Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - F-35 Chronicles: Life Lessons From Combat Pilot Hasard Lee

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Hasard Lee's remarkable career includes flying both F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, being awarded the title of 'Top Instructor Pilot of the Year' for the largest F-16 Combat Wing in the Air Force, and 82 combat missions. Hasard holds the unique honor of being the only fighter pilot to have flown two different types of jets in combat on the same day. Beyond the sonic booms and jet streams, Hasard has also carved out a space for himself in the digital world. As the creative force behind one of the largest defense channels on YouTube, he has captured the attention of more than 79 million viewers and touched over 290 million lives across social media platforms. Hasard's debut book, "The Art of Clear Thinking", was just published by St. Martin's Press. We discuss how the intense, pressure-cooker environment of air combat has shaped his approach to decision-making, mental toughness, and debriefing, and how these lessons can help us all navigate our lives more effectively. The Art of Clear Thinking: https://a.co/d/1czPc4x Sign up for the new G14 newsletter here: https://www.clearedhotpodcast.com/exclusive Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/  

Good morning, everybody. Today's episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. If you go to black rifle coffee.com right now, what you're going to see front and center is a banner for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. Directly underneath that, there's a little button that says learn more. And instead of talking about all the cool stuff that Black Rifle makes, the coffee, the subscriptions, all of that stuff, today, my suggestion for you is to click on that button, learn more about what the Special Operations Warrior Foundation is and why I'm Black Rifle Coffee would want to support them. And if you can find it in yourself, instead of buying a cup of coffee or a bag of coffee or a T-shirt, make a donation. This episode is coming

out on Memorial Day, and I can't think of a more fitting way to honor those that have paid the ultimate sacrifice. My guest today is Hazard Lee. It's an U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, who was hand-picked to fire the F-35, the most advanced and expensive weapons. weapon system in history, which was still a development at the time that he was flying it. While he was on active duty, he became the chief of training systems for the largest training base in the world. He led the development of new technology and teaching methods to train future fighter pilots. He's also an author. His book, The Art of Clear Thinking, just came out last week. It's a stealth fighter pilot's timeless rules for making tough decisions. And I highly recommend it.

Episode 287 with Hazard Lee and Joy. Looking at danger close now. So you're still active duty? Not active duty. I'm reservist. So I fly a couple times a month, and then the rest of the time I'm an author. I was going to say,

and I saw you have a ridiculous YouTube channel as well, where you're just basically going around, flying around in awesome jets. Yeah, we had a good time. We put UFC legend Tito Ortiz in the centrifuge. You know what the centrifuge is? I know what videos of the centerfuge are where people take it a touch too far.

Yeah. Actually, I don't know if they're in control. You got to check this out. The center future is terrible. Like, it's this like 6,000 horsepower machine. They put you on the end of this, like, gondola, and they spin you around 9 G's. Yeah, we put Tito in it. So Tito, you know, he's a beast.

Is this where you practice the hook drill? Yeah, yeah. At some point, though, that is the new screensaver on my phone. He had never been choked out before. So in all of his training, he'd never been put out. I guess he heard that if you, if you get choked out once, it's easier the next time. So in his entire career, never fully choked out. I don't think all information should be listened to.

I think all information has value, but it's not all valuable in the moment. And I think, Michael, have you ever heard of that? He's already Googled. I actually have heard of it. I don't know if it's true. This is where I need my speed dial, my wife, because she's a Gigi-2 instructor. She has gone out. She's watched a lot of people go out.

I don't know if it makes you more susceptible to going out. I don't know either. But the point is like, you know, he's a beast. He's been doing this for 25 years, never choked out. You know, the centerfuge got him. I think people confuse it with knockouts. Yeah, because I'm thinking, like, so if that was the case, if you essentially, so a centerfuge is driving the blood to your core, correct?

Is that what essentially that's what causes you to pass up? Add your brain into your arms and legs. Okay. So, yeah, you can, you can. pass out if you lose enough blood. And so a choke, like a rear naked choke, is just an interruption of the arteries in your neck. So I guess a little bit of the same thing. It's a lack of blood flow to the brain. Yeah, I think it's similar. Lack of oxygen. Yeah. But if it was true that if you were to get choked out and be more susceptible, then going into the centrifuge in going out would make you more

susceptible to that as well. I think he's retired now. So he just wanted to send it. No, my long way of saying is, I don't think he's right. Yeah. But I mean, props to him for hopping in that thing. Minimal training. Yeah. We spun them up to 9 Gs, so 9 times the force of gravity. That's rough.

2,000 pounds of force. Each arm weighs 250 pounds. So what do they take you guys to in training? Because I'm assuming do all pilots go through that just for that exposure before they get behind the stick of a... They do. Like, you'll go through pilot training. You'll make it all the way through, and then you'll get selected to fly fighters.

and then you'll have to go to the centerfuge. And it sucks because if you fail once, you get another shot the next day. After that, if you fail, you're out. What's the threshold they're looking for? Nine Gs. Nine Gs for 10 seconds. Oh, daddy.

Yeah, it's brutal. You can wear a G suit. You can wear a G suit. But, man, it's brutal. And, you know, the stress is on. Like most of these people, they've wanted to fly fighters their whole life. They've made it all the way through.

This is the last test. And then people will wash out. So it sucks. but it's a brutal experience. When they wash out, like if you can't handle that 9Gs, is that just a physiological issue, or not an issue, but, and I don't want to say deficiency either because that's such an, like, how many people are ever going to feel 9Gs, right?

Almost nobody. They just physiologically can't do it. It's both. It's a lot of training and also your stature. So short, stocky people do pretty well, long, lanky people, kind of like me. Yeah, as you're going to say, you're at the other end of that spectrum. Yeah, so it's tough.

So I had to, you know, train hard. It's a lot of technique because, I mean, Tito's a beast. You know, his technique wasn't that great. You can hear him gas out in it. And then he's done after that. So it's a lot of technique, a lot of just being in shape, doing a lot of hit training, stuff like that. But, man, it's brutal. Because one thing you don't realize in there is that you feel like you're tumbling.

So as you're accelerating, you feel like end over end? End over end, about once a second. Same thing when you're decelerating. So it's just a crazy, brutal experience that you can't really. prepare for. Can we put Michael into the centrifuge? You bet. Where is it at? It's in Philly. So we went to the Michael. Are you in? As long as it's paid, let's do it. Oh, I'm covering all the cost, but your threshold is 12 G's. I asked them if you can go to 10. They said they could

reprogram it. We actually had them reprogram it because it's typically 9 Gs for 10 seconds. Yeah. We had them reprogram it overnight for 9 Gs for 30 seconds. If I'm going to make Tito do it for 10 seconds, I got to push myself. Yeah. Did you do that? I did. How was that? It was terrible. It felt like it was like 45 minutes long. I was going to say how wide did this monster? This darkness is like you're losing your vision. It goes down to like, you know, looking like through a paper towel roll and you're trying to push this darkness out. And if it gets to zero, you're going to be out just like Tito was. And you know, it's kind of funny in the centrifuge, but in a jet, you're dead. We lost about one pilot a year for 30 years to

G-lock, G-induced loss of consciousness. Michael, we're doing this. Nine G's. How long can you last? Should we do you versus me? I think you would last way longer. We both know that I would without ever being in a centrifuge. But how long can you...

Oh, maybe two seconds. Okay, we need to talk about this. We should make this happen. I'm thinking about doing it, making it like a hot ones, like interview people while they're, you know, subject to these G-forces. Yeah. How long does it take that thing to get to nine Gs? Man, it's insane.

Like, it's like a, you know, Tesla and steroids. So 6,000 horsepower, zero to 9 Gs in one second. How fast could you achieve 9Gs in a jet? Probably similar. It depends on how fast you're going and how low you are. So I would say probably half a second if you really wanted to. Okay, so you could probably exceed the centrifuge. But you'd have to be really cranking on it.

Yeah, but the centrifuge, I mean, it's just like the horsepower to be able to go from zero to nine Gs. insane has this like this weird futuristic sound yeah yeah it's no joke it doesn't look like a joke i can't wait to see michael once he goes out can we keep spinning him for a while sure you can do it all right so here's here's we film this port this is why we went to uh to 30 seconds for nine geez there's like there's this viral thing a couple years back called the euthanasia roller coaster it was meant to like euthanize people like it's a concept where you how you mean how Are we talking about killing people? Killing people, yeah.

And like a humane way? Like a humane way. Like an end of life choice? Something like that. So it went viral. It's kind of bullshit. But so it was like 9 Gs for 30 seconds or 45 seconds, something like that. There it is.

So that's why we had them reprogram it just to see if someone could survive 30 seconds at 9Gs. I mean, I almost think, I don't know where I land on, you know, if somebody has like super terminal cancer and I kind of watched my mom you know it she chose hospice over continuing the chemo that she was on because the chemo was going to kill her it was fucking miserable I feel like people if they get to that point should have that option but as a species I think we're doing better than a fucking roller coaster that design looks insane like can't we think of something better it's ridiculous right what the fuck I don't know some some uh German madman

came up with that. But, like, can't we do like a pill or something? My God. Yeah. But this is the intersection, you know, of that subject plus, you know, fighter pilot stuff. So we want to see if someone could survive 30 seconds at 9Gs. Which you did. You did.

But I don't think you have a centrifuge or a G-suit if you're going to be doing that. So that was kind of a legal requirement. It would go against the ethics of the death centerfuge to put a G-suit on somebody. I feel like that would drag it out a little bit. Or it could be fun, you know. I think I would sign up for it just to see if I could make it. Okay. I can appreciate that headspace.

Yeah. Yeah, you're either going to make it or die. I mean, yeah, it's cool. Yeah, let's do it. All right. So you're in the reserves. I still don't understand to this day how reserve time adds up. I don't know either.

All I know is I'm not getting an active duty retirement. So I had 12 years active duty. So it would have been kind of easy just to stay in, go to 20. But I wanted to do all this other stuff. I want to do the YouTube stuff. Well, I really wanted to be a writer. So it's tough to do both. when you're active duty yeah and the government might put some some

boundaries on your YouTube as well then they're probably be very limited on what you could show active duty wise at least which is smart I get that so you I mean do you just go back to a so you're out in Arizona do you just go it down to Davis Monthon and I this is what I imagine that there's like in a valet there's like a little box that opens and you're just like keep like oh F-35 today and you just go grab a set of keys I wish I mean it's it's I mean it's I mean I mean, it's a brutal day. So I, especially when you're kind of out of it.

So I fly a couple times a month. And so whenever I show up. It's tough to be current when you fly a couple times a month. I don't know if it was like this in the SEAL teams, but we have a ton of currencies. Like, it's like a list of like 45 things. You're chasing your tail constantly on being current. So, I mean, it's difficult even when you're showing up every day. And now I'm showing up a couple times a month and trying to knock all those out.

So it's a long day. How much do you actually get to fly? The flying, the debriefing. about 45 to 60 times a year. How many hours? About 1.5 hours each flight. Man. That's less than 100 hours.

Yeah, yeah, it's tough. It's tough to stay current, especially in something that's that, you know, that competitive, that extreme. And the F-35's unique in that we're still at the kind of the testing phase of it. I'd say we came out of the testing in 2018, but still there's a lot of improvements, there's a lot of software upgrades.

So it's tough to, like, be able to stay current and understand how the sub menus are changing, things like that. I was going to say, do you ever get in there and you look at a button and you think, I think I know what this button does, but I'm going to push it and find out. Not the second part. So you can always, you know, that's one thing you can learn. You can always screw something up worse than it currently is. Yeah.

But there are some times when I'm like, do I need to. So we have, have you ever flown in one of these jets? I have never flown on those jets, but I got lost track, but I have somewhere between like 3,000 to 3,500 flat hours. Okay, yeah. So we have the, it's called HOTAS, hands-on throttle and stick. So each, each, uh, the stick and the throttle, they both have about 15 different buttons. They can go forward, back, left, right? How could you ever possibly forget what those? Long push, you know, short push. Um, and then four and then multiple master modes. Yeah. So the master modes completely change all the buttons. Oh my God. So it's, it's crazy. Like we call it the piccolo drill, but, uh, yeah, there are times when I'm like, is it a long push, short push? Is it a teamist left, team us right? Um, so, um, so, it's, um, so. So, Yeah, it's a little bit tough. That was the, I mean, it's a broad statement to say, but like at a gross level, airplanes are designed to fly the same. If you pull back, things get smaller.

If you push forward, they get bigger. Left usually goes left, right, goes right. I got typed in a G4. Flying the actual SIM and the aircraft itself was not hard, understanding all of the information that was in front of you, like you said, the submenus, you take a couple weeks off. Like, fuck, how do I put that approach in here? Yep, yeah, yeah.

It's tough. Like, it's, you know, especially. especially when I was coming from like the F-16 to the F-35, like I was an experienced fighter pilot. Yeah. And, you know, our closure rates are a mile every three seconds when we're fighting somebody. That's insane. So I was thinking and speaking in F-16 and I have to translate that to F-35. And it was just too slow.

It took me about a year to be able to like really start thinking in F-35. What would you say, so F-16, is that mostly an air-to-air platform or air-to-ground as well? Both. So it was designed to be, well, it was originally designed to be just a pure dog fight. And it's evolved into a multi-role fighter. Dogfighter against who? Like the F-16 is actually an, what was that, like an 80s or 90s platform? 70s.

Really? Yeah, with John Boyd, okay. Boyd, which I'm so glad you brought that up. It's actually one of my favorite books. And we use the Oodaloup inside of the seal community, and people would think that we created it. No, not at all. Like, so his book, what is it, Boyd, the fighter pilot to change the art of warfare. Yeah.

I recommend that actually at every leadership talk that I do. because of the fact of what the Oudalup, what it is, what it does to people, and how he used to just murk people. He did. He took no prisoners. How did he do it? He pissed off a lot of people. Oh, fuck yeah. But he dragged the Air Force with him.

Like he changed, he changed air combat. Describe, if you could, from somebody who understands air to air what he was doing to people. Because you read the book and you're like, oh, yeah, you just won really fast. But like, what does that actually look like? Because he was fucking, he was. From his dogfighting ability? Yeah, like he was just fucking people up. Yeah, I mean, his call sign was like 40-second void because he would just destroy people flying.

So what does that look like? Do you start off head-to-head or how does that go? So we have a couple different types of ways we dogfight. So we have offensive BFM, basic fighter maneuvers where we'll start out behind the adversary. So we have like what we call can setups where we're at precise altitude, precise aspect ratio, of how the aircraft is looking towards you. And we'll start off there to really build the site pictures for new students. So we have offensive, defensive, and then probably the best is high aspect,

where you're just turning in towards each other, you know, 1,000 knots of closure. You're just talking, one you cross, you know, it's game on. So how would he fuck people up so fast in that scenario? He was just a good, good fighter pilot. Like, I haven't seen his tapes, so I don't really know, like, how he specifically was good. but from what I heard, he was great at slowing down the jet. He actually, like, crashed a jet doing it one time. And, you know, classic John Boyd, he blamed the Air Force.

