Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - The Flight Path to Success - with Paul 'Roscoe' White

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

Paul "Roscoe" White is a retired Air Force fighter pilot turned F35 instructor, championship-winning football coach, and dedicated father. Roscoe brings a wealth of experience from his military career, starting as an enlisted Airman and retiring as an officer, flying iconic jets like the F15E and F16. Paul shares invaluable insights from his latest book, "WORK HARD DONT SUCK: Strategies and Tactics for Loving with Honor, Character, and Discipline," a Hail Mary of wisdom for the younger generation transitioning to adulthood. We discussed the hard-earned lessons of life, discipline, and the importance of earning your stripes, both in the skies and on the ground, and explored the parallels between military discipline, sports coaching, and raising a family, and uncover the no-nonsense truths about success and character. Check out Paul's Books Here:⁠ https://paulroscoewhite.com/⁠ The Speed of War Comic Series: ⁠https://www.thespeedofwar.com/⁠ 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/⁠

Well, hello everybody and welcome to Costa Rica. Do you remember that one time, a long time ago, where I forgot to do the intro and ad read for the episode, so I did it standing in the middle of nowhere next to my Bronco. That's what happened here again. So again, welcome to Costa Rica. There was a chair in the corner of our room. I'm not sure what it's for, but I'm sitting in it right now. It's not a big deal. Today's episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee.

Let's head over to their website. together to see what they have. First thing, right in your face, 30 presents out. Their holiday blend. I mean, Santa's right there with what appears to be a reindeer with night vision goggles on. Of course that's what it's for. You can grab that, or you can join the coffee club.

America's premier coffee subscription. Over $4 million donated to veteran causes and initiatives for shipping and customizable delivery schedule. That's actually one of the things I like the most. You can get what you want on whatever interval you want it to be. And explicit discounts on your favorite brand. So that's the two in the top rotating banner. Sliding down is the roast slider.

You can go from light to dark. And then apparel gear coffee bundles and coffee sampler. All I'm gonna say is we all know the holidays are right around the corner. Don't mess about, we're already in December somehow. The year's almost over somehow. So if you have a coffee fan in your life and at the very bottom would be the best sellers,

maybe start there, or my personal recommendation, the coffee sampler. That is where I would start you. And that's it for the business side of the house from Costa Rica. My guest today is Paul Roscoe White, an Air Force fighter pilot, who has an awesome story.

Started off as an airman enlisted in the Air Force and then worked his way into the officer corps and then into the backseat of F-15s, E, to be specific, and that actually means something you talked about, the differences in the F-15s, F-16s, and is now an F-35, and strong. He recently wrote his second book titled Work Hard Don't Suck. I mean, what more do you need from the title right there?

Strategies and Tactics for Loving with Honor Character and Discipline. We talked about quite a bit, everything from his time into the military thoughts on leadership, modern culture, generational issues, you name it. So let's just get into it so I can get back to Costa Rica and maybe start doing average on time when I'm back in the U.S. So episode number 316, I think, or 315 with Paul Roscoe, White. Enjoy. To the smoke.

I'm looking at danger close now. Is here, so to speak? Follow your heart. Six inches? I mean, listen. I meant like that. There's a lot of ways I could take what you would just ask, but I'm going to be professional, which will shock Michael.

I'm like, what the hell is going on here? Okay. I'm not sure which podcast I signed up for. I signed up for the cleared hot podcast. Yeah. Okay. Yep. What's where I talk about being professional in an unprofessional manner?

Got it. Okay. You know what I mean? Okay. Have you, so you were just talking about before, before we started? Yeah. That's how I get going, by the way, as we just start talking. Yeah, same.

You have recorded 17 episodes of your podcast. Ish. Is it live yet? Yes. Yeah, yeah. We're on Apple. We've done a couple of videos on YouTube. I got a week, really weak YouTube game.

Are you talking over there, Michael? Nope. I heard something on the computer, wasn't it? Pulled up Brave and the YouTube video was up and started playing. This is why you should really pick it. He's watching Disney movies over there? He, I can catch it out of the corner of my eye the way that you're sitting. You can't really see him.

But he'll be over there doing like word games or looking. Y'all say, hey, Michael. And he'll be like, huh? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, I agree with that. I always just agree with what Andy says. It's the best course of action. Probably not a bad course of action, at least in the initial.

Oh, it is if I know that that's what he's going to do, because I'll just drift off into a topic that he's not going to want to agree with. So sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, no, no. Actually, I'm not sorry. You know who owes us both an apology? It would be Michael for interrupting us less than a minute into the episode. Yeah, terribly sorry.

Yeah. I'll be terribly sorry when your pays late this month. Wait, he gets paid? Unfortunately. So I've got work to do on my podcast. I don't make a single dollar on it. So I don't have a Michael. All of that is the natural progression.

Yeah, and you know, and we're having fun. Yeah. We decided early on that we weren't doing the podcast for anyone except ourselves. And I say that. However, we really identified, I think, a gap in mentorship to a younger generation. And that's really, and you know, and I was just having this conversation. with the janitor at my freaking hotel this morning. We're sitting there talking.

We got off on the subject, and I said, how much of a waste would it be for us to sit here as 40-somethings with all of this essay and all of these good lessons learned and not give the little bit of effort? Hold on a second. Michael, you are absolutely messing up today. That's the AC. That normally I turn off or at least double check.

Yeah. Anyways, back to the episode. Are you ready, though? I'm ready. Are you okay? Yep. Did you need to stretch? Do you need to get another coffee?

Want to take a lap and get... Yeah. Do you want to start in like 30 so you can get a quick nap in? Nope, we're good. But are we? Now we're good. And go. You're having a conversation with the janitor.

Before we were rudely interrupted again. Look at you. You're about to get into the Zen, aren't you? I've been here five minutes. Well, I've been up since four, and I figured a good strong black rifle coffee and a pocketful of nicotine would do me good today. How long have you been having those Zins? I stopped chewing tobacco on January 31st this year. Haven't had a dip since.

How and why did you start? Why did I start dipping? My dad was a cotton farmer when I was growing up, and I smoked cigarettes when I was 16 or so years old, and he didn't like me smoking around his cotton trailers. So I picked up a can of skull chewing tobacco, and I'd been doing it ever since. Was he okay with that? He was. He chewed Codiac. Okay.

Yeah, so it kind of, it was accepted. You know, down south, there are, I don't know, I don't want to say different rules, but geographically, I think regionally, wherever you go in the country, things are going to be more or less accepted than maybe others. So, yeah, you could dip in church where I grew up. Okay. Okay. I mean, I'm assuming you need to bring in a spit bottle of some kind. Those that spat brought in a spit bottle. Oh, the rest of them just swallow it?

I assume. I don't know. I was a spitter, not a swallower. Go ahead and get your giggles on now. I'll let people follow their heart on where they want to go with that one. I had braces when I was younger for a couple of years. I played baseball, and I was a catcher. My sister was a senior when I was a freshman.

There was almost no overlap of social circle, but a couple of the people that she knew peripherally were on the varsity baseball team. and as probably my first experience of being a new guy, they offered me it was winter green Kodiak. I threw it in, super dizzy, but when I spit it out, I couldn't get it tasted out of my braces. And looking back on it, I'm thankful that that happened because it absolutely put me into a place where I'd never wanted to dip again.

I can't imagine, and I know, I mean, when people start dipping, I'm already talking about something that I don't have much experience with that I'm listening to other people. They get kind of that nicotine high, I guess it would be. But that goes away. I think there's a tolerance built up probably. I'm not a physician by any means, but. Well, the point being, how long into that did you actually stop getting that effect? And it just became habitual.

Oh, gosh, I don't know. I'll tell you my Kodiak dipping story real quick, too, while we're on the subject. But I was 10 or 11 years old out cutting firewood with my dad. Like I said, Cotton Farmer, we've got cotton fields all around these giant pecan trees. And at the end of the fields, the pecan tree, the limbs would hang over the turnaround rows. And it was ripping the antennas off of his tractor. So he puts me in the front load of a backhoe, the front end loader of the backhoe with a chainsaw. Oh, I like this story.

Yeah, OSHA's not involved. And so he lifts me way up in the sky. And I've got a chainsaw up there, cutting down all the limbs and everything. And on the way out, we're driving in his big four-wheel drive. truck, he throws in a, he was a Kodiak dipper. He throws in a big chew and I was like, Dad, give me a dip. Give me a dip. He goes, all right, here. And I got a little bit. I'm like 10 or 11 years old. So I put a little bit and goes, no, no, no, no, no, you get you a man's dip. All right, fine. So I took like half the can I threw it in there. Oh boy. Got home and he

goes off to do dad things or whatever. And I went down the street to go play with one of the, one of my friends down the, I forgot that I had the dip in. Left it in for like an hour. That night, toenails were coming out. I mean, I puked everything up. And to this day if I smell Codiac chewing tobacco, I get wheezy. I actually still remember a little bit what it tasted and smelled like, and we're talking 96? Yeah, it was before that for me. Yeah. So towards the tail end when you were still dipping, I'm assuming you weren't getting any of those effects? Probably not, maybe early in the morning or right after a good meal, something like that. And I honestly, in the year that I've been done, almost a year that I've been done, I've only had

maybe three or four times where I was like, man, I really want to dip right now. One was just a couple weeks ago. I think I'd eaten a really good meal or something like that. I just, I just had that feeling like I missed the taste. I miss the, it's, I think it's, it becomes more ritualistic than anything. If you hadn't have had the Zen, which I know quite a few people who kind of transition from one to the other, did you try to kick it at all during that, that time period leading up to try and Zen? I didn't try to go cold turkey at all. I just kind of went from one to the other, and it's just kind of lasted. Okay. So I was happy to get rid of the tobacco habit. I was going to say, just for the health reasons. The nicotine piece of it, call me two-faced or whatever. That doesn't bother me as

much. It was the getting rid of the tobacco and the health concerns with that as opposed to. It'd be like, I know we haven't kind of proven this medically yet, but the difference between smoking and vaping or smoking and maybe a patch or something like that, you know, get rid of the nasty shit. Yeah, well, the smoking and vaping argument, and I'm basing itself a documentary series I just watched with my middle son, from my understanding, the carcinogenic effect comes from the burning of the tobacco, but it's a disingenuous argument. for people to say that vaping is necessarily healthier. It might be a healthier way to get the nicotine,

but I still can't pronounce the vast majority of things that are in those vape pens. And I'm pretty sure that they're not necessarily good for you. So I think you have to pick and choose the devil you want to dance with. Well, that's valid. And also, I mean, there's always the potential that stuff just hasn't been around long enough versus to do some really good long-term studies like smoking has.

I mean, smoking's been around for centuries, millennia, maybe. And we've been really studying that, and we know what each one of those chemicals can do to your body, but the vaping stuff, and dudes, I'm not a medical doctor. I don't know shit about what I'm talking about. I can just sit here and look at it. I mean, vaping came around, what, maybe 20 years ago or so? Like, really hit the scene, good?

I don't know. Haven't been to smoker in many years, so I don't know. I don't remember seeing it until my kids went into high school. And then I started seeing a lot of vape pens. They all seem to have dabbled with it a little bit. All of them seemed to have been successfully able to navigate their way out of it. and pretty open and talking about it, but essentially the bathrooms became vaping hookah lounges.

So. Well, if you had to choose the lesser of two evils, would you, I'm not saying approve of it for your child to do that, but it's probably not as frowned upon as them smoking behind the locker room. I mean, I would prefer to not have such a binary choice.

Yeah, true. See, I mean, if you gunned to my head, it was smoking or vaping, I would want to know exactly what they're vaping and have a better understanding of all the chemicals associated with that, but my true choice would be.

if they're curious about it, hopefully safely navigate that way through the curiosity without developing an addiction or a habit, and then realize your life's probably better off without it. Yeah. Well, I mean, and that goes into hopefully being a good positive role model for your kids and, you know, Oh, they don't listen to me. Well, I bet they do more than you think. All of my kids are up and out of the house.

I can make a good argument that, like a solid argument that they don't listen to me. Are your kids still in the house, or are they out now? I have a 20-year-old son. Okay. So I'm divorced, and my wife lives just south of town. We share custody from a paper perspective of our children, 50-50 custody. My middle son who's 18 has lived with me and my wife for almost two years at this point. He just turned 18.

It's November, right? He turned 18 last month. I don't know how it got through middle of November. My 20-year-old is bouncing kind of back and forth. between his mom's house and his girlfriend's house and my daughter spends not as much time as I wish she would with us, but the majority of time at her mom's house. So I have limited ability to influence. And it's wild. And as you know, as a parent. Yeah. How many kids you have? I have three of my own, and then I picked up a bonus son about a year and a half ago. So wildly different, I bet. Well, I have all boys, too. So I'm interested to hear from a girl dad's perspective,

maybe some of the things that we might get into later. But, you know, as I was, I don't want to get too into the book just yet, but as I was putting together some of my thoughts for that, I'm watching my kids out in the wild for the first time in, you know, it's maybe like the last four or five years as they start to kind of mature into their late teens and they're starting to make decisions on their own and go their separate places with their friends and really interact with society. When all of my kids were born, I don't know about you, but I,

I wasn't given a checklist that says teach them this shit in the next 18 years and they'll turn out to be good dudes. I just kind of made it up as I went, you know? Did you read the book? What to expect when you're expecting? That's pretty good for the first couple of years. That's what I'm saying. That's kind of the only checklist you get. Okay.

So that's where I got, you know, that's really how I got to this was the first couple of years, maybe up to about four or five years old. That's pretty, you know, you can find books on shelves. It'll give you a little bit of a step by step. And then maybe the teenage years are kind of covered. But then there's a gap. There's a gap, I'd say, between maybe high school graduation and what you're going to find out you want to do for your career. And those two things are not necessarily simultaneous. I mean, sometimes there's large gaps there.

You know what I mean? So that's really kind of the space that I was trying to fill. But watching my boys interact with society, that's where I started to notice little pieces of our parenting in there. firm handshakes and eye contact, being able to tell a story, you know, being able to carry yourself into a room with confidence and hold a conversation with somebody. Those are things that, like, society is just not teaching these young kids this these days. Man, I'm talking in generalities. And I have a limited scope on these kinds of things. Obviously, only raising four kids. I'm not like a high school teacher or anything. So I don't have a giant pool to pull from.

But I did coach football for a lot of years, so I interacted with a lot of youth kids. And I can tell you, in my experience anyways, that's not very common. Yeah, what you described are the things that you touched on are certainly not taught in any curriculum. Yeah. So there is that gap between the standardized education and hopefully the role that the parenting or the role modeling, whether that be positive or negative, is filling in that space. But, man, it is wild.

My three kids are so incredibly different in their personalities. My middle son is absolutely fascinating. He is 18 but stuck in a 40-year-old's body, but then does things that blow my mind. Here's a story from yesterday. I'm sitting on the couch in the morning. For whatever reason, last night I wasn't able, or not last night the night before,

I wasn't able to sleep that well. So I'm just doing emails in the morning, quietly sitting out in the front room, and I was doing some work where I logged into my business account, and I'm looking at the checking account, and I'm seeing all of these charges, for DoorDash. And I'm sitting there, like, I didn't order that.

And then I checked my DoorDash app. I'm like, okay, that's associated with my PayPal account. And I texted my daughter, who was going to be up at that time driving a school. Are you by any chance using my card on DoorDash to get food? And she was the one who filled in. She goes, no, but I've seen Tyler. I was like, so she rats him out. Sibbling Frat Your Side.

Gotta love it. So, and then I start looking at that. this. And I had actually, before I had texted my daughter, I had called Bank of America and I was on hold with a representative because I thought somebody had gotten a hold of my card. My son wakes up in the morning. Like, hey, buddy, come over here. Have you been using DoorDash? And my son is Uber aware of the amount of money that he has in his account. He has these really weird rules for himself. I have to have this amount of money. He will eat cheese it. to save money because he doesn't want to go below like a round number in his account.

I can relate. I'm 47 and I still do that. So it's like, hey, buddy, have you been getting DoorDash? Yeah, yeah. What card have you been using? Oh, I've just been using mine. And then I have questions. So did you go to this restaurant and this restaurant and this?

And I had screen grabbed. I put it in a filter into the checking account and pulled up four pages of DoorDash stuff. And this day, and this day, and this day. And this day, he goes, yeah, but it's on my card. I said, you track your money very closely. Have you noticed that it's not going down when you get food? There's no way that's possible, Dad. There's no way that's possible.

