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

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1:33Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:24Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. My voice is a little sore, as I told you in the last episode, as I just finished several weeks of recording the audiobook of Wisdom Takes Work, which we now pre-order anywhere you pre-order audiobooks. You can grab the bonuses at dailystoic.com slash pre-order, including signed pages from the recording of the audiobook, where I was still making last-minute notes, much to the chagrin of my publisher. It doesn't matter where you order it from, but you can claim those bonuses at dailystoic.com slash pre-order. But The Daily Stoic is the only place you can get the signed and numbered first editions of the book.

3:04All that at dailystoic.com slash pre-order. Anyways, I opened part one of this episode reading something from The Obstacle. But that is not the only time I have mentioned space in my books. I wanted to open with a little riff from one of my other books, so I'm basically doing a little extra audiobook here for you. But it very much pertains to this week's episode. In 1971, the astronaut Edgar Mitchell was launched into space. From 239 ,000 miles up, he stared down at the tiny blue marble that is our planet and felt something wash over him. It was, he said later, an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.

3:54So far away, the squabbles of Earth suddenly seemed petty. The differences between nations and races fell away. The false urgency of trivial problems disappeared. What was left was a sense of connectedness and compassion for everyone and everything. All Mitchell could think of when he looked at the planet from the quiet, weightless cabin of his spaceship, was grabbing every selfish politician by the neck and pulling them up here to point and say, look at that, you son of a bitch. Not that he was angry, on the contrary, he was the calmest and most serene he'd ever been. He wanted them, the leaders, the people who are supposed to work on behalf of their fellow citizens, to have the same realization he was having, the realization that we are all one, that we are all in this together, and that this fact is the only thing that truly matters.

4:45Now, I wanted to read that today because my guest is someone who has literally seen that view. You think about a handful of people who have ever actually seen Earth from space, who have gotten what Marcus Aurelius calls the bird's eye view, but from a distance that even gotten what Marcus Aurelius calls Plato's view, but from a view that Plato couldn't have imagined. You know, Mark Aurelius talks about looking up at the stars and seeing yourself running with them. My guest today, Terry Virts, has done literally just that. I was reading the New York Times back in June, and I saw this headline, Former Astronaut Launches Texas Senate Run by Hitting Both Parties.

5:29I never had an astronaut on the podcast, let alone running for Senate, so I was very excited to invite Terry to come to Bastrop. He joined the Air Force at 17 and became an F-16 fighter pilot and test pilot. He flew combat missions over Iraq, tested the world's fastest jets, commanded the International Space Station. His military decorations include the NASA Space Flight Medal, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Air Medal, the Aerial Achievement Medal, the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, the Air Force Commendation Medal, and on and on and on. He retired from NASA in August 2016. And let's go briefly back to the idea of what Edgar Mitchell is talking about, right?

6:10He's looking at Earth and becoming intensely dissatisfied with the dysfunction and the selfishness and the myopia of the politicians of the world. And now he's saying this in 1971, but arguably it's gotten worse. And nowhere is it worse than Texas, right? I mean, one of our senators is Ted Cruz, one of the worst senators that there is, maybe one of the worst that there has ever been. not just an unlikable person, but I would argue a treasonous individual who has done absolutely nothing for this state. In fact, most famously runs away from this state when we need him most. As you know, I was in Greece this summer on vacation with my family because I'm not a U.S.

6:57senator. And Ted Cruz was there at the same time. Actually, we were at the Acropolis one day after another. But Ted Cruz hopped on that plane after the terrible floods killed all those people here in Texas. So it's been a long time since Texas had great senatorial leadership. And I think Terry is awesome. I'm glad he is running. And there's a couple of books I've been recommending a lot at the bookstore. Rutger Breckman, a guest on the podcast recently, his book Moral Ambition, then The Second Mountain by David Brooks. These are about how after you've succeeded in life, How do you give back? What do you do with your energy, your ambition, your time, your energy?

7:36What do you direct your career at? And this is exactly what Terry Virts has done. In today's episode, we dive more into his decision to run for Senate, why the military needs ethics, why he thinks the Democratic Party needs as much reform as the Republican Party, and why moral courage is harder than physical courage. We have not been served well by our politicians here in Texas. And I think Terry is a fresh voice, certainly someone who's put his money where his mouth is, been of service to his country, put his ass on the line for it. He's not going to run away when there's an ice storm or a flood.

8:12He's going to be there helping people as he has done all of his career. He knows what it means to be a leader, knows what it means to be a person of integrity. He is not a bootlicking little bitch like Ted Cruz, nor is he a corrupt, philanderer, liar, ledged criminal like Ken Paxton, who's also running for Senate in Texas. He's a great dude. And you can check out more about his campaign, www.terryverts.com. You can follow him on Instagram at Astro Terry. I can't wait for you to listen to it. and a lot of philosophical themes. I was really inspired to talk to him and to meet him. And I hope you like it.

8:51Enjoy.

8:55Let me through how someone can be brave under fire. Yeah. Or can go into space and take all those risks. And then they're like, I don't know, someone might say some mean tweets about me if I disagree with this. Or I might have a tougher reelection bid if I say something about it. This is what makes my head explode. Look, some people are just a hardcore, crazy MAGA person. I can actually respect them. They at least believe what they believe. There's a lot of folks right here in the great state of Texas that I might or might not be running against that know the right thing. They know the thing that they should do.

9:31And yet they still choose to do the other thing because they put party and self over country. And that's unacceptable. That's just completely unacceptable. If you really believe something, good. I can. AOC, I can respect her. I don't agree with her policies, but she is who she is. I respect that. But the people who know better and don't do it. And I think the fear of getting shot is one thing. A lot of people can't get over that. Some people can face that. But the fear of getting ostracized, maybe that's a, I don't know where the Maslow's hierarchy fear is in your brain, but people do not like to get ostracized.