He said that the jet was not designed well and then came up with some solutions to fix it because he thought he was going to be court-martialed. So I think he was just great at being able to slow down the jet. It's kind of like hitting the brakes fly right by. Yep. But the thing about that is, you know, if you're an adversary and someone hits the brakes,

you're going to do the same thing yourself. So it's not quite the move that. always works that it does in the movie. It works in TopCon. It does both of them. And all those movies. So yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, he, reading that book was fascinating from somebody who never, I did one of the most beneficial things I ever did. I was a J-TAC. One of the jobs I had I was a J-TAC, but I did a backseat ride in the F-18. And it was so wildly beneficial to understand the difference in what I can see on the ground versus what pilots can see. in the air. And you have a, you immediately recognize, oh, I understand why you can't see the white building. Yeah, yeah, in Korea, we'd say the blue roof building. Yeah, it's like, okay,

there are 57,000 of those. Could you be more specific? Yeah, it's even tough, like, taken off from, you know, your home city, like being able to recognize landmarks. Now imagine being in, you know, Afghanistan or something like that, like those villages. Yeah. But I, you know, that's, that's one of the key things I did in the F-16 going to Afghanistan, dealing with J-Tax, and having that connection is huge because that's the link to being able to employ air power in close proximity to troops on the ground. So the F-16, I didn't realize it was designed that early. What was it designed against?

Russia. Okay. So like they're Migs? Yeah, they're Migs. So it was meant just to have heat-seeking missiles on the wingtips and to be able to turn extremely tight. Okay. So they were moving out of the 60s where it was go high.

and as fast as you can. That was like the F-104 aircraft like that, to the 70s with John Boyd was saying, hey, we need to turn tightly and be able to sustain that turn for a long period of time. So that's what the F-16 was designed to do. Boyd would honestly be rolling over in his grave now because we put all kinds of stuff on the jet.

So when I was flying in Afghanistan, we were flying with, you know, AGR-20s. It's almost like a trash can on the side of the jet. Yeah. those old 2.75 inch rockets with laser-gagrack. Just add drag all over that thing? That we'd fly with bruise with 200-200-pound bombs. We'd carry two fuel tanks.

So there'd be times on the tanker where we'd have to hit afterburner just to stay on the tanker. No way. Just because you're so heavy. Yeah, these were pigs because we'd put so much stuff on the jet. But you weren't really had... There was not really an air-to-air threat though, right? So I guess you could get away with that in that particular environment?

Yeah. But, I mean, F-16 needs that for really any environment. It only carries 7,000 pounds of fuel internally. And with after burner, you're burning 50 plus thousand pounds an hour. So that's just minutes of fuel. Whoa. I didn't realize that that was that. I mean, obviously the burn rate impacts that, but yeah, that's not a lot at all.

No. So that's like a big thing. So are they constantly just sipping off tankers then? Yeah. I mean, we'd have a tanker in Afghanistan just following us around. But really what you do is, which is nice. I bet. Really what you do is you have two external tanks on.

Yeah. Those are each five, they each carry two and a half thousand pounds of gas. So, five thousand pounds of fuel. So it starts adding up. Yeah, you're about 13,000 pounds. So, yeah, the F-16 is a stripped-down hot rod when it doesn't have anything on it. But when you put all this stuff on it, it starts to be a pig, which is why the F-35, it's not really a fair comparison to compare a combat loadout in the F-35 to just a slick down F-16. So what was the F-35 designed against?

It was designed against really double-digit SAMs, so surface-air missile sites, being able to take those out. Like in Top Gun, when you'd see the, you know, when he's doing the canyon run, seeing all the SAM sites. Which is what you guys do like on most missions, right? You're just down there. Down low. Yeah. Like 800 knots, no big deal. Yeah.

Yeah, it's easy. So, I mean, that was my specialty when I was at Shaw Air Force Base being a wild weasel and really diving into how do you take out these Sam sites. That's, I mean, that's what Ukraine or Russia failed to do in Ukraine. They do not have air superiority because they're not able to take out these Sam sites. What is limiting their ability to do so? They just don't have the capability. They don't have the capability. They don't have the training.

They really think of air power as more of an extension of the troops on the ground, like long-range artillery. Yeah. And so, like, at Shaw, we'd really dive into how do you defeat the IATs, it's integrated air defense. And it's really multi-domain. You're talking about cyber space, troops on the ground. everybody coming together being able to defeat these systems because they're really sophisticated. These double-digit SAM sites, they go hypersonic speeds. It's really insane because they don't have to worry about weight on the ground so they can have better radars.

They can have bigger missiles. You know, it's pretty crazy trying to think of how do you defeat these systems, especially when they're embedded in a country where they built that infrastructure up for 20 years. Wow. How differently did the F-35 and the F-16 fly? The F-35, you can feel a lot more buffet on the jet. F-16 was smooth. Really?

It was just really smooth. You never felt that buffet, kind of like when you're close to a stall. Yeah. The F-35, you can go all the way up to the stall, so you're feeling that buffet, and then you can go post-stall. So we can pull a lot of alpha, a lot of AOA, really skid the jet a lot in the F-35, which is good. You know, you can put weapons onto an adversary a lot quicker with that. Really? Yeah, because you can skid the jet and then you can employ your weapons.

But, I mean, the flight control system is a lot more advanced than the F-35. We can, you know, like the first top gun where he's in a flat spin out to sea. Yeah. We can do that intentionally. So you can intentionally do that. I don't think I would enjoy that. I don't think I would enjoy that. What?

So you have full control. You're, you know, it's, I mean, you can call it up on YouTube. Michael? A pedal turn. And a pedal turn. Pedal. Yeah. Yeah.

Type an F-35 pedal turn. you can see it just spinning in space. It's fully stalled, so the lift vector is straight down. But I mean, so that's what we can do with these advanced flight control systems now that they didn't have in the 1970s. I got to see this. Are these things two-seatered by any chance? Single seat only. Can I borrow your flight suit and helmet one day?

Go for it. You can do anything once. No, I mean to like do that, not to do this, but just to fly it. I mean, I did fly in the first civilian F-16. So they have been for civilians now. Yeah, but I feel like you're a little bit more qualified given that you were trained on an F-16. That jet just looks so crazy.

I feel like you need to be so much higher up to be doing this. Well, yeah, I mean, their airspeed is almost zero right now and it's just going straight down towards the ground. So you can actually get yourself into quite a bit of trouble because they're fully stalled. The, is it a throttle on the right and a control stick on the left?

throttle on the left, control stick on the right. Does it move at all or is it just pressure sensitive? It moves a little bit. Okay. Because yeah, in the 70s, when the F-16 came out, it was all pressure. Yeah, like they found out that- fully moving stuff around.

No, no, didn't move at all. Oh, okay. Because they, yeah, they were advancing from like the F-4, which it was, you know, it was all over the place. Isn't the F-18 goes all over the place, right? Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. So they wanted to make it, you know,

super quick reaction. What they found out was that it caused pilot-induced oscillations. So, like, it just wasn't good with our brain. So they made it move a little bit. Yeah. It was about a quarter of an inch. F-35, I think is about half an inch.

I've heard that the new, like the 650s and the 800s on the Gulfstream, it's a control on the left and it's all fly-by-wire. I don't know if it actually moves, but they moved. They went to that. I've never flown a plane that didn't have the, where the controls didn't move. I don't know if I would dig it. I don't think I'd like that either because you kind of at some point want to know, like, you know, where you're at, as opposed to just pressure.

Like, give me a little bit of movement. A little bit. I mean, that's, I feel like they've already solved this problem because they tried doing that back in the 70s, pilots didn't like it. And they found out that a little bit of movement is good. Okay. What drew you to the Air Force? Let's talk about what got you in and what you did while you were in.

Yeah. So when I was five, I went to an air show, and that's what kicked off. It was back in the day when you could sit in the cockpit. I don't think you can do that anymore. Probably not. You know, sat in a cockpit, put on a helmet. What was the plane? What was the plane?

You know, I was trying to remember. I think it was an F-15 and an F-16. You know, it looked like a bobblehead at the time, but got some pictures with that. And after that, I was hooked. It's not a lot you can do as a kid. You know, you have a stream of wanting to fly fighters. You know, we definitely didn't have money to, like, you know,

go and fly in Cessna's and things like that. But when I was a teenager, I was able to get a flight in a Cessna 152, just like a flying lawnmower. Like 99.9% of people did their first flight on the controls in one of those planes. I mean, they're still flying from, you know, from the 1960s. Yeah. Man, I don't know if I'd trust, like, my kid flying one. one of those things.

In a traffic pattern, that's about it. I don't know if I'd do a cross-country. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they can glide pretty well, so you can probably land on any road out there. Yeah. But, yeah, so just flew, that kind of sealed the deal for me. Then I knew I wanted to, like, go the Air Force route because I didn't want to be on a ship all day. Yeah, good call.

Yeah, it turned out to be a good call. My brother's in the Navy flying F-18s, and, man, those guys are just always on the boat every six months back on the ship. So it turned out to be a good call with that. I figured I'd go to the Air Force Academy, applied for that, got rejected. So I thought the dream was done after that because I didn't realize that ROTC was an option. A few weeks later got a letter saying if I went to the school called New Mexico Military Institute and get my grades up, they let me in the academy. So I kind of went in a roundabout way there.

Okay. Almost like a preparatory course? Yeah, it's like a prep school. It's in Roswell, New Mexico. Okay. With the aliens? Yeah, with aliens. So a lot going on.

I mean, it was actually really cool. They have a huge airport out there. So I did a little bit of flying in Cessna's there, and you'd be flying with like B1 bombers. They're in the traffic pattern. So it's pretty cool. But yeah, after that, went to the academy, didn't do any flying until I graduated and went on to pilot training.

Colorado Springs, right? Colorado Springs, yeah. How was your experience there at the academy? Oh, man, it was brutal. Like, it was not fun. Like, you know, I'm glad I did everything. and no regrets going that way. But I think for most people out there, probably RRTCs,

the easier way you can have a little bit better quality of life. And, you know, my squadron is like half RRTC. So it's not like people going to the academy have any sort of leg up. Did you know going in that you were going to get the pipeline that you wanted? No. When did you actually find out that you were going to head down the path you wanted to go? I don't think it was until my junior year.

And you commit your sophomore year. So they know. They get you in. They're like, all right, come on, sign the five-year deal. What were the options you were staring down the barrel at? What did I put? It's been a long time. Pilot, maybe like, well, I actually was thinking about, like, wanting to go to combat

controller, something like that. So I wanted to do something to push myself. So I went to Herbert for a summer with the Special Tactics Orientation Corps. We're running around with rocks and stuff like that. Oh, almost like on your week, the Navy guys. Navy guys called it, I think it's the midshipment tour, something like that. Yeah, so I mean, I wanted to do something that would push myself, but... Pilot was obviously first, but you had to put some other things on that.

And then after that was like acquisition officer or something like that. So I'm glad that didn't have to do that. That is a far stretch from everything that you did. Right. Yeah, right. Glad it worked out. But yeah, I also was a collegiate boxer there. And so I remember it was after my sophomore year, so it was fully committed.

Then they give you the physical. And, you know, I'd say 25% of people just don't. don't pass the physical. And it was the day before my physical, and somebody hit me in my right ear, rupture my ear drum. Boxing? Boxing.

And so I had to go through a whole bunch of waivers. It took like six months. I thought the dream was over there. But they were able to, it was able to heal. And then I got waivers, and I was good to go. Yeah, so junior year you find out, you graduate senior year. What's the path look like for Air Force Aviator

out of the Academy? So first you go to this school called IFT, introductory to flight training. It's in Pueblo, Colorado. You're just flying DA20s, pretty much like modern Cessna's. Okay. And so they just want to make sure you have a diamond. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I mean, it's a good plane, you know, I'd love to just own one outright, but pretty slow aircraft. And they just want to make sure you have the hands. Like the video, once we monetize Michael doing nine Gs for five minutes, we'll be able to buy one. All right. Well, I got a better one. That shit's going to trend. Do I get the cut of that? No, dude. You're the talent.

You're the fucking talent, dude. We have the agent and I'm going to produce. I like it. I like what this is going. I don't. You don't have a choice in this. You're just talent, you're just the fucking talent. So yeah, you go there for six weeks.

Just make sure you have the hands. Surprisingly, about 20% of people washed out at the time. Interesting. What kind of washout is in they don't like it or they don't meet the test gates? They don't meet the aptitude for it. Because, you know, it's not like football or something like that where people have grown up doing it. So people have these dreams of wanting to be pilots and they show up and they're like, I actually suck at flying. Not everybody is designed to do everything.

Right. And I don't know why people resist or hesitate saying that. It's just the objective reality of the world. Yeah. We're not all. Some people are good. But the thing about flying is weird is that you don't really have those tests early on. So you go through, you know, Air Force Academy.

You get the pilot slot. Most people haven't done much flying and then boom. like you're fully committed and you realize that you're not that good or you know some people don't like it so yeah so yeah about 20% of people you know uh washed out there it's only six weeks and then from there you go to uh to pilot training so for me that was in oklahoma and you're flying the the t6 uh texan two it's almost like a p51 mustang so turboprop uh yeah turboprop okay yeah about 1,100 horsepower it was that's badass it was awesome like that's really where i was like this is what i love to do because it's almost like sports

mixed with academics. Like you're just, you're learning tactics. Yeah. It's just really click because I wasn't a good student and I wasn't a great athlete, but this is just where it clicked for me. How was the cockpit layout? Were you on steam gauges or glass? Steam gauges.

But they now have the T6B, so I did a couple of videos on that. And it's almost like an F-35. They're upgrading it. They're like hacking the software so you can put Sam sites in there. That's awesome. They're dog fighting it. So there's, yeah, heads-up display. So it is awesome, and that's going to be the link.

Because right now it's just steam gauges. It's really just good for like. It's a tough jump. It's a tough jump. When I got my private pilot license, it was like out in Sancte, California, straight, 152, maybe pay a little extra cash, getting like a 180, something that really just haul ass, add like five knots. Yeah, treat yourself.

No, totally. I think I had 50, 60 hours stopped for a long period of time and then got back into it, but went right into a series. So I had a bunch of time off, and then I kind of relearned. on the Garmin system. Holy shit. That would be a really tough to go from a turbo prop. I guess you'd be moving at a faster speed, but over the ground. But that steamed to glass.

