The Team House - Navy F-14 Tomcat RIO & Youtuber | Ward Carroll | Ep. 212

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Ward Carroll flew in F-14 Tomcats for fifteen years after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy. He was named Naval Institute Press Author of the Year in 2001 for his novel Punk’s War and is also the author of Punk’s Fight and Punk’s Wing. He is the host of the popular Ward Carroll YouTube channel. Ward's Youtube:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@WardCarroll Ward's Website:⬇️ https://punkswar.com/ Today's Sponsors: Hello Fresh ⬇️ https://www.HELLOFRESH.com/teamhouse16 Get 16 free meals plus free shipping by hitting the link! https://www.HELLOFRESH.com/teamhouse16 To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #f14tomcat #topgun #wardcarrollBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our team house. and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page, and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review,

why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 212 of the Team House.

I'm Jack here with Dave. Dee back there producing behind the machine. And our guest on tonight show is Ward Carroll. Ward served as a F-14 radar intercept officer and also

kind of an eclectic career through military media to today what he's doing as well. And we're going to have to get into all of that. We're just having a long conversation about that we're going to have to go through some of it ward um but welcome to the show man thank you for thank you for doing this thank you guys it's great to be here jack and dave i'm a big

fan of the team house so it's an honor to be a guest on the show thanks man uh do we need to do a shout out to our sponsor here uh so thank you to hello fresh for sponsoring the show uh hello fresh makes, you know, they send boxes straight to your house with all kinds of ingredients and a recipe so you can make your own food and it takes all the hassle out of shopping, all the guestwork out of things. So hellofresh.com slash teamhouse 16 will get you 16 free meals plus free shipping. So go check them out. So Ward, tell us about your origin story, man. Like what was that path? What was that trajectory that took you towards military service? So my dad was a Marine Corps attack pilot, you know, career.

So I was born into a Marine Corps aviation family, lived on base through my youth a couple of times. First at El Toro in Orange County, it's not there anymore, so don't look for it. And then I went to high school at Marine Corps Station Cherry Point or it's Havelock, North Carolina. But we lived on base there. My dad was the commanding officer of a A6 squadron, a Marine Corps A6 squadron, the Green Knights, who now fly the F-35B. But in those days, they flew the A-6 intruder. And so I was just sort of immersed in it. And I was long-haired.

Literally, my hair was to my shoulders. I was a tennis player. I love Bjorn Borg. I used to wear the headband and have that kind of McEnroe, you know, mid-70s tennis player look. And that was my life playing tennis. I was all conference. I did tennis camp all summer. That's all I cared about. And then, you know, it got to be 11th grade. And you're like, well, where are you going to go to college? I'm like, oh, yeah, I probably should think about that. Right. And so it came down to two choices. One was the University of Michigan, because my dad was from Michigan. And I actually qualified for in-state residency there. So it was either going to be the University of Michigan or the Naval Academy. And the Naval Academy. And the Naval Academy appealed to me because of the stories that some of the junior officers in my dad's squadron, who were grads told. I had never physically been to the Naval Academy. So, you know, you write

away for the catalog, and this is before the Internet, so I'm reading the catalog and cool pictures of sailboats. I loved sailing. I was a dingy sailor, sailing lasers, and other boats like that competitively and the Navy the Naval Academy had a great sailing team. We lived in Newport for the summer before I got to the Naval Academy. And so there I met Gary Jobsen, who was Ted Turner's tactician on the Americas Cup in 1977. And I just was like, I got to go there. So again, I had never physically been to the Naval Academy, which in retrospect is a huge leap in faith. You know, so because my high school profile, my candidate multiple wasn't awesome, sort of middle of the road, actually, I had to go to a year of prep school before I got into the Naval Academy. And at the time, it seemed like a drag. It seemed like an extra year of high school.

You know, all your friends are going to UNC and ECU and, you know, NC State. And it's like, where are you going? I'm like, I'm going to high school in Texas, you know, prep school. And so, but again, in hindsight, I'm glad I did it because it allowed me to get away from home. I actually cut my hair, Marine Corps length. I went to the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Texas, which is the valley, you know, very south, almost to Matamoros, very flatland, windy, arid. It is located at an old Air Force base adjacent to the Harlingen Airport. The places run by retired Marines. And at this time, so we're talking, this is 1977, 78.

So the gunnies and the sergeant's major and the other folks who were there all had these wild backstories. One guy, Sergeant Major Staggerwald, had been at the Chosen Reservoir. Wow. You know, this kind of thing. Another guy had been a recon guy in Vietnam and had some amazing stories. and they'd like to regale us, you know, with these stories. And we would just sit around, you know, and listen to these cool stories. And so it was easy to be Motto at Marine Military Academy.

The other thing that we did is you took college prep courses, because this is, you know, our 13th year, an extra year high school, really. But it was, we were called PGs, post-grads. And what we would do is on the weekend, we'd take the SAT or the ACT at, at some local high school there. So I took it literally 10 times that first semester. Because the academy would take any combo of math and English that you could conjure up, right? And then we were taking freshman level chemistry, calculus, physics, as our academic stuff.

So plus, I played tennis there and they were willing to drive me all the way as far as Corpus Christi or wherever to play in tennis tournaments. So it was really cool. And again, I got over the homesickness and the other things. And so by the time I got to I-Day, summer of 78, I was completely like an independent being, you know. And that made Pleeb year and the Naval Academy, let me just say, kind of easy in terms of the harassment part. You know, first I was raised by a Marine. So, you know, I was like Ben in the Great Santini. You know, I had a basketball bounced off my head and other things like that. So, you know, not a big deal, right? And further, now I'd spent a year at the Marine Military Academy who had more regimentation than the Naval Academy, by far, you know, and plus now I'm getting bossed around by seniors, right, first class mids, which was kind of a joke. So plebeier militarily was not rigorous to me. I know some of my classmates were having a hard time, but I didn't care. Now academically, that was a different story, right? So when I was there, the guy who rode heard over the Naval Academy's

academics was Hyman Rickover. And he only wanted there to be one major, and that was civil engineering. I got there and I validated two semesters of French, and they're like, well, you're not going to be an engineer because you'll flunk out. You need to be what they call the bull major. So that was history, English or Pollyci. So I wound up choosing Pollycii. But in spite of that fact that I was not an engineering major, you still had to take engineering courses. They were your core courses. So academics were tough and a struggle. You're taking fluids, statics, weapons, advanced level, electrical engineering, all of this sort of stuff.