10:05If you quit your religion, you know, you get, or if you're at West Point, for the honor code at West Point back in the 1800s, you would get silenced. So if you cheated on a test or something, your entire, nobody would talk to you for four years. And very few young men could handle that. So you'd think physical courage would be harder than moral courage. Yeah, I don't think it is. I don't think so either. No. A lot of guys. It's really rarer. I boxed when I was a cadet. A lot of guys can jump in and getting hit is not fun, but getting ostracized or being talked bad about is, man, people don't like that.

10:38Yeah. And you can always, I think you can always rationalize that I'm not actually being cowardly here. I'm not actually derelict of duty. I'm saving myself for some future conflict. Right. This isn't great, but we need, our party needs to stay in. I'll do some other good. And that's a slippery slope. Yeah. It's not even slippery. It's like an ice, ice covered steel, 90 degree slope. Yeah. Once you go down that path. What's an insidious lie. Yeah. Right. Like, look, and there are some people who you want to still be there at the last possible moment to be like, no, no, no, this is this is the hardest of the hard red lines.

11:18And I got to stop you. Mike Pence. Yes. Yes. But you you are lying to yourself when you tell yourself you're that person. Yeah. Right. And that's what Seneca was doing. Seneca was saying, hey, you know, if I don't speak up, if I don't condemn you, if I don't stop Nero from killing his mother, you know, He kept saying, you know, if I get involved now, I'll be replaced by someone worse and things will be really bad. But you stay and you stay and you stay. And it gets bad anyway. Right. And you are not the indispensable man who needs to compromise every principle to stay in power. And by the way, if everyone thinks that, then we're all just watching passively.

11:57We're all passengers to go to your metaphor as the ship's going down. And any one of us could grab the wheel and maybe do some. The bridge is out. The train is headed towards the bridge that's out and somebody needs to stop the train. Yeah. It feels like everybody's just riding along on the train right now. Yes. I remember I was talking to Kinzinger about this and he said, because it's been my experience talking to a number of elected representatives, is they'll passively talk to you about it too. They're like, somebody should do something. And it's like, you're one of 500. You're one of 100. it.

12:32And Kinzinger was saying it's like people in Congress think there's a super Congress. Right. You know, like there's somebody else. This is literally what you were elected to do. The impeachment. Okay. We saw what happened on January 6th. Clearly that's wrong. It shouldn't happen. And so many Republicans, we have former Navy SEAL here in Texas, voted that that's okay, rationalizing somehow that, well, you know, and now here we are, right? Like you have to do the right thing when it's time to do the right thing. Yes. If you don't, you might not have that opportunity again. But I think what people tell themselves, and maybe you could relate to this as someone who wanted to do something so badly, right?

13:10It's like, my whole dream is to be, I don't know, chairman of the Federal Reserve. My whole dream is to be the head of the CIA. You tell yourself, hey, I've been working my whole life to get this thing. And not only if I speak up, Am I? So it's these two competing things. It's like if I speak up, I'm out. Right. And then also, if I get on board, maybe it actually gets me where I want to go faster. So it's the it's the fear of losing the thing that you crave desperately that makes you compromise on your principle. And then also the temptation of a shot at the thing, which maybe deep down you understand you're actually not qualified for, like, I don't know, who's ever in charge of the FBI right now or something, right?

13:53It's a fast track for a thing that under ordinary circumstances, you'd have had no shot in hell at. And so that's the wicked sort of carrot and the stick that gets people in line with something that under ordinary circumstances, they'd see quite clearly. But there's a lot of movies about that. What was the John Grisham novel, The Firm? This is a tale as old as time is going back to Seneca where people compromise themselves to get the thing they want. It never works out. How many people in Magaland, everything Trump touches dies. And I hate to make this too political, but how many people have been, how did it work out for Mike Pence?

14:26How did it work out for Elon Musk? Elon Musk, Nikki Haley, is Marco Rubio ever, can he even talk to his dad at Thanksgiving to compromise and sell your soul like that? Yeah. It doesn't work out in the long run. It does not. But the temptation is always there. And it always will. In the year 2500, whoever's sitting at this podcast table, they're going to be talking about the whatever events of the day, you know, people are going to be tempted to sell out. Yes. To get the thing they want. And when they finally get it, it's not going to be what they thought it would be. And it'll be short lived. Yeah.

15:00And then when it and then when it ends, you know, you're going to have to live with. Well, so I imagine that they talked to you about this when you were at the academy. Oh, yeah. Like this is the timeless thing for for officers. It's the timeless thing for for anyone in a position of leadership. But it's only really in the academy where they're where they're explicitly training you for command and leadership. Yeah. Yes. It was awesome. I mean, I had never been exposed to that. I never talked about ethics or any of that stuff. And my kids went to civilian college and they never, they don't, this is all foreign to them.

15:35Academies and sports are kind of the only two places that really build character in that way. And then in sports, there's obviously just the raging hypocrisy on top of it, you know? Yeah. But at least there's like accountability and discipline and working hard and whatever. So there is, I think sports are great, but. I just mean at the collegiate level. The coach tells a nice story about character and selflessness and whatever, and they're the highest paid employee of the state. I know. I know. I used to love college sports and it's just hard with looking at their payroll. And yeah, but they're stealing signs.

16:11We would at the Air Force Academy, we had something called whatever. It was like a daily ethics class and we would go through situations like cadets won't lie, cheat or steal. I think most people know that's the honor code. We also had something that was called the toleration clause or tolerate anyone who does. And they added that on. And that's a tough one. Like, it's one thing to not lie to your sale. It's another thing to turn your buddy in for. Right. And I went to the French Air Force Academy. The conflicting loyalties there. I went to the French Air Force Academy for an exchange and they would never in a zillion years ever consider turning their classmate in.