Later that day, he goes, Dad, I checked my DoorDash app. I did have your card associated with that. That's fine, because here's the bill. I'm going to tally this up. But this is a kid who also started his own window cleaning business in addition to working at the coffee shop, in addition to graduating high school six months early. And now he's looking at doing his window business, try to help him out with branding.

So it's peeping Tom windows. That's catchy. It's not bad. And he wants to do a... What does his uniform look like? I told him he should wear a speedo. He was not comfortable with that. So he usually will just wear really baggy pants and a shirt.

My dad goes, who just moved up here, went to go visit him on a job site. And the woman whose house he was cleaning the windows on, invited my dad inside. and they're talking at the kitchen and they look outside and my son is just facing the windows with both hands down his pants, just itching the living crap out of his balls. And my dad had to pull him aside, be like, hey, man, if you're going to do that, at least turn around from the windows, you know, face the other direction. And so he's got that business.

And now he wants to start a Christmas light business. So I'm trying to help him, Michael, I'm going to float this idea by you guys, because I have another good branding idea. Epstein's Light Service. and the subline is, you know they're not going to hang themselves. I like it. I like it's catchy. Catchy, right?

What's his uniform look like? That one would probably be, I'd say, a prison jumpsuit. Well, I was going to say tidy whitey's with a towel around his neck or something like that. Yeah, he's so creative. It's fascinating. I didn't have that entrepreneurial drive when I was, well, I still don't have that entrepreneurial drive. Well, I didn't have the drive. Not only that, I didn't have the know-how.

Like, I grew up on a farm. He didn't either, and he doesn't really come to me for this stuff. You know where he goes? You two. I've heard that about the younger generation. Like, you know, you can probably relate in your community as opposed to mine or maybe even both the same. We have, there's a list of movies. If you want to be a fighter pilot, there's a list of movies that you have to be able to quote at a moment's notice. Talladega Nights, Anchorman, Step Brothers, Caddyshack. There's a lot of them. None of those are flying movies. No, but they're funny. They're funny, but what do they have to do with being a fighter pilot? You'd be amazed at how often those kinds of... I thought it would probably be Top Gun, Maverick, in the modern era.

Those are staples, and yeah, they also get very boring. How... Much better in the middle of a really tactical debrief where you're breaking down somebody's being off of his mileage by, you know, 0.2 miles or 0.1 mock. Yeah. When you throw out something like, hey, the world needs to ditch diggers too, Danny. You know? Yeah. It just, it resonates a little louder than maybe the dangers.

zone does. How hard is it for you to watch the new Maverick, the flying sequences and that? I actually love it. How accurate are they, though? Well, the flying itself, somebody can correct me on this, but I'm pretty sure that the Blue Angels are contracted to fly most of that. So the actual flying is spot on. Like some of those shots where they're hugging the deck across the desert or across the water, that's badass, man. Now, you know, the two jets flying in formation and Maverick flies up in between them, that's probably unrealistic. There's probably some cinematography that goes into that. And let's keep in mind that Top Gun is a drama and not a documentary.

I disagree. How so? It's historically accurate. He's one of our nation's greatest heroes. He may be a national treasure, but I'm guessing that probably not many 06s could crash a billion-dollar airplane going Mock-10, walk away from it, get a drink of water, and live to tell the tail. Wouldn't you just be liquefied if you punched out at Mock 10? Absolutely. In fact, you should go back and listen to episode six of my podcast.

where we broke down Top Gun Maverick. Yeah. Because my buddy that I do the show with, he's a fighter pilot as well. He was a viper driver. Okay. So we took it. Those are the aggressors, right? There are F-16 aggressors, yes.

I don't know that he, I don't think he ever did an aggressor tour. He was a weapon school guy, top 1% kind of dude. He's a big brain, 1-30 IQ kind of guy. He's going to hate me when he hears that. That's okay. So, you know, you mentioned the flying low over the water or low over the desert or that basically, you know, nap of the earth stuff. Is it nap or nape? You're the pilot, I have no idea.

Fuck, I don't know. Yeah. Is it niche or niche? I don't fucking know. Can you do that at any time you want to in a military aircraft? No. Well, can you at least fly upside down any time you want to? Hold up.

Hold up. Yes, you can fly upside down? Yes, you can hug nape of the earth once. But if you get caught, you're probably not going to do it again. So the reason I asked that, I was going to say, is they probably had to get some pretty substantial permissions. There are rules. And in fact, there are.

there are vastly different rules between the services. The Navy writes their regulations in terms of what you can't do. For instance. So they're prohibitive in nature. You can't buzz the tower at 600 knots at 500 feet. 500 knots? Can I do it at 599 and 601? See, so the Air Force, however, they're a little more direct. Thou shall, thou will, thou shall not. Those kinds of words are used more in our regulations, I think, than maybe the Navy's. can you at least fly upside down if you want to? Yes. Okay. Kind of an unwritten rule is you have to go upside down at least once during every sortie. I could definitely support that. Yeah.

Can you fly upside down as long as you want to? No. There are restrictions on the motors and the oil pumps and things like that. Usually it's, you know, 10 or 15 seconds or so, something like that, depending on what aircraft you're on what type of motor. But you're killing me. It's, and, well, now even that has limits too. And it depends on if you're positive G, negative G, 0G, G, G.G. If you're upside down, but you're probably pulling positive G, that changes your time limits.

Okay. Yeah, it's a little more specific. But typically, I mean, you wouldn't need to do the Maverick, you know, go canopy to canopy and communicate directly with them type thing very often. I mean, radios I have found in my experience generally work. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was one of the things I was curious about watching that movie is I just wondered how much additional performance.

mission they had to receive to actually fly the aircraft at that level, because you know they're not getting that on the first take anyway. They're going to do safety takes. There's some pretty high consequence flying going on there. There is, but you know what, look at it from Big Navy's point of view. Oh, it's a recruiting tool like a son of a bunch. I mean, that's the recruiting tool of the century. So you had, you had Top Gun 1 comes out in the mid-80s. The recruiting goes through the roof. And then you have this kind of this boom of the special operations in the aughts and the teens. And then now you've got Top Gun Max. Maverick that comes out, man, it's going to crush.

So, yeah, they might be a little more liberal with their, how much risk they're willing to accept. I would, I would say that based on absolutely no knowledge of it whatsoever. Here's the big question. I was reading about the movie, and they were explicit that Tom Cruise was not allowed to fly the airplane. So I did a backseat right in an F-18 and out of Oceana, and the woman pilot let me fly the airplane from the backseat. What do you think the odds are that he might have accidentally taken control just for a second?

I'm sure he has some hornet stick time. I'm sure he does. Just for us. I mean, who can really tell, right? You know what? We put maintainers in the back seat and give them incentive rides. We put news crew back there. There's all a matter of people that get incentive rides.

And yeah, there's going to be a point during the sorters. Like, hey, man, you want to fly for a little bit? And, you know, you get a couple of minutes. You do a couple of barrel rolls or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I thought Top Gun was great. I thought the cinematography was awesome. I actually liked the story, just the character arcs. And that's the way we took it in our podcast show is we looked at the characters and we broke down their arcs throughout. You got Hangman who's obviously the cocky arrogant, probably never been told no his entire life. You got Rooster that has a very awesome, I think, kind of coming out moment of confidence there in the end. And Maverick's character arc, you can kind of see him. I saw it on the beach scene where they're playing football. out there and he sat down in his lounge chair and you just got to shit it and grin on his face.

And that was kind of a proud bad moment. So it's kind of the passing of the torch to the next generation. I actually really enjoyed it. How reflective are those personalities that you just went through when it comes to at least your experience in the Air Force aviation? Yeah, I think you have, well, I mean, just like any other community, it's going to be eclectic, right? You're going to have, anytime you put a large group of people together and large is maybe even relative in a fighter squad. And like I was an F-15 guy, maybe 60, 65 people in the whole squadron. And if you're in a single-seat squadron, you might be half of that. So large is a relative term.

But when you put that many people together, aside from probably 90% of us being type A-driven, motivated people, yeah, you're going to have some varying personalities, for sure. Everybody comes from a different background, right? Everybody's got a different story. And perspective is the lens through which we see life. And my perspective coming up as a cotton farmer may be different from yours growing up wherever you grew up. I grew up at a basically a surf town in Northern California. Now that we're talking about Maverick, I have other questions. The scene where he basically takes the F-18 and goes to the range absent permission and apparently beds it.

He would probably never fly again. I was going to say it. Yeah. I mean, they don't have keys, to my knowledge. No. It's not like he went to the valet rack and took a set of keys off. No. But you do need permission to fly those things.

I'm assuming. Yes, there is a number of clearances that you must get before you. Now, interesting, you know, you don't just walk up to the desk and say, hey, man, give me the keys to my F-18 out there and you go out there and it's not like starting your car. We put the key in and there's a sequence of switches that have to be thrown in a specific order in order for that thing to start. And if you don't know that order, you're just not going. Well, obviously, he knew the order, right? However, you have to get clearance to take off. You have to get clearance to taxi. You have to get a flight clearance. You have to get range clearance. There's a number. of things that would have prevented that from happening. Okay. Yeah. While we're on the subject, let me steal it for a second and tell you a cool guy story. Okay. Opening scene where he steals the Death Star, another stolen jet. Did he steal it or did he just go flying before the Admiral was there to cancel him?

Mute. Mute. All right. Admiral's at the end of the runway, hands on his hips. Yeah. And Maverick blows the roof off of the little shack. I have a true story of when something like that happened. Well, didn't they actually do that scene with an F-18 and then CGI the Dark Star?

I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. I may or may not have watched the behind the scenes a few times. I'm pretty sure they set that shot up and then... CGI the Admiral into it? I remember them doing a camera shot. It was specific where the F-18 is very, very low over that dry lake bed. There was a shot where it came right over the top because it just...

It didn't nuke, but that concussive effect of the aircrew. craft going over. Kind of shocked a few people. I think that's how they did that scene. So Admiral's standing there. Yep. Shack, the lid gets blown off and the Death Star goes off to do his mock ten run. Because it totally wouldn't knock him over.

So we're in, we're in Bogram, flying out of Bogram in 08. And our takeoff procedure was NAP of the Earth until 400 knots. And then Max climbed to get up out of the surface to air threat, the shoulder-fired rockets and things like that. So we had this one pilot that was he was using hold it onto the deck a little, you know, his interpretation of that was a little liberal. And our ops group commander was taking the bus to get to work one day. And he got buzzed just like that general did. So he comes over and he shaky fingers our squadron commander. Squadron commander goes and shaky fingers the pilot.

All right, break, break. He got sat down for a couple of days. About a week later, he does it again. Same exact pilot, same exact bus, same exact same exact, same. same OG on the bus and he got sent home and never flew a jet again. So that's reality versus Top Gun being maybe a little dramatic. Yeah, hand of God, he got sat down and never flew a jet again. God, I bet that's.

So we have these things called, and you know what, you probably had the same thing in your world where we had what's called a Form 8, which is our check ride every year, we get a Form 8 filled on us and it's a Q, a Q2 or a Q3. A Q1 is basically you did everything right, you got no downgrade. everything's good. Q2 is maybe you did a couple things wrong. Nothing like really safety of flight or poor airmanship, but maybe you maybe just goofed up a couple of things. And the Q3 is like unsafe to fly. You're probably not going to fly anymore. At least for a while they're going to do a flight evaluation board, things like that. He got Q3ed and he was up for retirement about six months later. Damn. Michael, were you able to find a video of that low pass?

I found the opening scene. You're talking about the one where he goes in the valley? Pull up what you got. Let's see. You should be, I think it might be a behind the scenes, but it is... What? I don't know. I just did the opening scene. That's the one you were talking about, right? Does this look like what we were talking about, Michael? Again, what are you over there doing?

Are you over there doing a crossword puzzle? You said it was the opening scene. I did not say it was the opening scene. We were talking about when he takes... It does say opening scene on there, danger zone. Yeah. But that's not what we're talking about. Yeah, I'm talking about where he is flying that F-18.

I would be shocked if it was above 30 feet AGL. just ripping down that desert valley. Yeah. No, I know the scene you're talking about. I'm talking about the one where he stole the Death Star, but yeah, that one,

so we have, we have what it called LASD admins. It's a low altitude step down is what it stands for. And you have to get trained, like our normal training, what we train our brand new pilots to is 500 feet. 500 feet's pretty comfortable.

You can do that, and it's not terribly task saturating. Yes. There you go. I'm calling that like 30 feet. And what's wild is he obviously was in the backseat of a two-seater doing that. Yeah. And so, you know, maybe they didn't do that dark star scene.

I mean, low enough where the exhaust from the jet is disturbing. Little Hornet Highops. That's pretty sick. There's a, you know, we talked about this on our show. This attack that they're doing here, they made it out to be like this big thing, right? This is pretty common. This attack, this flight, this mission would be something that we would put our four ship flight leads through. Huh.

Yeah. You're going to take four jets. You're going to fly on low altitude. You're going to whip and pop, find your target in the pole. And then you're going to turn over and drop a GbU12 on it or a GB24. I do really like that you can see the effects of the G-forces on them. That's actually legit. That's going to say that's pretty damn awesome.

It's legit. I've got my centrifuge video where my face is just melting off of my skull. It's pretty nasty. Do they take all of you guys to passing out, or are you trying to hold a particular G load for a certain period of time? You are, and it depends on your airframe. So, for example, I went through the first time in, gosh, 2006 for Strike Eagles. Strike Eagle, while it can pull 9Gs, it's not a true 9G jet. So we did a 7.5G profile there.

We touched nine for a few seconds, then went down to seven and a half for quite a few more and then, you know, kind of up and down from there. When I went to Luke Air Force Base to fly F-16s, I had to go back and do the 9G profile. I was 40 years old at the time. It sucked. That was terrible. So I did both. I did the seven and a half profile and I did the nine profile. And it's nine for what, I don't know, 10 seconds or so. And then you're down. That's a long time, man. It is. It is. Now, I got the benefit, though. I'd already checked into my unit and kind of being an experienced dude, they gave me what was called the A-Tags, a flight, or G-suit. So we used to have these old shitty five bladder. You had a bladder on each cab, a bladder on each quad, and a bladder on your abdomen, and that was it. And that's what I did all of my flying with, up to the point where I

went down to Fly of 16s. And then I got what was called the A-Tags. I don't know what it stands for, but it's like snow pants. And really, really helped. Just forces that blood up into your core. That, yes, that. Plus, you kind of already really know how to do a good G strain and a hook maneuver. And then you kind of know how to play the game. It's like taking your hearing test. You know how often the beeps come and you know when to push the button, even though you may have heard it or may have not.

Yeah. So did you have any light loss, sir? Nope. I saw the dot the entire time. Is it true the F-15 can accelerate while vertical? The F-15C probably can. That is amazing. That's the one that set the take-off to altitude time record back in the 70s.

Pre 9-11, my first deployment was to Kadina Air Force Base in Japan. Yeah. And they used to rip F-15s from the ground and they would just go into the clouds. And I'm not sure at what angle that they were at, but I am very certain. And I think it's safe to say that they were not at a shallow angle of attack. Probably 45-ish degrees. I think they were past that. Maybe.

Yeah, maybe. And it was the opposite of quiet. Yeah. So, yeah, so when we were, and before I started flying, I enlisted in the Air Force in 97. I was an Airman Basic, made $100. My wife and I met when we were Airman Basics. Like, we started with nothing. And I was an F-15 C model, crew chief.

I was a mechanic. And we lived on base at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska. And gosh, we were maybe not even a quarter mile from the runway. And those damn F-15s taken off just, I mean, 12 jets in sequence. squadron after squadron. And what was actually louder than that that made the windows rattle and the pictures fall off the walls was the C-130s coming in to do their assault landings. They would come in with the props feathered. And then as soon as they would hit the deck, they would throw the beta in to slow down as quick as they could. And that would, I mean,

that would just shake our little tiny house that we had. It was crazy. Yeah, that's going to be rough. That's going to be some ear pro required for sleeping. Yes. Yeah, without a doubt. How was your transition from enlisted to officer it was interesting um gosh lost some friends um really yeah just due to a caller device man i tell you what it was i think ultimately it came down it was jealousy and and and i hate to say that because some of those dudes are good dudes but before i transitioned about maybe about a year and a half before I transitioned, I made E6. And in the Air Force, on the enlisted side, that's probably one of the harder ranks to make because you're not quite a manager, but you're expected to have that level of knowledge,

working knowledge of things. And I studied my ass off. And I was going to school. I was taking four classes. I was working full time as a crew chief, studied, made the rank, made a 4.0 that semester. I'm sitting in the expediter truck out on the flight line one day, riding around in the maintenance truck, and my flight chief comes out,

hands me a piece of paper with four numbers on it. And I was like, the hell is this? A phone number? And he says, no, no, no, that's your line number for tech. Get out of here, man. Go take the rest of the day off.

