in the highest levels of leadership.

They could not conceive of it. Virtue, a little bit of wisdom. Shame. A little bit of shame, a little bit of temperance. They assumed those things. Yeah. They assumed most leaders would be like Marcus O'Rour. Or Julius or George Washington.

But they did also in the Federalist papers, but they also wrote about the fear that at some point somebody would come along and could just flip this whole thing upside down. Yeah. We have checks and balances. I don't know if you saw King Charles's speech to the joint session of Congress a couple weeks ago. So he gave this speech and he was a good speech, 25 minutes, touched on a lot of points, made some jokes. At one point, he talks about the importance of checks and balances. Yeah. And I was shocked because everybody in the chamber was clapping.

Yeah. And I'm thinking to myself, you guys are the checks and balances. Some of you guys over there are not doing the checks and balance part of the job. Yeah. I mean, we're trying, but we're in the minority. Right. I mean, it's really the majority, you know, has to step up and really speak truth to power and tell a leader, whether it's a president or the CEO of the company.

You got to tell somebody when, you know, what they're doing doesn't make any sense or they're off track or, you know, you just can't do this. Yeah. You're not seeing it. If I agree with you on everything, that is illegal. That one thing. Do not do that. Yeah, right.

They're not doing a lot of that. Yeah. And it's really disturbing. Is it? Is it a belief that someone else will do it? I was talking to Adam Kinzinger one time, and he said it's like Congress believes there's a super Congress. Some people think we have like a giant button we can like press and stop things. There's no button. Yeah. I think it is that this president, he has got full control over the base of the Republican Party in a way that no president in my lifetime has ever had, Democrat or Republican. Yeah. Nobody has commanded that type of control over. the base. And he is very willing and able to use that against anybody that he perceives as a political foe or enemy. I mean, he's doing it to me. Yeah, sure. You know, right now, I said something he didn't like. He said I should be hanged, executed, prosecuted, tried to throw me in jail. The indictment

didn't work. Who knows if he's going to try again? Then they tried to reduce me in rank and take away my pension. So I sued Pete Hegsess. So this, you know, I have no problem fighting back. Yeah. And I'm not going to give up. And because there's a lot at stake here. Sure. You know, First Amendment rights of two million retired service members. But what I think is there's a lot of members of Congress in his party that just know that he can end their careers. Right. And they think their career is pretty valuable to them. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. You know, none of us should think we matter so much that the world comes to an end if we lose our job in the United States Congress. The problem is there are a lot of people that think they are so important that our country would collapse if they were not there.

And that is not true. The country will have the same problems it has right now. It will recover if, you know, rando, you know, senator from whatever state, You know, is no longer in his seat. There's only a one-term senator instead of a two-term senator or whatever. Yeah. I mean, it's not going to matter. So they shouldn't.

And isn't that the point of the six-year term is that you have some job security? That's right. Yeah. You could make decisions based on, always make the decision based on what's right, which is what I always try to do. And I don't, you know, I never wanted this job anyway. I had a great job. And then my wife gets shot in the head. And then she resigns.

And then I find myself in a position where. where before the election in 2018, a woman comes up to me. It was like, at a get-out-the-vote rally, and she says, she says, hey, my son has Down syndrome. And I'm terrified. He's going to lose his health insurance. Would you please consider running for the U.S. Senate? Without that conversation, I would not be in the Senate right now.

And that was November of 2018. So this was not something I ever wanted to do. And then I, you know, ran in 2020, ran again in 2022. And, you know, here I am, you know, just trying to solve some of these problems that we have. Well, it's a reminder that this isn't a game. I think that's the other problem is that everyone is like, yeah, it's bad. Yeah, I disagree. But, like, there's consequences for gutting USAID.

There's consequences for cutting off health care. There's consequences for these decisions. There's consequences for going to war with Iran with no strategic goal. with no plan, with no way to get it. Now the president finds himself in a really tough spot trying to figure out how you get out of this. We have 13 dead Americans. We've got other people who are injured. We've got thousands of innocent Iranians that have been killed, including at least 150 kids in a school.

And the president's trying to figure out, like, what do I do? I didn't think the Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed. So gas prices are really, really high. there was a woman that we helped her daughter get her health care back after she got kicked off of Medicaid. Kid gets kicked off of Medicaid and shouldn't have been. And it was all at the beginning during all that Doge stuff and got her back on what we call Medicaid in Arizona's called Access, got her back on it. She sent me a text a couple weeks ago and just really sort of felt like she was in a panic because she said. says now she can't afford to drive her kid to get the cancer treatments because the round

trip is 300 miles and she can't afford to put gas in the car. Right. So we're trying to figure out, you know, get her some help here. But how many people across our country are experiencing the same thing? Yeah, I think to the average person you hear, okay, now they're moving ships here. And that just feels like these set pieces. But there are sailors on those ships. Right. And they have family, Like the tragedy of war ultimately is that these are human beings being moved around to get a little negotiation leverage or to send a point or make a signal. I'm writing about Vietnam right now. Actually, I wanted to ask you about this. I feel like you're the perfect person who gave me some insight on this.