16:47It was like it was them against the academy. Yes. And actually, that was kind of good in some ways, but the toleration clause is important because we see that in our government now. Yes. How many people who know better tolerate really bad things in this government? And that's, you know what, we had four years to talk about it. Yes. And when the freshmen come in, they're going to make mistakes. You don't expect the freshmen to be perfect. By the time you're a senior, you're expected to be perfect because you're about to be an officer. And that time of talking, and not everything's black and white.

17:16And I came away from my space flights thinking like I used to be a very black and white guy when I was younger. And now I kind of see that there are things that are black and white. There is right and wrong. But there's a lot of gray areas in life in general. So but it was important to have four years to talk about that. And you had you could talk about it with senior officers and they'd go, hey, this happened and that happened. And most people don't get that. So that was an experience I treasured. I wish more kids had that. Well, then and now people wrestle with like, what is this? Aren't we just supposed to make them like big and strong and fast?

17:49Lethal. Yes, lethal. They got to be a warfighter. Well, first off, you know, the F-16 is doing most of the work, you know, like what you want is the brain inside. And you want the person who's able to think about, you know, where this bomb is going and why is it going there and all of that. And so I was telling you about the book I'm working on. I'm working on a book about Stockdale right now. Oh, wow. And you think about he says, you know, we're basically dropped in this hellhole. We have to the orders, he says, were laughably insufficient, you know, name, rank, serial number. Right. That's something that someone in Washington came up with.

18:25That ruins a lot of men, unfortunately. And so he's like, we had to come up with a civilization, a code, a system that was both ethical and practical, given the realities of our situation. And so it's precisely these kinds of vexing dilemmas that people are going to find themselves in. And again, most of them are not combat related. I think I had Alexander Vindman on the podcast. You think about here's a person trained in this same system. And then he hears something that he, again, you can disagree with whether what happened was right or wrong. But what matters is that it raised concerns for him.

19:03And do you want a military officer who then has civilian sort of adjacent roles or political roles? Do you want them to experience something that's profoundly unnerving and then go, well, that's what's going on? Or do you want them to be guided by their conscience? That's exactly what you want to build in if you see the services as the training grounds for generations of leaders in business and politics and communities. When you don't have that, you have my lie. Or unfortunately, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were multiple bad things that went badly. My lie was a massacre in Vietnam that got covered up.

19:44So I kind of laugh. A lot of people are like, well, I have my gun. So that's what keeps us free in America. I'm like, dude, you have an AR-15. They have F-15s. Yes. Like your gun's not going to win against the army. So you want the military to have ethics. Yes. You need those leaders to be doing the right thing. And right now, we're just taking a sledgehammer to the foundation. Every day that sledgehammer is hitting the brick. And the good news is we have a really strong foundation. Yes. But it won't last forever. So we need to stop hitting it with a sledgehammer and start to rebuild it, I think.

20:15Yes, yes. You don't want people who are just following orders. You want people who are able to parse and understand orders. And then you want that because that is also a check on the people giving the orders. You want people loyal to the Constitution and not one man. Yes. I have friends who got went through the doge process and they had this horrendous 20 minute loyalty test. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election? Will you support this? And it was like humiliating loyalty tests. And unfortunately, there's thousands of senior government workers who all pass that loyalty test. And that's terrifying.

20:51Yes. And you are ejecting people who failed said loyalty test, but are hyper competent individuals who, again, these are the things we learned the hard way. We learned how dysfunctional and inefficient a political administrative state was. I saw that in space flying over the Korean peninsula. Yeah. You see South Korea at nighttime, lights, beautiful, bright, vibrant, democracy, capitalists. North Korea is a black hole. Yeah. There's a little white dot where Pyongyang. You can see a system where everybody salutes the dear leader and there's no ethics. And you can see a system where there's competition and, you know.

21:31Yes. I could see exactly what you just said I could see from space.

21:41We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

22:17Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

22:59And daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns.

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24:46Well, you talked about Russia and Ukraine. If you have a military that is based on telling the leader what they want to hear, you get what was clearly, again, the rightness or wrongness of it, clearly a false picture presented to Vladimir Putin on how the invasion would go. Right. So just from a tactical and strategic standpoint, a government that cannot tell its leaders the truth for fear of their personal safety. Right. Right. It's going to go amazing. We have the best military in the world. It's full of neo-Nazis over there. Then then they'll fold in three days. Yeah. Then you bump into reality.

25:28Right. And that is we've had that at different points in American history, too. Nobody told the American president the truth in Vietnam. And the American president didn't want to hear the truth in Vietnam also. And that's why we ended up where we ended up. And we fed, you know, a generation of young men into a meat grinder for basically no reason. When I was a cadet, I struggled with Vietnam so much because I was like, what would I do? Yes. And I would serve my country, but I would hate it. I would have been, I would have tried to, you know, stop it. Did you see Ken Burns' Vietnam? Mm-hmm. I've interviewed him too.

26:04That's amazing. He's the best. I'm so jealous. We're also both not allowed to speak at the Naval Academy. Both of us had our invitations rescinded. Because of recent things. My commander on my first space shuttle flight was a Navy grad, and I was Air Force. And I went back to Bancroft Hall at the Naval Academy, and I got a standing ovation. It was so cool. I was at the Naval Academy two days ago having crab cakes on the Severn River. I was at a family funeral, but anyway. Not so good. Yeah. In Vietnam, Ken Burns, Vietnam documentary, amazing documentary. He had he had audio from Truman, from Truman through Nixon.