It's the same, isn't it similar at West Point? Like you have to minor in engineering or something at least? Well, so I think West Point is more of a liberal arts school. like they're more into the humanities and, you know, the writings of Robert E. Lee and stuff like that, right? So I don't think, I don't think it's as rigorous in terms of the engineering. And the reason is, again, Hyman Rickover and nuclear power, right? That's the sort of thing that, that you know. You can call it the Hudson River Community College if you want Ward.

Right. Just go all in. Yeah. No, I've been there once. It was during the summer. It's a gorgeous place during the summer, during the winter, I guess not so much. But no, seriously, Jack, I don't think it's as rigorous academically. No, it's not easy.

I'm not saying it's easy. But the focus of the Naval Academy is really intensely engineering. So I managed to get through there. And now as a function of going to the Naval Academy, and I didn't really think about this a whole lot, believe it or not. Again, it's sort of like when I'm in high school, oh, you've got to pick a college. Now it's my first class, my senior year at the Naval Academy. You've got to pick a warfare specialty. Right?

I'm like, oh, that's right. They're giving us a job when we're done here. Right. And so because my eyes were bad and I discovered that during my junior year when things are blurry and I went to the eye doctor there and I'll never forget. He turns around after I mangled the eye chart. And he's like, well, you're not going to be a pilot. And that was what I intended to be, right?

And like my father before me. And so now that matrix in terms of service selection was completely shot to hell. And so I was considering kind of everything except nuke power. You know, so surface warfare, ship driver, Marine Corps. You know, back when I was commissioned, you couldn't go right into seals. You had to go be a service warfare officer, get your swope in, your water wings, as a qualified surface warfare officer, and then you could request a transfer. So that process took about two years, you know, and I had some classmates that did it.

I had one, in fact, who did it and washed out of buds. The story is kind of interesting of how that happened. You know, he was hypothermic from the Pacific. they got him in the boat and warmed them up and then they said jump back in and he refute. And they're like, okay, you're done, right? Just like that. So this guy is now a brain surgeon, literally a brain surgeon. And he does the concussion protocols for the Dallas Cowboys.

Wow. So he's on the sidelines of Dallas Cowboys games. And so he did okay. Yeah, yeah. You know, great, great dude. And but I always think of that story when I think about, the pipeline that we had to go through to get to be, you know, special operators. Now, these days, you commission as a seal. And I'm not sure what the exact numbers are. My good friend Stu Smith,

who you guys may know, who was my fitness editor at military.com, runs the baby buds program here at the Naval Academy. He's a late 90s era seal, pre-9-11 type seal. Good guy. But anyway, so I have, happened to get a backseat ride in a Marine Corps F4, a Phantom, out in Hawaii during my first-class cruise. And I fell in love with it, you know, strapping into the Martin Baker, we're in the O2, light the blowers, boom, you're airborne. We did a 1v1 against another squadron F4 pulling G's, calling the fight, came back into the break, supersonic dash, came back into the break, land. And then we go to the club and now we're talking with our hands and drinking beer and you know and then we spent two weeks with the ground pounders and it was like real fun to walk 10 miles you know i'm like okay my job is find

my people i think i'm more of an aviation guy than than a an infantry guy right um and we also spent a week with force recon and that was awesome but again i i wasn't really uh that that didn't suit me you know i mean we repelled out of helicopters We did the dingy with the rubber ring, you know, water pickups. We did all kinds of cool stuff. We did the spy rig, and it was all hands on, you know, and these guys were really cool, these senior enlisted recon guys that were our mentors during that week. So I loved it, but again, I recognized that that's probably not what I would be good at.

So I wound up selecting what we called Naval Flight Officer, which is an aviation billet, but not a pilot bullet. And so you can see behind me, those are NFL wings, right? If I can get my hand to work. Right? So you can see it has crossed anchors instead of a single vertical anchor is how you recognize NFL wings. So went down to flight school, Pensacola, Florida, and just fell in love with the whole

program and kicked ass. I mean, if I had tried as hard at the Naval Academy, me as I did in flight school, I would have been, you know, top 50 in my class. And let's just say I wasn't top 50 in my class. So I wound up getting my choice, which was Rio, the Rio Pipeon. You pick after about four months of flying around in, at that time, we were flying T2 Buckeye jets. And you're in the backseat, obviously, you're doing the navigation, you're calling the fights, you're kind of treating the pilot like a voice activated autopilot. You learn. how to sort of exert yourself and not just sit there and be a passive member of the crew.

And I was very much interested in that as my role. So I got Rio as my pipeline, and that's where you learn to run intercepts. And back in those days, the F-14 was exclusively an air-to-air platform. And so the backseat of the F-14 has this cool radar, and there's very little redundancy between the front and backseat in the F-14. So the Rio seriously, has to paint a picture in the pilot's mind so he can execute the intercept before he gets tally. So it's up to the Rio to run the intercept. So we learned how to run intercepts. It's basically trigonometry is what you're doing there, angles and affecting the lateral separation and what sort of counter turn you're going to do and that sort of thing. Wow. And then you finish up with

five dogfighting flights in the TA4, super high tactical. And the NFL student calls the fights. and that was super fun. And I found out I was really good at doing that. IG environment, you know, you got to keep your wits about you and be able to stay ahead of the airplane and get the pilot on the other guys 6 o'clock. So that was the last part of that, got my wings, and now it's just a matter of what coast.