I'm like, whatever, dude, fuck you. He says, no, seriously, man, get out of here. That's your line number. What does that mean? So when you get promoted, when you, when they do it, you take tests, right?

So you take written exams for your promotion, and then they factor in things like, do you have any medals? Those are worth some points. You're describing the Navy enlisted system as well. Probably very comparable. Yep. Your enlisted performance reviews, depending on what rate you got on those, those are worth

points, you know, and I had enough points. I made the cut. You know, they tally up all the scores. They draw a line. If you're above the line, you get promoted. If not, then better luck next year. So I made it. And I go upstairs to gather my belongings and put my BDU top on.

And one of my best buds in the whole squadron, like he and I were like number one, number two in the shop. He comes up to me and says, you're a motherfucker. So why am I a motherfucker? Because I studied. We studied together, dude. I would go to his house while his little kids are playing in the living room and we studied together. We studied the same material. I'm sorry, I tested better than you. But anyways, when I got picked up for OTS, that was a little bit more significant, I would think, normally, traditionally, and this is not me whining. I'm well past this. But traditionally, when you leave an assignment to go to another summit, they're at least going to write you an achievement medal to document your three years or four years there. You know,

you did some good work. Thank you very much. You know, they didn't even, like, I didn't even get a letter of appreciation. It was a going away party at the peanut factory in Anchorage with a couple of Alaskan Ambers, and that was it. I've still got people to this day that have not talked to me since that day. Yeah. I think that's okay. I think they kind of showed you their true colors. You see a lot, yep.

You see into people's character when, you know, and that was really the beginning of my, I think my transformation, my transformational journey into the person that I am now because I realized that I'm just got to be me, you know, and it ain't for everybody. And maybe it ain't for you, but fuck you. You know, I mean, I'm going to be me. And for those that it is for, those. Those are going to be the people that I hold close to me and that I share life with. For everybody else, sorry, man, you're missing out.

Yeah. That's just my opinion. When you got your commissioning, was it a guaranteed track towards aviation? So, yeah, so that funny story, I put in my OTS package to be a maintenance officer. Obviously, I'm a maintainer. I thought that was going to be the easiest transition to go into being a maintenance officer. When you're on the enlisted side, you go through the education office, and they kind of quarterback the putting the package. in sending it to whomever. So a master sergeant down a Randolph Air Force base calls up the

education office lady and says, hey, you sent his package to a rated board for a non-rated position, meaning flying versus not flying. She goes, oops. He says, well, I mean, good package. Ask him if he wants to fly. So she calls me up and they offered me a navigator spot. I didn't have, I thought I was too old. Which would have been a backseat to roll? Yeah, and well, and that's what I took. Yeah. So, um, I knew going to OTS that I was going to be, I think it was like a 91F or something like that at the time, a training navigator was what I went into. And after a couple of quick Google searches, I found out I could be a Strike Eagle Whizzo. And I was like, chiching, I know exactly what I'm going to do.

And from there, it was competitive to get into the cockpit that I wanted to get into. And some of the best advice I got when I was transitioning, my maintenance officer was married to one of the fighter pilots in our squadron in Alaska. And he put me in the headlock at the peanut factory that night. And he goes, dude, being an officer's easy. You just be the best at everything. You get whatever you want. It's like, well, shit, I can do that. So that was kind of the mindset that I went into it with was, hey, man, I got to compete for number one.

And as long as I'm competing, then good things are going to happen. So did you do your aviation career as a whizzo? Yes. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Do you get to count that flight time? I can't call in his piling command time, but I have, what, 1,600 hours of tactical flying time. Yeah.

Wow, that's wild. Yeah. What is at the broadest, or get as precise as you want to, but the actual role or the separation in duties between front and backseat? It's really aircraft dependent. And, I mean, okay, so technically, let me see if I can just break it down the best I can. There are only a handful of platforms that have the Wizzo as part of the active crew, right? All the flying platforms have pilots, for sure, right? Currently.

Currently, yeah. I've seen that movie Stealth. I don't think... No. It's an old movie. Got Jessica Beal and a tight flight suit. You should check it out. Okay.

But, however, I don't think we're very far off from that. Another discussion for another time. Well, I mean, if you look at the UAV program, I mean, they're being flown from Connix boxes. True. So the airframe itself, you know, is already empty. But you take a jet like... I mean, look at the technology that's getting wrapped into our jets already, the fifth-gen aircraft that we have. And we're not that far from integrating some AI into it.

And this is all speculation. I do not speak for the DOVs. I would be surprised if there's not, I am not a technical expert when it comes to AI. This is a shock to no one. But given the way that some of those aircraft can maneuver or even just the flight surfaces or the fly-by-wire systems where they're providing feedback, and again, I don't know the technical description of where an advanced system versus AI begins, I would bet you they're already a little bit, a little bit blurred because you're going from a physical rote control

to a mechanical or an electronic input that's actually maneuvering the aircraft? Yeah, it's still computer driven. I mean, at that point, it's electrical input through a side stick or a side throttle, electrical input into a computer that's converted into a signal to an actuator that moves a surface.

This is more like aircraft thinking on their own. An extension, like, you have one aircraft with a man in it, and then you have three of his wingmen that are AI bots, basically, missile trucks doing their own targeting and stuff. What do you think about that potential evolution? On one hand, I think it's badass. I mean, if you're wanting to be a fighter pilot when you grow up, it's probably not what you want.

What about the decision to take life being completely made by an autonomous system? Yeah, well, that's an ROE discussion and probably an ethics discussion at some point. I don't know. I think that could go really deep. At some point, you have to have a man in the loop, though, don't you? I mean... I think it depends on. on how far down the rabbit hole that you want to go.

I mean, and they certainly, I've talked about this a few times, there was the exercise that was done with the unmanned drones. And what they did is they created a set of boundaries and a scoring system. And this was done, this was not actual drones flying overhead

to the best of my knowledge. But the drone recognized inside of the chess board that was put in front of it and the rules of the game, that it was actually the human operator that was limiting its ability to get a high score. Just walking him out?

Yeah, I think it attempted to. And again, this was all, this was not like, oh my God, there's a hellfire missile coming at a Connix box somewhere in Nevada. It was an exercise that they completed. But, I mean, that's a fully autonomous machine making a decision, okay, here's the rule set.

You told me to get the high score. Yeah. I am identifying a variable here that is preventing me from getting high score. AI is crazy, though, because at least the way I think of computers, and dude, I'm not a computer geek. I'm the opposite of a computer geek. I would rather go office space on it than interface with it. But typically speaking, at least the way that I understand it, computers operate on ones and zeros.

Command in, command out kind of thing. AI, however, is, especially when you take into the idea that AI can learn and evolve. that's scary. It's a lot scarier than having a computer making decisions based on the input that it was given versus having an AI system learning and making decisions on what it thinks is right. And it can also teach itself and it can provide different inputs for itself. What are your thoughts? Do you believe that there should always be a human being in the kill chain loop? Well, I mean, I guess we could probably go back through all the histories, at least modern history. and all the mistakes that have been made in combat have probably been the result of a human in the loop.

I'm talking about more like you deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, right? Yeah. Well, not Iraq. I did Afghanistan three times. So taken off out of Bogram, you're heading up northeast towards Abad, Jabad, and you have intelligence on a vehicle they think has a high-value target in there. You're watching that thing from 50,000 feet. I wish.

65,000 feet. 15,000 Whatever it may be Fuck I don't know I'm not a pilot But you're unsure as to Exactly whether or not that person's in the vehicle

And you're unsure as to whether or not there are innocent people in the vehicle I don't know if I want a machine Making the decision as to whether or not To let something off the chain Yeah, I'll agree with that And I think that's just the Not necessarily the human piece

But the humanity of it The ethics of it Like this is a person down there And man, I don't know I don't know how you guys were brought up But I was always brought up to not think of it in those terms. It's a target. You hit your target.

And I was trained to hit my target. If I had reasonable certainty that that was a valid target, I was going to put a bomb on it. And, you know, there was this big discussion when I was over there, even in 08. I went 08 as of flying. And then I went spring of 11. Actually, when Ben Laden was taken down, I was in country. I was down out of Kandahar on that one. And then I went in 1213 for almost a year there.

But the first two times I was there, there was this big discussion about this thing called shift fire. Have you heard of this? No. Okay, you got a bomb in flight. So we drop a GPU 12. You got a bomb in flight. You're bombing the house. You know it's a hostile house or at least there's a bad guy in it and a goat herder walks into your frame.

What do you do? Do you go, oh shit, goat herder collateral damage and move the cursors and hopefully drag the bomb off so that now the goat herder lives? Or do you say, sorry, goat herder. It's not your day. This is a big ethical discussion, right? Well, it also depends on the type of ordinance, whether it's a dumb bomb or a smart bomb and whether or not you have control over it once it comes off. Yeah, you know, in terms of dumb and smart, there is a gray area in the middle with the laser guided bombs. Yeah, because you could always just take – you could drag it off.

But like a J-dam, once you hit the pickle button and the coordinates are in the bomb, you ain't doing shit for that. Yeah, the decision is going to have to be made before it's raised. Exactly. Was there – was there an active effort to dehumanize? And I don't mean that in a negative sense. but when it came to releasing ordinance from aircraft to think about it from the perspective of that is your target and think of it only as that versus the human aspect of the consequences or the collateral damage of that bomb? I don't know that there was a push for it. I think that came down to a personal thing. And my example of that story is one of the guys that I was paired with flying over there was a devout Mormon. And I mean, doesn't cuss, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, very straight lace kind of dude. And he and I actually had one of these discussions. We're up there drilling holes in the sky for four hours one day. And we're having this discussion. And he said, Roscoe, I'll be honest with you, man. I just, I hit the target. If that's the target, I hit the target. So now, and then that, you know, maybe on the side, he was having some conversations. with his God and doing that. But when it came to drop an ordinance from a lethal killing machine,

we're trying to hit the target. Did you guys ever go to the impact site of your bombs? I never did. Do you know of any pilots that did? I don't. It's interesting. You know, you have the ability from that much distance that you can think about it from the perspective of your target is your target. Yeah. There was no attempt to dehumanize in my own personal experience. and this is my opinion. I don't speak for anything or anybody other than myself. There was no attempt in my previous job to dehumanize. And I don't think it would have been possible

because the ranges that we were talking about were maybe at maximum hundreds of yards. Yeah, you're up close and personal. Oftentimes, like single-digit feet or if not contact shooting people through their clothing. We're not exactly looking people in the eyes. We're making these decisions. You know, we're looking through a targeting pod

from three or four miles away at best, right? I mean, even if you're overhead and you're flying at 25,000 feet, that's four freaking miles, man. You're a hot spot on a computer screen. Well, that's why I asked if any of the pilots or wizos would actually go see the effects of their ordinance, because for us, it was unavoidable. I mean, once we secure an objective, you're going to go back through, you know, the three FEEA, find, fix, finish, and explain, analyze. Finding it was not really our job. We relied heavily upon intelligence, human or signant, fixing it in position. and people think I'm talking about maybe a fence,

and I'm not talking about that necessarily at all. I would say fixing is a relative level of certainty that the person we're looking for is there. Finish, it's kind of what we did. Yeah. And then, though, exploit, analyze. Coming through every inch of not only square footage, but individuals as well.

And then it's, you know, as the wars progressed on, it was the rules of engagements, they're theater specific and they're a little bit different. They're always based, you know, in Hostile Act, Hostile Intent, and you're a right to self-defense, those type of things. Later on, though, back in 2010, when I first started deploying, shooter statements weren't really a thing,

photo-documenting every single person. When was this? I went through your selection in 2002 and started deploying at the tail end of 2002. It was there for the initial invasion of Iraq and then just kind of bounced back and forth between the countries. By 2010, it was no night raids.

You were not, God, it would be, I think we'd just. dropped a bomb in 10 months versus 2002 or three or four, that building scares me. Turn that into rubble. Okay. Yeah. I'm not saying. It's ugly.

Make it go away. I don't like the way that building's looking at it. It looks like a jack lantern. Make it flat. I've been on both sides of that. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, the exploit analyze and when they, you know, they want to start to get pictures and the intelligence.

And as we refined our SSE, our site sensitive, exploit. the things that happened after the objective is cure. It's not possible to not see the humanity of, or not, the humanity is not the right word for it. It's not possible to avoid viewing the people that you are up against as human, in my opinion. No,

because you're confronted with it. Dude, I can totally get that from, and that may be a reason why people who are in your position or, you know, the ground pounders writ large, maybe have a higher rate of, say, PTSD or, you know. Have you ever done any research on the PTSD rates? I haven't.

No, with drone pilots. I've heard about that. Yes, I have heard about that. And the dissociation between going and doing this and living your life through this lens and then having to go home to your family every night versus, you know, like when you and I were going over, it was, I used to put family in a box. And, you know, once a week, I would go take a little family. out and put a little family back in, but it was mission-oriented for nine months, man. Yeah. And that was my sole focus. Whereas those guys are, they're having a kind of, you know,

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde this thing. And I can imagine where that would be, probably as big of a difference with that as there was between what you and I are talking about, being able to see it from the air versus seeing it from the ground, up close and personal. You know, you're, you're walking through the rubble. You're seeing the craters. You're seeing the, you're seeing the aftermath of me pushing a button in a cockpit and going to get in chow. You know, that's just not the way that we were taught to do it, at least not the way I was taught. Now, I don't want to talk, you know, in general terms about this. I'm not trying to put words in anyone's mouth.

This is my experience. I looked at it as hitting my target and blowing shit up was cool. Yeah. And I didn't, I didn't mean to bring it up in any way comparatively or judgmentally. I was just thinking as you were talking about that, the vernacular. I think, in my own personal opinion, I think. I think it was essential that we saw the after effect and were confronted with the after effect of what we did.

And I can understand how people would say that that might be traumatic and damaging. And I'm not going to sit here and argue and say that it isn't necessarily those things. But I think it keeps it, if you're going to be in an occupation that makes those decisions between life and death and you have to make them an incredibly fast periods of time where you have incomplete information and you're doing the best that you can,

I wouldn't want anybody to lose the gravity of that decision because it's a heavy one for sure. Well, and I mean, let's face it, dude, we're talking about guys who are on the pointy end of the sword here. You know, there's... I always described it as the round end of the spoon, but I mean, tell me more.

Probably the same. I had a buddy that was at the Pentagon, and this hasn't been that long ago, just a couple of years. And I'm still kind of kind of in the business I'm at least attached to the business still. So I still do it with security clearances and things like that. And he's working on the, he's at the Pentagon.

He's working, doing some work on the hill and everything. And he and I were just BS in one night. And I said, dude, imagine like a bullwhip, all right? And you're at the handle of the bullwhip. You make a small movement. And I'm at the end of the bullwhip getting whipped to the other side. You know, so kind of the same analogy for, you know, guys making big decisions up at the strategic level and then get down at the tactical level where,

man, when you kick open that door, it's, I mean, it is, you have to make decisions. For clarity, we never kicked them open. Blew them open? That would be the better way to go. Yeah. And if you are going to kick a door, don't do it like they do in the movies where you're facing the door, you have to turn around a donkey kick it. All right. Make sure you get it on video too.

So, oh, do you ever have any blue on green? Were you ever around any of that? You just mean friendly-on-friendly? Yeah, specifically with the Afghan, the A&A. or the AMP, something like that? Yes, to answer your question broadly. And I was also there when there was American on American. I never saw that, thankfully.

Yeah. It's as shitty, as you can imagine. And the fog of war is absolutely real. And I don't think it ever happens maliciously or intentionally. And I think if you're not careful, it could happen to anyone, regardless of how capable you think that you are. There's rules in place. There's step-by-step procedures, but occasionally, regardless of whether you follow it to a T,

there can be instances where things get confusing. And, you know, like you said, fog and friction is a real thing. And I was privy to an incident, again, from an Overwatch position. I'm, you know, flying around six miles away from this thing at night, watching it through a targeting pod. but there was confusion of who was who, and green guys started firing on blue guys, and it's pretty bad.

We have some pretty high-speed laser tag stuff. I mean, if you want to reduce it down to its simplets forms, it's kind of what it is. And a lot of the times they'll try to introduce, we would call it Blue on Blue. They try to force you kind of into those situations to give you warnings and indications in the future. of things you can watch out for.