26:37And every single president was like, yeah, this is going badly, but we're going to have to pretend it's going well. Like every single president, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, they all lied about Vietnam. Yeah. I mean, you go to the idea of moral, physical courage. Part of the reason they didn't want to drop out or withdraw is they didn't want to take, be accused. They didn't want to be the one. Yeah. Yeah. So they did. And for fear of looking cowardly, they did the cowardly thing. And then they forced other people to go do incredibly brave, terrifying. That's so profound. For fear of looking cowardly, they did the cowardly thing.

27:14That was profound. I was at McDonald's. I posted about this. I was at McDonald's. my Saturday morning tradition, getting a McGriddle. And there was a Vietnam guy sitting there by himself. So we were talking with him and he just started talking and talking and about all his experience. And then another Vietnam, you know, these guys who are their Vietnam hat. And I always thank them because my uncle made a point and he was there and he called himself a draft dodger. He joined the Air Force. That was his way of dodging the draft. So he didn't have to go in the army. And he was traumatized until the day he died getting, he was on an Air Force space, but they got shelled.

27:48So the men that went to Vietnam went through a lot and then they got back and they got treated like dirt and it wasn't their fault that the president sucked at the time. Yeah. So we need if you see a Vietnam vet, tell him thank you. And I introduced these two guys at McDonald's and they were like, oh, 66. And I was there for Tet. And it was awesome to see this camaraderie. H.R. McMaster in his book on Vietnam, which is fascinating, he says the interesting thing about it is like a lot of the generals thought we weren't being tough enough in Vietnam. And then others came to think that it was unwinnable and we needed to withdraw.

28:23And he said, but the remarkable thing is not a single member of the joint chiefs throughout the entire conflict resigned in protest. Exactly the same dilemma we're talking about. One of them was asked, you know, why didn't you resign? And he said, well, if I resigned, it would have been a news story for three days. And then I just would have been another ex-soldier. And yet, if everyone thinks that way, what happens is you are continuing to rubber stamp and approve something that you are in a lone, you amongst a few others are in a position to influence the course of. So I think we've what we've determined, Ryan, is that people will always do this.

29:04Very, very few people will stand up and do the right thing with moral courage. And most people will go along with it and save their bacon. I just read a great book about Churchill, The Splendid and the Vile. Amazing, amazing book. You know, and Americans think, well, we won World War Two. We'll always do the right thing. It was our manifest destiny. God, God had to know. We got lucky, had a lot of things not happened. we would have lost World War II. We had Father Coughlin. We had fascists in America. We had the fat Nazi thing at Madison Square Garden. We were not preordained to win that thing.

29:37Until on December 6th, 1941, most Americans didn't want to get, we were happy to let England, you know, get smashed. It was like a Christmas story where the kids out there and all the other kids just run away. They're not willing to help out their buddy. That's just human nature. So we, I think we need. It was the moral courage of a handful of individuals that started the stampede that eventually led to the right thing. FDR knew the right thing, and he was just trying to hang on because most of Congress didn't, and he knew the right thing. And anyway, it's just some, we need to be aware of that.

30:09And I don't know what the answer is, but one of these days, we're going to go down the wrong path and it's not going to be recoverable. So we need to try and avoid that. There's serious consequences. I think this isn't pretend. Just because a lot of this plays out on the internet, or on cable news shows doesn't mean that it doesn't have real consequences. Like a bunch of kids are dead because people decided to treat the federal government like a distressed company you could raid and sell off the parts, right? Or that it was an internet startup that you could move fast and break things. You broke something.

30:49Yeah, millions of lives. And those are just the tangible ones that happened right now. You are you're gutting our public health. You are making us unprepared for disasters. You are all these things that we take for granted. The federal government is not perfect and America is not perfect, but it is the result of a lot of hard won battles and decisions. Most of them learned from painful trial and error. And you are you're fucking with the inheritance of my children and generations of children. Right. In the Air Force, we have a lot of rules and we would always say those rules were written in blood.

31:28Somebody would die and then we would have a new rule like don't fly under bridges or whatever. Yeah. Somebody didn't label a gun properly and someone got shot or an explosive went out. All these things, these safety. It's like that that famous picture of the plane where it was all the bullet holes in it, you know, like all the things. These are all the things we've learned under fire and conflict and doing it the wrong way. Yeah. And so we have a president who is forcing loyalty to himself. He's making press submit. When you make the press submit, that's really bad. He's making universities submit.

32:04He's making the military submit. He's making the legal community. When you don't have lawyers, there's no more law. Yes. Right. You can't have these people submitting. All those people should be challenging the president. He's forcing them to submit. And guess what? They submit. Tim Cook's at the White House kissing the ring. Who's going to stand up? And if nobody stands up to that, we're going down a really bad path. I read the book. It can't happen here. Written in 1936. Look, a great leader doesn't need submit. They need a certain amount of buy-in from the majority of people, but they actually welcome dissent and they can handle it.

32:38You know, like I'm not threatened by immigrants or women or minority groups because I know I'm I'm good at what I do. Right. I welcome competition. And so there's something inherently weak and insecure about this sort of exclusionary roll up the ladder. You know, how dare you criticize me? How dare you give me negative information? Like, you can't handle it? As a fighter pilot, the whining and the grievances, oh, my God, that would that would last about five seconds in a fighter squad. Like you can't whine about stuff. Yes. Or you don't have grievance or you get kicked out of the door. So, yeah, it's a it's a bad situation.

33:22So talk to me about the decision to run for Senate, because I imagine you could have a much easier life as a consultant for a defense contractor or you could sit on a board or you could you could probably run for some much less contentious offices locally. You could do it. No one's making you do this. I lost a bet in a bar. That's my joke. You know, the last few cycles I've supported other candidates. I don't have a lot of social media, whatever, you know, a few hundred thousand. And I got to the point where I just couldn't sit by and watch this happen. I see the bridge is out and I see the trains going full speed ahead towards the bridge that's out.