So I'm writing about doing a book on Admiral Stockdale. Oh, who I knew. Oh, well, now I have a million questions. I went on a trip with him to Switzerland once when I was a test pilot. Okay. You know, he was part of the SETP Society of Experimental Test Pilots. Yes, right, because he went and taught at test pilot school. Yeah, as I did.

Yeah. Yeah, I was an instructor there before I was an astronaut. Well, I'll tell you a funny story about him at test pilot school. Maybe you know, maybe don't. But so, you know, August 2nd, he's up on a crusader flight and it gets flown over in the South China Sea. Hey, one of our ships is being attacked. So he flies over there and he sees the PT boats. People don't think the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin happened.

The first day it did. There was a really, it wasn't a big attack, but there's an attack. And then he flies back. There's two days between. And then on the fourth, and he's the air wing commander at this point. Yes. And so then the second incident in the Gulf of Tonga, fly out there.

There's nothing there. He says, we were shooting at ghosts or something like that, right? There's nothing there. And then so he lands back later that night. And when he wakes up the next day, they go, hey, we're leading the strikes tomorrow, the reprisal strikes. And he famously says, reprisal for what? Right.

So it's this complicated incident. And I'm trying to wrap my head around both the mindset and the responsibility, the obligation. So he gets ordered to lead a strike, basically the beginning of the Vietnam War, over, they're not illegal orders because the president can give these orders. But the pretext for them is he has some insight that they're fundamentally flawed. Right. How do you think about a dilemma like that for someone in his position? Well, I mean, for him, I mean, it becomes a bigger question that often a guy even in his role as an airwing commander, not up to him to decide what country we go to war against and what country we don't. Yes.

Right. The decision to use combat power to achieve some larger geopolitical outcome or purpose relies with the president. It's a civilian decision. It's civilian, the lies with the president. And, you know, that is, you know, struggle that I think, you know, people in Admiral Stockdale's at this time, Captain Stockdale. Commander, yeah, I think. Yeah, maybe Captain. Could have been a commander, probably a captain, you know, has to deal with.

It's something we all have to deal with. Right. Everybody who, you know, puts on the uniform. And, you know, like me, I dropped bombs 30, you know, something times. I flew 39 combat missions. You know, I, you know, sunk ships. I, you know, bomb buildings and tanks. And there's always like the, you know, the ethical struggle. Right. Like, is this the, you know, right thing to do? That's different than the, the situation that myself and five, my colleagues were outlining. Right. You know, troops about illegal orders or unlawful orders. Members of the military have a responsibility to follow. all lawful orders. And, you know, written down in the law of war manual and in the UCMJ, you do not follow illegal orders. Those are the things that are obvious to troops, sailors, you know, soldiers,

Marines that are obviously, you know, against the law. They're not the big, like, geopolitical, you know, questions about, you know, whether we take our country to war against another their country. Right. But, you know, any commander is, you know, often going to be, you know, wondering because he's the guy who has to lead the troops. Yeah. And as an air wing commander, you know, he's out front in the first airplane. And he's got to motivate these guys. And often he's going to have to explain this stuff and they're going to ask them questions. And it's his responsibility to motivate and inspire them. To motivate and inspire and get, you know, get behind, you know, the decisions that are made by our political leaders. Yeah. You know,

that's that's a different thing than the thing we were talking about. No, no, I know. It's a, because I think people, your average civilian is probably thinking, well, if you don't agree, just don't, but that's not. If you don't agree. It would not work. It doesn't work. Yes.

Yeah. If you don't agreeing or not agreeing, that's not an option. Yeah. You've got a responsibility when you swear an oath to defend the Constitution and when you get sworn into the military, you know, as an officer or a listed person, you know, your responsibility is to follow. the orders of your senior officers and the president of the United States. Now, you know, what happened later in the Vietnam War, the Miley Massacre, you know, when a

company commander, you know, tells his troops, we're going to kill everybody. No mercy, no quarter. Or no quarter. Yeah. What Pete Higgs said said, which I questioned him about this on the Senate Armed Services Committee a couple weeks ago, like, what did you mean? And I'm going to give you another chance because it was asked of him the day before. When you say no quarter, what that means, and it's defined, you know, by the U.S. military, that means you, there are no prisoners. You kill prisoners.