And that's also to highlight how fast it can develop and how quickly it can get out of control. Yeah, been there, done that. And, you know, seeing it from being removed from it in a position that I was, looking down on the fight, so to speak, you know, guys on the ground are running around. They're out of breath. It's dark.

You know, they're tripping over whatever there is out there in the yard or whatnot. And I'm kind of watching the dots move around. And I can kind of, to a degree, you can kind of start to see this, starting to play the way that it's going to go. And you don't want to be the guy that, you know, you don't want to be the guy that cries wolf and stops the whole thing because it could turn out to be nothing. But then you kind of feel like shit on the back end when it does turn out to be something and you're like, man, I kind of almost saw that coming, you know, like the way that guys were moving around, the way they were scurrying around, the way these

dudes were getting into some positions versus these guys. And, you know, it was not a fun situation to be part of. Yeah, the would also get you. Yeah. Michael, I have no idea why I was just reminded of this, but I forgot to check the focus on Paul's camera. Is he in focus? Hopefully not. Yeah. It looks good. I'm going to double check because I don't trust. Okay. That's fair. All right. Just like I said. Mike, hey, I just want to say, Michael, you're a champion, dude. Thanks. You're a champion. He's not going to hear that for me because he's not. That's exactly why he's a champion, because he's been taught some really good life lessons through the crucible of this guy.

You're operating under the assumption that he's listening to anything that we're saying. I've listened to a couple of... As clearly shown earlier in this episode, he is checked out. What crossword are you stuck on over there? It's a four-letter word of somebody who likes to sit in the corner. A certain chair. Nice. Oh, man.

How was your first combat rotation? My first combat rotation flying. I'll just, I'll be specific about that because I did a couple when I was enlisted. Okay. Which are, I mean, when you're in the Air Force, you're, you know, 500 miles away from the fight, generally speaking. That's a good thing, man. We were, yeah, we were at Turkey. We were at Injelik, and they were doing Northern Watch.

So we're launching jets and recovering jets, just like we did at Elmendorf every day. They go off and do, you know, hero things and come back, and we're none the wiser. We just check the oil and get it ready for the next go. My first rotation is a flyer. I had only been certified as combat mission ready for about six months maybe before we deployed. So very wet behind the ears. And where the gravity of the situation really hit me was when we landed at Bogerman. I walked into the life support building.

And there was a sign on the door that said the mission is an 18-year-old with a rifle. And, you know, you kind of, when you're doing training, on the mountain home training range, it's hard to get that perspective. And then as we walked out of the ops room door, you know, we would put on our G-suits and whatnot, and we get our jets and our tail numbers. And we're starting to walk out to the plane, and there's a sign on that door that says, Danger Close, don't fucking miss. And that's where it really starts to sink in.

I'm like, dude, there's real good guys down there getting shot by real bad guys. And we have the opportunity to make this or break it in a lot of cases. So that was, it was challenging. It was ch—I mean, never mind living on Bogram in a bee hut and, you know, sleeping in a twin bed that was—it was ice cold in that room and all those things factor into it. Very few of us slept soundly for about six months. We got to where—the flight dock will only give you so many sleeping pills. Yeah. And so I got to where I was biting them in half.

I would take half of an ambient to fall asleep. Wake up about two or three hours later, take the other half. And I was able to maybe get, you know, five, six, seven hours sleep most of not. nights. But, um, and then I think really it's finding your daily battle rhythm. You know, once you, once you kind of establish a daily battle, battle rhythm, it kind of makes the day go faster. It took a long time for me to learn how to do that, though. So going back to what was on the wall, you know, the, the battles an 18 year old with a rifle. I think I, I, I hijacked the conversation. We started talking about something else. You guys are up overhead in an orbit or whatever

you're flying, uh, cap or whatever you guys are doing up there. And you get the call that there's groups and contact. How are you guys task sharing inside of the cockpit? And up to the point where, you know, let's say that you are actually talking to a J-TAC and there is going to be a release of some kind. How are the roles and responsibilities broken down? It really depends on the mission. And, you know, something that I don't know that a lot of people maybe understand, at least a lot of my civilian friends don't understand that when you're flying pointing those jets, there's not just one mission that you do. There's air to air. There's air. There's air to air. the surface, there's close air support, there's defensive counter air, there's offensive counter

air, there's escort, there's all kinds of things that we have to train for and be ready for it. You know, when the Claxton goes off, you kind of don't know what you're getting into. Obviously, when you go to Boggham, you know you're doing a close air support fight. So we trained heavily for that. And there is a clear division of duties of who's going to be doing what and when in the cockpit. Typically speaking, and this is probably true 90 to 95% of the time, a guy on the ground talking to an F-15 in the sky is probably talking to the Wissau. The JTAC is probably talking to the Wissau while the pilot is maintaining the formation, keeping control of the gas and the wingmen and, you know, developing the tanker plan and maybe

making radio calls to get other assets involved or whatnot. But the Wizzo is kind of running the air to surface fight at that point. Do you guys have FACAs? Not in the strike A. That was more of an F-16 thing. And for people listening, it's a Ford Air Controller, but and the A means airborne. And it's as a J-TAC on the ground, it can be very difficult to rack and stack and keep an idea of what's going on and what aircraft is best suited for this altitude or what ordinance is best suited.

So you can load share, depending on the platforms that are up there. And basically, I mean, you could tell the fact, hey, I want you to rack and stack this and keep people at every thousand feet, whatever it is, and totally get them doing that while you're trying to look at things where you can do a talk on or a night.

You know, and a lot of times I would have my wingman doing that. Even though we're not technically fact A's, I'll be like, hey, man, I want you just, as a side duty here. I just want you can, I want you maintaining SA on who's in the stack and where they're at. While I'm running the show and I'm talking to this guy, if it comes time for nine lines and putting more heads on foreheads, I'll get you the information. Don't worry about it. But I want you tracking what's going on over here and maintaining what's going on in the stack. So even, even interflight, there were, you know, obviously there's going to be broken down

duties as well. So who's releasing the ordinance in the aircraft? Is it the front seat or the backseater? The both cockpits have the authority to do it. of the button, but typically it's a front seat thing. Okay. Yeah. He's the guy that has, I guess, the last consent. Okay. For weapons release.

But I'm assuming you're in the back there getting all the other. Yeah. And again, I mean, this comes down to... You're making the omelet, if you will, cracking the eggs. This comes down to crew coordination, you know? I mean, you were a J-TAC, and I was an ALO as well. I don't know what that means. Air Liaison officer.

Okay. So when you look at the tactical air control party, there's the Air Liaison officer, there's the J-TAC, and then the Romads is what the Air Force called him, the... the J-TAC helpers, if you want, the battery, battery carriers, basically. But regardless of what team you're on, there's going to be a clear division of duties, and there comes in that crew coordination between the two parties. So front seat, backseat, we're talking about things. He's following along with what's going on.

I'm copying down the nine line, entering in the coordinates, making sure that I've got everything right with the bombs. He's double-checking it, trust but verify, all that good stuff that we, these cliches and these platitudes that we throw around. but it works. And when it comes time and the J-TAC says cleared hot, the next thing out of my mouth is cleared to release. He double-checks one last time and he hits the button.

How did it feel the first time that happened for real? In combat, it's a little surreal because, you know, in the back of your mind, things are happening fast, you know, especially in our troops in contact. Things are happening fast. And one of the things that we trained to a lot was regardless of what, what's going on on the ground. We had the five Cs of communication, clear, concise, correct. And then there was calm and cool, right? You have to keep the situation calm because that dude down there is getting his ass shot off, potentially, right? A troops in contact. He's probably ducking behind walls.

He could be running around. He might be out of breath. He's obviously probably going to be scared, have his adrenaline up. And one of our jobs was, man, let's dampen the situation a little bit. Let's help him get his nerves down, calm him down just a little bit to make sure that we get all of the correct information and get the bomb where it needs to be. Even with all that, once you hit the pickle button, it's, you got these things going on in the back of your mind going, man, did I do everything right? Holy crap, where the coordinates actually correct and you're double checking your lineup card and kind of replaying and debriefing, you know, the 0.69 seconds that it takes to have all that actually working. It's a little, it's a little spooky. I think

that that kind of wears off over time. Maybe, maybe that not hesitancy. That's not. the right word I'm looking for. What's the word I'm looking for? You become accustomed to what you're doing. You do. You don't become numb to it. And I don't think you become complacent, but I think you get more, you get used to the, the adrenaline. You get used to the situations. You kind of know what to expect. You know what's coming. You know that this guy's probably going to be yelling into the microphone. You know that your adrenaline's going to get up. Because you know it's go time at this point, right? Once he starts reading off a nine line, dude, it's go time. and you have to check the boxes all the way down and make sure that you do everything correctly

because there's 500 pounds of hate fixing to come off of your airplane i mean i prefer a thousand pounders but i mean we just put two yeah two thousand so our standard load out on the strike eagle um those those who don't know the listeners strike eagle f15 e um it is it is an awesome it's a twin engine twin tail twin seat pull that shit up michael designed by god built by man. I mean, this thing is a work course. It absolutely is. That's verifiable. Our standard loadout flying out of Bogum was four GbU12s, three GB338s, and a GBU 31 on the center line. Jesus.

That's a lot of hate. It is. Yeah. I feel like I'm not staring at Strike Eagles right now. I know. It is sexy. What was it originally designed for? And when?

Well, so probably. Inception was in the 70s, and it actually started flying in the late 80s, mid to late 80s. Are they looking at replacing it? Is it timing out? Well, they've already built the EX. The EX is flying. The F-15 EX? F-15 E-X, yes.

E-X? They added some missile stations. Michael, this is a shitty picture, dude. Glassed up the cockpit. Yeah, I've got another one. This one's bad. So those are C models. All the C models are going to be single seat, and that is a 100% air-to-air platform.

Okay. The E model is both. It's air to air, air to surface. The distinguishing feature of the E model are the conformal fuel tanks on the wings. That's a C model. Yeah, that's a C model. This one, yep, nope, go back. Go left.

Yes, that one. Okay, so you can kind of see the conformal fuel tanks there. And then you see the bomb racks hanging off. Yep. The little doodads hanging there underneath the intake. That's the terrain falling radar. Opposite that on the other side is kind of looks a little more pointing on the nose there. That's the sniper targeting pot.

Okay. And it has IRN TV or EO, I guess, is the correct vernacular. But each one of those CFTs has six bomb racks. And then we have the wing pylons and the center station as well that we can hang junk off of. So with the EX, they're not looking at actually retiring this airframe at all. They're just, they're moving it forward. I mean, like the F-14 is a good example of the legacy aircraft they took out of service. Have you heard any talk?

them doing that with the F-15? I have, and I'm really hesitant to spread rumors because it's really warm right now. It's just word of mouth. I have heard rumors that some of the Strike Eagle fleet are going to get mothballed. And I don't know that there, I don't know if they're going to be replaced. I really, I really don't know the answer to that. I've heard some scuttle butt, but nothing, nothing that I can confidently say yes. And then, I mean, so that's where you started in the backseat. What predicated the move over to the 16? So I was getting towards the end of my career. I flew at a mountain home, did that for almost three years, went to the 101st in Kentucky, northern Tennessee, did that for three years as an air liaison officer, and then went back to Mountain Home. And I was then in the window to be able to retire at the end of that assignment. I forget what the exact math was, but I basically didn't have to take another assignment. So we were, honestly, we wanted to stay there in place. place in Mountain Home and just retire and fade away into the sunset, had no idea what I was

going to do for a living after that. Didn't know where we were going to go. We had some ideas, no real good plans. And then assignments came around, and I had put in just to stay at Mountain Home, stay at Mountain Home, stay at Mountain Home. I'm in there. We're actually getting ready to go to a cast sortie that day, and I was getting ready to brief, and my commander comes in. He goes, hey, man, are you the kind of guy that likes to open his Christmas presents on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve. I said, okay, assignments came out, came out. Let's go. Luke Air Force Base, F-16s, flying with the Republic of Singapore. I went, what? Who the fuck saw this coming? All right. So I go home that night, Katie, my wife, she's in the bathtub. Big garden tub. She's in there

taking her bubble bath, and I came in all giddy from work going, hey, assignments came out. Luke Air Force Base, F-16s. She goes, Luke, Phoenix, Desert. Nope. Okay. And I went and started doing dishes. I was like, all right, decision made. No big deal. Then she comes out. We have a conversation. And in the Air Force, we have seven days to make this decision. And it's right around Halloween of 2015, we're out trick-or-treating with the kids, walking between neighborhoods. And this has been a conversation for like five or six days at my house. And I stopped us all in the middle of the road. And I said, all right, dudes, we're throwing down with a decision right now. Do we go to Phoenix? Yes or no. pointed at my youngest son. He was, I don't think he was like fifth or sixth grade at the time.

He goes, whatever, new adventure. Let's do it. Pointed to my eighth grader. He goes, yeah, I'm fine with it. Let's go. Looked at Katie. She goes, I'm down. All right, fine. And I called my commander right there on the spot. And we took the assignment to go to Luke. Michael, pull up a picture of a two-seater F-16. We've got to talk about the differences. I can sum it up without even looking at the picture. The F-16 is half of a strike eagle. It's half the people. It's half the engine. It's half the tails. It can carry half the payload. God, it looks sexy, though.

Look at that picture. It is a nice jet, I will say. And they fly so very different. I was going to ask you about what? Very different. More precise? That's a difficult term to quantify, I think. Single engine, though.

I don't like that. Let me see if I can put it like this. The Strike Eagle is kind of like my Z-71. Is that a car? Chevy pickup truck. Okay. As you can tell, I'm a real gear head. The Viper is probably more like a Porsche.

Okay. Truck versus Porsche. They can both do 150 miles an hour. They're going to do them very differently, though. I would challenge you to get that truck up to 150, but I can appreciate the metaphor. Okay, 120. I mean, they look almost nothing alike except for the fact they have wings and wheels. Okay.

Single, you know, vertical tail fin versus two. They both have wings. They both have wheels. Yeah. And a two-person cockpit and a canopy. That's about it. I mean, the rules of flight still apply. Trees get small, trees get big.

Air intake on the front, engine on the back, radar on the front. Missiles and bombs under the wings. That's... Which one did you enjoy being in more? The Strike Eagle. Yeah. Probably, honestly, probably because, well, a couple of reasons. One, because I got to employ that weapon system.

And two, the F-16s that I... I flew when I went to Luke, again, Republic of Singapore, they were not the top of the line Air Force, U.S. Air Force versions. Oh, yeah, hold on. So what was the Republic of Singapore doing at Luke Air Force Base? Were you teaching them how to fly the F-16s? Yes, the three, God, I forgot even the squadron now, 325th, maybe, Black Widows. What do we do?

We sell them a degraded version of the F-16. It's not necessarily even a degraded versions, the versions they had there. Now, the ones that they had back home in Singapore were, they were full up. They have Link 16. They have pretty awesome radars. They're very capable air-to-air and air-to-ground platforms. Okay. The ones that they had there at Luke were more for training and learning TTPs versus, you know, the actual employment of the aircraft.

I know that's a bad way to explain that. But it makes sense. The learning how to be a flight lead, for example, you know, whether you can see 50 miles or 30 miles on your. your radar maybe doesn't dictate whether or not you have channelized attention or great essay in the aircraft kind of thing so the versions that we had at luke were i don't know for lack of a better term dumb down some okay uh compared to a strike eagle where i was floating zen like in the lotus position in the back seat it was more clock chart ground kind of thing in the in the vipers there at luke would you switch out who was up front or would you oh yeah so you could go

and fly with a different person every day yeah that was that was that was pretty typical. Huh. And we tried, on my first deployment there at Abogrom, we tried this crew pairing concept, but day-to-day currencies, additional duties, things like that get in the way. And it just, it just didn't work. I flew maybe, I don't know, 60, 70% of my sorters with the same guy, but that other 30%, it's, you know, it's whoever's on the scheduling board. You're really ruining my Maverick and Goose fairy tale here. Well, okay, but, but that is actually probably, Probably true. Now, maybe not when they were in... Back in the day, you mean?

No, when they were flying off the boat, maybe not. But when they go to Top Gun, even our guys, when they go to weapon school at Nellis, they're paired up. Okay. When I went through the B course, when I went through the training at Seymour Johnson, I was paired up with a pilot, and we went through the whole air-to-air phase together. And then at the break between air-to-air and air-to-ground, we switched. And then we did the whole air-to-surface. So, yeah, that's not out of the realm of possibility. I'd say when you get to the... When he's... got to the boat, for example. For us in a normal day-to-day flying squadron, he got guys to sit in the tower. You got guys that got to sit at the duty desk. You got guys that have to sit as the weapons officer in the back to sign out people's classified. You got the safety brick guy. I mean, all these additional duties, plus everybody in the squadron has another job of some sort, scheduler, trainer, safety dude, whatever it is. So all of those things are competing

interest for, like you're not flying every single day of the week with the same dude every single day. Did you ever find yourself in a flat spin headed out to sea? No, never. Fuck. Not a lot of sea in Mountain Home Idaho. There's probably some big lakes. Actually, Katie and I were laughing this morning. We were talking about some things in our hotel room, and I was trying to explain to her this maneuver.