I mean, you want to talk about information overload. You can just get lost staring at that screen. Yeah, but I think it's also safer. It had artificial horizon. It had like terrain. I'm sitting there. Yeah. And like asking like I teach me like,

does anybody ever like died not being an instrument rate of pilot just kind of flying around these mountains saying fuck it? because it was ridiculously accurate. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. That's situational awareness. So that's why I don't see, you know, for me, it's not safe. I wouldn't trust any family member to fly like the 1960s Cessna with all the steam gauges,

especially if they're part-time pilots. Like, I don't want, you know, them just going up and flying in a cloud and then, you know, packing it in after that. So I think, you know, I tell all my friends and family, like, save up a little and fly like a Cirrus or something nice. Because the situation awareness is just just much better. Remember I was shooting an approach. You know, San Diego was amazing because May, gray, June, gloom, you could just go approaches all day long,

punching through the marine layer, and it's fucking beautiful above. But I would, you know, you're flying, like an RNAV or even a, actually all the approaches. Just looking at the glass, I would look up. And even the number representation on the runway was accurate. It was ridiculous how precise. Again, I'm not going to bet my life on it. but you could almost bet your life on it.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's amazing. And, like, once you tie that into augmented reality, which is coming, because, I mean, we have that in the F-35. Yeah, because you can turn your head and see through the skin of the aircraft, right? Through your body. Like, it's crazy. We don't even have a heads-up display. Everything is just pumped in this helmet.

And, uh... What are those cost? $400,000. Don't drop it. They're going to garnish your wages for 10 years. For the rest of your career. But, I mean, it's insane. Like, you're looking out.

You see, you know, symbols over all the bad guys. all the information you need to kill them. 360 degrees. Yeah, symbols over all the... Holy shit. I mean, you can't see 360, so you're having to look over your shoulder. But meaning as you turn your head,

you're still, you have that visual. And we have six mid-wave IR cameras all over the jet, and it stitches that together. And so that's how you see through your body. So it's pretty insane. Plus, we have a night vision camera on the helmet. That is nuts, man. But that's, I mean, that's a future of civilian aviation, too.

Like, it's going to be crazy. Once you tie in those, you know, Garmin systems to augmented reality glasses, it's going to be a lot safer. Or people are going to be out there just not fucking paying attention. They're going to have so much information. They're going to do nothing with it. They're just going to be fried. That's interesting.

So why do you want to fly? I went from an East Coast Command to West Coast Command, and they were messing around with getting rid of a winter hellweek cycle to see what it would do to attrition. And the billet I was feeling was as a Buds instructor. So I checked in and they're like, hey, we don't have anything for you to do for like four months. So I was driving home and I went right under like the short final approach path at the C&T airport. And there was just this Sassna doing the classics dude. It was, I'm like, okay, that guy's going to die.

But I remember thinking my head like that looks interesting. So I pulled off the road, went to the flight school there and did like the classic. And I'm like, I would like to also try to kill myself on short final like this person. did the little flight and it was interesting. So I took that time to get my private license with no end state or desire to whatsoever. I just was bored and I struggled with idle time on my hands. Fast forward a bunch of years I was working for CrossFit and the founder of CrossFit called me up. And he'd remembered we'd had a conversation that I had gotten my pilot's license.

He was living out in Prescott but had a house in Santa Cruz and then in San Diego. So this triangle of death of driving, you know, was taking him eight to 12 hours to get back and forth. And he said, hey, like, I'm going to buy a plane at some point. So get yourself, you know, get back into the seat and start flying. So I found a serious training center at Montgomery Field, which is right next to Miramar. Heard horror stories of people who confused Miramar for Montgomery Field all the time and decided that they look nothing alike, by the way. But apparently civilians like to land on Miramar from time to time. And started flying.

So I got Kernighan, then I got my instrument commercial multi-e. and then ended up with typewriting in a G4, and then I got my ATP when I got my 525S type rate. Man, so you're fully committed. You're all the way. I'm not current anymore, but I have all the licenses somewhere. I got my FAA card somewhere. Nice.

It was awesome. And the Gulfstream was an interesting experience, and then the citation series, the single pilot rating on that, that's pretty wild as well. You're up there throwing all the shit. You're by yourself flying those? Yeah, I got my typewriting, so the 525S.

That's pretty cool. You can fly solo in those. Yeah, it's the large, I think it starts bouncing up against the weight requirement. I think a CJ4 plus is about as big as you can go, single pilot. Okay. Most people don't fly at single pilot, but you can, you can get that S on your type rating. Nice. Yeah. I mean, that's all I'm used to. So, you know, I'm sure people can do that. So, I mean, it's not too bad. It's nice to be able to sleep, you know, have somebody else over there and just like, mm-hmm.

Yeah. Eat your meal, the trays built into the air buses. Yeah, probably is. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is. Like, so they'll have their meals. They'll pull it out, you know, over the stick or over the yoke. But here's the thing.

Do you think being an Airbus pilot is actually exciting? No, not at all. I have tons of friends that do it. I feel like by their company policy, they're probably on autopilot at 500 feet on takeoff or earlier and probably not turning it off until they get to that on the landing. So you're really like you're managing systems. Absolutely. And you're not even doing a whole lot of that either.

You're just, just chilling there. I don't know if I would like that. I mean, it'd be cool that you get to spend some time in different parts of the world, but for me, that is not fun flying. Same. I mean, if we were in the 1970s or something, like, I'd probably be an airline pilot right now. Because, you know, that was the golden era for that. But now, tons of fighter pilot friends that fly for the airlines,

they'll all say the pays good, benefits are fantastic, but that it's not fun. Once in a while, they'll see a good sunrise. Yeah. That's it. And you know they're up there just like, I could barrel all this fucking day. You know, like, split ass. I think somebody actually did bear a roll a 707 back in the day. You know that movie, Flight, where the plane inverted and they lived.

Yeah, the Denzel movie. Well, that was based off of an accident that actually happened in the L.A. area. Let's just say the outcome was not what it was in the movie. But what's crazy is the audio, I've found it once before. The audio exists. So with the other pilots talking about, other aircraft talking about what they see. And you hear somebody like, click on like, that airplane is upside down. And then it went straight in it, like, I think, like 800 knots.

Yeah. So obviously, zero people survived. But that's where the, I believe, the inception for that movie came from or the idea. It's been a while since I saw it. But I did remember they were flying upside down for a while. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of weird stuff in there that even as a non-airline pilot, you know, they turn the engines off.

And then one time the guy's like, you know, firewall. I'm like, but you've turned them off. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, movies clearly not realistic. Speaking of, what are your thoughts on the Maverick series? One and two? Top Gun?

Yeah. I mean, they're classic, iconic movies. Half my friends are... The flying, I mean, though. Like, what are your thoughts on the flying sequences? Ridiculous. Yeah. Terrible.

Good movies. Great storyline, all of that. But terrible in terms of tactics. They'd all get shot down. Yeah, what do they get wrong in that? I also feel like you don't go head to head four feet from each other either. Like splitting a flight of two. Yeah, exactly.

A thousand knots of closure there. Yeah, I mean, it's completely ridiculous. You could tell they built the script and then gave it to some fighter pilots. So the comm is actually pretty good, like dead eye, where your targeting pod's not working. Those little things are right. The medium and big things are completely off.

So you wouldn't send like a four ship of F-18s to go take out this, you know, huge, huge system. Why would you not just cruise missile that fucking thing? Yeah, you can use cruise missiles. but I mean if it's a hardened target, you know, cruise missiles can have a tough time with that. So you probably do need an aircraft. But F-18 is not the key aircraft.

So they needed that because Tom Cruise only wanted to fly. F-18s? F-18s. He's kind of a big-five single seat. I was going to say he's kind of a big deal in the movie world, so he's probably going to get what he wants on that. Exactly. Yeah.

So, yeah, so it's not going to be F-18s. You have to be stealth. So stealth is really the key to the show now. You have to be stealth. If you're not stealth, you're going to get shot down. So if they had done it more realistically and obviously don't give away anything about stealth technology, but would they have even had to have flown at that low level work? They just have relied on the super small reflective pattern of the aircraft and flown

in a normal altitude. So we've really transitioned to more of a medium altitude air force now. So you really don't have to fly as low anymore. So that's to defeat the radars. But even then, probably the biggest thing that they get wrong and people, get wrong is it's not this one v1 cage match of sending up, you know, their best fighter, your best fighter. It's like hundreds of assets all going in, multi-domain space, cyber, C, everything working together, trying to defeat the adversary.

Aversary is doing the same thing. They're extremely smart. You know, they're just sitting around thinking about how to break your kill chain. So it's really this, you know, it's more of like a football analogy versus a cage match analogy that people think of it as. So we'd have to take out all those SAM sites, the surface-stair missile sites. Yeah. You know, so you're looking at hundreds of aircraft going in there, taking all those out. I guess, you know, the cruise missile strike early on was reasonably, you know, accurate, but you'd have a lot more assets in there.

Yeah. So you'd be hitting the airfield and also just destroying that surface-dair capability on the way in. Just destroying everything. It's the shock and awe thing that you, you know, have seen the last couple wars. Like you need a lot of aircraft going in and destroying all those key nodes. So, I mean, that's what you see Russia failed to do with Ukraine. And so now they're kind of stuck in a slug fest. You really want to go in, disable all those key nodes, kill their infrastructure,

and be able to establish air superiority. Well, that's a fucking boring movie. I think it'd be exciting. I mean, that's what we do. But, you know, that's electronic warfare. Tom Cruise isn't going to sign on for that shit. I know. I hear he's working on going into space next.

I had heard he is trying to do a movie sequence in space as well. I forget where I heard that from. It was somebody who was kind of in the know, though. But I also thought and had heard he was trying to be the first, but I think a Russian already accomplished that. With a movie? Yes. Went to the ISS to shoot just like a cinematic movie.

Somebody else, I think, did it. All right. Well, I guess it doesn't count because we don't know about it. Yeah. So how about the dog fighting sequence in Maverick? How is that from a flight perspective? Kind of the same thing. Like hit the brakes, fly right by.

Clearly, if you're the other jet, you're going to hit the brakes as well. Wouldn't the brakes be bringing the throttle backwards as well? Because he jammed it forward and then pulled back on the control stick. Yeah, I don't think that's the wrong thing. So, yeah, idle speed brakes, you know, AOA override and pulling full aft. So we'll call that a stack or a tree where you're flying almost highway speeds and you're just rocketing in the vertical. You're trying to slow down as much as possible.

So that would be a lot more realistic instead of just hitting the brakes flying right by. You know, fitchin fighters, especially Russian fighters, they are extremely maneuverable. So, you know, that's probably taking it to the extreme, what you saw in Maverick. But if you see some of those air shows, like, it's pretty insane. It is wild what they can do. I think my favorite, honestly, the sequence in that movie, and it wasn't super exciting. I love seeing the F-18 flying right over the desert. That, to me, I was like, that's fucking badass.

Well, they did it. I know. And you can tell, too. Like, that's awesome. Like, 20 feet? Like, that is insane. How many waivers did they have to get for that? It's Navy.

I think they just do whatever they want. I don't know. Air Force were really restrictive. I just got qualified down to 300 feet. So typically it's 500. Yeah. You can go down to 300. But, I mean, that's that altitude.

You just sneeze and you're going to go into something. I don't feel like the Navy just lets their pilots go that low. I feel like there were some conversations had behind closed doors. Because that thing was probably, I mean, it had to been under 50 feet. Yeah. I guess, I mean, when you're taken off, you can stay low. So like, not for that long, I don't think. He was nowhere near a runway.

Yeah, if you're near. So, I mean, I just got into this because we flew at the SoCal Air Show. So I got a chance to do that a couple weeks ago, or was it? It's about a week and half ago. And so there are tons of rules and regulations, and we had to kind of pick through that. And, you know, if it's an airfield and not just like somebody's barbecue, like you can do really anything at an airfield, including, you know, staying low. Yeah. And staying an afterburner.

So, I mean, we had to get, like, general level approval to do some of the stuff we did, which is just regular stuff we do at the airfield. So, yeah. All right. So after the turboprop, when did you strap into a jet for the first time? With the, so you fly the T6, then you move on to the T38. So six months in the T6. Is that a double-seater? Both are double-seaters.

Okay. So both are trainer aircraft. So we started with 30 people in my flight. Seven people got selected for the T-38. And so that's a 1950s-era jet. That's the hardest aircraft I've flown in my entire career. Really? That's killed the most people.

That's why they split. So back in the day, everybody went to the T-38. But it's super underpowered. They wanted to go supersonic, and the engines are very underpowered. So they had to make it look like a dart. So it's like a flying dart. Pull this thing up, Michael. I want to see what it looks like.

T-38, you said? T-38. Okay. underpowered, very aerodynamic at high speed. It doesn't have any of the active flight controls that we have in the F-35. F-35's wing is completely changing as we're moving through different flight environments. This is just old school. Oh, you see this, this actually was like the airplane they were using in the first top gun as like the aggressor aircraft.

It almost looks like. Yeah, like what was it, the Meg 28? Yeah, something like that. Wow, that thing does look crazy. Yeah. What about that is killing pilots? So those wings are tiny and they don't have like active flight control. or active flight control surfaces.

So the F-35, the leading edge will move. So it'll increase the camber so you can fly slower. This, you wanted to go super-sling. Yeah. But this is 1950s technology. That wing doesn't move. And so high speed, pretty good handling. Low speed, terrible handling.

So a lot of people would get in traffic pattern stalls and just kill themselves. Oh, fuck. So then, I don't know when they changed, I think in the, I guess in the 90s, they split. So most of the class, anybody going to heavies, like tankers transport aircraft,

they would go and fly the T1. It's like a business jet. Pull that shit up, Michael. I want to see that too. Yeah. I think they're retiring in the next couple years. For those train aircraft, are the,

is the rear cockpit set up the same as the front? Yeah. So you can talk about what everybody's seeing and they can kind of coach you and teach you through? Yeah, I don't think it's like identical, but it's pretty full up. Oh, this is interesting. Yeah, that's like a small PJ, like a private jet.

Yeah, but they're actually retiring that. They, they, so their air force is in a pilot shortage crisis. They're trying to push as many people through as possible right now. And so what they're realizing is that airlines are being able to train people in simulators. Yeah. So they're getting rid of the T1 and just putting people straight to sim in their actual airframe because they're saying. Like a level D sim. Yeah, it's not really translating from the T1 from the T1 to like a C-17.

So why not put somebody in a C-17 sim, spend more time there and have them fly as a co-pilot longer? My only, well, my first experience with it was the Gulfstream, which was my first ever turbine time. And I mean, you realize because of the graphics, like, hey, I'm not in an actual aircraft. But to get that certification, I think it was level D, whatever it is. Like all the buttons are in the right place, they all functioned. It had a heads-up display that you could flip down and look through. And then you go to do your first flight. And it's crazy to think, too, that you can get qualified and licensed to fly a Gulfstream, having never actually been in a Gulfstream.

And it's like, okay, let's, uh, the sim, this button kind of turns it on. Let's start the APU up. Well, I mean, same thing in the F-35. Yeah. First time you're flying, you're flying on your own. And you have to land that thing on your own. Fuck. But the sims we have are incredible. Yeah.

They're insane. They're like two stories tall. Multi-axis. Well, not that because they found that you can't really replicate, you know, flying fighters without, without that. Although the centerfuge actually has a flight sim mode where they can do that. Really? Because they have like a hydraulic lift on the gondola, so it typically spins you out. So it can adjust so you can get some lateral G forces.