So at that time, the Tomcat was the supreme fighter of the Navy. And there were 11 squadrons on the West Coast and 11 squadrons on the East Coast and a training squadron on each one of those coast. So the matrix was you want to go East Coast or West Coast. I'd always been an East Coast kind of guy. So

wound up selecting Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. And so went there. And again, I took to it. And what I loved was because you're always like, what are the pilots because we'd never dealt with pilots as peers, right? I mean, all of the pilots we dealt with

were our instructions. instructors, you know, and now you're in a class with pilots. You're like, what do they, what do they know about us? What are they going to think about, you know, are we kind of second class citizens or are we a team? And right away and the instructors, you know, very much set this tone. It was co-equal. In fact, in some missionaries, the Rio had more responsibility. And so we were really invited to plug in and take a strain. And this community was so, cool the spirit and the flight line there you know these big airplanes it's a big airplane you know 65 feet long 64 feet wide with the wing spread um and i remember walking to the hangar when i first got up there and just seeing that airplane and it just sort of settles on you you know like the first

time you're issued a rifle or some weapon you're like this is mine and i'm i'm going to use it to its full effect and that's kind of what i felt about the f14 so i wanted to know every thing about everything. And so you do simulators on your own and you hit the books and you're there late hours and you're pimping the instructors for what is this like and what did you do? And those guys love to go to the O Club and talk about it. So I really did fall in love with the F-14 community. Because I was the what we call top scope in my rag class, rag is a replacement air group. It's an archaic acronym. But it's the F-14 training squad. And I was the number one Rio. I got picked to go on cruise right away, the number one draft pick. So I joined VF32, the swordsman, on the USS

Independence, which was a conventional carrier, a forestall class carrier, and went right on cruise. And I love that, too. I mean, being gone from home isn't that fun, right? And being away from your loved one for an extended period of time. But this was go to the med, hit ports, fly these bilateral exercises against our NATO partners, so we're dogfighting against the Spanish and the French and the Turkish. And then we went through the Suez Canal, you know, on an aircraft carrier, which is amazing. I've done that eight times, by the way. And so here I'm a Lieutenant J.G., which is an O2, the most junior guy in the squadron. I'm just being like, you know, totally barraged by all of this stuff. And we go to the North Arabian Sea.

and we're flying real world intercepts against Russian transports that are coming out of Karachi Pakistan. And that was cool. We're doing an exercise against the Omanis and all kinds of stuff. Then we did a port call in Singapore, right, which is halfway around the world. And so all of this took place on my first cruise. So I was loving fleet life and very much taking to it. And so, you know, I did that tour, second cruise on the USS John F. Kennedy, another conventional carrier, then rolled out of there and became an instructor at VT-86, which is down at flight school, the Rio Training Squadron. And so in the meantime, and this is kind of the theme of my career,

which is, you know, neither Athens nor Sparta, right, or both Athens and Sparta. So just describe the the the sparta part now Athens is I had started to do a cartoon on the flight schedule so every day the flight schedule would come out again pre-internet pre-digital anything so you printed out the flight schedule and then there would be this little cartoon a one-panel cartoon and so I started being the guy that would do that cartoon every day and then the air wing commanders saw that he's like I want Mooch, which is my call sign, to do the cartoon for the airplane, which is across the airwink. So I started doing that. And that came to the attention of the editor of Approach magazine, which is the Naval Aviation Safety Magazine at the Naval Safety Center. So I'm down at VT86

in Pensacola, fooling my heels. And in fact, I started a rock band. I'm a frustrated rock and I can tell from the guitars behind me. So I had a rock band down there that was playing like four times a week in addition to teaching future Rios how to do their thing. And so I get this message from my detailer. He's like, hey, do you want to go to the Naval Safety Center and take over the approach editor's job? Oh, wow. Okay. I didn't know that.

How was that possible? Yeah. And so they gave me a waiver to go from short. duty to shore duty. Now, I'd only been at VT86 for a year, but I went to the Naval Safety Center and relieved a good friend of mine guy named Dave Parsons, who'd done a lot to increase the impact of Approach magazine. He did theme issues. He did double issues. He had posters in the middle. You know, he was an amazing innovator, and it was helping. You know, the mishap rates were down. People were talking about the stories in approach. Now, approach is basically, Jack, what you and I

would call user-generated content, right? These are stories submitted by fleet Bubba's about, here's how I screwed up and you really shouldn't do this, right? Always with the white hat, meaning there's no punitive for admitting that, you know, your transgression. And that's sort of the aura, the air, the atmosphere of naval aviation. In fact, the Air Force would look at that and go, man, you guys are really different than we are in terms of being able to tell on yourselves and not get in trouble about it, right? Which we viewed as healthy. So approach is the vessel for that. So here I'm a lieutenant, you know, two cruises under my belt, had about a thousand plus hours in the F-14. And I am running this thing. I have absolute dominion. I mean, I had an 05 for a boss,

but he really didn't care what it was I was doing with this magazine. And I'm doing the cartoon every month. It was called Brown Shoes and Action Comics. And Comics was spelled C-O-M-I-X, kind of like an our crumb kind of thing, right? So it was, I got away with murder. I mean, this was borderline underground stuff, but it always had a safety message at the end of it. And so I'm kind of, you know, you and I were talking before, can you believe what we got away with? You know, and this is one of those cases. Now, meanwhile, I'm flying with the aggressor squadron over at Oceana, VF43, as well as any Tomcat squadron that needs a guest player to come and fly. So I'm getting really a lot of flight hours and keeping my name out there in terms of, okay, so follow on orders.

So I wound up getting orders. I was what we call a by name call, meaning I didn't even talk to my detailer, to go back to a squadron, thereby avoiding ship's company duty where I'd be not in the airplane, be a shooter or another member of the crew, which was not fun duty, right? I mean, those guys were, those were necessary jobs, and anybody who did it found it very rewarding. But if you have a choice between being in the airplane or the guy that Rogers is a salute and launches you,

you want to be the guy in the airplane, right? And so I joined the Puking Dogs, VF-143, which had brand new F-14, what we called A-pluses. So the F-14, the knock on the early version was the engine, was underpowered and prone to compressor stalls, just like the movie Top Gun. So that's the Pratt & Whitney, TF30. The B and the D had the F-110

General Electric Motor, a much better engine. So I got to the squadron with these A pluses, then the designation was changed six months later to the F-14B. There were some other gizmos in the backseat that the A didn't have. This was an all-star team.