I was listening to your episode with Hazard, where he was talking about the F-35 and the pedal maneuver and the pedal turn and that. And I said, well, in Strike Eagle, we did kind of the same thing. The F-35 flies a lot like a Strike-Ewell does. but um it's uncanny how how similar they are even though two very different platforms with very different flight control mechanisms very similar in the way that they talk back to the pilot and the way that you can use the rudders to fly them at high a way and things like that but you're loaded up uh you're doing a uh you're doing a bfm set you're looking over your shoulder you see the bad guy getting into a uh where he can employ the gun on you or very close range this was a tactic

that we would use is you plant the stick, increase the AOA to max, and go full boot or rudder, and the jet goes, jup, like this. Not quite a flat spin. We called it a vector roll in the strike eagle. It's called a pedal turn in the F-35. They're very similar maneuvers. But if you hold that, then it can corkscrew. It's not really a flat spin, but.

I'd recommend you just step on the brakes and let them fly right by, but. That also doesn't work, but. I've seen it work several times. In the movie theater? Yeah. Here's one. So I'm sitting in, gosh, this was a couple, three years ago, four years ago. And I'm running the simulator at Luke.

I run the Sims for the F-35 guys. And we got this 06 that comes through. I wants to just sit at the console and watch one of these missions that going on. And, you know, he and I started this conversation. And he informed me that he had just come from Navy Fallon, where he got pulled into a theater, told to leave his phone outside. And they showed him all the raw footage. of the F-18 slinging themselves at each other.

That's awesome. He said it was better than the movie, just watching the raw footage. I was like, oh, man, I'm so jealous. Yeah, I would have loved to seen that. It exists somewhere. I'm sure it'd probably end up on YouTube soon. Yeah, I bet it will. What, did you get out of the military or decided to move on because you were just at retirement

or you felt like you had accomplished what you wanted to in your service? There was an incident that I was at 21 years. And there was an incident in the squadron that I knew. that that was my last assignment. The question was when. It wasn't if. It was when. This is it. I don't want to move my family anymore. I'm done playing this game. I got a kid that's getting ready to go into high school. Another one that's sixth, seventh grade or so. I'm done moving around, right? At most, we're going to do one more move. I wasn't chasing rank or anything. Man, I started as an Airman Basic. I ended up as an 0-4. Hashtag no regrets, right? So there's an incident in the squadron where two jets swap paint. And- Like swap paint and wings came off or just a little? A little, a little, a little, A little kiss. When you're going 400 knots, even a little kiss can be a significant emotional event. Yeah. And Ben metal.

So, yes, there was bent metal. Okay. But the airframe and aircrew survived. They flew home. Okay. In fact, they didn't even know, at the end of every sortie, we're supposed to do a battle damage check. Get in very close formation. Jets do this.

And they check to make sure that no parts are missing, no panels are missing. Occasionally, there's been overgees and panels will fly off of airplanes. It's not uncomp. Well, it's not unheard of, I should say. Okay. So whatever the specific circumstances are on this, I'll keep that out of it. But these two jants, in your terms, they kiss. They pinned it all on this one particular person in the squadron, and I was not going to be the next dude. So I went to my commander's office, who's a really good friend of mine.

I said, dude, what the F? He goes, sorry, man, they're not my jets. They're single poor's jets. they ran their own safety inspection. These are their conclusions. I said, that's it. I'm done. And I went and I hit the retire button that day. How long until you were actually retired from that point? Less than six months. That's not bad. That was August. I retired in January. That is not a ton of runway. Had you already been looking at what you were going to do when you got out. Had no fucking clue. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Just jump into the abyss, cannibal style. Dude, I mean, sometimes you got to take a risk, right? No risk it, no biscuit. I'm totally comfortable taking risks. What I tried never to do is gamble.

It, well, so when you're at a position like that, I think when you're at the end of a 20-year career, you're an educated person, you're going to be able to find something. It may not be the perfect thing. It may not be exactly where you want to be, but in the short term, now, I admit, man, there was a, there was a bit of panic there. In fact, that was a, there was a lot of friction in my marriage that fall because I don't know what I'm going to do in three months. I'm coaching a football season that was not going very well. And I'm trying to out process the Air Force. It was tough, right? But things work out, man. You know, and one of the things that I talk about a lot on my podcast and my books,

to whomever I speak to mentoring young kids, I talk about opportunities. You have to be open to opportunities. You have to learn how to recognize opportunities. And it takes a little bit of practice and discipline, I think. And then you have to be fearless enough to take. some opportunities. And I was afforded a couple of opportunities. They weren't just dangling right in front of my face. I had to go search for them and maybe I had to nudge some doors open, but some opportunities opened up and I'm glad I did it. What kind of opportunities were there? There was a, well,

first of all, so when I hit the retire button, I panicked. I didn't know what the hell I was going to do for the rest of my life. I've been a military guy since I was 20 years old. So I went and got my P&P certification just as a backup. I figured, What does that mean? Project management professional. It's a certification so that you can do project management in a business type environment, whatever. That sounds horrible. It was scary, and I probably would have sucked at it.

I'm glad that it didn't work out that I had to go that route. But it was at least a solid exit strategy, a solid, you know, backup plan. So I'm scouring the job sites. When we moved to Phoenix, I had said before we even moved down there, I said, in a perfect world, I get to be an F-35 instructor because that job is going to have the most longevity of any job at Luke Air Force Base, probably, right? That is the birthplace of every F-35 pilot in the Air Force is going to Luke. I did not know that. Yep, that's the training mecca for the F-35. So that's what I kind of set my sights on. Well, the problem is the F-35 is a single-seat platform, and I'm not a

pilot. So it's not looking good for me. I had asked the question numerous. Times got I was told no more times like account. I put in an application to a couple of different companies that had the contract there, prime and then a sub. And ended up through that, I got put in touch with another guy and I took a job at Luke as what was called the LVC subject matter expert, live virtual constructive subject matter expert. And we were basically putting constructive entities into the link 16 so that the f35 see things on their screens that are just synthetic and it gives them more training capabilities and i'm sitting at a computer console 1g zero knots putting things out on this computer screen that they're seeing in the air that they can actually yeah it's actually pretty cool

um it's through it's all through the link 16 um and it works pretty darn good well i i built that entire program and that entire system there i did that for eight months after i retired and on a friday morning I happened to check my email, and I had an email from one of the companies that I'd put a application into. The prime contractor was having a hard time filling spots, and they decided to open their aperture a little bit, and they said, hey, I think the Wiszo Man can maybe do a lot of this, you know, maybe not left-hand, right-hand stuff, but he can teach academics. He can run the simulators. He knows all the tactics and all that stuff. And so the guy had my resume already in, and my application already in the system from eight, nine months ago, calls me up on a Friday.

Hey, man, you want to be an F-35 instructor? Yep. That's awesome. So, again, man, just dumb-looking timing. And that's the story of my career. How long ago was that? How long have you been out now? Well, 18.

January of 18, so six years, almost. Carry the one on that one. Yep. Don't do math in public. It's probably going to end poorly. But, yeah, somewhere around six. I text Glover and I ask him to do my math from him. He's got the computer.

ask him. He's not, again, he's already completely checked out of this conversation. I can't read, remember. It's, it's numbers. You don't have to read. He's got his tea over there, his burrito. He's just doing, he just does whatever he wants. I looked up a pedal turn. Oh, my God. Please don't use any analogies or metaphors or terminology from an aircraft. You're doing great, Michael. Keep up. He's been an aircraft twice on the way to Arizona with us and on the way back. Not true. Don't listen to him. Lots of experience.

Love it. So far, you haven't talked at all about being an author, but yet there are two books in front of us. Yes. So at some point in time, that hit the interest radar scope. Yeah. There was a lot of downtime and the job that I was working. The F-35 one?

Yes. Okay. Yes. It's not extremely test-saturating. I'm at a point in my life where I'm getting paid for my experience, It's not necessarily my ability. Obviously, there has to be some ability there to be able to communicate with people. But I sit around and tell old guys stories to a younger generation of fighter pilots coming through.

So in my downtime, I started putting some thoughts together. This one, no new lessons was first, correct? No new lessons was first. And that one, I kind of had a construct built, maybe a five-page that I'd written, five pages of the story written. me and two of my buddies went on a hike in Alaska. It turned out to be pretty epic. And Katie had been trying to get me to write the story for years. That happened in 2009. This is now 2019-ish when starting to have this conversation. And I just started kind of plinking away. I started with an outline and filled in some blank spaces and then put some fluff in there. And before you know it, you got a book a couple years later. How many total words? That one's 48-ish. Okay.

Yeah, 48,000. It's a quick read. Yeah, yeah, about four hours or so I can get through it. I've read it about 10 times. Well, I've always heard that the average book that is published is somewhere between 40 to 80,000 words. So I was actually asking, selfishly trying to figure out, or I was guessing in my head it would be about 60, just to see what the... This one's 68,000. These two are dimensionally, they are the same size, six by eight and a half, maybe, something like that, five and a half by eight and a half.

And this one's about 68,000 words. So you can, I mean, it's just a little bit thicker. So this one is based in a hike where you're... That's a hike in Alaska, yeah. Okay. Work hard don't suck. I'm going to guess is not based on a hike in Alaska. No.

Go back to the beginning where we were talking about the kids. Now, I don't know about you, but when I find a child in the dumpster, I'm apt to take him home. For clarity, what you just described that have never had happened. Nor do I know anybody else that has had that happen to. Did you actually find a child in a dumpster? My youngest son was found in a dumpster at the Walmart. Did you find him in the dumpster? No, but my two older boys had convinced him of that by the time he was about two years old.

And we still joke with him about being found in the dumpster at Walmart. So I was challenged by my 21-year-old to mention that on this podcast somewhere, so I had to throw that out there. I mean, I'm thinking more about. the living environment or circumstances and conditions and what would drive a parent to the place where I mean there's a lot of options out there and I'm not saying that people know what all those options are adoption would be probably largely recognizable but even fire stations

I forget what they call it it's like it's essentially a safe I don't know it's a safe I think it's a safe surrender is what they call it where if you want to take that step they will there are there used to be one right down from where I lived in San Diego. It was out in the O-Tai area. There was a fire station and there was a picture of a baby on the outside of the fire station. And I think it said safe surrender site, but it was a, I think, kind of no questions asked. I just feel like there is a galaxy of options in between all of those things and putting a child into a dumpster at Walmart. For the public surface announcement, that is awesome. I have no essay on any of that.

I have not researched any of that. And to be fair, I've never found a child in the dumpster. Okay. This was something my children had convinced my youngest child of and still tease him about to this. Okay, so it didn't actually happen. We did not find a child. You motherfucker. I was thinking that this actually happened.

I had almost just lost all faith in humanity. If I were to find a child in the dumpster, I imagine I would treat it kind of like a stray dog and take it home. I don't know. At least I would probably tell someone about it. I don't know the rules on that. I think you're supposed to call 911. Again, I don't know. I've never found a child in the dumpster,

but I won the challenge with my 21-year-old, and now we can move on. Okay. Where the fuck did that challenge come from? It's a, well, it's not a long story. It's a short story. Because my two older boys had convinced him when he was about two years old

that we found him in a dumpster, and we still tease him about that. A few days ago, I found on Instagram or something, there was a, what do you call them, memes? Memes? It could be. A picture was words on it. Yeah, that's a meme.

And there were two children sitting on the steps and it said something like siblings and she was pointing to the other one and said, you were found in a dumpster. So I screenshot it and I sent it to my boys and I said, ha ha, this sounds familiar. Immediately in five seconds or less, my 21 year old text me back and goes, I challenge you to mention that on the podcast with Andy tomorrow. Is it okay, challenge accepted. So. Okay. I mean, I guess it could have gotten a little bit weirder.

Caleb was found in a dumpster as far as he knows. Perfect. I don't know how that ties into the work hard don't suck. I'm fascinated to see how you put a bow on this. Eventually, this dumpster child grows up and he goes off into the real world, right? Well, okay, so he's, gosh, he's maybe 16 or so. And Caleb's an athletic kid. He comes in from football practice one night.

Katie and I are sitting in a living room watching TV. He comes in, no shirt, hat turned backwards, beats headphones, walks right past us to his room as 16-year-olds are apt to do, right? And in that moment, it just hit me, and I leaned up to Katie and I said, I think we're done raising our kids. I don't think you'll ever be done being a parent. But as far as teaching them right from wrong and the do's and don'ts of life, at least, you know, the 80% solution, I think we did that. And it kind of scared me a little bit because, you know, in a couple of years, these kids are going to be out in the real world. So fast forward a couple years, a year or so, Father's Day, 2021 was the first time that none of my kids called, texted, emailed, said, happy Father's Day. Doesn't it feel great?

Kind of caught me off guard a little bit. It did. It caught me off guard, man. and I had just finished Jocko's book, Extreme Ownership. And I just sat in my room and I did a lot of introspection and I tried to figure out where this train started to go off the tracks. And I realized that as my kids had gotten older, mandatory family time had kind of been put on the wayside or off to the side. We didn't do as many things together anymore that we used to. I think when your kids are little, you know, you're used to them playing in the living room.

They're in your bubble a little bit more. And then as they grow up and they have their own friends and their own life and they're starting to write their own narratives, naturally they start to diverge. Right. And I view my role as the dad to to keep that together as much as I can. You know, that's just part of the leadership of the family in my opinion was I got to keep this. I got to keep this from exploding and everybody going their separate ways. And so I called a family meeting around the table, started talking to them. And I owned everything. I said, look, man, I'm going to take ownership. of this. I'm taking accountability. From now on, when I deem it necessary to have family time, it doesn't even have to be anything formal. It can be pizza over watching the Goldbergs or whatever

it is. You know, 30 minutes over a sitcom, let's just BS for a minute. How is your day? My day sucked. All right, good. At least I've put eyes on you and I've had a conversation with you. That turned into me doing a little bit more thinking and realizing that these kids are getting ready to go out into the real world. I wanted to give them one, last volley of dad advice. And so I started making a list. I had an idea. I was going to make a list of things that we taught our kids as they were growing up and write one eight and a half by 11 single space page, six, 800 words or so on each topic. Short stories, because the attention span of a teenager I'm predicting is probably smaller than you hand a teenager war and peace. They're

probably not going to read it, whereas if you hand them a short article, maybe they will. I ended with 160 of these topics. Just brainstorming over a couple of months. Started typing them out, ended up picking 61 of them, and that's where work hard don't suck came from. It's basically dad advice to help you suck less in life. Do you, when none of your kids communicated with you on Father's Day, do you actually think that you are responsible for that?

I think that I could have potentially prevented it. Yeah. I like Jocko very much. I've read his books. I go back and forth. You know, I'm kind of a... Everything in moderation to include moderation sometimes. And the extreme ownership model, I think, has far more positive benefits than negative.

And the only real negative one that I can think of, actually. And before I say anything else, I am not trying to present an opinion that is different. than Jocco's. I think sometimes people take his message a little bit too far. It's almost, fuck, I was screw this one. That was either McRaven or Crystal did the Make Your Bed speech. Yeah. So it's made a lot of people start making their bed.

And they completely lost the forest for the trees. It's about a disciplined act in the morning. It's not actually, yeah. It's not like make your bed because we're not animals. Exactly. Which, funny side note, again, on Tyler, he, my middle son went eight months without having sheets on his bed and I had no idea because he would just put a blanket over the top and folded in and he came to announce to me about two weeks ago dad today was a big

day I was like oh tell me about it he goes I have sheets on my bed I put sheets on my bed yeah and I said to him I haven't seen your sheets in the laundry room or in a hamper where were they for the last eight months oh they were balled up inside of one of my drawers another good story about Tyler one time I went into his room and opened his top drawer and found an entire dinner place setting. Fork, knife, plate and food on it in his top drawer. I'm only laughing because I've seen this movie before. And then I, of course, ask him, what the fuck, man?

Yeah. And he looks at me as if I'm the one with three eyeballs growing out of my forehead and goes, well, yeah, it's just there for right now. I was going to put it in the dishwasher later. You know, part of my, going into this, I didn't write this just straight out of my brain onto paper. I did, I talked to a lot of people, a lot of dads. I talked to girl dads.

