Spending 213 Days In Space Does THIS To You | Astronaut Terry Virts (PT. 1)

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1:36Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

2:20Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My voice is a little tired. I just, today, just finished recording the audiobook for Wisdom Takes Work. So you can pre-order that, dailystoic.com slash pre-order if you want all the cool bonuses and stuff, including signed manuscript pages from the edits that I did on the draft, the final draft of the book that I just read for the audiobook. So I put off doing this intro a little bit because I knew I wanted to open with a little riff from one of my other books. So I'm basically doing a little extra audio book here for you, but it very much pertains to this week's episode in The Obstacle is the Way, I wrote about controlling your emotions, which I'll riff for you now.

3:13When America raced to send the first men into space, they trained astronauts in one skill more than any other, the art of not panicking. When people panic, they make mistakes. They override systems. They disregard procedures. They ignore rules. They deviate from the plan. They become unresponsive and stop thinking clearly. They react not just to what they need to react to, but to the survival hormones that are coursing through their veins. Welcome to the source of most of our problems down here on Earth. Everything's planned, and then when something goes wrong, the first thing we do is trade in that plan for an emotional freak out.

3:50Some of us almost crave sounding the alarm because it's easier than dealing with whatever is staring us in the face. But at 150 miles above the Earth, in a spaceship smaller than a VW, this is death. Panic is suicide. So panic has to be trained out, not that it goes easily. Before the first launch, NASA recreated the fateful day for astronauts over and over, step by step, hundreds of times, from what they'd have for breakfast to the ride to the airfield. Slowly, in a graded series of exposures, the astronauts were introduced to every sight and sound of the experience of their firing into space.

4:27They did it so many times that it became as natural and familiar as breathing. They'd practice all the way through, holding nothing back but the liftoff itself, making sure to solve for every variable and to remove all certainty. Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority. It is a release valve. With enough exposure, you can adapt out those perfectly ordinary, even innate fears that are bred mostly from unfamiliarity. And fortunately, unfamiliarity is a simple fix, which makes it possible to increase our tolerance for stress. John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit Earth, spent nearly a day in space trying to keep his heart rate under 100 beats per minute.

5:08That's not a man who's simply sitting at the controls, but a man in control of his emotions, a man who has properly cultivated what Tom Wolfe calls the right stuff. But you, you confront a client or a stranger on the street and your heart is liable to burst out of your chest, or you're called on to address a crowd and your stomach crashes through the floor. It's time to realize that this is a luxury, an indulgence of our lesser self. In space, the difference between life and death lies in emotional regulation. Hitting the wrong button, reading the instrument panels incorrectly, engaging a sequence too early, none of these could have been afforded on a successful Apollo mission.

5:45The consequences were too great. Thus, the question for astronauts was not how skilled a pilot are you, but can you keep an even strain? Can you fight the urge to panic and instead focus on only what you can change on the task at hand? The Greeks had a few words for this. Apatheia. Ataraxia. We might call it. stillness. It goes on, but it's something my guest today is an expert on because he's an astronaut. Terry Virts joined the Air Force and at 17 went to the academy and then went on to be an F-16 fighter pilot and a test pilot. He flew combat missions over Iraq, tested the world's fastest jets, commanded the International Space Station.

6:25He orbited the Earth, not once, not for a day, but something like 3 ,000 times. He spent 213 days in space. He's won basically every NASA and Air force metal you can think of. He's just an incredible person. And now he's running for Senate here in Texas. I'm glad he is running. You can learn more about his campaign. You can donate. You can register to vote, as everyone should, wherever you live in this country. But definitely, if you're in Texas, you can check all that out at TerryVirtz.com. You can follow him on Instagram at Astro underscore Terry. I know he is not running against John Cornyn, but I will tell you when that whole nonsense with the Naval Academy happened, I emailed him and John Cornyn sent me a reply, a form reply, where he just listed all the things he's done to support Pete Higgseth, inarguably our worst secretary of defense, perhaps of all time, but certainly in the last several decades.

7:24We need new leadership. And one of the things Terry talks about quite movingly in this interview was his experience in space with some Russian cosmonauts and how, you know, not everyone looks down from space and wants to help people. And I'm so glad that someone who did is now running. And I think you will really like this episode. It is not overtly political. It's mostly about these philosophical concepts. And I think you'll really like it. so obviously a lot of people want to be astronauts right so it's it's a process of of winnowing right like eliminating the people they don't want to be astronauts basically right this sort of selection process what they basically have the access to the best and the brightest of a generation right what are they looking for and i guess i'm more interested in what are they what are they selecting out of the pool?