And I'm on my first nuke boat. I cruised on the Eisenhower. And so life was good. Good. And that got me back in the game, really, because like I said, I was sort of sideline to go to the training command and be an instructor. And through this very unorthodox process of doing a cartoon and getting my name out there, I was brought back into the varsity, the big leagues. And I used that. You know, I was very much one of the top officers in VF143. One of getting orders to the F14 training squadron, VF 101, the Grim Reaper's. and love that job. And then from there, and this is where the career, you know, I love the Navy because anything can happen, you know, once you get above the rank of, you know, senior 0304. And so I flew with the commander of U.S. Naval Air Force's Atlantic. You know, back in those days, both AirPAC and Air Lant were three stars.

Now AirPack is a three-star, airline is a two-star. And you guys, if you've seen Top Gun Maverick, you know, you know, The John Hammond character plays the Air Boss, right? Back in those days, there wasn't an Air Boss. There were two, three stars at each one of the Ticombs. So I worked for the East Coast three star, a guy named Tony Les, who had been seal of the Blue Angels, C, OssS, Ranger. He was the guy in charge of NAF sent when they did Praying Mantis,

a stellar reputation. And I flew with them. I introduced him to bombing in the F-14. So now the other thing going on is the F-14 is going from being a strict air-to-air fighter to starting to adapt. adapt to being a bomber as well as an air-to-air fighter because the world is changing. You know, the Soviet Union collapses. Nobody else really has an air force of any renowned.

And so like, hey, guys, if you want to stay in this thing, you've got to start dropping bombs like the Hornet. And at first we're like, really, that sounds like messy business, you know, and then we realized, oh, we kind of need to embrace this. So we did. And the F-14 was not a very accurate dumb bomber. For instance, it has a 10-mill accuracy. The Hornet has a 1-mill accuracy. However, the piece de resistance was they slapped the lantern pod on the Tomcat

and made the Tomcat a precision bomber. They put a cool 10-by-10 display in the Rio's cockpit that was super high-res. And suddenly, we were the precision platform of choice, thereby cutting the Hornet Bubba's out of the pattern, which we relished because those guys kind of had a two, you know. And so I go to be the aid to Air Lant. Admiral Lest is the guy before me got fired for having a DUI. He later became a surgeon. And so I'd flown with Admiral S.

His son-in-law was my detailer, my monitor. And so he's like, hey, dad wants you to come be his aid. You know, and so I'm like, should I? He goes, yeah, you need the word. you need the paper. So I did it. I loved it. It was the hardest job I've ever had, you know, because I'm basically his, his steward, his right-hand man, the guy, the setup man, take his uniforms to the dry cleaners, answer his mail, say yes or no to, you know, invites to be the keynote speaker at changes of command, whatever. But I will tell you what I first was

overwhelmed by once you get comfortable, it is a very powerful job. And suddenly, as a fresh caught 04, I had 06s and 1 stars kind of working for me. And once you learn how to be respectful, but hold that lever, it was kind of fun. And so I did that for the rest of Admiral Lesser's time on active duty. And then as a function of that, I was able to synthesize my follow on orders by working it with a friend of mine who is now the skipper of a fighter squad in VF 102 aboard USS America, CV-66. They were just about to transition from A's to B's. Again, serendipity.

And so I went to this guy's name's pirate, Barbary, and I said, hey, do you have a slot for me? Because the trick was, can you fit the department head in so he'll get both ops and maintenance before it's time to roll? because if you don't get absent maintenance, you're not viable beyond that. And so Pirate was like, yes, we can make it work. And so I went to Admiral S.

I'm like, hey, I want to go to VF 102. I had hard copy orders on the board the next day. Ward. I never talked to my detailer, right? Ken, Ken, we give a quick shout out to our sponsor before we move on. We'll pick right back up. Yeah, real quick.

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Yeah. Yeah, we love it too. So go to Hellofresh.com slash Teamhouse 16 and use code Teamhouse 16. that's T-Mouse 16 free meals plus shipping. Moush, thanks a lot, man. What? Plus free shipping. Did I say plus shipping?

Plus free shipping, I'm sorry. Hey, so let's, I want to ask you because, you know, your eyesight wouldn't let you be a pilot. So you became a Rio. What are the, like, why is that qualification different? You're in the same plane. You're pulling the same G's. What's the difference between being the. in terms of like I cite a medical qualification.

Yeah, well, you have to be correctable to 2020. Okay. Right. Now, these days, that's a mood point because you can have Lasix or whatever. I corrective surgery and everybody's 2020. Back in my day, they were just starting to come up with PRK and these other things. But if you had that surgery, they would make you not physically qualified. Right. Because flight surgeons were afraid that under G, the, the, the,

incisions would burst. Right. You know, there's kind of these wives' tails. But the bottom line, Dave, is the Rio is looking like three feet in front of them, right? I'm looking at gauges. I'm looking at a radar. I'm looking at this. The pilot is looking at the meatball, at the aircraft carrier, at the bandit, you know, so visual acuity, especially the landing part on the aircraft carrier, especially at night. You've got to have good eyesight. Right. You have to see movement of the ball way out.

It can't be fuzzy. It can't be imperceptible. So that was why pilots had to have 20-20 vision. And Rios didn't have to have it, but it had to be correctable to 2020. So saying all that, there were many times when I was the first guy to get a tally, you know, in a fight.

And I took great pride in having enough trust between me and the pilot that if I said roll left stop roll pull keep the pull coming he's at two o'clock do you see him no okay keep pulling roll left stop you know and he would just do it so I'm actually flying the airplane from the back seat without a stick in my cockpit or my stick controlled the radar not the airplane and filling his windscreen with bandit right so that was part of the real responsibilities that I very much enjoyed I wasn't just this guy sitting back there doing cheerleading for Maverick, which is kind of the tone of, you know, I was I was calling the fight.

I was running the airplane. The only way I have to relate to that word is like on the from like an army perspective, it's like the sniper spotter relationship. Like you develop such good rapport. They know it when you say something, he knows exactly what you mean and it gets you on target right away. That's a good analogy. That's a good analogy.