I talked to guy dads. I only have boys. And I wanted to get a girl dad's perspective on things. And, I mean, just having all these conversations, I really, I found that all these kids are the same. There's going to be dinner plates in the top drawer. There's going to be sheets wadded up under the bed for six months. You know, there's, I had, my son came down from college the other day for two nights. There were four dirty towels.

That checks out. Not one of them was in the dirty clothes. They were all on the floor. The dirty clothes hamper is right by the shower, which is also right by the door to exit the bathroom. Yeah. They were on the floor. It takes more effort to put it on the floor than it does in the fucking hamper man. I can add to that.

I was having this conversation with my wife this morning, I think. For whatever reason, our towels all have, like, white spots on them. They're bleached. No, they're bleach. Stains. We don't have any fucking bleach in our house. So our son is, he's doing laundry, but somehow the fucking towels all have a bleat. And she's like, are you doing this?

Like, I'm not doing this. Who's doing this? Like, there's only three of us in this house. I'm going to guess. And it's like, what is he, what is he doing? Does he put a handful of apples in there or some fruit that has a naturally occurring? Oh, yeah, dad. By the way, I throw my batteries in the wash as I'm doing my towels.

Oh, he's done that. Yeah. I got him a passport for so we could travel to Costa Rica. We get there, he does a load of laundry and puts his passport in his pocket for the first load. I had to put his passport in a book with weight on top of it to keep it from falling apart so get back in the fucking country. Again, seeing these movies before. But that's, you know, when I'm talking to, I grew up. But meanwhile, he wants to start his own business.

Like, how? what is happening here? You're like a needle that is penduluming back and forth. He will learn lessons the hard way. And, and, you know, there's, there's so much of that is in here. And one of the things is life will continue to present you the opportunity to learn a lesson until you actually learn the lesson. You're going to get opportunity after. Pretty soon, he's going to be old like me and he's going to have a bad back and he's going to get tired of reaching down and picking up fucking towels off the floor. And maybe then he'll put his towels in the dirty clothes. Maybe it takes that long. Hopefully. he learns it earlier in life. But yeah, you're exactly right. The make your bed thing, it's just everyday discipline. Well, it's starting your day with a small disciplined act. That's it. I'm glad you're mind of that because I wanted to finish my thought on the extreme ownership. Yeah, go. I'm going to give you, I'm going to paint an example that I bet you've seen in your military career, because this is one where I think the extreme ownership can be taken too far. And the reality is you can't control other people's behavior. True. So how many times

did you get a safety brief on a weekend? Hey, guys. don't drink and drive. Yep. Yeah. So basically every Friday. And there's great, let's just, we'll create a hypothetical command. There's a fantastic leadership structure, both on the enlisted side and the officer's side. And there is mentorship.

And the mentorship is checking in with these individuals at a personal and a professional level. And there's not a culture that promotes the usage of alcohol, which I always found to be hilarious when I first got to the SEAL teams. Do not get a DUI. better be at the fucking kegger on the grinder at noon on Friday. And since you're a new guy, don't be a pussy and be the last one to go home. And it's like, sir, I drove here to work today. And you're telling me that I have to stay and drink beer and be the last person here. How am I supposed to get home?

Because you just told me not to get a DUI. This is a different podcast subject in and of itself. But you talk to your people. You give them the safety briefs. You give them the phone number for, you know, a lot of the commands will have services set up with taxi companies back in the day. And I'm sure they do now with Uber, where it's like, just call this number. They'll give you a ride and the command will pay for it. We have a budget a lot for that.

And a young kid's going to go out and get a fucking DUI or an alcohol-related incident. And oftentimes they'll want to hammer the direct supervisor for that individual as well, to include the individual. Is the supervisor actually accountable and responsible for that? Now, I say people at the very foundational level, You are responsible for your actions, 100%. The extreme ownership model, though, can be taken to a place where you think you're responsible for other people's actions. I can see that. And while I don't disagree with there are circumstances where the leader should be responsible for the team, definitely agree with that.

But at an individual level, and we're just talking about your own Andy's personal standard, you are 100% in control of that. And you have to own that. And like, you can't blame other people that you've gained five pounds. That is on you, man. You didn't go to the gym. You didn't eat the right things. You didn't have that daily discipline in your life. And I mean, I'm going through this right now. I had a really good summer. I had a fantastic summer. I was in great shape. I was doing really good. And then I had an event in my life that derailed me and kind of took me off track. I lost focus. My parents went through some things. My mom had to come live with me for a little bit. excuse after excuse after excuse. But at the end of the day, it came down to, I should have been able to factor in 45 minutes a day to go for a walk or go for a jog or go hit the weights or whatever it is. And because I was unable to do that, now I've put on a couple of pounds right before Thanksgiving, which is probably not the best time to do that. So, but there's another side of that coin. You should be able to also give yourself a little bit of grace and realize that there's the way that you want life to go. and then there's the way that life goes sometimes

and the challenges that it throws at you. I've watched people auger in with this level of myopic focus on where they are falling short and being unwilling to accept in any level of deviation. I am failing because I didn't get enough time at the gym. It's okay to give yourself a little bit of grace.

And you need the valleys to appreciate the peaks. I'll agree with that, 100%. I also will say, my own personal standard, those valleys should not last for two or three months, maybe a couple of weeks before. And what's really bad to me is I recognized it two or three weeks into this. I recognize it and I'm going, man, I'm getting off track. At that point, it's now a decision to not do the things that I know I should probably be doing. Perfectly capable. The time is there during the day. I have the bandwidth. I should be able to do these things, whether it's

sitting down and reading a book for 10 minutes a day or doing a little bit of meditation or going for a walk and listening to a good book or podcast or something to keep my mind and my body and my soul sharp, I was actively choosing to not do that. And that's where I had the problem with it. And this is all between my own ears. You know, you have a personal standard that you like to uphold. Hopefully you do. If you don't have a personal standard, I would hope that you would establish one at some point. and when you're not living up to that standard, identify that and get back on track. You're right with the grace thing.

I get it, you know, I had to take a rest day yesterday. I didn't want to, but due to some physiological things, I needed to take a down day. Yeah, almost passed out in the shower. It would have been ugly. I thought it would have been a good chance to do some burpees when you woke up. Very jocco-esque. Yeah.

Oh, here I'm down on the floor. I should have took a picture of my watch when I got up this morning, because I got up before Jocko, just saying. I have so many ideas that would make his life easier, like hiring somebody for minimum wage to take a picture of a watch for like several years in a row so he can just post on a schedule. There. Schedule that shit out on Facebook?

You can do that, man. And don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing, and I don't want people to think that I'm arguing for being too easy on yourself because there are examples of what that looks like all around us. And I'm just going to leave it at that because I don't want to nitpick on anybody. and I don't know the realities of what's going on in people's lives, physically, emotionally, life circumstances, but there are plenty of examples out there. I just, I worry that those things can be taken too far. The reality is, I don't know if there's much that you could have done for your kids to contact you on Father's Day.

It's they also have their own lives. That's true. They have their own interests. and I think as parents when you're talking about your son walking by and saying to your wife, hey, I think our job raising them is done. Not that you're done being a parent.

The realization I have had is the older my children get, the less influence I have on their life and the more that their social circle does. Because when they start going to school, especially if you are a professional in any capacity, like you have an occupation,

your kids are actually going to spend more time away from you than they're going to spend with you. you. Yeah, they will. And that continues to grow as they get older. My oldest son, he used to work at the coffee shop, and it was such a beautiful time in my life because I could go see him almost every day. And there was a period of time in the middle of my divorce where we did not communicate or see each other for 18 months. And that was largely his choice. And I reached out in every mechanism that I knew how, whether it be writing him letters, texting him, trying to call him, but not forcing that time and fuck that was a rough road and we came out of that it sucked yeah and we came out of that

and I was finally getting to see him and now he has a different job and I don't ever get to really see him and I don't and I try to reach out to him and it's it's it guts you as a parent yeah but I also don't want to go and be overbearing and I think I could push him farther away if I adopted the approach of his lack of communicating with me is somehow my fault. So I'm going to double my efforts and force it upon him via my own actions. It's a double-edged sword. Yeah, I could see that. And I noticed that with my boys as well.

You know, as they got older and they started filling in their social calendars, oftentimes we were left out of that. And I... You were in the month of Neviary? Yeah. I made a... I think I... made a conscious decision at some point along the line, I think it's your kids are growing up.

Now, again, this is boys. I only have experience with boys. I don't know if it's different with girls, but there comes a point where it was less, you know, yelling at them or getting on to them and trying to shape their behavior via a disciplined parenting approach versus just being an example for them to follow. I think that there was a line in there somewhere, probably around when they were 15, maybe 13 to 15 years old, where I really, I shifted from the shaky finger tactics to, man, if I just live my life in a way that they would want to emulate when they got older, they're going to, just by osmosis and watching, hopefully they're going to start replicating some of the behaviors that I'm doing.

And there's a quote in the book that says, one day your son's going to grow up to be just like you. Are you okay with that? And that was, I mean, that's kind of a tough question to a degree. Do you think that's valid, though? How true do you think that quote is? Well, on a level, I think it's good because, I mean, I can see it in my boys. I got a 27, 21, and a 19-year-old.

And even my bonus son is he's 18 and just graduated basic training. And I can see the little pieces in there. What does a bonus son mean, by the way? So my youngest son's best friend since fifth grade had a not-so-good home life. Other than stellar upbringing? Well, his home life was deteriorating around him. Stepdad and mom, they ended up splitting. He was living with his stepdad driving 30 miles to school every day.

He was sleeping on the couch. There was all of his shit in a box at the end of the couch. My 21-year-old moved out into a house in town with a couple of his buddy. So we had an open bedroom, and my youngest boy says, hey, man, can Colin come and move in with us? Yep, bring him on. We got enough space. We got enough love to go around. Bring him on.

Can you even fathom allowing one of your children to, sleep on the couch with all their shit in a box? No, but, you know, when people fall in hard times, shit happens, you know, and sometimes you have to endure some things that maybe you didn't plan on. To a degree, yeah. But after this goes on for six months and instead of trying to rise up to the occasion, maybe the person sulks and goes down a different road, goes to the bottle, something like that, that's where I would probably have more of an issue with it.

All of those circumstances, notwithstanding, He came to live with us about a year and a half ago. And I realized very quickly that I had a lot of dadding to do with this boy. Was he receptive to it? At first he was a little, he'd been used to solving life's problems on his own. So he had a little, he had some barriers up. And it was, it was tough for us to knock some of those down, even up to the point where Katie and I went out to his basic training graduation just a few weeks ago.

Katie had gotten up to go to the bathroom and I was sitting across the table from this kid. He's in his blues, looking sharp. I mean, he crushed it. He did great. And I had a conversation with him in that four to five minutes or so. I was like, dude, I hope that you understand now, I'm on your team, man. Like, I got you. All right? You're my boy. I'm going to take care of you. I'm not just spitting a bunch of shit at you to be mean to you, right? I'm not trying to tell you to pick up your crap in your room because I just want to get on to you. There's a reason for this stuff, right? I told him before he went to basic training, your success in basic training is going to come down to two things. Attention to detail and your ability to follow simple instructions.

If you can do those two things better than everybody else, you're going to win, and you're going to win hard, right? He's an intelligent kid. He's smart. He's the first of five brothers to graduate high school. Even his mom didn't graduate high school. Happy to report that she is going back to school. He inspired her to go back. That's all great.

Hard working kid got a great work ethic. He's worked jobs since he was probably, what, 14 or 15? 15 years old. I mean, he's a good kid. He just needed some shaping. And I was, I was really glad that we got the opportunity to mold him and turn him in. We convinced him to join the military. And he, in my opinion, was a prime candidate to go to Air Force basic training. And he's going to crush. I think he's going to do great. Do you really think your kids turn out exactly like you, though? Maybe not exactly, but there's pieces in there. There's pieces, and I think that they... Hopefully it's the good pieces.

It's not going to be at all I swear to God They are so attuned to mistakes And they are completely oblivious to successes sometimes But is that just a rite of passage or Well I don't I personally don't believe that your kids are going to end up exactly like you I think they will have some character traits And I think the environment that they grow up

And is certainly going to leave an imprint on them My hope for my kids actually is that they end up Nothing like me I hope that they exceed Who I am and what I have been able to do, which I quite frankly and honestly from the bottom of my heart, don't consider to be that much. I feel like they would have to trip over the bar. It is so low to be able to achieve more. But that's all I want for them. And I also, and I have no desire to define success

for them. I just want them to be happy and thriving in what it is that they're doing, a positive contributing member to society. Well, there's two chapters in that book then that I think go along with that. Actually, there's probably more than that. But the two that stood out to me, just while you're saying that where there's a chapter in the book that says you define success only you can define that if your idea of success is working minimum wage and living in a single wide then dude go for it you know but at the end of the day you probably only have yourself to blame for any misfortune that you may encounter because of that if your idea of success is hosting an awesome podcast then go for it man set that bar and do it and you and i see life through the same lens when it comes to man i tell people

all the time. I didn't do anything special. I was a product of dumb luck and timing. That was it. I say all the time that you don't always have to be the shiniest penny. Sometimes you just need to be a penny when they need a penny. And I got on the wave in the shallow end when the wave was really small. And as the wave went out, it got a little bit bigger. I just rode the wave, man. Yeah. That was it. There's a lot of luck and timing involved in almost everything as well. How much of that do you create on your own? You know, how much of how much of luck is due to preparation, though. A lot of the times people want to associate success through whatever that metric that may be.

Some people think success is your Twitch streamer on YouTube and you have millions of followers. Okay, cool. Not my thing, but I don't give a shit. I really don't understand what you just said, but I'll take your word for it. I actually don't understand exactly what I just said. There are terms that I have heard used. So the video game part I get, Twitch, I believe, is a streaming platform. And I still don't understand why people enjoy this.

It's a streaming platform where other people who are not playing a video game watch you play a video game. Oh, I've seen this. Is that kind of an accurate description, Michael? Yeah. Okay. But, and there are people who have millions of followers that do that. And they give them, they do like donations. I think you can do a subscription model.

And that, cool. Other people, it's like, I have to be a titan of industry and I have to have patents and all these other things. I don't, I don't give a shit what all of that is. It's easy, and this happens all the time. You see somebody who's successful, oh, it must be nice to be an overnight success, the 10-year overnight success story, or people will say luck. But luck, you could define it a variety of different ways. I think it's the confluence of opportunity and hard work. Yeah.

And you have to have both of those. Timing. Timing. You know, there's a lot of things that have to kind of get smashed together into a circle peg to be put into a circle hole. And yes, it's easier for people to say, hey, oh, you're really lucky. And in many aspects of my life, I've absolutely been very lucky. But you can't view just that, you can't myopically view, say, one marble that's on the top in a fishbowl. You have to look at all the other marbles and all the other work that were put in to build that foundation.

Yeah, you can see the one that's on top because it's the highest one up there, but you're ignoring everything else. Yeah, you're a product of every decision you ever made. Unfortunately, yes. Yeah, well, a fucked up decisions. I hear it all the time, too. I hear, oh, Roscoe, you're so lucky. Okay, well, why am I lucky? Well, you had this military career.

You got to fly jets and do all that. Okay. Well, I made a decision when I was 20 years old to join the military. You didn't make that decision. I did, right? I made a decision to go to school and get an education and apply for officer training school. Now, yeah, I got lucky. And the education officer sent my package to a rated board versus a non-rated board.

Maybe that's part of that luck in there and the opportunity in that kind of nebulous area. But had I not going to school, I wouldn't have put me. myself in that position. Yeah, you did a lot of things to get yourself to the place where the luck would actually pay off the right. And that's where I say the preparation comes in. And preparation may be a loose term. But the decision making on the back end set you up for the success on or the decision

making on the front end set you up for the success on the back end kind of thing. And, you know, going back to the book, the work hard don't suck. You know, that's really where I'm trying to fit in. These kids go up there. I saw this with all of my boys. They get up to graduation. to high school graduation and high school is their why for a lot of things in their life. Either it's the sports or, you know, trying to impress the girls or whatever.