8:16So my last job as an astronaut was to help go through thousands. I forgot how many thousands of applicants. And the good thing for NASA is that there's no shortage of talent. Like they don't have to advertise. They don't have to spend money on YouTube to advertise. And I was going through the engineers. I'm a fighter pilot, but I was looking at the engineer category because there were so many and everybody had Python and everybody had been a senior engineer. It was literally the same resume over and over. So what we were looking for was something that made you stand out. Like, remember that there was one lady who had been a NASCAR mechanic and we do a lot.

8:49Half of what I did was mechanic work. So I was like, all right, take a look at her. Um, you know, people who have operational experience. So pilots, even if you're not a pilot, even if you're just an engineer, you really need to have a private pilot's license. Cause that's the best training that you can do. What I didn't want was thrill seekers. Like I I don't want the wingsuiters jumping off the mountains and stuff. I want people who can do mountain climbing professionally or who can scuba dive, you know, seriously, but the thrill seekers, that's not who you want to be in space with. So you're right.

9:22There's a winnowing process. You go through all these interviews and kind of the end of it is you show up at NASA for an in-person interview and they go from tens of thousands down to, you know, 20 people at a time. Everybody's competent. Like they're, everybody's smart, good by that point. You're just looking for who you want to spend six months stuck in a can with. And so we used to go to this bar called Petey's. It's shut down now and you can drink all you want and you can, they give you all the rope you need to hang yourself with. And so they're just, they want us here's things. They want to hear you say stuff, you know, that's how they winnow you out.

9:56Cause when you're an interview, you're going to be nice and professional. And you, you know, one of the things, Ryan, when I was there, I was so excited. I was the youngest guy. Everybody told me I had no chance of getting picked. You're two. You don't have any experience. I was just excited to be there. So I went and I talked to the secretary who had set up my plane reservations. And I was like, this is so cool. I'm here. And the guy that drove us around in the bus, like I would hang out and like, I can't believe I'm whatever. I was nice to them. And I found out later that they asked the secretaries.

10:24Right. They asked the bus driver. They do that in the NFL, too. They interview the drivers that take them like to and from the combine, to and from the team meetings because they want to see who you are when you're not when you're not on. Yeah, exactly. But the real lesson in life isn't to act better. The lesson in life is to be better. Right. Right. Right. Right. It's supposed to be a window into your character. Exactly. And so that's when nobody's looking. That's when your character comes out. Yeah. The book that I'm working on now, a big section about it is about the Naval Academy during World War Two.

10:56And I'm just fascinated by the fact that so they spent this huge process trying to get all the best boys in the country at that time. As soon as they're accepted, it's about how do they get rid of as many of them as possible, right? Like they're subjecting them to these stress tests and this unrelenting set of standards. And it's all about now we want to find some way to ship you out of here. Not because they don't want officers. And this was like the most desperately needed officers never before and never again. And yet they're trying to see, do you actually have what it takes to do this thing?

11:35Yeah. The whole process of selecting people is an interesting one. And what you need to be a naval officer is different than what you need to be an astronaut is different than what you need to be a philosopher. Is there a big difference between what they need to be a fighter pilot and what you need to be an astronaut other than like your knowledge of physics? It's when people say, what are you? I think of myself as a fighter pilot more than I do astronaut, but fighter pilots can be kind of rough. Like we're not necessarily trained to be super, you know, friendly. We're funny and good looking and humble.

12:05But so there's a lot more edge on fighter pilots. So being able to think under pressure and do dangerous things, that's the same. But when you're an astronaut, you also have to, you know, work well with others and you're in a civilian environment and you and I flew with the Russians. And so there's a lot of those other softer skills that I think are more important. When you're a fighter pilot, your job is to kill people and break things, right? So I was going to say, as a fighter pilot, you quite literally need a killer instinct. And as it currently stands, that's the opposite of what you want in an astronaut.