So that's the only thing. If you're in a centerfuge, you can have a good fighter, fighter, you know, multi-axis moving a sim. But outside of that, we don't use any movement. So I mean, they're insane. So, I mean, you learned how to fly in a sim. Yeah, it makes total sense, though. Yeah, I mean, it's only single seat. So you learn how to fly.

So you go through a couple months of academics, a couple months. of simulator training and then after that, your first flight is on your own. So I'm an instructor, so we'll follow these new students around. So I'll be an F-35 following them, which is great. Like as a fighter pilot, you don't want to be stuffed in the backseat of like an F-16 or something. Not unless your ejection seat is guaranteed to work.

Yeah. Even then, I don't want to break my back. Totally. So yeah, so yeah, we'll follow them around. They do a great job. Simulators are great. Like these Sims, they're full, you know, 100% real cockpits and they'll, they'll, uh, you're on this like tank track. So you hop in the

sim and then wheels you into the middle of this like giant two-story dome. And it's like HD. And they're all interlinked. Uh, so I mean, it's, it's pretty crazy. Where's that at? So we have them at Luke Air Force Base in, in Phoenix. They're multiple places. When can I fly one of those? They do declassified every once in a while. So, right, I'm just saying. I'll hit you up next time they're declassifying it. And then we'll go over and knock Michael out. It'll be a perfect video series. Yeah, we have some good content here.

I like it. Wow. Okay, so you're in your jet trainer, and then how long are you in that before you switch over to... Well, actually, when did they tell you? It's going to be F-16s. So you're there at six months, and then they make it dramatic, so it's the last day. They drop all the stuff. So it's...

So day one, when you show up, like the wing commander came in, gave kind of like a pep talk. It was like, all right, close your eyes. How many of you want to fly fighters? raise your hand. I rose my hand. Open your eyes. Everybody's hand was going to be my guess. He was like, all right, two of you guys are going to fly fighters.

The rest are going to fly heavies. I want you to think about that while you're here and walked out. I was like, oh, that's some pep talk. So it was game on after that, you know, and it's a weird dynamic because, you know, you're there to help your friends, your teammates and stuff like that. But at the end of day, you know that only two or three people are getting fighters. Did he tell you the truth about that? Or does he say that in every class, and then maybe there are more than two that are going to get fighters?

Yeah, so it changes. So anywhere between like one, I think every class got one fighter, at least. So anywhere between one and like four at the time. So it just depends. Very few, though, in comparison to the total number in the classroom. Yeah. All right. Yep.

So the very last day is when they announce what you get. So everybody's like sweating bullets up to the end because seven people go on to fly T-38's, and then out of their two, three people get fighters. and everybody in T-38's is pretty good. We had like airline pilots that were in the class who was just crushing everybody the first half. But then they started having some issues with like formation flying and things like that.

But yeah, T-38, very tough to fly. We'd even fly in the back seat for instrument rides, which was brutal. There's no autopilot in it. It's all hand-flying. They'd have like drapes that went up over the back seat. So, yeah, six months of flying that. you announce, you know, that, you know, I got selected fly the F-16.

Then you go to this other school called IFF introduction to fighter fundamentals, and it's kind of the last stage of, all right, this guy probably has the hands and the aptitude to do it, but does he have the attitude? Like, does he have the, is he coachable? They pretty much just, like, push you to fail rides. You know, they're going to. What are you flying there? T-38's.

But you're flying them in a tactical way. Up to there, you're flying, you know, instruments. formation, you're not really doing anything tactical. IFF is where you really start to do dog fighting, really starting to do air to ground stuff as well. How many hours do you have at that point for the average person? Assuming you came in with zero, because I'm sure there's people who come in with a ton. If you were to come in clean, how many hours do you think you'd have at that point?

Maybe about 200. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, you're still pretty green. You're still figuring out flying? Nobody is good at flying at first. Yeah. Like every student, you know, that's a lot of people come up and they're like,

You know, they want to act like their Maverick throughout that whole thing. Maverick would have never made it through pilot training because everybody sucks as a student pilot. So you really have to have like a good attitude. It's probably the same thing being a, being a seal. Yeah, it's actually, it's a course that in many ways selects for character through a physical means. Unfortunately, as with all selection pipelines, it's not perfect. Yeah. Yeah.

Same thing. But, yeah, IFF is that last stage of this guy is a good pilot, but we're going to poke and prod them. We're going to have them hook some, fail some rides. We're going to see like, just to see how they react. Is he an asshole. Yeah. And, uh, and actually at the time, they were washing about 20% of people out of there. So, um, what would happen to them if they did get washed out? They would go fly heavies. Okay. So they're not going to get ejected from the Air Force in general, just a different pipeline. Yeah. The Air Force is like, this is a good asset. Let's, let's use them somewhere else. Same thing with Centerfuge. They go fly heavies. Okay. So at some point, though, they tell you you're going to go

F-16. Yeah, yeah. So that, I mean, that was outside my son being born, that's probably the best, best day of my life. And so, yeah, went to Luke Air Force Base, flying the F-16. That was the dream from the beginning. So getting a chance to do an afterburner takeoff, like max AB. I mean, okay, so this is a pretty funny story.

So first flight, we do a max afterburner take-off. The first flight. Yeah, you might as well get after it. Let's do it. get to nine G's. Like the instructor is cool. He's like, all we're going to do afterburner takeoff. We're going to get to nine Gs.

We're going to do all the fun stuff. He's in back at this point. He's in the back seat. And so after burner takeoff, I mean, you can feel each of the five stages lighting off. Like it's just pushing you against the back of the seat. You're just accelerating faster than you ever have. You're flying this or he's flying this? I'm flying this.

Fuck yes. So I'm so here for this. Oh, it was awesome. And yeah, you can feel each of those five stages, boom, boom, boom, boom, lighting off, accelerating you down the runway at about 100, 50 knots. You pull back on the stick. The thing you have to worry about

is over speeding the gear at 300 knots. Right, you know, right away. Bring the gear up. And the weather was pretty bad this day. So it's in Arizona. We get a lot of like monsoons and things like that. Oh, yeah, you do. So the weather was pretty poor.

There's like thunderstorms around. We go right into a thunderstorm. And there's a bunch of hail in there. So we're just like hitting all the canopy. It breaks the, AIM-9 sidewinder news. No way. It, like, sandblasted things.

So, like, five minutes in the flight, we're now an emergency aircraft. We've sandblasted the jet. You know, the AIM-9 is jacked up. So we have to get a chase ship. We have to land it. So it's just this big thing. There's a safety investigation afterwards. But it was, you know, the best 10 minutes of my life.

I was going to say, get it out of the way on, you know, hop number one. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that was flight number one. But, man, I was like, I don't need to do anything for the rest of my life. I've achieved my goal. How much classroom before you got into an F-16 cockpit? It's about two months. Okay.

But it's co-current. So you do two months, about two months of SIM training. That gets you just flying. And then after that, you're doing a mix of academics, Sims for like tactical stuff. Because after that, you move into BFM dog fighting. Then you move into medium-range air-to-air, long-range air-to-air. and then the second half of the class is air to surface. When do they put you in a single seat?

I think it's only four flights in. Wow. Yeah, four flights in, you're soloing. How was that the first time? Oh, awesome. Just you and an F-16, just do-de-de-do. Yeah, well, because up to that point, you know, you get used to like not saying anything, not talking to yourself because there's somebody in the back seat.

Yeah. You don't want to say, like, you know, like, what's the city of doing? Yeah. So, like, so yeah, you can just talk to yourself. You can say, you know, so it's, it's, it's awesome. I mean, for me, soloing the first time ever, even a Cessna was just like a big deal. Like it changed my mindset. It's like, I took this thing off.

I have to land this thing on my own. So I don't know if it was like that for you. I always felt like I forgot to do something. Like, let me get that checklist out one more time. I've done everything on here, but somehow I feel like I'm going to remember something that forgot the second the wheels get off the ground. Yeah, yeah. That's how I felt for the first half my crew. There's something I'm forgetting. God damn it. It's like packing. Yeah. But yeah, that was like the ultimate solo. It's like I can do whatever I want with this F-16, especially because

the first one, I don't think you're going out with a flight lead. The first one, I was doing some advance handling or something. So it's basically like, here, take the keys, go have fun. So you're like fucking off in an F-16. You know, they call it advanced handling. I like it. I don't care what they call it as long as that's what you were doing. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, that's just, it's an incredible feeling. That's amazing. Yeah. So, yeah, after that, you're, you're, you're flying solo probably every second or third flight.

They've had to, the D models are the two-seater ones. They've had some wing spar issues and some launderon issues. So they're getting old. So I think they're changing up the syllabus to be more single seat only for the F-16 pilots. And, I mean, we've proven it in the F-35 that you can do the entire syllabus solo if you need to. Yeah. At some point, obviously, you finished training because like you said, you were flying for 12 years. How long into it before you did your – actually, what year was this that you were going through? This was 2011.

Okay, so well post 9-11. How long until you were sent downrange on an operational deployment? It was a while. So it was 2016. Okay. Because I went after graduating from the B-course, as we call it, I went to Korea. So, you know, we were doing some missions there. There's no, you know, no combat missions there, obviously. So I was there for two years. And, you know, the thing is, even after you make it through the B-course,

you're still worthless. Like the biggest asset you are to the squadron is being a snacko and stock in the snack bar. Okay. So you still have to go through like upgrades. I think it's about three months of mission qualification training. And then after that, you can just be a wingman. You can just follow your flight lead around. Do that for a while.

After a few years, you can become a flight lead in charge of four air, I moved to Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina where we did the Wild Weasel Mission. And then I became an instructor pilot after a few years. And then it was 2016 that we deployed to Afghanistan. What do they have you doing? And where were you based out of? Bogram. Okay. I mean, it was, so when we first heard that, so I reclama twice. So reclama is where you stay back. So I ended up spending three and a half years at Shaw because I wanted to go on this deployment. But when we heard it was, it was Afghanistan. We were all a little disappointed. because of the drawdown, there wasn't a lot going on out there.

We deployed first two months, as expected, nothing really going on. We were supporting a lot of different ops, but we weren't dropping a lot of ordinance. Did you fly your F-16 to Afghanistan? The squadron did. So I was on the advanced team, so I went out there on a C-17 about a week ahead of time, and set everything up and got everything transferred over from the F-16s that were out there. But yeah, we fly the F-16s there and back. I feel like that's not a comfortable flight.

I feel like that's a lot of time in that aircraft. Yeah, it's terrible. So, I mean, coming back, it was four hours to Qatar. And then, of course, the tanker broke for two weeks because their windshield wiper broke in Spain. Oh, weird. Standard. It's like when I would deploy pre-9-11, our first hop would be Hawaii. And they always had an engine issue that they couldn't fix during high winds, which is every fucking day.

Yeah, the good spots. I wasn't complaining at all because we hung up. out in Waikiki for two weeks. But it's interesting how planes never break in Bogram, but they always break in Hawaii. Yeah, or Al-U-Deed. Yeah, so, I mean, we were stuck in a tent

with 50 people in Aoud. We'd been gone for seven months. All our families are waiting for us, and they're waiting on a goddamn windshield wiper in Marone, Spain. But that eventually showed up, and it was 10 hours flying to Spain. Oh, so you're flying with the tanker,

so you can just hop on off the things. Because we can only fly, you know, less than 1,000 miles with our fuel tanks. Holy shit. So you're flying with the tanker. And then out of Spain, we go to South Carolina. So we took off six F-16s with two tankers.

The first tanker refueled us a third of the way across the Atlantic, turned back to Europe, and then we start refueling off the second tanker. It was a, so it was a 10-and-a-half-hour flight. We refueled 10 times each because you always want to be topped off to give you options. Are you guys just fine on like a V up there, just kind of with the tanker? Yeah, with the tanker. For like three hours, there was weather, so we had to stay in fingertip formation, so, you know, about three feet separation. And I mean, it's all manual, so you're just like...

That's exhausting. Yeah, you're taking, you know, go pills just to stay, stay alert, stay conscious. You're in, you know, anti-exposure suit. It was actually kind of a big deal. So we had gotten stuck in the deed for two weeks, and then the weather was rolling in. and the waves were 30 feet in the Atlantic. Oh, boy. And so typically, unless we're doing what's called the AOS movement across the Atlantic,

I think it's 10-foot wave heights is the max, because they can't save you after that. Yeah. And so we all had to get together and say, you know, is this something we really want to do? If nobody wants to do it, if anybody doesn't want to do it, we'll just stay. And we're like, let's go out of here. But, I mean, looking down, these waves are the size of a house. Like, it was pretty crazy. What altitude are you crossing it?

I think we were mid-20s. I'm surprised you guys didn't go higher. I think the tanker has some issues with, well, first of all, tanking at high altitude is really tough. Okay. The controls are really sluggish. And then the tanker being heavy, I think has some issues getting that high. Limited, yeah.

So, but yeah, about a third or half the way through it, we had to stay, we had some weather, staying fingertip for three hours, and that's just exhausting doing that. And then I was able to make it home. So it does take forever. But yeah, we were in, we were in Bogram for the full seven months. First two months was pretty much as expected, pretty boring. And then that's when Mattis took over a secretary defense. And ISIS was starting to take over the Nangahar region.

And so after that, Mattis said he wanted ISIS annihilated in the country. And so the Air Force didn't know what that meant. And so they spent two weeks figuring out what annihilated meant. And after that, it meant we were cleaning the rails every flight. Were you just working a lot with J-Tax and CCT on the ground and just? We were doing a lot of that because they were doing clearing-ups in the Nangahar region, so pretty high-risk stuff. We were the only fighters in the country.

So we were, you know, our strength is going fast. So we'd work on the Iran border. We would work in Helmand Province. We'd work on the Pakistani border. We'd have to have multiple PMDs like mission data cards to be able to work different sides of the country. Yeah. But yeah, the really busy parts were when they were doing clearing up. ops in the Nangahar region, and we're the only fighters, so we're dropping a lot of ordinance out there.

What's your average drop altitude? Like your average profile when you're rolling in, where do you guys actually release it? For the F-16, when we were flying those missions, you know, 15,000 feet. So you were dropping smart bombs? We were dropping smart bombs. I straped a couple times. Yeah. We were also dropping or shooting the AGR20s. I don't know if you ever had a chance to see those, the APKWS, advanced precision weapon kill system. No. So those old Vietnam era 2.75 inch rockets, but fitted with a laser seeker. They're really perfect for Afghanistan. We were the first, we were one of the first, first or second squadron to fly with those.

I mean, we had to load those up as dumb markety two bombs because the jet couldn't even understand what those were. So we're like, because, you know, we found out we were going to get them a couple of weeks before and we're like, how do we use these things? And so we had to figure that out. Wow. They turned out to be perfect for Afghanistan. and nail drivers, 10-pound warheads. I mean, that's exactly what you want. Low collateral damage.

Yeah. So we were using that a lot. We were using, yeah, smart bombs, GB-54s, Gb-3-3-8s. We even put on some GB-31, 2,000-pound bombs. Yeah. But, yeah, for the next four months, five months, we were just dropping every bomb we had every sortie. That's awesome.