But that's the reason they get up early in the morning. That's the reason they read. That's the reason they keep their hair cut, hopefully, things like that. All of a sudden they move their tassel to the other side and that shit's over with. Now what? Now real life begins. And there's a gap in there where society, I think, a lot of people in society are expected these kids to know what they want to do for the rest of their life. And, dude, I'll tell you,

it took me years to figure that out. I knew I loved the, I knew I loved airplanes since the first top gun came out in the 80s. So I'm talking about, God, that's what I'm talking about. I didn't know how to get there. I didn't know how to get. I knew zero people in the military when I was growing up, not one. And so I just kind of made shit up as I went. And maybe I got lucky, but maybe I also worked my ass off, right? And that's kind of my message to, at least to my boys, is the success that you have or don't have in your life is going to come down to the decisions that you make. And if you make good decisions based on good information and you work hard and put forth effort, then you too can have a successful life, however you define that.

What color are the officer dress uniforms in the Air Force? Blue? Question mark? Yeah. All of our service dresses is all the same. But do you guys ever go to bars with aviator glasses on and sing to women at pianos? Occasionally, even my son's an ROTC, and he wears aviators now. Yeah.

It's tough to make those look good. What I really enjoy, though, is a good Saturday afternoon shirtless volleyball game. Those never get old. Do you notice in that scene they had their wrists taped as if they were... What was that for? I'm not a volleyball guy. Maybe there's pressure on the wrist when you're spiking it. When you guys would get out of the F-15 after a combat mission, would you high-five,

high and then finish it up low like Top Gun? I have high-fived on the ramp. But was it that Mav Goose? Feel the need for speed kind of thing. Please tell me you guys at least say that shit sometimes in there. Oh, yeah. More often. Thank God.

My hope is that there are children up there flying multi-million dollar war aircraft. Dude, I have no kidding, been taxiing out and having a conversation on the intercom going, who the fuck thought it was a great idea to give us the keys to a gym? That is what I'm talking about. I'm a child. And being in a fighter squadron is probably no different than being on in the ready rooms that you've sat in. It's an excuse to be a 12-year-old for the rest of your life. Dick and fart jokes never get old.

We don't really have ready rooms. No? No. Just hot bunking. Well, hold on. What is a ready room? I guess rooms that you would sit in and get ready for things? We would usually, I mean. Briefing room?

We have that. Okay. Yeah. go. Mission planning rooms? I tried to stay out of those. Big table in the middle with a map on it. I was more into the execution as opposed to the ideation phase. What are your thoughts on?

Probably a good way to be. Yeah. What do you thoughts on all military branches missing their recruiting goals? Oh, wow. And I might be, Michael, if you could double check me on this. I believe the highest number and I don't know which service is associated with, but I think it might be near 40% under. Yeah. I actually just had this conversation with one of the recruits.

back in the spring when I was trying to get fourth kid into the Air Force. And some of it is the kids just don't want to join up. That's definitely, that definitely plays a part. Some of it also is. Did the recruiter, not to interrupt you, but did the recruiter have any ideas as to why? Because I get that sense, but it seems like it really spans a lot of different issues, whether it's how the military is portrayed. They don't want to be told, honestly, it's almost they just don't want to be told what to do and what they can and can't do. Yeah. I don't think it's military specific, honestly. And this is anecdotal. But I don't think that they want to work. I don't think that they wanted to. I was, again, this morning, sitting by the pool in the hotel, having a conversation with the janitor.

What hotel are you staying at? We're up in Columbia Falls at the Cedar Creek Lodge. I was going to say, I wasn't aware of it. Any hotels appear having a pool? Yeah, no, there's like five people in the whole hotel. That's the only reason I asked. It was like, pool, what are you talking about? Yeah, I got to know, I got to know like the entire staff in 15 minutes up there. It was great. But yeah, we're talking. He said, even there, he says, we can't find people to work.

They just don't show up on time or they don't show up at all. They ghost us all the time. So I don't know if it's military specific with that. I mean, the military has always drawn small numbers in comparison to the overall population. It's a hard life. Six percent is the stat I've seen somewhere between World War I to World War II peak draft era. It's at about 0.5 percent right now. So there's all, I think, I mean... We have peaks and valleys in there too.

Peaks and valleys for sure, but it's never even approached a double-digit number, which it was interesting. I was having a conversation this morning with Sebastian Younger, of all people. I did an episode for tomorrow that'll come out kind of specific to veterans for Veterans Day. He said, you know, it's actually a good thing that we haven't had a military that is that size because he's not sure whether we could afford it. Because if you look at one of the largest DOD line items for spending is actually retirement. Retirement. And that's lost on a lot of people.

So I don't know if our economy would actually sustain a 10 to 15%. Well, and you got to look at, I mean, also look at how many people who enlist or join up day one actually make it to retirement. There's a percentage cut there too. So, I mean, those numbers could go up for sure. And I know in the Air Force on the officer side right now anyways, we're in kind of a bathtub, the bottom of a valley. The guys who joined the Air Force 15 years ago, there weren't as many. And so, I mean, we're seeing people who are getting commands of squadrons that two or three years ago wouldn't have even been considered. And I'm not, yeah, that's not a slight on any of those dudes.

They're all awesome dudes. But I'm just saying that, you know, when you compare them to some of their peers from two or three years ago, there were more numbers. The pool was a, it was a larger selection at that point. I'm going to correct what you said because you said they were all awesome dudes. What you meant to say was that they're not all awesome dudes by any stretch. And the reality of the military is, is if you're in long enough and have a heartbeat, you're going to be considered for those positions. And oftentimes the people most prepared for and suited for them, they leave for other waters. What you said is not incorrect. By awesome dudes, I also mean, dude, if you've

been in the military for 15 years, like you've devoted a large portion of your adult life to service and you've done some good things, right? Now, you may not be the strongest swimmer. You may not be the shiniest penny, but again, you're a penny and we need a penny, you know, and sometimes just being a penny as half the battle. And not a slight on any of those guys. I know a lot of guys that are in command positions right now that five years ago wouldn't have been considered. What does that do for the readiness of the military, though? I don't know. I guess we'll have to.

And again, you're not talking about just your community. I think this is a problem probably military-wide. You're probably right. So if you're considering people for a job that in comparison to their peers five years ago, which those peers have since moved on, they wouldn't have gotten the job. I'm not saying that there's another option. But what does that mean as far as readiness and actual lethality of those units? Well, you know?

Is your question really, are we lowering the standard? Is that really your question? No, I don't really have a question. I mean, in my mind, the battlefield should set the standard because that's the execution of the real world execution of the occupation of the job. I don't think that's going to shift. So that's what the standard should be. Are we tolerating people who are falling short of that standard with limited gene pool? Probably.

Yeah. That would be, I would say the same thing. Yeah. And the problem is, though, that's not a galactic, like, crack in the concrete that spreads apart rapidly. That's an incremental insidious creep. Well, and you're not talking about these gross differences either, I don't think, at least not in my career. In my career field, like, you have to be doing something right to get into a single-seat cockpit. You know, we don't just put every knucklehead Joe Bob into a single-seat cockpit.

probably just like there aren't very many machine gunners out there who were just, you know, hey, man, come here. I'm going to give you this machine gun. You know, you worked at Walmart yesterday. Let's try this out. More often than that's actually a whole happens. At some point, you have to prove that you are at least capable of meeting the standard. And, you know, you understand that a machine gun is far less complex to operate than a single seat F-16, right? Probably. I can teach a monkey, and I'm not joking. Probably not a howler monkey, but I feel like I could teach a chimpanzee how to use a saw. And it would be amazing, and I would put that shit on Instagram. I could probably teach that same monkey how to fly an airplane. That is not true. That is not true. Trees get small. I'm a pilot myself. I'm telling you that is a monkey could up.

I mean, they say, oh, if you put a limited amount of monkeys in front of an unlimited amount of typewriters, you'd get Shakespeare's work. Yeah. You're forgetting all the fucking F-16s that would crash for that one monkey that could get it off the ground. Given enough time and enough budget, we could probably make this happen. Yeah. You know, one of the things that was interesting to me, though, is just on a medical line, DOD changed one of their medical systems, I guess, one of their databases or their intake or outtake systems or whatever it is. And the things that used to be waverable in the past are now having to go to Surgeons General to get wavered.

and those guys are like there's a large percentage of them that are getting kicked back. So the kids who do want to join, even a percentage of them, are getting are getting rejected based on this new system. And this was from the recruiter's mouth. Now, I don't know exactly what she was talking about. Like, I can't give you the exact acronym or whatever it was. But again, anecdotally speaking, let's say that you got 10 kids that show up. Maybe four of them are going to get red flagged by this new system and have to go to the Surgeon General. and two of those guys aren't going to make the cut and get the waiver.

I'm actually okay with that. The military should be, in my opinion, exceptionally hard to qualify for, given what the job actually is. That's the key phrase, right? That's the qualifier, though, right? I mean, to be a cook in the Air Force, how physically demanding is that job? Yeah, but then you're forgetting what happened in the early aughts when they developed the IA program, the individual augmentee program. And all of the sudden, I can only speak on the Navy side of the house, all the same, all the sudden people who had non-combat MOSs were getting hit up to deploy overseas because they were short on bodies.

We saw some of that in the Air Force. So you could say, so an easy argument to make is, well, how hard is it to be a cook? It's not that hard when everything is in line and there isn't an excessive pull on forces because we're in a war in two different countries. And now we're pulling people downrange. And if you go down range, you're going to associate all. I mean, I'm not saying that they're going to be on target. But now all of a sudden they're accepting the additional. risk of being downrange. Maybe an IDF round comes in and you're going to be required to actually

pick somebody up or drag them out of the building or be a first responder. That can't be lost. The litmus test for people joining the military can't be the day where it's sunny out and then at nighttime the beautiful, you know, the stars and rainbows and all this shit. It needs to at least be tempered through the worst case scenario. That's valid. And I'm curious to get your take on this, like service specific air force Marines Navy Army I heard this I heard this it was kind of framed as a joke but there's a there's a Marine enlisted and a Marine officer they're walking down the street and some guy goes hey Marine and they all turn they both turn around yep every Marines are rifleman army enlisted officer they're like hey soldier they

both turn around enlisted and officer Air Force Somebody yells, hey, airman, the enlisted guy turns around. So I'm curious, service specifically, is there a mentality shift? Or is there a difference in just the way that we're trained and brought up and taught to where, like you said, every Marine is a rifleman first? And maybe you can subplant that cook into a, I don't know, a fob where he's cooking. and he also has an enforced right to his back. I would say that there are differences between the service, but then also inside of the services as well.

Because I could take that same analogy and say there is a naval fleet officer and a naval enlisted sailor, but then there's differences in how they view their role versus a seal officer and an enlisted seal. That's valid. So you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. There are definitely differences.

I absolutely love the Marines. They have a little bit of a weird, addiction to red vehicles, which is fine. But what I love is that at a core, and I understand that this, you know, there's mottos and then there's living, you know, the ethos and motto. But the fact that, you know, every Marine is a rifleman. That is an awesome foundational point to start everybody with to keep them mission-oriented and focused writ large.

The Navy doesn't really have, I mean, it's, fuck, I can't even think of the number of times. the motto of the Navy has changed even when I was in. I was prepare for the future. Actually, I'm not even to pretend to make it up. I didn't even pay attention because a lot of that was for just getting people into the Navy to begin with. But even inside of those, you could compare the branches, but it gets even more complicated when you start comparing the other jobs inside of those branches on the conventional side, and then you add the special operations later that.

It's a tough one to compare apples to apples on. Yeah. And, you know, I would think that I don't have to. have any firsthand knowledge of this, but I would think that the special operations piece of either of the service is kind of notched out of the main service in a lot of regards, both from a leadership standpoint, from a recruiting standpoint, from how you carry yourself on the team day-to-day standpoint, and much can be said for a fighter squadron as well. Like, we are notched out of the, what I'll call just the regular Air Force, for lack of a better term. It's not like we're,

you know, some special command or anything like that. but I think that there's just a little bit of a different mentality there. We wear flight suits. None of the Air Force, none of the rest of the Air Force wears flight suits. We wear Cool Guy patches on our uniforms. None of the rest of the Air Force does that. So, yeah, we kind of stick out like a turd and a punch bowl in a lot of ways. And there's just a different way that we carry ourselves in our day-to-day actions and our squadrons.

Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's healthy as long as it's not taken too far. Well, then you get, you know, the outsiders looking in. Maybe they want a piece of that, and that's where the grumbling start. and then you start with complaints, and there was that whole thing at Shaw Air Force Base back, what, I don't know, 10 years ago,

10, 12 years ago. There was some, there were some complaints from some of the enlisted females in the fighter squadron that there was some pornography on one of the computers in the fighter bar.

I believe this is the story. Somebody can correct it in the comments later. Is the fighter bar on base? The fighter bar is in the squadron and it's a password protected. computer that on some Friday nights, we would go into the bar. I was never there, to be clear, I was never there. This is all just anecdotal third-hand information. But we do things, we call it a roll call. We'll go in, we'll shut the door, and the whoever's in charge

of the roll call that night starts at the wing commander, and he starts calling names. And if you're not there, you're assessed, you pay your fine or whatever. It's a reason for us to get together and have some camaraderie, sing some songs, drink some whiskies, whatever it is. Well, in the background, I guess, there was a password protected computer that they had unlocked and there were some pornography floating on a screen somewhere. I don't know the exact details. This enlisted airman female caught wind of that, did an IG complaint. The commanders and squadrons got in a lot of trouble, and that trickled out through the rest of the Air Force to the point where, so I had been kind of over here with the army from 10 to 13, I come back to Seymour Johnson to get requalled in the jet.

And sitting there day one of this transition course, the wing commander comes in and she just has us go around and introduce ourselves and welcomes us to Seymour Johnson. Thanks for coming back to the strike of you all, y'all have a nice day. She's in there 10 minutes tops. The next person that walks in is the ops group commander and he goes, all right, you, you and you're going to have to change your call signs and he walked out of the room. That was how bad it had gotten. Like some people who had these, I don't know, well, okay, so I knew a guy, I can't give anybody's name away. I don't want to give anybody's name away. There were some call signs that had some duality that could have been thought of as maybe risque, right? Like hammercock. That would probably be

not risque. That would be blatant in your face. I think it's right down the middle of the road. You could go any way you want to with that. I just came from a Navy base. And then the Navy, I spent a week out at Lamar doing some some sim events for them. And they do very different name styles than the Air Force does. We had what was called the Red Flag Test. You're familiar with the Red Flag exercise out of Nellus? I have heard of it.

And that is the limit of my knowledge or understanding. So Red Flag was brought up. After Vietnam, they realized that the kill-rable. ratios of air-to-air engagements, engagements overall were not what the leadership wanted to be. So they came up with this big-ass exercise called Red Flag. And hundreds of aircraft flying numerous objectives, ground, air, very robust exercise, right? And the Red Flag test for a naming ceremony in the Air Force is, can this guy, if we give him this name, can this guy get on stage at Red Flag and say, hi, my name is, and I'll be your mission commander today? That's kind of the test, the litmus test that we give in a naming ceremony.

So you can't name a guy sperm, burping, gutter, winch because it won't pass the red flag test. It's also a lot to paint on the side of the aircraft. To be fair, we named a guy sperm, burping gutter winch. We called him Spurpin for short, but... That's better than trying to write all that out. Luckily for him, he got renamed later. So... Huh. All right.

Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting... It's interesting direction with the modern military. area is going. Yeah. Good, bad? I don't know. I don't know. Or is it just ebbing and flowing? You know, maybe it's just changing with the times. Who knows? I don't have an answer to that. I'm not at a place of concern. I'm certainly at a place of being interested and seeing what's going on. I like my view from the outside in. And you know what, though, to be fair, I still do have a small level of influence on the people that I get to meet day to day. Like I said, man, I get to see all

the lieutenants come through the schoolhouse, the guys who are coming from other airframes, and we get to sit around, and we get to tell the old guy's stories. And how it used to be... What's a lieutenant in the Air Force? Is that an 03? No, no, no, no. So, sorry. That is a lieutenant would be 01 or 02. Do you guys... Do you guys go second lieutenant, then first lieutenant, then lieutenant? Yeah. Or is it a captain. Captain. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah, so the... Captain in the Navy is in 06. I know. So if I were... an Air Force 03 calling a Navy base to get lodging.

I would say, hey, this is Captain White. I'd like a room. And you'd get a dope room. Yeah, you get the nice suite at the VOQ. Yeah. But no, so I still do have a little bit of a very small part of influence on the next generation of guys that are coming up into the Air Force. And I see, I see some differences between the guys coming through now and when I went through, even just, when did I go through, 06, 06. seven time frame. And even the generation before that, you know, it's just, it's just different.