12:36You would need a survival. Yeah. So there's, you know, there's some overlap, but as an astronaut, you need a few more. Yeah. A few more softer skills. And what about risk? both require a certain risk tolerance. Yeah. And yet maybe in an astronaut, you want a slightly more risk aversion. I don't know. It's not so much aversion as it is smartness. Like the only way to be safe in a space program is to not launch. If you don't launch, you won't blow up on the rocket. Right. We used to say that as a fighter pilot, the only way to be safe is to not fly. Yeah. So you need to look at risk smartly. And if there's risk that you can buy down, that you can get rid of, you get rid of it.

13:14And then there's some things that, You can't buy down and you just have to be willing to accept it. But you want to make sure that you are actively accepting those risks. And if it's something that you don't want to be surprised. Like during Challenger in Columbia, I teach at Harvard Business School about risk and the Columbia and Challenger accidents. The vehicles were talking to us. We knew that on Challenger, we knew there was problems with O-rings. On Columbia, we knew there was problems with foam. And those were the two technical reasons why both of the shuttles blew up. But it was really a human reason.

13:47Like engineers were talking, the managers had time, budget and schedule pressure, and so they ignored that risk. So for risk, you have to be smart about it.

14:02Thanks 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 into 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. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields.

14:42and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that.

15:22If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We 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.

16:10My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky'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 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.

16:47Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

17:07Yeah, people think entrepreneurs are sort of risk junkies, but it's really about the one big risk, and then you're looking to mitigate all the other risks from there. If you're going all in all the time, it is guaranteed that you will go bust. Right. And if that going bust kills you, then that's bad. If the going bust, you know, as long as you're not going dying, then you can accept those risks. But risk isn't it. We could talk for an hour about it. Yeah. Without risk, there's no reward, right? In the stock market, flying jets, whatever it is. But the risk junkie is a real thing. Like that's why I said when I'm choosing an astronaut, I don't want the guy doing wingsuiting.

17:48If you're doing wingsuiting, you're going to die. If you're doing free solo on Yosemite, you have a limited lifespan. Maybe you'll do it once and get lucky, but you know. And at the most, you'll kill yourself. Which is not the worst thing, right? If you're flying an airliner, you might kill a whole airplane full of people if you're doing stupid things. So it's being smart about risk and being realistic about risk and also understanding statistics. We have this chart at NASA where you look at how severe something might be and how often it happens. If something happens every time you fly, but it doesn't matter, you know, it's on one corner of that chart.

18:23If something happens often and it kills you dead, it's on the extreme corner of the chart, right? You're not going to fly in that risk. So if you can, I think an exercise that we did at NASA and is valuable anywhere, just sit down and brainstorm. What are all the things that might go wrong? It's not a perfect scientific thing, but you can look at all your risks and then the things that are in the one corner of the chart, you have to get rid of the, it happens often and it kills you dead. You have to get rid of those things. If it doesn't happen ever and it doesn't matter, then don't spend any time or money on that.

18:55And so going through that discipline process can help you figure out what risks you deal with, what risks you accept and what's not acceptable. Well, one of the stoic exercises, the Latin word for it is premeditatio malorum, which is basically like a pre-mortem. So you think about all the things that could go wrong. Wow. And Seneca, who talks about this in, you know, 2000 years ago, he's talking about this, like you're about to travel by ship. He's like, look, you could be attacked by pirates. There could be a storm. There could be delays. You could go into quarantine. I think sometimes people take this as, okay, that's depressing.

19:28You're missing the point. Some people think that it's an excuse for not going, also missing the point. It's what's your plan if X, Y, and Z happens. And you're never going to be able to plan for everything, but even planning for something adjacent to this thing is what's, how prepared are you for it not to go your way? Because it almost certainly is not going to go your way. Seneca was doing NASA risk management 2000 years ago. Eisenhower has a quote. I think it's spectacular. Plans are useless, but planning is essential. I think it's plans are worthless, but planning is everything. Planning is, yeah.

20:03Yes. Whatever. I'm a loose quote. That's the fighter pilot quote of it, but it's true. Like the mental discipline of sitting down with a team, what might go wrong? What are the odds of that happening? You know, going through that exercise, but then what Mike Tyson, you know, at no plan survives getting punched in the, you know, once you get punched in the face, the plans are out the door. It's a very true thing. It's true for VC, for tech startups. It's true for a lot of things in life. Yeah. I think I heard Chris Hadfield talk about this. He says, astronauts aren't braver than other people. They're just meticulously prepared.