So, and you know, you have that that when you're in that zone you know it's kind of transcended right now you're really a killing machine and and that's how the tomcat was as i said early on very little redundancy between front and back seat these days if you see a super hornet or a strike eagle you know there there are multifunction displays in both cockpits either guy can call up whatever he wants you know so if the pilot wants to be autonomous he can bring up all the weapons blaze, fleer, radar, whatever, and he doesn't need to listen to the WISO, you know, the weapon systems officer. The Rio acronym is archaic now. So, you know, in our day, the pilot only had a

repeater that was beneath the stick, hard to see. So, and he couldn't control the radar in a way that the Rio could. So all the long-range modes were Rio modes. The long-range missiles were shot by the Rio, meaning the Phoenix and the Sparrow. you know, I shot those using the launch button. And then the pilot had the sidewinter, which was the enclosed heat seeking missile and the gun. So teamwork to the max, right? And so that's what kept me in the profession so long

as a guy who's type A and wouldn't have abided by this notion that, well, you're only a Rio. So just, you know, sit back there and take notes and answer the phone. That's not, that wasn't going to work for me. Was it, was it different? Because, you know, Jack brought up the snoburn. for example, and usually, like, they're both trained the same way. The sniper, the actual shooter is the junior of the team.

Generally, the spotter is generally the senior because they have those skills for windage. But you guys trained in two separate skills. So it's, so there's not a seniority. How difficult was it to make that pairing between a Rio and a pilot that would get along, that would respect each other, they kind of could get into that groove. So I would say, David, that 75% of the time that wasn't a problem.

Okay. But to your point, 25% of the time there would be sort of personality conflicts. I was kind of like Mr. Fixett towards the end of my first tour, and I would be the guy that would be reassigned after there had been a breakup, you know. And so,

I prided myself on not, you know, getting cross-threaded with guys. And I think some of it is, you know, personality. I didn't take any bullshit, you know. And so if the guy's trying to punk me, we didn't have a fight in the airplane, but during the debrief, we would figure it out. You know, we weren't going to Chow until we were in the back of the ready room. We figured out how this was going to go, right? And I think I had enough respect in terms of my reputation that you didn't want moods to think you were a shitty pilot.

You know, and so, or you didn't want to be the attitude guy. So I think some of this is self-selecting. You know, it was hard to get Tom Katz as a pilot. You know, so the best of the best was kind of a thing. Again, talk to an A7 guy and he will, you know, spike that idea. But, you know, the Tomcat was hard to fly. And it was the fastest airplane we had. you needed the best, what I would call a nosegunner pilot to control the machine.

So that population of people, again, 75% of them were ready on arrival, regardless of rank. I flew with the skipper. I flew with department heads. I flew with the junior most pilot. And there was same same. There was no, I'm copping, I'm pulling rank. That wasn't part of it. Again, that's what made it rewarding, you know.

but occasionally there were personality conflicts, some pretty extreme. In fact, one of my episodes is about that crash that happened in Nashville, where two of the Rios went to a couple of the department heads and said, we refused to fly with this guy because he was unpredictable. He wouldn't listen. He had, you know, sort of this, you know, attitude that wasn't productive. And so it got so bad that. You know, the two guys, like I said, said they wouldn't fly with them.

So the skipper's response in that case was, well, then don't schedule them with that guy, which is kind of wrong in terms of the leadership problem. And so long story short, and I entreat folks to check out that episode, because it really is a story about a failing naval aviator. But he wound up trying to do a mini air show for his parents, launching out of Nashville on a cross-country, pulled up into the clouds, got disoriented, got vertigo, and wound up crashing into the ground miles away from the airport.

Oh, my God. Right? So the folks who flagged that he was missing things were right. And ultimately, the CEO was actually fired for not taking more direct action on fixing that, that, the evidence that was before him. Right. So, but again, that was kind of the exception. Generally, we call it the org chart, the organizational chart or tack or the tactical organization. So who you crewed with, you like to fly with the same guy as much as you could.

You know, duty schedules, people would get sick, other mitigators. It wasn't possible all the time. But you wanted to make the airplane efficient by, to Jack's point, you know, spot or sniper. You got to know each other and you got to know the inflection of the voice and why are you not talking. and all of these things, those, you know, those parts, the subjective parts, the subconscious parts are what take you from good to great, right? And so that's how we'd like to fly the airplane. So personality conflicts were the exception, not the rule. Now, could a pilot and a Rio, could they plan their rotation, their orders together?

I mean, could they stick together as a team if they were a highly functioning team? No. Okay. Because a squad is like coral, right? It looks like a thing, but it's always shedding and growing, right? So your rotation schedules, and I'm sure this is true in the Army as well, you know, maybe it stays fixed for a deployment, you know, and the Navy likes to make sure that you got a unit that did the training and goes on cruise.

And then as soon as you get back, some people roll, some people stay for another deployment. The CO leaves the XO fleets up, new XO comes in. So it's always changing. Now, sometimes you would wind up in your next command, sort of, oh, by the way, with guys you had served with before, particularly the training commands and the F-14 training squadron. After I was a puking dog, a bunch of us populated the VF 101 training squadron, because we were kind of known as the hot property during those that year, those two years. And so they wanted all those guys to come be, you know, train the next generation of F-14 pilots in Rio.

So, but that, that wasn't part of the plan. And that was sort of happenstance. It wasn't something you, you would, you would plan. So Ward, talk to us about, like, what led to either your retirement, you're deciding, deciding to leave the Navy. I mean, what was that sort of path like to leave service and transition into the civilian world? So I think we all feel it, you know, whether it happens at five years or or 20 years or 35 years when it's time to make a change. So I had been in nothing but fighter squadrons, as I described, through about year 16. And my last fleet job was I was the airwing operations officer for CAG one, Air Wing One.

aboard the USS George Washington working for a great airwing commander and the what we call the battle group commander what they call strike group commander in those days was a guy named Mike Mullen who went on to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I remained close to him and he was so fun to work for forward leaning we were doing Operation Southern Watch which was the patrolling of the no-fly zone over southern Iraq flying our assets. is off, very busy, but we were really surrounded by talent. And I had done back-to-back sea duty. As I mentioned early on, I did back-to-back sure duty. Well, the payback was back-to-back sea duty. So I'd been a department head in VF 102, as I described, first on America. And that was the last cruise

of America. We fought the Great Bosnian War of 95-96. And that ship was decommissioned. It's on the bottom of the Atlantic now off the coast of the east coast, unfortunately. That ship was, we had her singing, although she was actually sinking slowly while we were on that deployment. We flew a lot, got the Serbs to stop the siege of Sarajevo and broke all sortie records during that cruise for VF 102. Again, an All-Star team. And when Mullen comes to me, or at all-year-old. actually the Kags, like, do you want to be the airwing ops officer for my next cruise? And I called the wife, who was a Navy junior.