Flying rules are different. The aircraft are different. Society is different. The cultures are changing. Like, the, we used to, we used to have this rule in a debrief where, uh, you answer questions with yes, no, or I don't know. That's it. If you're asked a question, it's yes, no, or I don't know. And I see kids over here, you've got 20 hours flying. and you're going to sit here and argue with an instructor about whether you thought you were right or not. And, you know, it's just a, I guess it's just this shift in culture, the shift in mentality. And we can go back to the, are you holding the standard or not discussion? But I guess you get what you tolerate at some point.

Yeah. I don't know. What are you going to do with the rest of your life? I'm riding the wave, man. You going to write more? Maybe. There is a volume two to work hard, don't suck. It's on a computer somewhere.

I am I am really interested in influencing the generation that's that's transitioning from that high school to say mid-20s or so trying to figure out their shit, man. Dude, I graduated high school when I was 17. I moved out of the house immediately. Went to college for two years, failed miserably. So I joined the Air Force. And it took me, it still took me over five years to decide to go back to school. I knew what I wanted to do at that point. I had a family by then.

I mean, these things just don't happen overnight. This idea that an 18-year-old's going to know what he wants to do for the rest of his life, maybe there are some out there, but I think for the vast majority of kids, it just takes a while, man. You've got to experiment a little bit. You've got to move around. You've got to try some things and maybe figure out what you don't like first. And luckily for me, I joined the military. I was given some rules and some lanes to play in between, and I did well at that.

So now it's, you know, spreading that message, trying to. to hopefully take 47 years of lessons learned and pass them on to a generation. I really like to get into reaching larger audiences than selling a book here or there or going on a podcast here or there. I would really like to break that public speaking kind of boundary and be able to communicate to more than maybe my 20 people on my football team and things like that. So just trying new things. you know, looking at the horizon, seeing what's next. Yeah, I think sometimes that's all you can do, man. Yeah.

I mean, you look at the course of your life and how many times did you just say, oh, that looks cool. Let me go try that. More often than not. Yeah. And that's kind of where I'm at. You know, I'm in a good place financially. I'm in a good place in my marriage. My kids have moved out.

I've got a lot of freedom, a lot of time. and I got a lot of, I got a lot of want to. I got a lot of that drive, that, that motivation and that desire to do some of these things. So, hell, why not? Do you find the generation that you're trying to communicate with? Are they receptive to the information that you have? Or are they resistant to the mentorship? That's a tough one.

I think that outwardly they probably want to put up some, they want to put up some defenses, put up some shields. but I think deep down, they really crave it because where else are they getting it? Where else? Look over the last 20 years, man, and how this whole everybody gets a trophy kind of mentality of society. That wasn't like that when you and I were growing up. You know, there was a winner and there was a loser. And it's okay to lose every now and then. You need to learn that lesson of how to lose gracefully and come back to practice the next day and try to get better.

But now I'm hearing stories of moms going to job interviews. with kids. Stop it. It's like, what the fuck, dude? If these kids aren't given the opportunity to solve their own problems, when are they going to be able to solve their own problems? You know, and that's, I mean, it's, maybe it's a harsh lesson. I mean, I was on the phone with a guy in the UK the other day.

He's a self-published author, and he and I are having this conversation about going on his podcast. And he asked me, he said, what's the title of your book? I said, work hard, don't suck. he said well that's why you're not selling any copies i said what are you talking about he goes nobody wants to be told to work hard and that they suck well maybe that's exactly what they need man because probably they haven't heard this up to this point in their life if you've never been told that you need to work harder at something i mean where are you going to get that messaging

anywhere else i guess i'm perfectly okay telling people that it's okay to give effort it's okay to work hard for a goal it's okay to set all day goals. It's okay to go to work every day and put out. It's okay to outperform your teammate. It's not okay to sit here and want, want, want, and then complain when you don't get anything because, you know, that saying that good things come to those who wait. The good things that come to those who wait is just the shit left over from the guys who worked hard and got there first. Yeah, I feel like the expectation should be that you do all those things you listed. work hard, put in effort, outperform your peers.

It's, I still personally believe that there are winners and losers. What's changed in that is people trying to round the edges to make failure not hurt as much. Dude, failures are the greatest teacher, though. I mean, if you're humble enough to take the lessons learned from that failure, that's where growth happens. Easier says it done. It is, but that's a good lesson that you have to learn at some point in your life. If you're never given that opportunity to learn from that failure, if you're just said, well, it's okay. Here's your trophy anyway.

He didn't learn anything from it. But if you're told, sorry, dude, go back to practice, get better, see you next week. Maybe that's your incentive because you see these guys over here getting cake and ice cream at the end of their game and you didn't get shit. Failure can be a motivator, man. It's a tough lesson to learn the farther you get into life as well. It's not that you can't learn it, but those in grandkids. trained thought processes, personality, habits, all those things. Yeah.

I mean, I can't imagine trying to learn or arrive at that lesson in your 40s or 30s. That's tough. Well, you know, you and I benefited from years ago when we were still moldable, we were taught these lessons at some point along that line. And we just kind of grew into that. And for me, it was an evolutionary process. Like, I mean, think about it, man. I went to my first fighter squad and I was 32 years old. So I wasn't like your normal 24-year-old right out of college.

You were an old man. I had three kids, man. Like, I was an old dude, you know. But I was still able to learn those lessons based on the things that I had happened in my earlier life and earlier in my military career. Even like if you fuck up in the military, you're going to be held accountable, you know, by somebody, your supervisor, your leadership, whatever. I hope so. I've heard some horror stories of being the exact opposite of that. Yeah.

well if you don't learn those lessons early I creatures a habit the older you get you know you get set in your ways it's tough to be told no sometimes it's tough to be told that you're not meeting the standard or you know for like a better term you suck luckily for me in my career field it was told to me every day every day that I flew I still never flown the perfect sortie and every day it's not possible every day in a debrief we're told what we're told what we're told what we fucked up that day. And that's what we focus on so that we don't fuck it up again. Versus sitting in a debris room for two hours, patting ourselves on the ass talking about all the good shit that we did, right? Probably no different in your career field. You focus on the things that you could have done better that day so that you, like the things that you did right, that's, that's great. Continue. Let's focus on this stuff and improve that. We did really robust AARs after action reviews. And I would say if you broke the amount of time we spent into a percentage, it would be 1%

on what went well Yeah Because there's just not a lot to be gained there And then the rest of the time Not all of it is on What went wrong But you know this is what we planned This is what actually happened

This is what we briefed This is what we were presented with And so that eats up a lot of time But the lion's shit And then hey what do we see From our enemy or competition Are we our tactics still valid Are we seeing any shift?

And then it's like Hey motherfucker I saw you at that door What are you doing front kicking that thing. I saw your foot get stuck in that door. You know, you focus on the things where you need improvement. There's not a lot of benefit, like you said, to patting yourself on the back and having a, you know, a little raw, raw party about how awesome we were right this one thing. Well, you suck at eight other things. Yeah. Is the kid that's pushing carts at Walmart getting

that same feedback? I don't know. I really avoid Walmart. Wherever you shop, family dollar. Did you know that Walmart will deliver your groceries? I mean, you need to look into these things. It's $7.99 a month. Yeah, but Andy, I'm still poor white trash, and I can't afford that shit. It's $7.99 a month. That's more than Netflix, isn't it? I don't know. You should look at what you're paying for Netflix because it's way more than $7.99.

My CFO handles all that. God. Where can people buy your book? It's on Amazon. My website, Paul Ruscowhite.com. It's got a link to the Amazon's there. You can Google it. It actually started popping up on Google not too long ago.

That's awesome. And if you go to the podcast link, B1Change1.com. com be in the number one change in the number one there's a link on there that'll take you as well okay so how about social media do you play in that ecosystem at all dude i suck at social media probably because i hate it and i don't want to give time to it i need to be more i need to i need to give it more due but yeah i'm on social media as paul rusco white on instagram linkedin and uh and facebook so here's a suggestion for you yeah that would make it easier and you could uh you could treat a little bit more like a business a lot of what happens on social media

I'm not going to say a lot. People can have their own perspectives on it. There's a lot of negativity and a lot of people trying to chip away at others. And there's always, it seems to be this race, even though I don't think that's a very precise term, to do something trendy or viral or the next thing. I think, and I haven't read your book yet, but I absolutely read it. You know, 61 chapters in there, but you said you had 180. you could dedicate a week to each one of those and just put put some positivity out there. I'm so glad you said that.

Consistently. And just you could literally go chapter by chapter by chapter. And that way you don't have to think about, oh, what's the flash? What's the dance that I need to learn or whatever it is? You could have a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, put up a social media. And it'll help you. One, you'd probably be surprised at the number of people that you touch. Because, God damn, the participation.

and social media is unbelievably high. So it probably would expand your reach, especially if you presented it in the form of really short, digestible positivity or lessons learned. And you've already done the work. Now you can repackage it for that medium,

which would draw eyeballs, which is going to draw engagement, it's going to draw people back to the works that you've written. It's going to draw people back to the podcast. So it gives you a chance to interface in that system, but not get drawn in. to it. Yeah, and I'm glad you said that, man. And thanks for the feedback. I appreciate that.

We're always just trying to make things a little bit better. If I can just get a little bit better every day, then we're doing good, you know. And for the podcast, it's, we're, we're just having fun, really. We're, we just got these little boom arms the other day. And we thought we were king shit of turd Island because we didn't have to hold our mics in front of us. You are. You know, so we're, we're making small improvements. We're going to try to break into video soon so people can see our ugly faces and our reactions and things. But when you said that, spread positivity. That was one of the big focuses. I guess about, I don't know, six, nine months ago or so, I really made a conscious effort. I'm sitting there scrolling, you know, whatever social media I'm on,

and there's a lot of negativity out there. There's a lot of people complaining about shit and, you know, talking shit to other people and read the comments. Those are hilarious. Like, my little neighborhood comments, the, oh my goodness, that's, you want some entertainment. Read those things. But that was where I started focusing was, hey, man, if I can just, I was a grumpy guy for a lot of years for no fucking reason. And I find it so much easier to be happy and spread positivity. And I really believe that the energy you put out, you get reciprocated. I agree. And there's still going to be assholes out there. And one of the most powerful tools on social media is the block button. Yeah, fuck. Love it. The, you know, we talk about the man in the arena quote all the time and

it's not the critic who counts and all that stuff. And haters are going to hate, man. But you know what? I know when I open up the social media and I see positive things. And that's why I follow people who put positive stuff out there. You put positive stuff out there. Black Rifle Coffee puts positive things out there. Mike Glover puts positive things out there. And I follow all those dudes. And it just, it's so much easier to go about your day when you're in a good mood

versus being a grumpy guy with a cloud over his head. I agree. And a lot. And I've said this a ton of times. People are probably sick of hearing it. But, you know, the social. media platforms and that negativity, it's a voluntary interaction. You actually have control over it. And your input informs your output. And if your input is largely negative, it doesn't surprise me that

people have a very doom and gloom headspace about where they think their personal life is, the world is, oh my God, we're going off. Everything I see in front of me is just the train is going off the tracks. I don't think it is. I think we're going to be okay. Yeah. Well, consider too that A lot of the things that you see on social media, at least a lot of things that I see, are people putting either their best, their very best, or they're very worst on there. A lot of people aren't just putting the mundane every day. I do get tired of people putting pictures that are fucking food on there. I don't really care what your steak looks like. What if they're a chef? That's super judgy. It is. What if they have a restaurant? It is judgy. And I'll take that. God, you're one of the assholes on social media. Gee- Jim. Take back all that advice. I wouldn't do any of that business shit that I advised you of. Jim, I'm going to have Michael Roman. social media. I'm sure it'll go great. Suck. Jim selfies. Those are

pet peeves. Let's go down a pet peeves roll for a second. How about we don't waste our time even going down on the pet peeval? Who cares? Let them live their life. Block them. Here's the question that I almost forgot to ask you. Tell me about the UFOs you saw. All of them. I saw all of the UFOs.

There's a lot of pilots out there saying they saw some UFO shit. Did you ever see a UFO? I hate to disappoint you. I'd never saw a UFO. Fuck. I never did. Michael and I are both. Flue a lot of nights.

Flew a lot of nights. But no, never. My wife's dad has a couple of stories. They're like that. And he was a Marine, and I give him shit all the time because he puts cream and sugar in his coffee. I thought Marines were supposed to be tough. I drink mine black. You know that you can still be tough, but enjoy the taste of the beverage you're drinking, right?

I enjoy black coffee. No, you don't. See, now you're being judging. I'm just telling the truth. You're just habituated drinking something that tastes like the inside of a garbage can lid. I used to drink cream and sugar in mine, and then I went to basic training when I didn't have time to fix coffee. I just had time to get just a splash in. And that's when I started drinking black coffee, and it just kind of stuck.

Do you do you? Exactly. Exactly. What do you want to leave people with? Gosh, man, I don't know. I think I've used all my words. Okay. We talked about the book where they can get the book, the website, the podcast.

Yeah. Closing thoughts for anybody listening to this of the generation that you are trying to influence. Don't be afraid. Yeah, don't be afraid to put in the effort. If it's a goal that you desire, don't be afraid to do the work that it requires to get there and be on the look for the opportunities that may help you get there. I think that that's, maybe it's an art form. Maybe it's a skill that you develop over time. of being able to recognize when doors are potentially cracked open for you. But if you never take the opportunity, then it was no good. It didn't matter in the long run, or the short run, I guess. Well said. Let's end it on that. Sounds good.

What are you guys going to do with the rest of your time up here? Well, we're going to go to that steakhouse. Mercantile? Real fancy place that you suggested. I would be cautious using the terms real fancy and anywhere in Calispell in the same sentence. But there's still tumblewees that go down Main Street here most days. I tell you what, I would really like to know what people do in Calispell other than gamble and drink coffee, because that's really the two establishments that we see the most of around here.

Outdoor sports, is what I would kind of say. I guess. I haven't seen an outdoor sporting store yet. Is there one of those around, or do you just order everything off of Amazon? You could do that. There's not. So for Calispell in comparison to a lot of the other cities or towns in Montana is on the smaller end, down in Missouri you'll have like the shields and stuff like that.

I would say there's a, what is it, Michael, Sportsman's up north. We have a Cabellas, too. We do. Oh, really? Yeah. It's not that big of a deal. We're not trying to like brag about it. I think your big-ass airport out there used to be a Cabellas.

That's what the front end looks like anyways. That's actually the new portion of it. Yeah. So that is not going to open, I think, for another year. And I'm pretty excited about that, actually. It looks like the front of a Bass Pro Shop. Is that good or bad? It's smaller than I would have.

expected it to be. Well, it's not a bass pro shop, so. That's true. That's true. Very tiny airport. Yes. Very tiny town. We're damn near in Canada. I didn't realize that we were that far.

Yeah, I didn't realize that we were that far north. 60 miles from Calispell. Yeah, as the crow flies. As the crow flies. Okay. What's the average temperature here in the winter? Just, I would say in the valley just below freezing. It's a little bit of a banana belt.

It's not as windy here. If you go out east towards great fall. it's going to fucking knock you down on the ground with wind and it rips. There's going to be a cold snap or two every year. Like last year, I think, what did you think? Michael, negative 10 one day and maybe like negative 15? Yeah. It wasn't great, but also it wasn't as bad as I thought.

I mean, I went outside because I had to. I'm not saying spend extended periods of time. But I would say for most of the winter, in the valley, in the valley floor, a few degrees below freezing. You're surrounded by mountains on all sides? Well, except for the south side where the flathead looked. Okay. Do you get like the temperature inversions that causes a lot of fog? Very gray during the winter time.

Yeah. Okay. Some of the coolest days up at the resort is where there's an inversion and you can actually ride the lifts up above. And it's quite glorious. You'll get maybe half a dozen those a year. We used to fly out a mountain home and mountain home air force space is in the Snake River Valley between the mountains. And the temperature inversions in the winter would cause fog. when you could get enough visibility to take off,

the fog's only three or four hundred feet thick. As soon as you break through it, it's bright sunshine. You better be flying with sunglasses. I mean, it was freaking nuts. So during the wintertime, I would get to go up and see the sunshine every day. Get your vitamin D allocation. Oh, it's great, right?

But the ground pounders over here, like my wife at home, she hasn't seen the sun in two weeks kind of thing. Does she like being called that? She's been called worse. Okay. I'll just say. She might have been called worse this morning.

Interesting term for your significant other, but all right. It's a term of endearment, I guess. Well, cool. Yeah, and I give you some suggestions off here. Yeah, dude. People with, like, restaurant suggestions in Callispell. Well, I'm interested to continue the conversation off air, pick your brain on a couple of things.

Okay. Thanks for having me, man. I really appreciate it. You're very welcome. Yeah. Right on me.