20:33Or dumber. But anyway, yeah. His thing was the reason you have to be prepared. This is my favorite part of the quote. He says, because he's like, something will go wrong and there's a bunch of things you can do. And he says, but you always have to be aware there's no problem so bad that you cannot make it worse. And that that's really kind of what it is too. So it's the surprise that'll kill you. And then it's the impulsive reaction to the surprise that will make a bad problem into a fatal one. Yeah. We used to say, I was a pilot on the space shuttle. There's no emergency that the pilot can't make worse with one switch throw.

21:09And as an Air Force pilot, we have these three steps that every pilot learns. Maintain aircraft control, step one. Step two is analyze the situation. And step three is take appropriate action. So the first thing you do is like fly the jet and don't hit the ground. And then the second thing you do is think about it. and then the third thing you do is take you know push the button so you don't push the button until step three and that's a good maintain aircraft control analyze the situation and take appropriate action is a good way to go about life is that what most of the astronaut i assume to a certain degree the the pilot training is about is just exposing you to simulations or high stress simulations over and over and over again to sort of disabuse you of the impulse to just press the button or jerk the wheel or freak out.

21:57You're not going to be cool under pressure if you've not spent a lot of time under pressure. Absolutely. So that's why at NASA, we had a T-38, which is like a mini fighter jet training fighter jet. And that was the best training we did. In space, you're not flying a T-38. The physical stick and rudder skills, you don't use them. But the mental, staying cool under pressure, thinking ahead of the jet, that mental discipline was super important. And the other thing, they put you in these simulators that are awful. I talk about that in my book, but they give you 5 million malfunctions and they're all smart.

22:33Like if they fail that computer and this electrical bus and that hydraulic, then, you know, they fail all the things that are the worst case scenario to put you under pressure because you just can't imagine what it's like to ride on a 4 million pound rocket going 25 times the speed of sound. that's a stress that you can't simulate yeah even a t-38 doesn't do that so they try they simulate the stress by in the simulator but um giving you some pretty intense stress yeah is really important when you're an astronaut or when you're a business leader or you know whatever you're doing yeah like jim level who just died like just passed away 90 of it is probably in the just not freaking out when a cascade of problems begins.

23:19I had, I was flying over Iraq back in the day and my wingman, we were in F-16s, which is single engine, single seat, single engine. And my wingman called me and said, head north. And the wingman never, ever, ever, ever says anything on the radio. And he certainly doesn't tell the flight lead what to do. So I knew something was up and I rejoined on him and there was smoke coming out. Of your engine? Oil was leaking. If you're in a car and your oil starts leaking, pull over and turn the engine off because it's about to seize. can't do that in an F-16 over Iraq. At what, 20 ,000 feet or something?

23:50Yeah, well, we probably, we were probably 20 or 25 ,000 feet. So he made it back. It was incredibly tense moment, barely glided in. The engine eventually seized. But while we were flying back, I told him some jokes and I had literally, I was an evaluator. So the week before that, I had just given him an evaluation on engine outlandings. And I dinged him on it. Like I gave him a bad grade because he messed it up. So as we were coming in, like his engine's out, he's wondering if he's going to have to eject over this ice-filled sea by Iran. I'm like, hey, dude, we'll count this for your next emergency simulator.

24:25So trying to use a little bit of humor in the emergency, that's the way I deal with things. I try and keep things low stress. So how much different is the margin for error in a fighter jet versus space? Like, do you feel you're like, oh, it's much, the air is much thinner up here, kind of like in the sense that you screw up. No one's coming to get you. Yeah. Once you're in orbit, things are pretty chill. Like, look, if a meteor goes through the spaceship, you're going to die. There's nothing you can do about that. Right. But you're not, it's during launch and landing that's a really dangerous time.

25:01So there are things that you can do that can kill you. But while you're in space, most of the things that can kill you are just going to come out of the blue. So, but I was also there for seven months. So you can't be like on the edge of death every second for seven months. You know, you have to have some thing. Although on my last flight, we went through this period where the alarm was going off every day. And alarms go off periodically. The Russians have terrible smoke detectors and they false alarms all the time. You get a fire alarm like every week or two. So that's normal. There's always something going on.