34:01And there's a, you know, verse to those who much has been given, much will be expected. And I've been given a lot. This country has given me a lot. I feel like I have a unique experience. There's not a lot of folks of my experience between business as a small business owner in the energy industry and being a fighter pilot and astronaut, it's a pretty different thing. And I think in a state like Texas, that resume will play. Most people are not political nerds. Most people are not obsessing over the New York Times and Politico every day. Most people look at a candidate and they're like, I like that guy or I don't like that gal or whatever.

34:34So I think my background will play well in a state like Texas. And I think that we have a lot of great candidates, but I don't think they're going to win in a state like Texas. And if I thought there were, I would just go support them and live the good life that I used to have. But I just didn't see that. So I said, I'm not going to sit around and do nothing. I'm at least going to try. And people say mean things about me and that's fine. I love Texas. I live here voluntarily. I had family here a couple generations ago, but like I had no ties here. My wife and I moved here. I raised my kids here.

35:04I live in this small town instead of a big city. I love the people I know. I love my neighbors. You got Whataburger. Got Whataburger. I have trouble wrapping my head around how it's even a conversation that we might elect a literal crook who not just cheats on his wife, but humiliates his wife, forces his wife to sit through his own impeachment trial. for the cover-up he engaged in, where he somehow managed to not just be a criminal, but also be unfaithful to his wife and merge the two together. This is what he gets impeached for. And it's like he's a viable candidate. I mean, he's currently holding one of the most important law enforcement offices in this state, but he's a viable candidate for the U.S.

35:55Senate. How do we live in this upside-down world in Texas? I don't get it. I think he's going to win the nomination. Ken Paxson is going to be there. John Cornyn is not going to win that nomination. Here's the problem. And I'm running as a Democrat and I'm a Democrat. People know how bad Trump is. They know he's a liar. They know he's full of BS. And yet they still trusted him more than they trusted Democrats. The Democratic Party told America that Joe Biden's not too old. Back in 2016, when he left as vice president, I remember I saw him and I was like, oh, I'm glad he's like, it's time for Joe to be done.

36:26That was in 2016. But we told America he's not too old. We put Kamala, we just hand, we parachuted her in without a primary and we lectured everybody about democracy. We said, don't worry about if you're against illegal immigration, you're a racist. I've been talking to voters all across Texas. I'm going down to the Valley tomorrow and the Hispanic community on the Valley hates illegal immigration, not because they're racist, but because they want people to follow the rules. We told people the economy's fine. The stock market's up. Well, half of Americans don't even own one share of stock, right?

36:57So people trusted the known liar more than they trusted the Democratic Party. And we need to be honest about that. Trump's underwater in every issue right now. People don't, even on immigration and the economy, they don't like Donald Trump. And on every issue, they like Democrats even less. So we need to be honest about that. We need to have a debrief. What I've been saying in a fighter squadron or as an astronaut, we have a debrief after a thing. What went wrong? In the 24 election, What debrief have you seen? What national leaders have you seen? Chuck Schumer is still leading our party. Right.

37:29I'll say it right now. Chuck Schumer needs to go. Yeah, I mean, that goes to our conversation about being a man or woman of honor. When you shit the bed or when things go bad on your watch, we have lost the ability. We have lost the cultural expectation that you resign in shame when you fuck up. Not that you need to be driven from public life forever. You should be humiliated and send it to exile, but you should go, I guess I messed up. I'm sorry. Yeah. And we have messed up like and unless look, you go to war with the army you have and the army we have is two party system. We have Democrats or Republicans.

38:06So either you vote Republican or Democrat. And today it's not Mitt Romney, George H.W. Bush Republican Party. That party is dead. It is it's a disaster. It's a path to fascism. So you either vote for that or you vote for the Democratic Party. And they're a train wreck, too. And so what I'm what I'm hoping to do is bring some renaissance to the Democratic Party. some. Well, let's think about this. So I live on, I live on a ranch out here. I live on a dirt road, right? So if the road was 60 feet wide, it could be taken over by the county and the county have to take care of it. Very deliberately, someone set it up as 50 feet.

38:36So it'll never be taken over the county. And so it means it's, it's all of our responsibility. And we have no, none of our neighbors will come together and form an HOA. So it's a voluntary. It's very Texas. Yes. And it's, it's wonderful and terrible. Right. Right. There's like a a hippie commune on this long street. There's ranchers. There's a bunch of people living in trailers. There's people with Trump flags, all very different political beliefs. Sounds like Austin. Yeah. But we come together and we have to take care of this road. We voluntarily contribute. I saw one of my neighbors out there with a tractor like three days ago.

39:13I think about this guy who's out there fixing it with his tractor, voluntarily solving a collective action problem on his own, right? He drives that tractor back to his house with a Trump flag in front of it. And I sometimes go, if Trump or Paxton or Ted Cruz lived on this street, do you think they would be contributing? Do you think they'd be a good neighbor? And so that's something I've always just struggled with is like, you see these people who on a personal level have these values and live their life by a certain code. And yet time and time again, they support and forgive people who not just don't live by that code, but make a mockery of that code.

39:58They're actively evil in some cases. I mean, we know what Ted Cruz does when there's a problem. If he gets on the first flight and goes as far away as possible. I mean, that's what to me is so interesting about the Ted Cruz thing. It's not just that he got on a flight when his fellow Texans were freezing. I actually don't need him there handing out water. He probably is unpleasant to be around and not very helpful. It's that he didn't even, for all his years in Washington, he didn't even think, there's probably some people I can call. Like he didn't, he doesn't even know how the levers of power work to get anything done.