Which was, I mean, pretty crazy, because most of our friends in Syria thought they were lucky, and then it turned into drawdown for them, and we started getting really busy. And that was all F-16 at that time, or were you guys flirting with the F-35 then, too? No, we were the only fighters squad in the country. So we had 12 F-16s for an entire country,

and that was all the fighters. And so we were doing 24-hour ops, two F-16s, four-hour rolls, but we get extended pretty much every time to like six hours. Yeah. And by that you mean two in the air at any time? Two in there at any time. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. But, I mean, it's pretty cool to, Typically, as we were talking before, like you're going out with these packages of 100 aircraft. Here, you know, if you're the flight lead, I was using the flight lead, you're in charge of 100% of the fast cast, you're making the decisions. Do we, you know, do we handle this tick that's going on near that Nangahar region or there's, you know, some special ops thing going on in the Hellman region? So you're making a lot of decisions that you really wouldn't as part of a bigger package. Yeah.

Yeah. Pros and cons are being in a small unit like that, or a small footprint, I should say. What'd you do after you got back from that deployment? So midway through the deployment found out I was going to the F-35. Had you put in for that? Yeah. Okay. So that was my number one pick.

And at the time, you know, a lot of the pilots thought I was crazy because F-35 had a lot of issues back then. Like what? It was just, you know, it was G-limited. The sensors weren't working that well. The program was having a lot of issues as well because it's a joint program. So it's an international. So there's a Marine variant, a Navy variant, and there's international partners, I think 13 other countries as of a couple months ago. So, yeah, there are a lot of issues.

But I mean, any jet has a lot of issues. The F-16 lost, we've lost 600 in the U.S. over the years. What? An insane amount. How many of that in combat? Like three? No, I mean, we lost a good amount during the Gulf War, but most fit training. and there are years, training years,

where we were losing one every three weeks. Why? Single engine. I mean, it was known as the lawn dart back in the day. And it was also the first electric jet, so fly-by-wire jet. So, I mean, it had a lot of issues, too. Same thing with any new jet. So the F-35 was having a lot of teething issues.

But I had been to a bunch of advanced exercises, like at Nellus Red flags, things like that. Yeah. And I had seen the writing on the wall where, especially wild weasel pilots we were you know our motto is first and last out but we weren't doing that anymore we were hanging way back not going into the mezzes the missile engagement zones and just lobbing in harb missiles while the f22 f35s the fitgen players went in and did all the uh the good stuff so is the f35 considered a fifth gen fighter yeah a term i didn't know of until i saw maverick yeah yeah it's

it's the newest one we we called f22s legacy fit chin and they're not fans of that but they're retiring the F-22 in the 2030s. Didn't they just put that thing into service not too long ago? Yeah, it's like the second newest jet. Why would they already have a hang update on that thing? Because they only built 180 of them. Oh, and they're just going to time out? Yeah, they kept getting cuts to them.

And so they only ended up building 180. And these jets are so software dependent that you can either do a software upgrade that's billions of dollars that can help 4,000 jets. The F-35 is projected to be 4,000 or 180 jets. So F-22 is a fantastic jet, but it's a victim of just having a small footprint. Those jets can do some crazy things. Yeah. The flight surface options on that, I'm like, it's like watching Iron Man, when he gets in his suit the first time, you're like, holy shit!

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's the best aerodynamic jet out there. Like it was during a really key and interesting time during the 90s is when it was built, when they're moving from like, should we build a jet like an F-16 or should we build a. jet like the F-35. And they're like, why don't we just split the difference and make it ultra-maneuverable and also make it like a flying sensor? It's crazy. Huh.

And I'm assuming the F-22 role would just be absorbed by the F-35s? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, yeah, it does a pretty good job. And there's just so much, so much money going into it, so many upgrades going into it that, yeah, it's a fantastic jet now. So my friends, they thought I was crazy back in the day.

They thought it was just, I don't know if you know, an F-117, those old stealth fighters, bombing only. Yeah, I know exactly you're talking about. Yeah. So the initial read on the F-35 was, it was just a, you know, F-1-17 with Amram missiles. But it's, you know, as you see with the air show clip, like it's really matured and it's, it's far better than it was even a couple years ago. Is it the Marine Corps variant that does the vertical takeoff? Or are they all capable of that? No, just the marine variant.

Okay. That caused, that's the biggest consternation. the biggest issue. Because I mean, imagine being an engineer. You have to design the latest supersonic stealth fighter has to, you know, have better sensors than ever before. And this thing has to hover. Like, it's just an insane order for, for an engineering team. And so that's, that was the key part. Bless you. That was the key piece that, uh, that caused a lot of issues for the F-35. Yeah, that is a tall order. All that stuff in there. And by the way, vertical take off from landing. Yeah, and just hover. At C. Okay. I know.

I still haven't seen it. I don't believe it. Michael, F-35, vertical takeoff at sea, Marine Corps. I've definitely seen it on video. But we had a, we'd have 35B at the air show, and he was not allowed to hover. And I was like, why? Because of those rules, regulations. Like, he's allowed to land at slow speed, but not hover.

And I was like, I don't believe it. I don't think you guys can really hover. So the plane you fly looks like that, but it just can't do the, vertical takeoff essentially. And it has the gun. So it shoots 180 rounds of those. I mean, this guy's about to do it. That is so fucking crazy. Yeah. I feel like the most dangerous time would be transitioning from horizontal or vertical to horizontal flight. Apparently it's a three hour class to learn how to hover this thing for a three hour pilot. Yeah. Like it's it's simple. Like the Harrier, the Widowmaker, tons of people died in it. Yeah. This, you know, apparently

it's like a drone. Like it's, it's easy. I don't know if it is, but that's what my friend say. I got three hours of spare. All right, let's do it. We have so far we have three videos in this series we're going to do. Yeah, we can go to Yuma and do it. It's going to be called Hazard and Andy Kill Michael. We'll do the fun stuff. Yeah, you're the test dummy. We'll, we'll test ejection seats with you, Michael. Ten Gs, G's, 12 G's. Yeah, we got to get him in the dunker and not help him when he can't get out. So that'll be good. We'll let you go unconscious underwater. I'm not sure with the dunkers. Don't worry about it.

You don't even need to know. Yeah, a new challenge every day. Yeah, I like it. You know back in the 90s, they put pilots up to 12 Gs. So it is possible. Their videos on YouTube. Did their retinas detach? I don't know.

It doesn't sound healthy. It really doesn't. I have bad eyesight anyways. You do? It could help you. You could turn superhuman. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah.

It's like the X-Men training protocol for you. Yeah. It's like getting bit by a spider. I love it. All right. How was, so how was your first flight in the F-30? When did you get into the F-35s?

Because you come back from that deployment. Yeah, so, yeah, found out in Afghanistan and then had to wrap up a few things. Like, everybody kind of goes off in their own directions after deployments and came to Luke Air Force Base to learn how to fly the F-35. Yeah, they put you through simulators. At the time, at the time, it actually wasn't too bad.

Like, it was, so now the upgrade is really tough. But back then, there's a lot of issues, and it was, it was, we're mostly figuring out how to not break the jet. There weren't a lot of tactics yet. So, so the upgrade wasn't that bad, but it was, like I was saying before, it took about a year to really start getting comfortable with the jet. You know, you're just used to flying the F-16, especially me. How many hours did you have in the F-16 at that point? I think I had 1,200-something hours. So pretty experience in the F-16.

And so, you know, it just was instinct. And so kind of undoing that, there's a lot of negative transfer. Although the F-16, especially a Block 50, wild weasel pilot, that's the best transition to the F-35. Because we have other pilots, A-10 pilots, F-22 pilots coming to the F-35, and it's a more difficult transition. Because, you know, F-16, you're kind of a jack-of-all trade. Same thing with the F-35. So it's really the people that are hyper-specialized. The F-15C guys focus purely on air-to-air or the A-10 pilots that have issues, you know,

learning the other half of flying. So they generally have a little bit of issues, nothing that studying can't fix. But yeah, it takes about a year to really start getting current and good at flying the F-35. But, you know, it's pretty crazy. It's just a new way of thinking with the F-35.

You're talking stealth, you're talking fantastic sensors, sensor fusion. That's something that the F-16 did not have. So the F-16 was like that Cessna-152. It was a rat's nest of technology. So we had like, we had like, it's not fair to say it's a 70s jet. So it was like a 90s, it was 80s, 90s, 2000s technology all tied together.

You'd have your radar warning system that would be separate from your radar, all kinds of different sensors. And your brain's the fusion for that. And unfortunately in the F-16, we had like six times a C-fit controlled flight in a terrain of other jets just because there's so much to do, especially if you're flying at low level, which we were doing a lot of. Was that just pilot saturation causing that? Some of it is the G-lock, and then some of it's the saturation where there's just working the radar and then run into a mountain or something like that. Describe G-lock, if you will.

G-lock? Well, that's the Tito thing. So G-induced loss of consciousness. Yeah. So, you know, we're pulling upwards of nine Gs. That's draining the blood from your brain, and if you lose enough blood, you'll pass out. You'll be incapacitated for about 30 seconds.

It's a long time at the speeds you guys are cooking. Yeah, especially, you know, when you're pulling a max, performance maneuver like that, you're generally going to be nose low using some radial g, some gravity to help you out. You'll be in max afterburner. And so, like I said, we've lost about one pilot a year over the last 30 years to G-lock. So they become incapacitated. They wake up after like 10 seconds, but they just, you don't know where you are. And you're flying max afterburner pointing towards the ground. Fuck. And yeah, I mean, those accident reports are pretty bad because you don't,

You don't find anything when you're, you know, you find very small things when you're going 800 miles an hour into the ground. It was, when I was flying, I always paid attention to the incident reports, the civilian ones. Shocking, how many of them are controlled flight into terrain, perfectly functioning aircraft and just straight into a fucking mountain. Yeah, just lack of prioritization. Or people over their skis, taken off in VFR conditions, thinking that everything's going to be fine and not paying attention to the weather, finding themselves in IFR conditions for the first time. and I think I know how to do this. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's really tough because when you're first learning to fly,

you learn to fly by the seat of your pants. Like you want to look out, you don't want to be looking at the gauges, like when you're doing steep turns and things like that. Same with flying fighters, but then when you transition to IFR, now you're ignoring the seat of the pants flying. Yeah. And you're just focusing on the instruments.

And I think most people kind of biased towards one or the other. They're pilots that, you know, have good hands, real good at stick and rudder stuff, and they have trouble flying out. IFR, that was me. Like, that was probably the biggest difficulty that I had in pilot training was learning how to fly under instruments. Really? Yeah. I mean, formation came pretty naturally. Sticking rudder stuff came pretty naturally. But flying IFR just heads down. It is wild when you feel like you're in like a left or a right-hand turn and you're flying completely off of the attitude indicator. Like, fuck, it's telling me it's straight. I feel like I'm going right. It's telling me it's straight. Go straight, go straight, go straight. Well, the really bad thing is on a tanker. Like tankers, you're, you're flying. You know, when you're in the clouds, you don't have any of those references. You're just looking at the director lights. Oh, God.

It's a full manual maneuver. So you're fully following this tanker. Where's the probe coming into the F-16? Behind you. Okay. So when you're refueling, you want to try to hit your head on the probe, just really slowly. So you're going like two miles an hour. They'll move the probe out of the way.

And then you pull up, and then they'll stick the probe in the back. And you're just staying in that position for like five to ten minutes. There's some director lights telling you to go forward, aft, down, up. And so you're just focused on that. But the tanker has to turn to stay in their orbit. And so you'll be in this like two or three minute turn, and that'll become the new normal. And so there have been a lot of people that have gone like spatial lead

and done like barrel rolls and stuff like that underneath a tanker. So that's really where some guys get into issues. Okay. I think that was my favorite part of flying, was shooting actual instrument, approaches. I just, I loved it. I liked the integration of the sensors and I'd like, like, like the whole, the whole aspect of it. San Diego, again, it was perfect. It was like great weather almost all the time so you could go do whatever you want. But I would just get up early and shoot like

six approaches every day, seven days a week. It was fucking awesome. Yeah, I mean, there's something, there's a precision to it. Yeah. And it's, it's an extremely useful skill. Like I tell all my friends and family. Like if you're going to get a pilot's license, you have to get IFR. Otherwise you, I mean, you get to fly when it's perfect conditions. And you never know, like in Phoenix, like the weather roll in in 30 minutes and then you're in IFR conditions and then you can easily kill yourself. Yes. So many, so many like doctors lawyers. They've gone spatial D and killed themselves. But yeah, generally in Mooney's for some reason. That's the doctor killer was the name on that one. Yep, yep. But yeah. But yeah, I like, I like shooting approaches. Like there's some

precision to it. You're working as a team with the controllers on the ground. I mean, it's kind of like doing cast, close air support. Yeah, that kind of the synchronized back and forth. Yeah. And it's also just cool when you shoot one well, like taking it all the way down to minimums and you pop out and you're like fucking awesome. There's a runway right there.

Yep, yep. There's something cool to it for sure. I like the opposite. When you are taken off, like, I mean, we were doing this from the air show. Saturday, Sunday was beautiful. We left Monday. It was overcast down to two. 200 feet, just dreary gray.

Yeah. And once we took off, perfect. You know, it's so bright. You don't realize how bright it is. Like, I don't think our eyes really are used to that transition of going from like overcast to full daylight. So, I mean, that always catches me by surprise, even with the visors that we have.

But I think that's the best feeling like you're leaving, you know, that shitty weather. Yeah. And you're seeing a perfect day out there. That was that cool thing about the approaches in San Diego, too, because it's, you get up, Montgomery Field, get up above it. Beautiful, dive back down into the May gray like misty, up up, and just doing that rotation of back through together. Yeah, that was awesome.

And then another thing that's similar to that is like at Bogram, I'm sure you've been to Bogram, right? Many times. Yeah. So, I mean, all those 15,000 foot mountains around there. So, like, the sun in the, in the winter sets at, like, maybe like 3.34. Yeah. And so you'll be almost taken off its post sunset, and then you'll take off,

and then it will be a bright day. So you'll take off, and then you'll take off. and then you'll see the sign again. So that was always a pretty cool feeling. What got you to your, I know you wanted to be an author and do stuff with YouTube. When did you start thinking about getting out? When did it start tugging at you? After I came back from Afghanistan.

So like, even before you got into the F-35. Yeah, because I had a few months off waiting to fly the F-35. And so I was just writing some of the stories that we had there, because, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that went on. We had, like, a suicide bomber infiltrate the base and detonate himself. And so there's that, you know, there's just a lot of stuff that we saw out there. So I was just kind of processing it, writing it down. And I was like, it might be interesting to, like, write a book about this.

About the same time, Luke Air Force Base was looking for a speaker on Memorial Day to speak at this town called Carefree. And so I started speaking or I gave a speech there. There was a teacher in the crowd who was like, my students really need to hear this stuff. Can you come speak there? And so I started speaking in schools and figured there, you know, all the students really enjoyed it. A lot of them wouldn't become fighter pilots.