25:33But we went through a page like every day, multiple times. So I used humor. I had a little yellow sticky and I had a cautions, warnings, emergencies and smells. Something was on fire and we were smelling smoke. And so we were just like ticking off the things to try and use humor to deal with it. But I remember after about a month of like every day, I remember thinking, all right, that's enough. I'm done with the emergencies. Did you ever see The Right Stuff? The Right Stuff? Yeah. When they were doing the astronaut selection and they put that guy in the thing and he was all stressed out. And it wasn't nearly that bad, but it was kind of like that moment in the right stuff.

26:06Like, all right, that's enough emergencies. When they're probably trying to see what I took from this sort of they're trying to see, do you break under that kind of pressure? Because it's like whatever we're going to train you for, it's you probably can't simulate being subjected to a month of consecutive false alarms. so they're trying to find analog tests that they can do on earth to go how does this person respond to all sorts of zaps and you know smacks so they don't you know break it's hard to simulate that stuff like the stress of being on a rocket there's just nothing you can't you can't simulate being weightless on earth for more than a few seconds right on we have an airplane we call it the vomit the comet that you push over and you get 20 seconds of weightlessness.

26:53But yeah, the stuff in space is hard to simulate. So stress is an important part of that. So did you always want to be a fighter pilot then? Was that, like you said, that's what you identify with. Was that the dream? Yeah. I wanted to be an astronaut and a pilot. I love those things. So I literally, when I was a little kid, I had an F-16 poster, the old YF-16. It was a red, white, and blue, the original F-16 from the 70s. I had that poster above my bed and I had a space shuttle poster though. They used to paint them all white. So I had like the original Columbia poster on my bed when I was a kid and I was lucky.

27:27I got to do the thing. I got to do my dream. You know, most, most people don't get to do that. So. Yeah, you did. Did it seem possible to you or was it like it was a dream in the way that kids dream of being a rock star, but they don't, there's not actually a viable path to get there. Yeah. My son in kindergarten, they go, what do you want to be? And he said he wanted to be an ice cream man, which is a pretty good dream for any kindergarten boy. Sure. You know, as I was growing up, I'd be like, I want to be an astronaut. And everybody's like, oh, that's nice. You should be an accountant, you know, something like that.

27:59So I just kind of smiled and ignored them. And then when I was 13, a family friend said, you need to read the right stuff. And so I read that book. It's an amazing book. It's a great movie also. And it talked about how the early guys had been fighter pilots and then test pilots and then astronauts. And I didn't know how to be an astronaut and like nobody in my family was an astronaut. So I said, that's what I'm going to do. And that's, that was the path that I ended up taking a lot of luck involved also, but having that path, like mapping that out is an important step. When I do motivational speaking, I have this thing.

28:30I say, don't tell yourself no. So whatever the dream you have, if you want to be a doctor, don't, don't tell yourself, no, there's a A lot of work, you got to go to college and you got to get good grades and you got to do all these things. But the first step and a lot of people, I think, don't do this is don't tell yourself. No, that's the most important step. Well, this can be the power of reading because very few of us, you know, our parents, friends aren't astronauts. Right. And so so sometimes it's it's reading or movies where you go, oh, this is like a this is a process. This is like there actually is a resume that a reasonable person could put together that qualify.

29:06It's not an easy resume. Right. But it's hey, if you do this, you know, it's it's kind of that winnowing in reverse. Right. It's like you do that. You go, hey, the majority of all presidents have been lawyers. So like going to law school is a good first step. Right. To putting yourself in a position to be in contention. Right. And so you read something. Oh, yeah. These guys, they they got drafted or they went to one of the service academies. And then they were suddenly they were miles closer to doing the thing than the vast majority of the population. Yeah. But the first step, you have to take that step to put yourself in that pool of people.

29:45If you want to be an actor, you got to move to Los Angeles, you know, and starve and probably fail. But unless you do that first step, you'll definitely fail. Yes, yes. If you don't put yourself in contention, it's not going to happen, which is probably deep down why most people don't decide to enlist or move to L.A. is that not being in contention is also a way to not fail at said dream. because you didn't actually try. Yes. It hurts to fail. And I failed at a lot of things, but I'm like, I got to give it a try. And then you can be honest with yourself. And then you can live with yourself when you're old, sitting in the old folks' home.

30:23You can go, yeah, I gave it a shot. Yeah.