40:31So here's the really terrible thing. A couple months ago, Ted Cruz is the most hated guy. Al Franken. Yes. Has the funniest thing. He's like, Like, you know, when I was a senator, I liked Ted Cruz more than most of my fellow senators. And that's saying a lot because I hated Ted Cruz. So Democrat just lost Ted Cruz by almost 10 points and he's running again a couple months later. Like, guys, we need to win because there's a threat to the republic and we need to win and we need to get better. Like what works in a liberal district here in Austin is not going to work statewide. This is Texas. What works in the liberal congressional district in Dallas is not going to work statewide.

41:10And we have to figure out, we have to be open and honest and say what's going to win. It's going to be some type of common sense. It's not going to be the traditional old school Democratic Party. Texans have voted. It's been over 30 years since the Democrat won. 30 years. Yeah. Any statewide office. And Richard, I joke, do you remember the Texas land commissioner back in 1994? And people like, huh? I'm like, yeah, that's the last time a guy won in Texas. Yeah. Pearl Jam was at the top of the charts. We need to get better because we need to win the redistricting. Yeah. The guys went. And I'm glad these guys were willing to put themselves at risk.

41:42And it's cost some money and their families and inconvenience. And I'm glad I'm glad that there were people willing to do it to leave to break quorum, leave and stop the redistricting. Two weeks later, they're back. Yeah. And the redistricting is going to happen. Yeah. And they're claiming that's a victory. Right. What the hell kind of victory is that? Yeah. It delayed it by two weeks. And now Gavin Newsom is going to fight fire with fire. And I'm glad Gavin Newsom is going to fight fire with fire. So now there'll be California voters disenfranchised, just like there's Texas voters. It's like when I was an F-16 pilot, I was nuclear certified.

42:14And I knew if the Russians dropped a nuke on us, they might call me up and ask me to go drop a nuke on that. I trained for that. By the way, this is why they train in ethics and. Right. Because of the weight of the decisions that you. It was nuclear weapons. I literally had a B61 dial a disaster, we called it. You could go, you could select the yield. Anyway, retaliating is not a victory. There's no victory in nuclear. It's a mutually assured destruction. You have to do it. Of course, you're going to do it. But there's no victory in that. So what we just did for, it was two weeks of performance.

42:46No, no. And it's always on the defensive, right? The way to win is to win elections. The way to actually have a victory for Democrats is to actually win an election. We haven't done that for 30 years. So we need to stop having performative politics and actually win elections. No, and it's this idea that like, I don't know, I've driven all over the state. You drive through some swaths of Texas and you're like, this is big enough for all of us, man. Like, like we should be inclusive. We should be welcoming. This could be one of the great, I mean, it already is, but I mean, you just, you think of the potential of this place.

43:24Yeah. And then you have the people who are currently in charge on this sort of exclusionary, backwards facing, you know, agenda. And it's like, why don't we just talk about all the awesome shit we can do? Let's do some awesome shit. You know, I think most Texans are like that. The problem is we have partisan primaries. So one of the things I want to do is have a democratic reform. We need some serious on a lot of different things. But when you have a partisan primary, the MAGA extremists are going to let Ken Paxton. And by the way, John Cornyn's no better. The voting record is going to be exactly the same.

43:57Ken Paxton is a lot more prickly and he's took the corruption and Cornyn's a nice grandfather. He's going to vote the exact way. Not a degenerate felon. He is not. But he also just said, we're going to send the FBI to get these guys. And he posted a picture of himself reading Art of the Deal. And he's the problem with Cornyn is going back an hour. He knows better. Yeah. And he still does what's wrong. Ken Paxson is just bad. Yes. John Cornyn knows what's right and wrong. And he chooses actively to not do what's right. That's the problem with Cornyn. So Paxson's going to the primary. And in what I'm what I hope doesn't happen, what the message I'm trying to do.

44:33But Democrats, they might nominate somebody that makes them feel good in the primary and makes them feel sad in November. And what we need to do is nominate somebody who's going to make us feel good in November when we win the general election. But the partisan primary system is one of our many problems in this country. We need to. It's basically like 3 % of the population picks the representative of the whole state. And if you're gerrymandered, literally the other party has nothing to say about it because gerrymandering works. Like it's it's a really smart way to do things if you want to just have raw power.

45:05It works. Yeah.

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46:47OK, so slightly more positive now as we wrap up. All right. So when you were a kid, kids wanted to be astronauts. When I was a kid, kids wanted to be astronauts. My kids want to be YouTubers. How do we build a society in a world where our kids want to do that kind of stuff again? Part of the problem is, you know, video games and AI and stuff, you can actually see everything, you know, that you can experience things online. It's like you don't have to do them in real life. I'd rather do things in real life than online. A friend of mine raised two teenagers without devices or anything. And you can do that for eight-year-olds.

47:29But man, by the time you're in high school. Yeah, it's hard. And they made it a deal like, you'll get a car, you'll get this and that. But they literally, and these kids, I sat down for lunch and they like, they looked at me and they had a conversation about meaningful adult things while looking at me for an entire lunch. And it was like, oh my God, you raise these kids great. I've done a lot of speaking on all seven continents. And I was in Vienna a few years ago. I was in the hall where Beethoven first played his Ninth Symphony. It was like, it was cool. It was amazing. And this thing hit me.

47:59So I wrote a, I used to have a blog and I called it the end of genius because back then, if you wanted to know some knowledge, you'd have to come and get a book and read about it and you'd have to actively study. And now everything's so instant that we don't have to go through the same disciplines that people used to do. I don't want to go back to back then. I think they're a lot better. But there were still some there's some benefits for sitting down, doing some research and writing and thinking as you write an argument on a piece of paper. And with AI, kids don't have to think anymore. I think that's going to if we think our brains are fried now, just wait till an entire generation grows up without ever having to think and do critical thinking.