A lot didn't have any contact with the military at all. So it was just a big, scary thing to them. So I could kind of put a face to it. And so I started a podcast out of there. And I wanted to write, but then I realized you really have to have an audience to be able to write a book. book. Otherwise, nobody's going to buy your book. So then I started the podcast. That turned into

the kind of YouTube stuff. And then full circle, the book's going to be coming out in a couple weeks. What are you talking about? It's right here. I actually haven't seen the finished copy. This is the first time I've seen it. They sent me two. Would you like to have one of those? I need to tell them. Come on. I wrote the damn thing. But yeah, I mean, it was it was a cool experience. Like I wrote every word in the book. Yeah. It was a six-year journey because that's really where I started wanting to be an author and then I had to figure out how to write. So I started doing some like guest blogs and things like that. And then you have to live like a monk like for 500 days straight I wrote every single day, usually like four hours in the morning. Did you have a like a

word goal or what you set for yourself as far as a template? Yeah, like 500 words. Like I'm just a super slow writer. Yeah. Same here. So so yeah, I just I would try to write 500 words. Okay. Some days I wouldn't quite get there. Some days it would just pop off and I would write like 2,000 words. Some days I'd write 2,000 words and be pumped and then go back and realize it was terrible. I think it's more about getting the words on paper, not necessarily the quality. And I say that as somebody who's not an author, but have some friends that are. And they're like, yeah, not every swing is going to be a home run. You know, some of them you're striking out, but it's more of the repetition and actually getting it done. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what they say, just write a crappy first draft. And so I wrote a

crappy first draft, and then I was like, oh, man, I have a lot of work to do. And so I went through like nine revisions. And I thought the published, I thought we'd be having like team meetings and the publisher would be doing stuff. Like, you know, I was just on my own writing this thing for a year. But like I said, 500 days in a row, it was the second, uh, Thanksgiving that my wife's like, on Christmas, you know, you're taking a day off. I was like, all right. That's fair. Yeah, that is fair. That's fair. So you, when did you inform the Air Force that, hey, this active duty thing? Eh, perhaps reserves.

Well, the thing is about Luke Air Force Base, they have a reservist squadron there. So, you know, that was actually the most competitive thing I've ever gone into. Really? Yeah, because everybody, you know, most people, you can do most things in the reserves that you can do active duty.

Like most reservists are full-time. At the time, they're only three part-time F-35 pilots. So everybody else was full-time in the reserves. I think it's about 20% of the Air Force are reservists. We're moving to 30% just to retain more people. Interesting. Because I think the train is like $50 million. So every time somebody just leaves and goes to the airlines, they lose that.

And like five to 10 years of experience. Thank you. Yeah. So yeah, we had. So it's pretty competitive joining the reserves. We had like 21 experienced fighter pilots show up to the board. And I think we selected, or they selected six. and I was fortunately one of those pilots.

But, yeah, at the time, there were only three part-time F-35 pilots, and they're like, you know, is this going to work? You know, especially with how these upgrades are coming down the pipeline. And, you know, it's tough. You definitely have to, like, kind of reduce your sphere and know your limits. But, yeah, it's been good. But I was going to say, it netted you more time elsewhere,

because then you could do more riding if you wanted to podcasting YouTube. Tell me about your YouTube page. Michael, can you pull up his page because it's awesome. If you're into aviation or just, like, I watched a shit ton of the videos just because I love, I haven't flown in years, but I love jets and flying shit. So, but you tell the story of it. All right. Well, thanks.

That's great to hear that you're enjoying it. I just want to, well, first of all, there's not many pilots doing this stuff. I feel like there's a lot of special forces, people out there telling the story. And, you know, like you, you guys are doing a good job, Jock Willick. In the Air Force, most pilots go off and fly for the airlines. Like, I think it's too comfortable of a job so people don't, like, take a chance and go out there. And that's one thing I didn't want to do. It's such an easy transition.

So easy. Yeah. It's, it's, uh, there are a lot of guys in the world that come from that will go, uh, government contractor. They literally are, well, I was going to say they're literally doing the same job, but they get paid differently. But that's not really the case. But it's the vast majority of their skill sets are overlaying. And it's enticing. because it's like putting on an old pair of shoes.

Right. As opposed to going out there and maybe you like to wear stilettos. I'm not going to tell you, you know, what you, I don't know what you're flying with up there. Yeah, I got six inch pumps on underneath here. So. Yeah.

I love that picture. Fuck, that's such a good picture. That was, so, so, uh, it is interesting. I mean, we had, I had to figure out a lot of interesting things because the Air Force, like, you know, how do we quite, you know, handle this? And so one of the things is, uh, so that was that was that. Nellus Air Force Base, they, it's pretty interesting. We were doing physiological monitoring.

So these jets, $100 million a piece, they see out to the horizon, but there's nothing monitoring the pilots, which would be useful for all these G-locks and things like that. Yeah. So we went out there and showcased it some of the testing that they were doing on. Win a real fighter jet? Let's talk offline to make sure that I actually win that? Win a flight. Oh, damn it!

Yeah. Let's get rid of that flight. You've already been an F-18, though, so. Yeah, she'd let me fly it for a little bit, too. All right. Nice. how did it feel uh you know you push down and things get bigger and you pull back up and things get smaller yeah don't overcomplicate it honestly like most airplanes like fuck at a general level

pull back on the control surfaces and things will get small pull that shit back up there michael we're not done we're fucking talk about it i love it i mean yeah you're you're clearly a good pilot because because people like to overcomplicate it i'm not smart enough to overcomplicate anything like i need gross fucking motor skills well how many videos have all how many videos have you done so far? Hundreds. What's been your favorite? I mean, the one with Tito was great.

Michael, scroll down a little bit. Oh, damn you, Michael. Go back to that. Scroll down. This is the shit that blows my mind. Go down more. More? Those complex.

The most complex. Holy shit. Yeah, you need to have Terryverts on this. Isn't that the space shuttle? Yeah, that's the space shuttle. Space Shuttle. I'm going to claim I could fly that fucker right now. We had a competition.

I would pay attention to none of the information it was giving me and just look out the windows and fly it. Me and Terry had a landing competition on it. He won by a little bit. But yeah, I mean, it's crazy. Like he showed us around the space shuttle. Michael, go back to the beginning of that video, just where it's like it shows the cockpit. Like just, oh my God. It's insane.

That is so much information. And so many things to go wrong. Oh, MFDs, PFDs, like, hopefully it's all made by the lowest bidder as well. Yeah, I think it is. I think it is. And it still costs a couple billion dollars. But, yeah, it was like, I mean, it was cool to just talk with Terry, like Terry Verts. Like, he was a space shuttle pilot, and then he went on to be the commander of the space station.

Fuck! So, like, he has, you know, stories of coming back at Mach 20. Yeah. And so he's flying the shuttle. And they put the payload. operators down below deck. So four people are above, a couple of people below.

And so the cardinal rule is like, as a pilot, you never say, what's that? And like, there's like a big bang at Mach 20. And he's like, what's that? And all those guys are sweating bullets. Yeah, people down by the girl. You used to hear him go, what did you say? What did you say?

Shut the fuck. Yeah. So he's like, yeah, they investigated. It's just like some anomaly that always happens with this space shuttle going mock 20. So I guess it's not a big deal. But like, it's just insane to hear some of those stories. Or like how the booster

or separation rockets are similar to our AMRM missile rockets. Yeah. So they, like, shoot off the side boosters. And, like, he was talking about, and I think it's like this for me, he was there during the golden age of space. Like, he would not want to be an astronaut now because everything's automated. Same thing now. Or systems management.

Yeah, I think the F-16, F-35, they're kind of the pinnacle. And then after this, we're going to start getting really automated stuff. So it's just cool to hear some of his story. What's your approach to your YouTube channel? How do you decide on what it is that you want to make a video out of? Personal desires or interests? Try to, yeah, something I'm interested in. I used to do a lot of talking head videos, but I like getting out there mixing it up.

So yeah, Terry and I went on the zero-g vomit comet, which is pretty cool, so where you go wait-ness. Oh yeah, yeah. Do you see that astronaut training a lot as well? Yeah, so, I mean, that was pretty cool experience to go do that. They're flying parabolas, right? Yeah, just parabolas, 15 to 20 seconds. of weightlessness. So that was pretty cool.

He was saying that we're lucky that we weren't on the Russian one because the Russian one is like a 20-foot bay and so people will float up to the top and then you're just smash. You got 15 seconds, then you're getting two Gs and so people just like break their neck.

That's episode four in our series. Michael getting smashed on the Russian vomit comic. We got to rent the vomit comic from. Fuck, we have a banger series lined up. I think we do. This looks great. I can't wait personally.

This was awesome. flying the first civilian F-16s. It's insane the amount of paperwork they had to go through with the State Department, like years of stuff. And these are Israeli F-16s. They were on the like 1980s nuclear raid. They've shot down aircraft. Okay.

They're the stripped down hot rods. There's no gun in them. They didn't give you a single-seater, though, did they? No. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I'd just in the backseat. But that was pretty close.

Yeah. That was very maverickish. Yeah. But how many times did you? you hang out underneath two airplanes that were having a conversation and then roll out over to the top? All the time. Yeah, it was like one to two feet. Yeah, one to two feet from glass to glass. Never mind the fact that the tail fin might actually strike. Depends if we played volleyball that day. Their shirts off and jeans. But yeah, this was a, this was a fun one to do. Is that Vegas?

No, it's Phoenix. Okay. I was going to say most wild shit happens in Vegas when it, because I think they have a gunfighter school there in turbo props in Vegas where you go out and you dogfight each other. That's a video that we're doing. We're looking for somebody to do it. You want to fight? Fuck yes. All right. You have to wear an eye patch

and you can't use your dominant hand. I'm 100% in. I'm not current and flying at all, but let's fucking go do it. And I got buddies down there because we can go down. Michael, you want to come? Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah, sky combat sport. We'll train jihitsu with Henry. Let's do strafing runs. He runs through the desert and we shoot inner rounds at him, but they'll probably kill him, but that's fine. He's here for the content.

We can't really drop a flower bomb. on, you know, let's chuck that out the window. I'm 100% down to do that if you want to do that. All right, let's do it. Like I said, we, you know, I've talked with the school. They're fully on board. We were just looking for the right guest to do that way. I'm putting down.

Yeah, let's do that. But yeah, this was a really fun video to make. I don't know. It's just, I feel like there's not a lot of people in the aviation space doing engaging videos like this. So. Well, you're looking at it from an angle that there's aviation and then there's the stuff that you got to fly and the things that.

you got to do and you might as well try to broad jump the Grand Canyon. Like your average aviator, even on the path that I was on, the apex for me was flying 135, you know, in the Gulf Stream and the citation. I got to go see a bunch of cool places, but at the end of the day, it's very rot. Well, here's our flight plan. Here's log our flight plan. Get to see portions. I mean, like, the coolest thing I saw was a lightning and thunderstorm from above. I think we were at like four or five zero just hucking, you know, across. I was looking down. Like, what the fuck is that? I was like, oh my God, we're watching lightning from above. That's so different than the things that you get to do.

And so there's aviation, but then there's the type of aviation that you used to do. And I think because almost nobody can touch that, the interest level is just through the roof. Yeah. And, you know, fortunately, a lot of these companies trust me, I guess, to tell the story. You know, there's not a lot of, like, people on YouTube out there that kind of have a professional aviation background like that. So I don't think, like, top Aces would have trusted, like, some 20-year-old. YouTuber, but I was like, we're going to tell the story correctly. Yeah.

And like, you know, I know about OPSEC. Well, like the Nellus video was really big. They were like, we're not going to declassify these F-16s. We're going to, we're going to let you guys to fly them. Like, we're trusting you guys with this. And I was like, don't worry. I'll make sure that everything's good to go with that. I'm very cautious with my previous career as well.

There's things that I'll talk about broadly and there's things that I will always talk around. And for the listener, they would never know. but I know that people who are still doing that job would appreciate it, because I'm not interested in putting anybody's life in jeopardy or in danger at all. Yeah, and that's, you know, I kind of like doing these perforer things. Like I don't necessarily want to dig down on like stealth technology and like things that, you know, Amram missile technology, things that can, you know, get me in trouble as well as things that, you know, I don't want to get close to divulging anything like that.

So this is like a fun way to show aviation that a lot of people, into as opposed to just hardcore, you know, military aviation people. What was your call said? Hazard. That's bullshit. That's just your fucking... Yeah, because, you know, we, you know, in the squadron, people just know you. What's your real first name then?

First name is Justin. I was going to say, you have the coolest fucking first name ever. So everybody knew me as hazard. So I was like... How'd you get that name? So here's thing. I'll tell you offline because the... That means just a good story.

It is a good story. But more than that, like, I don't know, our tradition and... at least in my last couple squadrons has been, you tell it over a glass of whiskey, and you don't tell it publicly. So if anybody out there, you know, I have some whiskey, you know, I'll be more than happy to tell you my call sign.

Michael, since you're going to be part of this video series, your call sign is bottom bunk. Okay, that's fine. The Air Force is pretty good with calls signs. I'm going to get a patch for him that says bottom bunk. Navy and Marines, brutal call signs. Terrible call signs. It's not based on anything you did well.

Your nickname or call side should be something that has a very pejorative nature to it. I mean, same with mine. It was from a time I almost, you know, warded myself. Perfect. Yeah. So, yeah, it's never like, oh, Hollywood, because he's really cool. Like, it's always something like stupid or something dangerous or like a play on your last name. You run into a Marine and they're like, oh, yeah, my nickname's bone crush.

I'm like, no, you gave that to yourself. Am I calling you that? Exactly. Awesome. Well, I'm trying to be cognizant of the time because I'm. I know you have a flight to two, right? Yeah, I mean. We're good.

I want to talk about. I don't mind pushing the limit. Well, the airport, you'll get through quickly, but I want to make sure you have time to get there. But I also want to talk about your book. Talk to me about what it is you were trying to accomplish in the book. Yeah, so for the book, I really wanted to be able to combine storytelling with some lessons to learn. I really enjoy authors like Malcolm Gladwell, Atul Gawande, who was a surgeon who wrote the checklist manifesto and being mortal. The checklist manifesto.

He's probably my favorite author. Okay. Fantastic author, but it's like 80% storytelling, 20% lessons learned. I don't necessarily like self-help books that's like just white papers on how to be better. I think the context is the most important part. So I really wanted to incorporate, you know, interesting stories, some of them from my time flying, but I also pulled on other stories like Air France 447 where the co-pilot ended up stalling the aircraft from 35,000 feet. Have you heard of that?

Tell me more. I have not heard of that. I feel like he had to try really hard to do that. Man, it's insane. Like, yeah, as a pilot, it's going to infuriate you. So taken off from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, bound for France, about a third of the way through. They were just cruise out. They were just cruise south.