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32:05So you're one of the handful of people who have ever left Earth. Yeah. So like when I look at that blue marble photo, it's just a photo to me. But you've seen Earth from that view. What does that do to a person? I think it depends on the person. It transformed me. I mean, Earth is a beautiful planet. I helped work on an IMAX movie called A Beautiful Planet. Yeah. Perfectly titled. It's just, you can't imagine how beautiful it was. I felt like I was seeing creation from God's point of view. Like it was a spiritual thing. The planet is just amazing. And I would have spent my whole time, when I got back, they told me that I took more pictures than any other astronaut.

32:48I took over 300 ,000 still photos and it helped make the IMAX movie. But unfortunately you gotta work. The reason you're up there, so there's a lot of science, which I love the science. I loved working on the space station. But what I really loved was looking out the window and trying to share it. And the pictures are great. I grew up looking at astronaut pictures, but it's just not the same. There's an emotional thing that happens when you look out the window. There was one moment where I was looking out and I was like, hey, that's Earth over there. That's my planet and I'm not on my planet. It's pretty profound.

33:19What is the difference? Because I was thinking about this the other day, my wife and I, we were down in Florida in the Panhandle and we were watching the sunset over the beach and we were sort of like, we're trying to take a picture of it and we're kind of going like this. And you're like, it's not even close. Like just the difference between photo and eyesight wasn't even close. So I can't imagine the difference between Earth from space while you're in space or photo of Earth from space. Right. A friend of mine is doing a space photography exhibit in Europe right now, 130 of my pictures. And they're on these giant, beautiful printed on metal, you know, pictures that mostly I took.

33:57some other astronauts took too near Munich right now is in Austria. And it's the best I've seen, like in terms of just walking through, it's the best experience of experiencing space, but it's still not the same. It just doesn't come. On my first flight, I installed a cupola. It's a seven windowed module. It's about the size of this table. And then there's six windows on the side and it's on the bottom of the space station. So, so when you float up into it, you're looking up at earth. Right. And it feels like you're out in space. I mean, there's like the big window above you and all these things on the space shuttle.

34:30It was amazing. It's like an airliner. Like I was an airline pilot, you know, there's windows up there for the pilots to look out and it's cool. So it's like driving through the Rockies, um, or the Hill country in the, in your minivan, you're looking out the window, the blue bonnets look nice. Um, but when you park and you get out, it's a lot cool, you're experiencing it. So the cupola was like that. It's the difference between looking out your minivan window at something and then getting out and walking through the mountains or whatever. Because there's a name for astronauts looking at Earth from space.

35:00It's called the overview effect. Right. Right. And it supposedly like just changes you spiritually, politically, socially. Why do you think? I think it depends on the person. Right. I got to be honest. What does that mean? So some people have empathy. They have an open heart. They're willing to change. Like I've changed my views on some important things. I don't think if Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin went into space, they would come back some enlightened, you know, human being. I could have all that. Exactly. How do I conquer? Let me go and invade the moon or whatever. Or yeah. So I think it depends on the person.

35:37I think the types of people who are astronauts are generally good human beings and, you know, they come back. But here's a terrible story. I'll tell this. I was up there and I flew with three different cosmonauts. on on different missions and they the three of those came back and some other cosmonauts i didn't fly with did the same thing they joined putin's party supporting the war in ukraine yeah these men and women know better look are americans like obsessing about invading russia and all that's the propaganda that they hear of course we're not we don't care about russia right so these people were willing to support this evil even having spent months in space so right so you're you're up in space and you're seeing that that borders you're seeing an illusion right right like yeah like this belongs to all the people that were all equal in this sense and then you go home and you're like this country deserves to conquer and subjugate that country that you're missing you miss the lesson of the overview effect anton skupler of i flew with him on the soyuz i have have pictures on my phone with me and him together he came back and he was like krim nosh krim nosh which means Crimea is ours.

36:45He was just so big about that. I spent seven months in space with this guy. There's a beautiful passage in Mark Sreles' Meditations. So he's the most powerful man in the world. And he talks about, he says, you know, to understand people, you have to take Plato's view. And he says, you know, Plato's view. We could take this to mean, like, climb up to the top of the Acropolis and look down at what was then, you know, most of the developed world. The known world, yeah. But like, you just think about in the ancient world, other than getting on top of a mountain, which was pretty difficult. You're not going to get that many views, right?