48:38Anything what AI is going to, an AI world is going to demand from people is the ability to think critically. Because even the best models like hallucinate like 20 % of the time. So if you don't know how to, people who can't separate fact from fiction, misinformation from real information, you know, truth from fantasy. We're already struggling in a society that has trouble doing that. If you can't go, no, that doesn't sound right. I don't think that's true. That doesn't make sense. The only way you can get anything good out of AI is if you can engage with it and you have a base of knowledge to bring to it, to even ask it to do the right things.

49:16So, again, it comes back to that broad liberal arts education that your kids are going to need. A thousand percent. Critical thinking. If I was king, every kid would graduate from high school with a class on critical thinking and ethics. Yeah. Yeah. And so Texas has decided to respond to this existential threat by gutting its public schools. Here's another thing we need to do is get money out of politics because Greg Abbott has a mega billionaire. It's like one dude decided. He gave him like 10 million dollars or some huge number. One percent of Texans thought that for those who don't know, we're talking about vouchers.

49:46They thought that vouchers were important. My kids went to private school through elementary school. It was great. I paid for it out of my salary. And then they went to public school. And here we are because one man gave millions and millions and millions of dollars. Dan Patrick forces it through the Senate and Senator Paxton, Angela Paxton, voted for it. And here we are where the public school is going to get hurt and private schools are going to get built up. And that's like, I'm a fan. I'm a product of public school. Me too. It's a huge, hugely important thing. It's what gives kids opportunity.

50:20Especially in these small towns in Texas. They're the ones going to be hurt the worst. I know. And look, there are some really nice, great private schools that are incredible. There's a lot of them that are not incredible. And those kids who go to those are not going to be learning any critical thinking. They're going to be taught a very narrow and inaccurate, you know, information. And so. No, no. And it's like, wait, I know$10 million sounds like a lot of money. Yeah. And it is. But it's like, wait, you sold out billions, an entire state, you know, of millions and millions of people and an education budget of billions.

50:58For what? Again, this goes back to, are you or are you not a person of honor? Is this what the people want? Or is this what somebody who has leverage over you wants? And that's what Texas politics is, is primarily that these days, unfortunately. Well, that's the genius of our founding fathers. They gave us this system that had checks and balances. And we need to make sure that that's strong because there's always going to be people who do the wrong thing. There's always going to be people who don't have honor. So we need to strengthen our checks and balances and our press and those institutions.

51:29So there's hope. We just need to get back to doing that. And also teaching kids critical thinking. Like you said, that's, that is the most important skill for the future. Most kids aren't going to have it. Yeah. I mean, so we need to, that, that's an educational emergency, I think. Yeah. And I mean, my kids use devices. They, they, they explore these things. They play with AI, but it's like, how do you make them, how do you make them excited to do real things? And there There was a New York Times piece that was, it was like the U.S., a nation of lawyers goes to war with China, a nation of engineers.

52:01Like we're really good at fighting and arguing over things. Right. But what we need to be is that country that sent people to the moon. Builds stuff. Yeah. And there is this sort of, you want people who want to do cool stuff in real life. Yeah. A lot of that happens in school. You know, when I was in school, reading is what did it for me. The first book I read was as a little kid. I read one of those cardboard books about Apollo. And that's what I was like, oh, this would be cool. I want to be an astronaut. I read the right stuff as a teenager. Like reading is what did it for me. I used to read about, I used to read science fiction.

52:34I used to read about mountain climbing. And, you know, I like adventure. I hated, hated English class. Like all those English books I hated. I was a terrible student. And now I'm an author. I've written several books. But it's about things that I like. So my advice to any parents is, man, get your kids reading. Let them read stuff that they like and that they'll enjoy. And there's nothing better, I don't think, that you can do for a kid than reading. What I try to do is take that energy that's like, yeah, I want to watch YouTube videos. And we watch videos about places and things. And then we go do those places and things.

53:06You know what I mean? And then whenever my kids want to do stuff in real life, I try to go, am I like on Sunday night? It's like five in the afternoon. and my son goes, can we go to Barton Springs? It's like an hour drive from my house. And I wanted to be like, no, you know? And I had to be like, wait, no, no. I want a kid that likes the outdoors. Yeah. That when they have that sense of adventure, there's a voice inside them that says, yes, do it, not don't do it. And here I'm at a crossroad. I can say no and instill the, no, it's too hard. No, it'll take too long. No, it's too cold, whatever.

53:42Now I got to say yes. Barton Springs is awesome. I took my kids there when they were little. Yeah. There's some rivers there and there's a golf course, great golf course. Yeah, a little golf course. But again, also, it's like all the things that people love about Texas, not all, but a good chunk of the things that people love about Texas were built by the government they love to shit all over. Do you know what I mean? Like, well, the Johnson Space Center. Yeah. The state parks are all built by the W.A. You know, Barton Springs is a crown jewel run by the city of Austin. You know, you know, but people just don't think about where these things that they love come from.

54:20Right. Like they were trying to build a trash transfer facility. It was Austin so big. I live out here. They're trying to build like a transfer facility where they're just, you know, They just take the trash from one city and put it in a smaller city with less power. And so we went to this sort of meeting where we're all talking about it. And what's it called? It's the TEQ, whatever, the Texas Environmental Quality, whatever. The environmental agency that would be able to be like, hey, actually trying to build this next to a creek, bad idea. And then, you know, it was interesting to watch these people get upset that this agency was toothless to protect them.

55:01And it's like, yes, right? All the things that you want, you think you don't want this thing until you want it. How about the floods? Yes, exactly. The guy at the National Weather Service whose job was to warn people took the early out that Elon Musk gave him. And now we're shutting down weather research. and they don't have, I just spent, I went to Ukraine a few times last year delivering ambulances on humanitarian. Those alarms are, you know, the air raid alarms, they're going off every night. In the worst flooding zone in the world, they don't have those alarm systems here in Texas for a million bucks.