Her dad was an A6 pilot. She was from Virginia Beach, so we were living kind of in her hometown. And she was like, sure, we can do another C-tour, no big deal. So had her buy-in. I told Kag, yes, I can do it. So I did it. And I loved it. So I knew the game because we'd just done it, right?

So I knew all the players, same airwing. I'm now the Airwing ops officer flying with the same fighter squadron and whoever else will have me. I loved that job. Got along great with CAG, got along great with Admiral Mullen and his staff, and, you know, we're working hard and playing hard. Pulled into Dubai a bunch, played a lot of golf in Dubai.

We pulled into Cairns on our way out, and so it was a great cruise. But one day, Admiral Mullen comes walking in. I literally had phones to both ears because I'm working with the Joint Task Force and running Operation Southern Watch, and, you know, airplanes are breaking, and airplanes are in Air Force guys

can't make the commitments. Can we cover their markers? and so forth and so and I go, yes, sir? He goes, what are you doing for your follow-on orders? I'm like, I don't know. And he goes, well, would you like to teach at the Naval Academy? I'm like, all I have is a bachelor's degree from the Naval Academy. What would I teach?

And he's like, well, I don't know, but they need somebody to run this company officer master's program. So if you're interested, let me know. And I'll give you a phone number. I just said, okay, I'm interested. So he comes back 10 minutes later with a, you know, a Post-it note with a phone number. on it. So as soon as I find a free moment, I call the number. And I had this phone at my desk. And this is 1998. And this is pretty high speed for the day. Right. This is pre. I mean, we had,

everybody had an email account, but you didn't have your own like computer server or whatever, you know. But I had a phone that I could dial nine in the number, not even the area, and it acted like I was on base at Norfolk. So I call, it's a Naval Academy number, you know, 410, 293, whatever. And Captain Bill Mason answers and he goes, I understand you want to teach at the Naval Academy. I'm like, well, that's what I'm a Mullen is recommending, but what are we talking about? And so we explained it. And it sounded super cool. And so I said, okay. And again, just like I was describing before, I had orders on the board very shortly thereafter. So now we're going to the Naval Academy. Okay. So this is a long answer for why did I decide to get out? So this is my first time.

since I got my wings being outside of the fighter community. Right? So now I'm in literally life of the mind. And I was teaching plebe English and the ethics course to sophomores and a leadership course to juniors and a capstone course to seniors that selected aviation. I was the officer rep for the dingy team and the flying team. And we lived on base on the yard at the Naval Academy. My sons went to the primary school across the river, the Naval County Primary School.

It was an idyllic situation. Now, I had always had this book that I was working on, you know, called Punks War, which right here, right? And so this manuscript, as we all know, was in a shoebox, you know, for years and years. And I had none other than Stephen Coons as my mentor who would give me names to see. send it to me, you know, send to this guy at pocketbook, send it to my agent, send to this guy. And they all gave me these really nice rejection letters. I had 37 rejection letters in a different shoebox for this book. And so here I am now in life of the mind.

And in the squadron, if you were like in your state room working on a novel, they'd be like, what are you doing? Rewrite a tack note or something. Why are you writing a novel? You know, they didn't, these are a bunch of Philistines. You know, these guys don't care about art, right? And so now I'm surrounded by philosophers and tenure track English profs. And, you know, I mean, the Naval Academy, half the faculty is civilian.

You know, it prides itself on not being over military. And so I'm in the English department as an adjunct. I'm in the professional development in the philosophy department, team teaching in the ethics course with a straight stick PhD philosopher. In one case, it was this rock star named Nancy Sherman, who's written books about Epictetus and stoicism and just these people were hardcore. And I was loving it. So I'm writing Punks War, and I wanted Punks War to have some import, not just be a techno-thriller.

And they were willingly reading the manuscript and giving me recommendations. So I showed the first four chapters to the acquisitions editor at the Naval Institute Press, which is right there on the Naval Academy grounds. And I was a member of the Naval Institute had written for their periodical proceedings over the years, was great friends with the editor of proceedings at that time, a guy named Fred Rainbow. And Tom Cutler was the acquisitions editor.

He's still there, by the way. He still works at the Naval Institute. He's a legend. He has been the editor of the Blue Jackets Manual for many years, written his own series of books about the Brownwater Navy in Vietnam. He was a brownwater guy. and so he after about five weeks comes back to me and says,

I like the book, where's the rest? And I said, I haven't finished it. So that gave me the desire to finish the second half of Punk's War. So basically, if you read it between chapter four and five is what I'm talking about. And I also retain an agent, a guy named Ethan Ellenberg, who's there in New York, has been my agent ever since. And so long story short, Punk's War was put under a conversation. and published in the spring of 2001 pre-9-11, which is important here.