They're going through the intra-tropical convergence zone. It's where the air from the north, northern hemisphere meets the southern hemisphere and produces a lot of thunderstorms, and they lose contact. And so they find a bunch of wreckage floating on the surface. It takes them two years to be able to find the actual black boxes. Which are orange, by the way. Yeah, exactly. No figure.

Michael's just over here watching fucking YouTube while we're talking. What are you looking at over there, Michael? Air France 447. Well, that's not Air France, 447. Oh, I'm pulling it. Yeah, it's insane, though. So what happened was it was an inexperienced co-pilot flying through this thunderstorm. Yep.

The captain had gone back to sleep, so left the number two co-pilot in charge. And then there's another co-pilot who worked in more of a management role. So he was experienced but not current. So both seats were occupied by co-pilots. And so this young 30s co-pilot, known as a company baby, he gets into this thunderstorm. There's hail in there. It clogs up all three petio tubes at once. No way.

For the Airbus, very advanced system. Airbus, even up until last year, was marketing their system as pilots can't go outside of the envelope. Like, it'll prevent pilots from pushing it and exceeding their envelope. We should explain what the Pito tube is for people listening. Right. So Pito tube is how you measure airspeed. So it measures the compacting of the wind against it versus the static port. And it's literally a tube.

And that's why the hail could. Yeah. So it's just a little tube. Measures how fast you're going. And so Airbus had three of them on. there. All three became clogged up at the same time. Not a big deal. Plains still flying, still generating left. By every other indicator, you can look at it and tell that the plane's still flying. No issues. Yeah. Attitude indicator. Good to go. Just cruising. In fact, this had happened

12 times in the past year. Also, the Pito heat, I have to assume, was going to be on at that point anyway, so it eventually would have corrected itself, given it enough time. Exactly. So that's what they figure if they, so if they had done nothing, it would have, it would have, they would have gone through the hailstorm, it would have melted the ice. They were flying, no big deal, and then they would have continued on the way. Like, he started... 12 times it happened in the previous year. But he probably was looking at a zero airspeed, wasn't he? Or a rapidly decreasing airspeed? I think it might have been a really fast airspeed. So it was incorrect. Erroneous either way. Yes. And so what he does is he, before he thinks,

just pulls back on the sick. And that's the point of the book is you need to break down decisions and to assess, choose, execute. That's kind of what we were taught in pilot training, assess the problem. First, he doesn't assess. He just moves right into doing something, pulls full back on the stick, rockets the plane up to like 30 degrees nose high. That must have been fun in the back. Yeah, yeah, in the middle of the night.

Holy shit. Stalls airplane at like 38,000 feet. No big deal. 38,000 feet, easy to get out of that. Like power forward. You at least have time. Plenty of time. Power forward.

No big deal. relax the stick he keeps it stalled full ass full back pressure um you know and the other co-pilot is trying to figure out what's going on so he's heads down so he's really close to figure out a few times what's going on but then he's like changing the radar screen trying to go to the standby pito tube which is also clogged by the way the the autopilot handed full control over the pilots at this point so they're probably groggy middle of the night and then oh you know shit all the alarms go off you know full back on the stick, 38,000 feet, stalls, holds back on the stick. And this goes back to what we were talking about. The, you know, airline pilots, a lot of them just turn on autopilot, you know, 400 feet and then

keep it there. Full back on the stick. They call the captain. Captain has time to run from his bunk up to the front. And full back on the stick. I mean, he's even more lost. Like, what's going on. He was sleeping. God, what a snapshot to be thrown into from a dead sleep. Holy shit. It's buffeting. and he just holds a stick back the entire time and they just hit the ground. So he stalled it right into the ground. It's five minutes, 51G impact, five minutes held back the stick.

At one point, he goes, I've been holding the stick back the whole time. And the transcript is haunting because they're trying to figure out what's going on. Even at 5,000 feet, they finally figure out what's going on because this guy says, I've been holding the stick back the whole time.

The captain and the other first officer's like, no, no, no. like, what have you been doing? I have the aircraft. And so he pushes the stick forward. They can still save it. And inexplicably, the copilot pulls back on the stick. And then...

So they had competing input? Competing input. And so, you know, that's kind of like a... How does that aircraft prioritize that? That's good question. That's interesting. I wonder what a fly-by-wire would do if it had competing input like that.

There was a chime going off that there was competing inputs during it. But, yeah, I guess it... I guess it went with him. Holy fuck. So, yeah, ends up stalling it again. And then the, you know, other co-pilots like, I don't know what's going on. We're dead.

And the captain's like, all right, just pull up. And this is like one second before impact. Then boom, 51G impact broke up the whole plane. Yeah. But, I mean, that's, it's just such a, you know, like in the book, I talk about, like, you don't want to necessarily, anytime somebody crashes and kills himself, there's a quote in there that basically you don't necessarily want to blame the pilot because you know every person that talked to them every instructor that instructed them had a chance to

to break this kill chain and it's the same thing here he either didn't get the proper training or something happened and he ended up stalling to the ground killing all the people because he didn't assess the problem first and so that was that was one of the stories that I have in the book um I talk about Eisenhower on D-Day moving back the decision to uh to launch because of the weather. And then there's a really risky three-day gap in the weather. And he chose to go on there. And then afterwards, he played board games afterwards,

like after making the biggest decision in history, he was playing shoots and ladders. Because he was just like, his brain was fried. There's nothing he could do for the next, like, 24 hours. And so he was just trying to, like, recharge. And so, you know, I go through some of his thought processes of, you know, urgent versus important. You're not breaking that into quadrants.

But yeah, I wanted to be able to really help people make better decisions in an engaging way. And I think that's one thing, you know, flying, as soon as you take off when you're solo, you're having to make decisions. It forces you to make decisions. So I think that's ultimately what we do. You got to take the time to analyze all the information coming to you. I had a time I flew. It was early on when I was flying.

I actually flew a Cessna out. I was augmenting a skydiving course out at, there's a jumping facility south of Phoenix, north of Arizona. and I was like, fuck it, I got my license. I'm going to fly out there. I tied the, I think it was like a, I don't think it was a 152. It probably was like a 180 Sesta. And tied the airplane down and I forgot to put the Pito tube cover on. And there's a lot of dust out there.

So I go to take off and I take off. And the airspeed indicator starts giving me an erroneous airspeed. And I recognize what it was like halfway back to San Diego. But I also, you know, there's other information sources. Like there was a GPS on this one. I'm like, huh, here's a very good indicator. of my actual airspeed, probably not great for my true airspeed, but I can, one, see that I'm moving, two, have some number to work with, and we'll base it off a feel when I go to, like,

you know, there's, you don't have to freak out. And like, well, actually, freaking out is never going to help solve a problem, but like, there's other options. Right. You know, I could have totally just stared at the analog airspeed indicator dropping off, be like, oh, I'm going to fall out of the sky, or I could have looked at the fucking windshield or looked at the RPM. of the engine, I'm like, I'm totally fine.

As long as you're flying, you can always make the problem worse. So just, well, so this is a good story they have in there. So as soon as you get to F-16 B-course, the instructors tell you anytime there's an EP, wind the clock. And so, you know, it's pretty advanced avionics in the F-16. Yeah. There's still a windable analog clock in the low right-hand corner by your knee. Like, we never use it for anything.

But they would say, wind the clock to give you, to break that habit, give you a couple seconds to before you do anything catastrophic that's going to change things. Just wind the clock, think about it for a second, and then start moving into what you're doing. So, yeah, I talk about, you know, being able to assess the problem. And then I kind of get a little bit philosophical, I guess, in it because, you know, as fighter pilots, what we're, what we are is we're wrapped in technology. We can fly a hundred times faster than we could by foot. We can carry a hundred times more. We can see a lot further. So we're using technology to augment our dissoning. decisions that we're making. Same thing. I think that we are in everyday life, like the average

American, despite only burning 90 watts of electricity physically, we use about 12,000 watts of electricity every day. And that powers the technology that augments our decisions. So decisions have never been more important than they are now. I think Bloomberg just came out with something saying they think that a billion dollar company is going to be run by three total people within the next decade because you can use like AI to automate a lot of things. So instead of like industrial revolution stuff

where you have, you know, sweatshops with like thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people working, now use technology to automate a lot of things, which makes our decision making even more important than now. We're going to end up working for robots in like 10 years.

Like I said, literally this last weekend, I'm down with my wife teaching at a Glover fieldcraft event. And I was, actually, the YouTube question. I was curious about it because I was talking with the guy who runs his YouTube and he was kind of showing me behind the scenes and he goes, hey, have you ever play with chat, GPT? I'm like, I've heard about it a bunch, but I actually have, I've never looked at it. So he pulls it up on his laptop. Five minutes later, I'm fucking downloading it for my own and creating

my own account. The, it scares me. Again, I have a touch point of it of about like five entries into the thing, but the velocity that it's growing and how fast technology is evolving, versus how slow human beings are evolving. I'm pretty sure we're about to live in the Terminator movie. Yeah. And I don't know what I think about that. There's a good chance. I mean, just hop on board.

I mean, I figure it makes sense to learn chat, GPT. That's what interests me. He was using it to, he was using it to not do work, to do research. You know, and specifically talking about YouTube stuff, using that software to figure out what, give me compelling descriptions of this episode. And one of the things I did like about, and again, super limited touch points on this,

but the chat GPT is you can ask it to refine it again, and you can get a bunch of different answers. So it's not that I would cut and paste on that, but it's a creative avenue. I'm not a very creative person when it comes to that stuff. And the way he was showing where it'll research hashtags, or it'll do bio research for you on a guest that you have. He's like, yeah, it saves me like 10 hours a week.

Yeah. Fuck. Why would you not use that tool? Exactly. I mean, I think that's leveraging what we can do. You don't need a team of five people to do that anymore. Do you even need like a Michael? You know, I'm thinking right now that his days are numbered.

Yeah, we should whisper about this, but. Yeah, I mean, not that it would apply to anybody in this room, but like. You can auto switch now with the editing. Can you? It will auto switch so you don't need an editor anymore to do that for your podcast. It'll do that in like five seconds. I've known that since I first started working for. you.

He's just been keeping it secret. I was like, son of a bitch. I probably shouldn't tell him about this one. The next time we roll at Jiu Jitza, I'm going to fuck you up.

It happens every time. I'm going to keep Michael around because we can't put that software into the center fuchsia. Yeah, it's not going to be as entertaining. But I mean, I think, you know, I think it's just such an interesting space.

I think for a long, long time, it's going to be man plus machine beats either. And because everybody's always like, you know, aren't fighter jets going to be obsolete? Even, I mean, they're even like a billion dollar CEO, company CEOs that are saying bringing a manfighter to a autonomous battlefield in five years is going to be like bringing

a knife to a gun fight. And that's just wrong. I agree. I mean, I don't have any data to support it, but I feel like that's just wrong as well. Maybe in like 50 years or 100 years or something like that. But, I mean, I think just humans, we think critically, we think creatively. So I think we can certainly be enhanced by these tools. We can, but also like the interaction with, like, so say there's a software that could pull up a YouTube video and it could do the camera switching for us.

Like you can't have a conversation with us like we're talking about or kick around ideas or make fun of bottom bunk over there. Like, I'm getting you the fucking patch that's going to, you're going to have to wear a fighter jacket at all times now. Helmets optional for now until I can find one that's uncomfortable for you. I'll get a patch made. Fuck yeah. Bottom, bottom bunk. Bottom bunk. Okay.

It's where he belongs. It's where he lives. I'll do it. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting, interesting space, especially with, like, you know, combat aviation, like being able to, you know, what are we going to do?

Are we going to go out with autonomous drones, you know, with man fighters? Because they're going to have to make decisions on their own. So it's a difficult, it's a difficult place. Are you going to continue to write? I don't know. This was, I put everything into this. this was this was like a six-year journey to be able to make this happen. I love it.

I love the writing process because it was so painful. Yeah. It was, you know, four hours every day for 500 days. It's just super painful. But I think being able to learn how to be a pretty good writer is valuable. So it might be like a training camp thing where, you know, I just got done with a fight. I'll, you know, kind of take a little break time off. Yeah, go fly fishing.

whatever, floucher boat? Yeah, once I kind of get the bug again. Because I think there's a lot of interesting things to say. I think writing is a really interesting medium that's going to be around for a long time. I mean, maybe I'll use chat GPT to help me organize the chapters or something like that. Michael and I were talking before you came in because I was telling him that I was fucking around with it, if I had had that tool when I was in high school, my GPA would be amazing and I would be even dumber than I am. Because all of my, instead of getting a like a 1.8 GPA because of not doing anything, I would have had like a 1.0 GPA understanding with like a 4.0 GPA of work turned in, at least on my homework.

I mean, that's all that matters is, you know, do you really need to know about the Great Gatsby? I don't know if I need to know about the Great Gatsby, but I mean, even from, again, I have, you know, I went through all the high school math. I've never used, well, I probably have used essences of trigonometry and, you know, math and stuff every day. Like you can ask you complex mathematical questions and say, hey, give me a very detailed response of how you got here. So you could have 100% scores on stuff with absolutely no fucking understanding of what it is. Which I think we need to find a blend of those two things. There is some value to education. Yeah.

You know, as opposed to educating yourself on the tool that allows you to get the grades so people leave you alone. And it's like. But I think you like right now all schools are like freaked out by it. They're banning all this stuff. Good luck for that shit. But I mean, that's like not being able to use a calculator. You know, at least my teachers would be like, you know, when are you going to have a calculator on you at all times? And it's like, well, every day.

Every day. Every day that has an app now that you can literally hold the camera up to a math equation. And largely do the same thing that chat GP does. That's pretty crazy, right? What's it? Will frame alpha or something like that. It solves it for you just by using the camera. Yeah.

It's insane. So, I mean, I would never ban tools if I were like a school principal. I think you have to be able to utilize these tools. I would embrace the tool, but also make sure that the underlying lesson still got across. Because having an understanding of the tool that can solve the problem, I think that's spectacular and that shouldn't be ignored. But there is a baseline level of problem solving that people should understand. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's learning how to think critically.

Yeah, like you have to maintain that lesson because what happens when you are separated from your tool for whatever reason, right? Anything with a battery, I hesitate to risk my life on that one thing, even though, you know, shit, the stuff we had overseas, night vision goggles, all that stuff. To some degree, you could say, hey, you're relying upon this for your performance. And yes, I could, but I also understood the rope mechanics behind it that those things enhanced. And you have to have both. Totally agree. Like that's one of the chapters in the book I talk about is fast forecasting. I think a lot of people today, as we've specialized, are willing to hand over their critical thinking to committees or to computer models or chat GPT or Wolfram Alpha or whatever. I think you always have to be able to come up with a solution on your own. You have to.