55:39The federal government offered them one. No, we don't want, the federal government's evil. We better not take money for an alarm system. So do I love the government? No. Is the government bloated? Does it need to be? Of course it does. I spent 30 years at NASA and the Air Force. We used to joke that NASA puts the no in innovation. Like, of course, it's bureaucracy. Of course, it needs to be better. But it does some pretty important things. Yes. It does some like, you know what? I didn't have to worry about polio. Thank God we have vaccines. Yes. My parents had to worry about that. Their classmates died from polio.

56:10I don't know if you've flown into Austin recently, but it's one of the worst airports in the country right now because it is usually has about 50 percent of the air traffic. controllers it's supposed to have. Yes. So government is important. Driving on the roads or doing road construction, schools. There's a lot of things that the government does. So they're not all evil. Should it be more efficient? Yes. Should we destroy it? And I think at the end of the day, that's what's happening right now. They're trying, because if you destroy government, who's going to stop the AI companies from growing and taking over the world?

56:43If you're going to destroy government, the IRS, who's going to check up to make sure the rich people are paying their taxes. That's a genius thing for billionaires is to kill the IRS, which they've done very effectively. So the problem is, Ryan, most if you're listening to Fox News and Newsmax and those podcasts, you don't ever hear this. Right. All you hear is about how evil they are and they're going to turn your kids trans and they're going to put chips in your vaccine. That's all you hear. And that's so how do we break in? Yeah, no, you're outraged about these other things that are egregious or weird or uncomfortable.

57:19It is weird why, you know, I don't know, why was there that weird drag thing at the Olympics? But that's not what you should be worried about, right? So we have a media system that's really good at taking fringe things and making people deeply uncomfortable with them. Meanwhile, things that are not weird, but will keep you up. Every time I get in a plane, I have to think, oh, man, are there enough air traffic controllers? I speak all over the country. So I used to be able to do a lot of, you know, if it's at three in the afternoon, I can leave my house in the morning, get on an airplane, you know, on a Southwest flight, do the thing, fly home that night, see my kids the next morning.

58:06Right. And and now it's like three hour delays are so common, more common than they were in the 50s because we fucked up the FAA. Hey, those are the things people should be outraged and upset about. We should ask ourselves why other countries without a fraction of the economy we have have things like paid leave and have things like - Family leave. There's one of my, that's something I want to implement. Of course, you should have family leave when you have a baby. When I had my first kid, I was at test pilot school. We literally had him induced on Friday night so I could be back at work on Monday.

58:41And by the way, you know who has great schools, great benefits, all that stuff? The military. Yes. You know what I mean? Like, it is capable. The government can do things right. Yeah, when it is a priority and when the people in the system demand that they get those things, they tend to get those things. Absolutely. Look, government's not the answer to everything. And I'm a big private sector fan, but you need to have a functioning, well-run government. And what's happening now is they're destroying it. Yeah. And the people they're putting in are sycophants. They're having to pass this egregious loyalty test.

59:16People are afraid to do things. My neighbor has a child in the FBI. And oh, my God, it's bad. It's really bad, the stuff that they're having to do. They were working in political corruption in Florida. Yeah. That division got shut down. Right. Actually, they were investigating a Democrat. Sure. Not anymore. That's shut down. No more investigating political corruptions. They got sent to pull immigrants off the street as a like trained FBI is not. we have a massive secret police. If the ICE budget were a military, I think it would be the 16th largest military on earth. Yeah. It's insane. It can't happen here.

59:53Again, I live out in the country. There's a lot of different people from a lot of different places where I live. And I go, you know, like, I was driving down 812, which is this little sort of farm to market road. And this was maybe five or six years ago. And this car kind of swerves and it flips. So me and another guy, we rush out to the car. We break the window. We pull the guy out. He's sort of shaking. He's standing there. And then like, I see him text something on his phone. And then a few minutes later, another car picks up. It pulls up. The car gets in and drives away. And I realized, oh, this guy can't wait around for the police or the paramedics.

1:00:31Right. Right? And, you know, some people might take the moral of that story as we have, you know, whatever. To me, the moral of the story is you want to stop people at the border. But once they're here, you want them to be not afraid of law enforcement. Right. You want them to be functioning members of society. Right. You want them when they see a fire to call 911. You want them when they get in a car accident to wait for police. You want, you know what I mean? When they're being beaten by their husband or boyfriend. Yes. And that's in Houston. That's, unfortunately, there's been some stories where women are getting killed.

1:01:03Or if their neighbor is dealing drugs, you want them to call the police. You do not want law enforcement to become politicized because it makes everyone less safe. You don't want a mask either. Yes. What the heck is up with masks? If you're in North Dakota and it's January, all right, wear a mask. But if, you know, unless there's some tactical reason you have to wear a mask, which there almost never is, get the masks off, man. This is America. I was in Moscow in 2012. I was training for a flight and I was wandering around and there was a giant mob. So I was like, this is weird. There's not usually Ma.

1:01:36So I went over. Of course, I should have left, but I went to it. It was Alexei Navalny. He was having a, it was like Beto. He was the Beto of Russia. And because Putin was coming back. Remember he did that switch. He switched president and vice president, basically, with Dmitry Medvedev. And the Russians were actually protesting in 2012. That ended. But the police there wear masks. They don't have name tags. So that's what we have here now. Yes. I saw it with my own eyes in Russia, and yet that's what we have here now. So there's a lot of things that need to change, but that's one of them. No, it can happen here, and it is happening here.

1:02:12It is. It's present tense. Yeah. So I think your listeners probably understand that, and they're hopefully willing to do things about it. All right. You want to go check out some books? I'll show you the picture.

1:02:29Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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