So this was a natural stepping off point. I'm done with the cool stuff of being in fighter squadrons. Commanding a fighter squadron wasn't in the cars. I had my third look at command while I was at the academy. It didn't happen. I have no remorse or bitterness about that. The guys who did make it deserved it more than I did. And oh, by the way, it worked out pretty damn good in this unearthed,

Doc's way because had a not written punk's war, all of the stuff that's happened to this having a YouTube channel would not have happened. Right. So that was my decision and it was sort of a organic natural decision because I'm now hitting 20 so I can retire with, you know, retirement half base pay and all the other benefits of being a 20 year guy. I got a day job at the Naval Air Systems Command down in southern Maryland. We moved from Annapolis to Leonardtown, Maryland, and I started working the V-22 program. But I was under contract to Penguin Putnam to write novels. And so that's where I wrote Pung's Wing, Punks Fight, the Aid, and Militia Kill, which is my, those are the rest in my novelist career. And also loved working at Navarre. I mean,

the V-22 program was, was another all-star team getting that. airplane fielded and I learned about procurement. But that's why I got out, Jack. That that the, the, the, the, the, the, the fighter community, going to the Naval Academy, having Punks were published, made retiring a natural step. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

It felt right. So this was, so the plan was sort of a, leave the Navy, retire out of the Navy, and write, right, right, fiction. And that was the initial plan. Yes, yes. And I mean, it sounds like, it sounds like you had a good run, too. Well, I did. you know, the first advance

was pretty huge, you know, and so you're like, oh, that's income. And then you look at the tax piece and the, you know, everything else. You're like, oh, that's a pretty decent annuity. Or that's a down payment on a house, right? It's not income.

And the other thing about being a, just like being a writer. And as you know, intimately, Jack, you know, it's a tough gig. People like, I want to be a journalist. Like, okay, so you want to be poor is what you're saying. Right, right.

And so same with being a novelist. In fact, Stephen Coons, who I used to hunt with at his, what he called farm in West Virginia, we go deer hunting there, once told me there are 12 people in America who sign their tax form as writer. You know, everybody else does it. Even Edgar Allan Poe wasn't a full-time poet, you know. He was a pharmacist or something, you know, as his real job. And so I imagine.

I could be a writer. I had a two-book deal, but what happens is they start giving you advances based on the results of your previous books, right? So, you know, Punks for, so here's the hardback, right? And then I go with Penguin Putnam and they're doing mass market paperbacks, right? So the good news about mass market paperbacks is they, okay, the hardback, Naval Institute Press did 2,500 copies of this as the first print. they sold right away and we wound up doing, I think ultimately in this version, it sold 30,000 copies. The first print run of Punks War in paperback, mass market paperback, was 125,000. Holy shit.

It was in every airport kiosk, it was everywhere. But this is very ineligent, right? This is these things, if I leave it on the shelf, it'll just like wither away. Warren, take the money and run. Like, well, that's not what. Well, okay, so I did. I did. However, however, it turns out that that's a short trip, right?

Because suddenly all the elegance associated with what happened when this book came out, because the Naval Institute Press did Punks War, and the only other novels they'd done before Punk's War where you may have heard of these books, hunt for Red October, and fly to the intruder. So they created Tom Clancy and Stephen Coons. So it's like Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and all these big time reviewers are like, this kid's the next big thing. Right. And so I was fully willing to wear that jersey.

But it just didn't happen in terms of sales. And the reason is because Punk's War, if you've read it, is not a techno thriller. It's a study of the personalities in a fighter squadron and those who are in the Navy. right so that's not world on the brink of Armageddon right right and so some of these you know it's funny the rhetoric um here so here's Stephen Coonses's blur it says Tom Clancy meets Joseph Heller in this riveting irreverent portrait of the fighter pilots of today's Navy at last somebody got it right okay so there's no Tom Clancy it's more Joseph Heller right but everybody's thinking oh Tom Clancy and then they read it they're like where's the Russian guy

Right. And where's the submarine mutiny? You know, I didn't have any. Right. That doesn't interest me. So it just turns out that it was a side light that generated enough to buy a really cool guitar, you know, like this, this Les Paul. I bought this with royalties. Okay.

And so that's what the writing part. So meanwhile, I still needed a deal. day job. So I worked at Navi for three years. Meanwhile, I met the founder of Military.com, Chris Michael, who was a Navy NFL, a P3 guy, anti-submarine warfare plane guy, who went to Harvard, got his MBA, met his partner there, Ann Duane. They moved out to San Francisco and, long story short, founded military.com. It started as a basically military website that was dedicated to making it easy to figure out what your benefits are. Right. So this is pre-9th century. 9-11, right? And so in 2000, the dot-com bubble burst. So all of the venture capital that was there

for all of these dot-coms. And there were these derivative, like, they couldn't even explain what they did. I mean, the internet boom was nutty. I remember talking to some lieutenants before I got out of the Navy at the golf course, the Naval Academy, who were getting out. Like, yeah, I'm going to work for this website. I'm like, well, what is it? And it took. And it took. them literally five minutes to explain what they did you know and so military.com survived the dot com bubble bursting their workforce went from 70 to 10 and Chris Michael made a lot of enemies in those days but he found his way by changing military.com from a website into a database marketing company okay so this is where we use you know if you look at the business plan the

The hub and spoke model is, okay, what are the waypoints in a military career? Use your GI Bill, VA home loans, your other benefits, uniform discounts. What choice should you make in your career? Should you join the military at all? So these companies, including the military, would pay military.com pretty high money to find leads. So this is what you call lead generation. And they would do arbitrage. And there was paid traffic.

And this was the Wild West Day. Yeah, yeah. And so I got aboard because they didn't really care about the website anymore. And Chris, they were just doing syndicated content when I got there. So military atcom had no original reportage. And so I get there and we're basically my, I'm kind of like a glorified or a poor man's drudge report. So I'm just aggregating other people's stuff and calling it that. those are our headlines, but it'd be AP, Reuters, you know.

And as we know, if you are beholden to Reuters and you imagine you're a military website, you're going to get it wrong and you're going to piss off your readership. And so consistently, we weren't doing anything of value beyond what any of the major media outlets were doing for our membership. And Chris had this brilliant thing where you can be a member. for free. All you got to do is give us your email address. And this is before anybody knew the value proposition of an email address. Right? You're like, sure, here's my email address. What is, you can have it. And like, I'll just see you're getting barraged with newsletters and emails and, you know, use your GI Bill.

And here's a for-profit school. And here's a, you know, countrywide lending wants to give you your VA home loan benefits and, you know, all this stuff is going on. And so that's an ugly business. that wasn't my side of this $50 million enterprise, right? That was 75% of a $50 million business when I joined in 05 was this lead gen. I like the way you distanced yourself from the spam emails, but continue. Yes, I did. It kept the lights on, right? And, you know, I had a pretty decent salary and the benefits.