And stake kind of your name on it. I think too many people now are kind of afraid to do that, especially with like, you know, in the government, with committees, just bringing in lots of people. I think you have to say, I think this is how I'm going to predict this is the decision we're going to make and go with it. And at the end of the day, it's, I talk about like it's expected value. How good or something is it going to be times the probability of that happening, minus how bad it's going to times the probability of that happening. And you should always be able to, for any decision, be able to come up with a rough, basic solution before you start going to committees, computer programs, things like that. Because it's, it's so easy to, for those programs, for like, you know, one input to be off and for it to skew out just bullshit data. Yeah, for sure. How long are you going to stay in the reserves for? What are your plans there?

I don't know. Just as long as I. Don't tell me, like, if you don't need to do it. Because the Air Force might be listening. They're like, oh, that motherfucker's getting out of here in two years. No, I mean, I'm flight hours just all of a sudden auger in. I'm, I'm too valuable for them right now because F-35, they're just building a crazy amount. So the pipeline is instructors.

So, I mean, it's a good, good position right now. Not many people are able to just be, I didn't even know. being a part-time fighter pilot was a thing. So when I was growing up. So it's pretty cool to be able to do that. It is a lot of work, even though I do only fly a couple times a month with all the currencies. So I'm just going to keep doing it until I don't enjoy doing it anymore. I, you know, I deployed with the F-16 in the combat, not the F-35. There's not a lot going on right now that the U.S. Air Force is involved in. So it would be, because I mean, that's at the end of the day, what you want to do as a fighter pilot. You want to go make an impact. And that's,

that's the most meaningful stuff that I've done is working with those J-Tex on the ground to, you know, you could hear it in their voice. They were stressed out. You'd be able to take out the threat. And to this day, that's still the most meaningful thing that I've done in my career. So it would be nice to be able to live that kind of again in the F-35. But I'm just going to keep enjoying it. I really don't have a good game plan for what I'm doing. I'm just kind of hunting around, doing the YouTube thing, writing, flying. There's worse ways to spend your time. No, live in the dream right now.

If cash wasn't an issue and you wanted to commute with your own airplane, what would you fly around in? Limited to civilian options. You can't say F-22. Okay. Or F-35. You said cash wasn't an issue. It's true. Well, that would be bitching, but I don't think they're going to sell you one.

All right. Isn't it a glider also? That'd be a tough one. You'd have to talk to Elon to get you up high enough. Yeah, yeah, that's going to be pricey. I would say there's this cool, cool company that I've been working with a little bit called Black Shape. They make Italian carbon fiber prop planes. And it's almost like a little miniature fighter.

And so that's going through FAA. Get this shit up on the screen right now, Michael. It's been going through FAA approval for a couple years. But black ship. Black shape. Black shape. And so they want me to be a test pilot in the U.S. for that aircraft. It's pretty cool.

Oh, interesting. This one here. A little lightweight. It can pull six Gs. Is that a four-seater? Two-seater. Okay. Oh, so it's vertically.

Act, okay, as opposed to side by side. Yeah, tandem. So, I mean, that looks like a badass plane. That does look like a little fighter. Yeah, so. What we got there on the right wing on that thing? Is that a little radar bulb on the right? No.

What is that thing? That might be where the gear comes in. Yeah. Okay. That does look interesting. See that on like the Pilates. I think it's on one of the wings. Is it like a flare?

It's, like, I think it's their weather radar, something like that. I'm not incredibly familiar with the Pilates Airframe. So this would be the plane that I would fly. What kind of ground speed you get into that thing? I think right now it's like 160 knots, something like that. So it's not insane, but it's pretty good. So much fun, though. They're trying to get through the FAA process.

Like, it's been like a three-year thing for them. FAA is just so slow. So as soon as they get through with that, I think there's a lot of upgrades that are coming down. So that would be the plane. I look at that. It's like, yeah, it might not get either of the fastest, but you'd have so much fucking fun on the way.

Yeah, it's getting inserted for aerobatics. So it would be that or, you know, if I had to go with like a more boring pick, but still badass, it would be like SR22 turbo. That's what I've, so they ended up buying an SR22 turbo with the full Fleer under the left wing, like cell texting. Like, and I flew that thing. I got 1500 hours in that thing. Oh, nice. It didn't suck. I haven't even flown one, so how is it?

Yeah, it's, you are used to fly and not having a satellite control where, so it's left-hand control. and very simple, you know, throttle. It's simple. Yeah. And it was interesting because I went from, you know, flying the Cessna with the traditional yoke. I thought it was going to be really weird, only having one hand on like a very limit.

It actually moves around quite a bit. No issues whatsoever. It actually found it to be quite intuitive. And I'm right-handed, and I thought that was going to be the issue because it was a left-handed yoke. That would be tough for me. A lot of negative transfer for that.

Yeah. I could figure it out, though. Like, I think... Speaking of that, what is it... And obviously, you didn't fly F-18s. In Maverick, though, what's the little bottom piece that they were grabbing when they would always pull a full deflection to the rear? Does that allow them to exceed the G limit on the aircraft? You know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, I think it does. Like we have like a... You know what I'm talking? Because they would always show it, actually. When they would do the high-speed pull-out, they're like, they would slap it with it and then... I think it is. Okay. Because the F-18 is limited to, I think, seven and a half G's.

Okay. Because those wings have to fold up. Same with the F-35. Mad have to take it to 10, though. I know. While doing... I'm sure maintenance was happy about that, especially in training. So the thing is, if you ever over-jee the jet,

you have to bring the crew chiefs a case of beer. Because, I mean, those guys have to, like, it depends how far you over-jee it. Sometimes it needs, like, dozens of hours of maintenance, and you're like, especially with the F-35. Like, when I first came to F-35, before we got a software update, it was limited to, like, 7 Gs.

And the whole jet was designed to pull 9, and you don't have to think about it. So people were over-geeing it left and right. And I suspect that it. If you do that, there's a record of it that can't be turned off until the mechanic goes in there. Especially with the asymmetric over G. So I'm sure in the F-16, you're asymmetrically over-gene that all the time, there's just no, it never showed you it. Yeah.

The F-35, if you're flying the X, as we call it, versus the T, you know, staying in plane, it will, it'll pop and say you've over G, and you're like, damn. Some of the bitch. Yeah, I think you would actually probably enjoy one. I think they're up to like the G-3,000 suite now with like, oh, everything is push button instead of rotary. and I actually don't have any experience with that it was a much more analog panel but yeah you'd be able to fly the shit out of that thing I think with the ESR

22 turbo it can actually start to make sense I think like assessing or something it's too slow and too bulky They have systems in these now where you it's like if the pilot's incapacitated it will fucking land itself I've heard of that that's insane yeah like I think it actually

it communicates probably via transponder code it loads in and again I'm speaking out of my ass here but this is just what I've kind of heard but I think it'll load in an approach to the nearest airport that's suitable for it and will actually put it on the ground. I think I've heard of that. And they have to be real careful with the language because, you know, the legalities behind it.

But that's insane that they can do that. For a commercial air, I mean, for a civilian aircraft, yeah, the parachute system on it is interesting as well. Not that I would ever want to test it, but it is kind of cool to have that option, especially if you over a wooded area. Like, oh, let's just glide it into the treetop. I've seen videos. Yeah, I'd rather come in like this than like this.

Yeah, yeah. Or fix gear into water. No, thanks. I know how that works out every single time. Yeah. Yeah, I think it makes sense. Like if you're driving, I don't know, six, ten hours. Oh, it 100% makes sense at that point.

It's just, I think the acquisition costs on these things are in the millions at this point, like low one point something. Relatively low, I think, operating costs, but it's, it's, you're going to write, we'll be writing a check. You can't really make it make financial sense. Correct. Yeah, you really can't. What are you trying to pull up there, Michael? The parachute. Oh, the cap system?

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty sweet. That is pretty cool. Although I heard most deaths happen in the traffic pattern where that probably won't help. I think, well, yeah, because I think most deaths are based to final turn stall and they go right in. Yeah. Yeah, same thing with that T-38.

Yep. We could do this video with Michael inside. God, he's so useful. That's why he'll never be replaced. I mean, Martin Baker invited me to do some ejection seat trials. I don't think it involves me sitting in the seat, but I might try it. Yeah. That's one thing you don't want to do as a pilot is have to eject

Because that's like 20 plus G's most pilots are about two inches shorter after ejecting I mean this is wild what a wild option I mean obviously it destroys the airframe but you live and that's why you also have insurance You know yeah yeah yeah friends and family yeah they got to fly something like this Well and for people who don't know if you have a fixed landing gear aircraft and you have an engine this is a single engine if you have something over water you are going to fucking cartwheel As soon as the landing gear makes contact you're going ass over tea kettle versus this is going to bring you in vertically. Not that it's going to be comfortable,

but it's certainly more survivable. Yeah. Yeah, there's a strap. It's crazy. So the strap system is all built underneath the fiberglass and only upon the ejection does it actually strip away like that. Yeah, that's such a cool system.

I mean, that's kind of, anytime I'm not flying an aircraft that doesn't have a backup system like that, I kind of feel weird. Because, I mean, we always have the ejection seat. I wonder how hard this thing will hit. Looks like it's getting close.

Enough to mess up the plane. Dude, that's survivable every time. Yeah. That is survivable every time. That's really not that bad. Yeah. I'm not recommending anybody test it. I'm just saying it really doesn't look that bad.

Wow. Yeah, that's impressive. Yeah. And again, imagine that. Like, you're flying cross country over wooded train and you lose an engine. Like, I would take that over trying to. I mean, yeah, same thing in the F-6. seen up 35, we're always training to glide it in to an airfield.

But if we can't do that, we're going to punch out. Yeah. And then it's going to glide itself in wherever it wants to. Yeah. I mean, you try to direct it somewhere else. But yeah. Yep. Cool.

That's so crazy. You don't want to try to land it on a road or something like that. No. That's awesome. Where can people find you? I've got to get you to the airport. You know, pretty much everywhere under at Hazard Lee. So you can find me on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook.

I have a website Hazardlye.com giving away a flight in a L-39 jet. So you can go on the website hazardly.com slash book and then you can apply there just to kind of show

what that decision-making is like in a fighter aircraft. So yeah, just a bunch of different places. And then the biggest one is the book coming out, May 23rd. May 23rd. And people will be able to find the book, I'm assuming Amazon or

wherever they normally. get their books? Yeah. Did you do an audio? I did the audio book. Okay. So I did it and I read, read parts of it from the cockpit of a non-D-aircraft. That's awesome.

That's awesome. Non-D-air aircraft, but read parts of it from the air. Hell yeah. So pretty unique thing and then also some interviews, questions in there as well. But the book has been well received. It's been a priority book by Barnes & Noble as well as Meta, formerly Facebook. And it was selected as a must-year-old. read by the next big idea club and Malcolm Gladwell is on that board. So it's been well received

coming out May 23rd. You apparently got the copies before me. So they have I have two. Would you like to leave with a copy of your own book? No, you take it. I'm sure it's somewhere on the way. I'm sure they got stuck somewhere. So yeah, I'm excited to see, you know, how this helps people. I think it has a good chance of helping people to make better decisions. So I'm just excited to see where it goes. I like things also that take the experience that you had, like I said, when it comes to, I think the interest in the stuff you're talking about on YouTube. It's aviation, yes, but aviation to a degree that most people will never be able to touch. You're taking lessons from a world that people can hear about often, but I what I think the most value, and I struggle

with this too. Like, I really enjoy the experiences I had for my old job. But if I can't do anything with them beyond me, it's kind of like a dead end street, right? Like, it was cool for me, but what's cooler than that is trying to figure out a way to take those experiences and help other people or bridge the gap for people who either have no desire to experience what we did or just will never be able to. But still, you know, that touch point and doing something with it, I think it makes it a much more enduring process as opposed to like, yeah, cool, it was great, lived a great life, see you guys later. Yeah, it's beautiful. You know, there's just so much institutionalized knowledge out there. I got that with the Tool Gwanda's book,

how much knowledge surgeons have. I think fighter pilots have it, special forces, a lot of stuff in there. So I think there's a lot of people that have a lot of institutionalized knowledge. And it doesn't get out a lot because people are busy. So, you know, I think it's really cool and interesting when people are able to share those lessons. I agree, man.

Well, I really appreciate you making the time to come up here from Arizona. And I feel like we need to go dogfight each other. Let's do it. Let's have. I, hold on though, you are a combat fighter pilot. I get to pick like several rules that stack the odds in my favor. All right. You need to be in a Cessna.

I'm going to be in a turbine aircraft. I get real guns. You get fake ones. How about you start off offensive? I'll start off defensive. I don't even know what the fuck that means. So you start off behind me. But if we ever get out of a situation.

But, okay, cool. But if it ever changes, we have to reset and I get to go back there. If I'm able to shoot you. If you're ever able to not be in front. of me, we immediately reset because it's broken the rules of the game. How am I going to shoot you? How am I going to win? Do you don't understand the game we're playing? Only I can win. The game is I win. I suspect it doesn't matter where I start. I'm going to end up getting shot down.

I don't know. I've never flown, I think these are extra 300. So I've never flown a prop playing like this outside the T6 trying to dog fight. So I think that's a huge advantage. I mean, neither of I, though. What we originally, what we originally going to do, but I think this will be just as good is taking a gamer. Because those DCS, gamers, they're really good at flying in the digital world. Yes, they are. So I wanted to dogfight one of them in the digital world and then take them into the real world under G's and see how they do.

Oh, I can tell you right now how they're going to do. It's called a degradation of skills. Yeah, when they puke all over the windscreen. 100%. It's like watching people who play Call of Duty and they jump into the middle of room, they spin around real fast, but they actually shoot everybody directly in the face. It's like, okay, here's some wax bullets that I may or may not have put into the freezer and by that I mean only I have those and maybe your gun's not even going to work let's go

actually clear a structure and we're going to do it at night and I'm the only one who has nods do your tactic I'm going to fuck you up like it doesn't work the pain part will make a big hundred percent it completely and utterly changes it and I'm not talking shit about any of the digital stuff I understand it's entertaining and awesome not everything in the digital world applies to the real world agreed yeah the difference is you have you understand combat fighter tactics. I've watched Maverick. That's my dossier of combat fighter tactics. Well, you have like 3,000 hours of flying. That means I can probably safely take the plane off and get it back on the ground. It doesn't mean I know how to dog fight. Sounds like experienced pilot to me.

Experience pilot. You are an experienced combat aviator. Okay. I don't, I'm not disagreeing that I have advantage. Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah. We should have a bet to this too. I don't know what the bet is, but we should have, we should establish the ground rules and then have some sort of Fuck yes. Because that adds, that's really what you need for the YouTube videos. Yes. You need that tension of something good or bad is going to happen. There's got to be some meat on the bone.

Yeah. For sure. I'm so 100% down for that. I've seen videos of that school and know exactly what you're talking about. Okay. But yeah, let's brainstorm. All right. I like it.

And then bottom bunk over there will somehow be involved mostly from an entertainment perspective. From a, you know, painful. Yeah. Whatever's the shitty job. He'll be there doing a job that he fucking clearly. knows AI already exists for, but doesn't tell me. That's so funny. Awesome.

Just saving his job. Yeah, thank you for the time. All right, cool, thanks.