37:18So, you know, they don't even have what the average person has today, which is like an airplane or think about what was the tallest building the emperor of Rome got into? Maybe three, four stories, right? So there are going to be the opportunities to look down and see the interconnectedness and the peacefulness of everything to literally take a bird's eye view. Those would be exceedingly rare. But he says, you know, sort of philosophically, you have to actively kind of take this zoom out view. And you see how trivial most of the things that we fight about, that we argue about, the terrible things we do to each other over this scrap of land or that scrap of land.

38:00And that this is sort of an antidote to those kind of imperial ambitions or those desires to compete or even to like, obviously making your mark is important. But also I imagine when you look at earth from a distance and you get a sense of the billions of years that this has existed, you probably stop going like, what's in my bank account? Or, you know, how do I get more followers on social media? Like the legacy stuff goes away. That's the legacy, the earth. Ryan, there's so many things to unpack. Everything you just said was so profound. That was, I could talk for hours about it. You're not worried about what the Kardashians are up to when you're looking at Earth.

38:42And I remember thinking, man, Earth's been around for billions of years. It's going to be around for billions of years. So the things that I worry about are probably not that big of a deal. But there are some things that are important. What Russia's doing in Ukraine, causing misery is awful. What's happening in Sudan right now, the civil war is awful. I think the pain that AI might be causing to lots of humans on Earth and automation, like there are important things. Yes. But most of what we worry about are not important things. Yes. And my crewmate, Samantha Christopher, I think she said it best.

39:13When you look at Earth, it's a spaceship Earth that's going through the galaxy, right? We should all be passengers and not crewmates on that spaceship. You know, so we should all like take some ownership. We should be crewmates, not passengers. We should be crewmates, not passengers. I said it wrong. Yeah, exactly. And that's a pretty profound observation to do that. But, you know, and it's so interesting. Your podcast, I was listening to your podcast preparing for this about Seneca was having the same problems we had today where you had to brown nose the emperor and tell lies for the emperor.

39:45The whole American government is based on a foundational lies. Everybody who has a serious government job had to say that Trump won the 2020 election. Yeah. So literally, it's a foundation of lies. The Department of Labor and Statistics now has to think about not whether these are the job numbers or not, but whether it will please the emperor or not. It's the Ministry of Truth in 1984. And we're living in that today. Yeah. I'm reading a book called It Can't Happen Here. Oh, by Sinclair Lewis. It's a tough book to read. It's not my favorite prose, but it's like reading the 2025 news. It is happening here.

40:21The follow-on sequel should be, it is happening here. So the antidote, I think, and there's always been bad guys. There's always going to be a man. It's always a man who wants to make his country great again. Ever since Seneca, Nero, and whatever. The antidote to that is democracy, a well-functioning democracy with freedom of press, with freedom of speech, with right to assemble and petition the government for redress. That will keep those men in check. When I would say in competing interests, each one doing their job and asserting the prerogatives of their office. You mean like a Congress, a president and a judiciary?

41:01Yes, that's exactly what I mean. And that's why it was designed that way for a reason, that ambition would check ambition. So you don't go, it's what he wants. Let's give him what he wants. We were given such a blessing from the founding fathers. They were such wise men. They got a lot of things wrong. You know, with slavery and all that. But think about what a profound success. Well, they understood human nature. Yes. And they also understood history. And much of what they were seeking to avoid were sort of timeless figures, which are always with us. Demagogues, warmongers. Always. You know, populists, you know, there's a guy named Catiline who attempts to overthrow the Roman government and it's Cicero and Cato that stop him.

41:51And if you don't understand history, if you also just don't understand human psychology, you end up sort of repeating these things. The problem, Ryan, throughout human history, some guys with swords could come in and change things, right? The power, the overwhelming concentration of power, we've never seen anything like this in tech. Information space, right? Like we all live in these little information echo chambers. And if you're in that echo chamber, you're never going to hear anything from outside of that echo chamber. So the amount of power that bad men, that evil men can exercise, I don't think we've ever seen anything like it.

42:28And in the old days, you could have an executive and a legislative and a Supreme Court and there would be checks and balances and you'd have a free press. And those checks and balances are tougher and tougher. And that's what worries me. Well, I think separate from all that, and I imagine you spent a lot of time thinking about this at the Air Force Academy because it's what it's all about. You know, they're not just teaching you engineering and how to drill and stuff. It's primarily character formation because they understand you're going to be in charge of multimillion dollar aircrafts. You're going to be, maybe you'll work at the Pentagon.