I gave him the opportunity to clarify what he meant. He refused to do that. So he stuck with what he said originally, which was no quarter. That's not who we are as a nation. We've never been that. way. We can't be the Russians, you know, who are brutal and commit war crimes. But, you know, he decided to, you know, stick with that. So that's, that's a whole different problem. But no quarter would be an example of an illegal order. We're going to destroy your entire civilization, things like that. That is one too. And by the way, even saying a threat of a war crime. Yes. Is not allowed. Right. Even the Even the threat. Yeah. First of all, doing it is a war crime. You know, destroying an entire civilization would be a war crime genocide. Threatening genocide is also against the law.

If you have a large arsenal of nuclear weapons, you say, give me all your stuff where I'm going to drop nuclear weapons on you. You haven't committed the war crime yet, but you are using the threat of the war crime and the uncertainty of whether you'll do it or not to do something illegal. Yeah, that's also against the law. Yeah, I'm fascinated with this question that what he must have wrestled with because, you know, he was there. It was incredibly complicated. And I'm sure that takes time to work through this. But to then spend all these years as a prisoner of war as you staying loyal to a country that had, you know, done something imperfect or outright wrong, it makes what he did and what he went through almost more inconceivable and superhuman. Like the dark nights of the soul that he must have had, knowing that he is a sort of a pawn in this war that was, you know.

And then as a senior officer, though, at the, you can't let any of that on. Yeah. I mean, he did like, I mean, from what I understand about, you know, him as a P.O.W. I mean, did a fantastic job of leading, you know, all these men from different services. Yeah. And took on that role. Right. You know, as a senior captive there at the Hanoi Hilton, including the guy who I serve in a Senate seat, John McCain, who probably was shot down, I don't know, a year and a half later. Yeah. But it was an interesting experience to spend.

I've spent a couple days with Admiral Stockdale and his wife in Switzerland. Just do incredible people. Yeah, he really was. Yeah, a great American. You're writing a book about him? I'm doing a biography of Stockdale. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Including his time as the VP candidate for Roswell. I'm probably going to fast forward at the end of that. But did you know he at test pilot school, he taught John Glenn. Oh, I did not know that. Yeah, John Glenn. Or maybe I did. John Glenn was a much more experienced pilots because he'd flown in Korea in World War II. So he took Stockdale on his first cross-country night flight and then Stockdale taught him physics,

because he had a better engineering and math background. Stockdale did. Yeah, Glenn was more of just your sort of natural pilot that to go to the next level had to kind of learn about the stuff that he didn't know. I don't think John Glenn had like a degree in engineering. No, it didn't know like a service academy or anything like that. Not everybody, but most of the students at the U.S. Navy Test Pilot School, you know, have at least a bachelor's degree in engineering or maybe physics, sometimes math. that's about how deep we go, at least when I was there. Yeah.

You know, and I, you know, it was a great tour for me because I did get to be like a teacher. Yeah. Not only a flight instructor in my case, three different kinds of airplanes, teaching all different kinds of things, but actually in a classroom with a piece of chalk. Yeah. And I taught classes on like transonic flying qualities. and aerodynamics and, you know, how airplanes, you know, flight control and performance in that region between about 0.9 and 1.1 Mach. Yeah. It's that little band where things change, you know, rapidly as you accelerate or decelerate through Mach 1 through the speed of sound.

It was a good experience to, so I understand, I mean, certainly I don't understand what a middle school teacher goes through. But I have a little bit of a sense of what it's like to be in a classroom. with a piece of chalk and the chalkboard. Yeah, I think people maybe from top gun and stuff think that the fighter pilots are kind of like these cowboys just like sort of really good at doing this thing. And like it sort of skips over the incredible technical expertise and mathematical and physics background required to do it at that level.

Yeah, a lot of academics behind, especially being a test pilot. Yeah. Fighter Weapons School a little bit different. They're actually teaching people, how to teach at the highest level of, you know, aerial combat. Yeah. The air to air portion of it, not what I used to do. I was the air to ground guy.

Right. But at the two test pilot schools, the military ones here, it's, you know, a lot of heavy academics, you know, physics, propulsion, engineering, aerodynamics, electronics, electronics, electronic warfare, radars, all that stuff. Yeah. All that woke stuff. Yeah. All that woke stuff, all that science, that science-y stuff. We don't need that. Some people don't believe anymore.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The thing about science is science doesn't care if you don't believe in science. It's still there. By the way, neither does history, right? Like, you can make up whatever you want. It doesn't change what happened. It doesn't change some of the sort of iron laws and patterns of history. But some people will try to change history.

Yeah. They will try really, really hard. Mm-hmm. They will go all the way to follow. County, Georgia and sent the Director of National Intelligence to try to figure, how do we change the history? Wow. Yeah. You want to go next to all?

I've got some books for you. Yeah.