42:59You're going to be making life and death decisions. And so what they're primarily trying to instill in these officers is one, a broad liberal arts education. So you understand history and humanity, the fundamental values of Western society. And then you're also instilling in them ethics and character and principles so that you can make really good decisions under pressure. This idea now that it's like, no, these are war fighters. We got to know what makes the American military great compared to, say, the Russian military is the education and the values and the independence of our sort of officer ranks.

43:39The four star nominees now have to meet with Donald Trump. Yeah. That's the opposite of what you want. That should be terrifying. Yes. That should be terrifying to every American to politicize our military. Yeah, that should be terrifying, among a thousand other things. But the Air Force Academy and West Point Navy, not as well, but the Air Force Academy, of course, I'm giving my guys a lot of time. It was about leadership. I took philosophy. I was, you know, in every, we used to call them basket weaving majors, but like the English and those majors, they all had to take mechanical engineering and chemistry and physics and calculus.

44:09And all the engineers had to take history. And it was such a great, broad education, but also character training. But I remember my philosophy teacher, you would love him. We learned about John Stuart Mills and the categorical imperative and Emmanuel, all that stuff that I forgot about. He was Captain Jones. We used to have all military instructors, which was actually really, it was great for undergrad. Yeah. For PhDs, you want free thinking, but for undergrad, it was really good. He was super tall. He had no hair. He had giant Coke bottle glasses. Like if he went out in the sun, it would probably burn right through his, and he was so goofy.

44:45And he had been on Wheel of Fortune. So he met Vanna White. And of course, she was like the hot thing back then. And we were all super. And he was so funny. And he taught me about philosophy. You know what he taught me? Two wrongs don't make a right. Right. That is the definition of many politicians today. Sure. I hear from my Republican friends. Well, yeah, we're gerrymandering, but you gerrymandered too. Yes. I'm like, guys, we all sat through Captain Jones. You know, two wrongs don't make a right. And those categorical imperative ends don't justify the means. All these philosophical things I learned as a 19-year-old.

45:16Well, that's what I was going to say. the founders understood that a system that is based around personal liberty had to be checked by a country with character in the people, right? Especially its leaders had to be men, and now, thankfully, women of high character and principles and honor who cared about those things more than maintaining the office. Yeah. And you're in a tough spot when you erode that by word and deed and you end up with people who don't understand what it means to be a representative of the people. Right. Who was the French guy that came here in the 1800s? Lafayette. Lafayette wrote, I forgot the name.

46:06Oh, you mean Tocqueville. Alexander de Tocqueville, yeah. He wrote the book about America And I think his quote was, America is great because America is good. And his point was like we had character. And it's, of course, nobody's perfect. Even like Air Force Academy, honor code people. Everybody makes mistakes. But we at least agree that we should try to be good. And like, when you make a mistake, you admit it. But that foundation of ethics and morality. I did a social media post about ethics recently because it just seems to be disappearing, which totally frustrates the heck out of me. No, I was when I was writing.

46:38So I've been doing this series on the cardinal virtues. So I did courage, which I think most people understand. I did discipline. I think most people understand why that's good. And then I did it on justice, which is primarily about ethics. And I was talking to this friend of mine who's an Air Force officer. His name's ***. And he went to the Air Force Academy and he was telling me about he'd been a whistleblower a couple of different times in his career. He had to saw a superior officer doing something or he saw something in a program and he sort of had to go public with it. And, you know, we like to celebrate whistleblowers, but it's usually never fun for the whistleblowers.

47:06And almost always there's reprisals and consequences. Right. And I was asking him, I was like, you know, why did you do it? He's like, Ryan, I went to the Air Force Academy. I swore an oath. And I was just like kind of shocked by the like the the earnestness of like, oh, I believe in these things. I went to this program. The government paid for it. And so I am held to a higher standard. and you go, that's what you want in a leader. Someone who says, hey, this might be bad for me. This might be unpopular. People might not agree with it, but like, it's my duty to do this thing. And that's what leadership really is.

47:49That's what character is. Right. And we've seen today that there's just so few people. It was true during Seneca and Plato. It's just most people are not willing to put their hide on the line and do the right thing. like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. Yes, Kinzinger sat right in that chair. Yeah, he's a good friend of mine. So I'll give him a hard time. But yeah, I mean, he's like one of my heroes. Liz Cheney has more balls than the entire GOP male cohort. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show.

48:23We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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