And then they got acquired by Monster Worldwide. Right. This is HBS 101. You got to get acquired. And so that was kind of the beginning of the end in terms of their, you know, this is the oldest story ever told at B school. Right. You got to do it, but standby for pain. And so Monster, it turns out as a parent company, like most parent companies, was a terrible company. And they were tone deaf to the military part. They just wanted to milk it for all the revenue and stock share price and all that kind of stuff. And so it'd be. became pretty unfun for the co-founders. They both wound up quitting eventually. And then the monster wound up hiring the next leader, who was a former chief of naval information, one-star admiral, who wasn't awesome for the job. You know, he didn't know anything about product.

He didn't, you know, in his defense, he wasn't, he didn't have any pedigree that suggested he should be the guy. And so I basically had a running gun battle going with him for a few years and wound up accepting the opportunity to go to a startup in Hollywood. So the thing about my time, Lord, if I could interrupt with like a very brief sidebar. This is, this moment was sort of like when our paths began intersect a little bit because I got out of the Army in 2010 and I started a blog, like a WordPress blog, because I was

trying to, I started writing novels myself. and I was trying to kind of like get the word out there. Like how do you do that? I was feeling my way through it like a blind man, of course. And somebody at military.com, I can't even remember the editor's name approached me and said, hey, just come right for us and it'll get some better exposure. And so I was writing for military.com for free for a year. I apologize for skipping over that.

A year or two. No, I guess. The guy you're talking about is, no. no, again, that's an important part here. The guy you're talking about is Christian Lowe. Yes, thank you. My managing editor, who was also our scout. And so he, and you may remember that we sponsored the Mill Blog conference every year.

And we loved citizen soldier journalists. And we embraced the blogosphere in a way that nobody else did, and sometimes to our own detriment, you know, with guys like Jim Hansen and people like that who didn't love the man, right? And so. Well, yeah, you can blame, I guess you can blame Christian for setting me loose and I've been a, you know, a terrorist to the Department of Defense ever since. Yeah. Well, but that's what we wanted because the thing is we realized not only was this the right thing to do if you're a military affinity site, get the voice of those who were, you know, in it and had been there and done that and not just some, you know,

stringer or some syndicated source, you know, or somebody, you know, writing about the war from the bureau in, you know, Karachi or something. Right, right. You know, and so we were able to get that right. But the readership started to go up like exponentially. So we went from two and a half million uniques to 10 million uniques. Wow. We incorporated all of these blogs because we started blogs because we couldn't get our engineering team.

to create new verticals. So we just took WordPress and bolted it on to the side of military.com's, you know, sort of structure. And so we had all kinds of blogs and we loved sort of, you know, cross-posting content by guys like you. So that's how I first became aware of you and some other guys that we won't name and so forth and so on. And, you know, it was, those were good days, right? Those were good days. And I became internally aware of the stories of the post-9-11 veterans like you and the other guys, the names we could rattle off. You know, some guys went into the political space.

Some guys went into the not-for-profit space. Some guys went into the think tank space. You know, some guys started their own thing. Some guys became journalists, you know, and some of them were still around, right? Marty and guys like that. I became really good friends with Paul Reikoff, who's a controversial figure. But I was the first one to invite Paul to write op-eds for military.com and started to realize what IAVA was all about. Paul was a lamplighter, just like Kathy Roth Duket was a lamplighter when the Obama administration first took office.

So my Rolodex was amazing because I'm living in Southern Maryland, which is basically D.C. Metro and then working in San Francisco, one or two weeks. a month, right? We were right there on Market Street, 799 Market Street, which was a lot of fun. So I'm seeing the sort of product side, the internet growth side, the revenue side, the impact side. And then I'm also an influencer and a guy with a very viable network in and around D.C. You know, going to the gala's and the cocktail parties and the what-nots. And that was good sort of, you know, Intel fusion for us in terms of are we getting the stories right? Are we prioritizing the headlines right? And that's, as we know, the Sea of Goodwill started to just like explode, you know.

And so suddenly we have 40,000 organizations that are there to support the troops. That's when I met Bonnie Carroll at Taps. And again, Kathy Rothukai at Blue Star Families. and all of these other organizations. So continue with your story. After, after Military.com, what was the next stop for you? So I went to,

so was it Military.com for nine years. And then, like I said, Chris and Ann had left. It got less fun. The parent company was sucking the life out of the organization. You know, so I left for personal and professional reasons. I was sort of, you know,

on a destructive path, let's just say. And again, it's better to be lucky than good, the same way I play golf. I got in or I was reached or I was pinged by a guy who was the president of MTV Films for 18 years, a guy named David Gale, who was starting a website for the military, the military's entertainment brand called We Are the Mighty. And so he invited me to come to Hollywood, like the real Hollywood to come see what they got. And so I was sort of like Axel Rose

getting off the bus and the Guns and Roses Welcome to the Jungle video, right? That was me. And the office, their first office in, this is like September of 2014, was on Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood and Coenga. For those

of you with Google Maps, you can check it out. You can see the Hollywood sign from the front door of the office. The walk of fame is in front of the front door there. So it was just amazing. And so David and I were fast friends. He knew all the right people. So I trusted that he was on a good vector.

And he just wanted me to bro his fledgling site that wasn't even live yet. I was able to hire Paul Zoldra, who maybe your viewers know, who created Duffel blog. he was at Business Insider as their military editor. And since then, he's been the editor of Task and Purpose and some other things. But I poached him from Business Insider to come be my executive editor. So he moved down from San Francisco. We actually lived together in the Hollywood Hills for those two years.

I was there. And it was just a very cool opportunity. So we grew that site in a hurry. In fact, we were scaring the people at military.com. You know, all of a sudden, they were down in Hollywood, like, hey, what's going on? You know, you want to have lunch? I'm like, what are you doing on here?

And so, you know, we had a rivalry going with task and purpose the early days. They were kind of like the Rolling Stones to our Beatles, which is to say they were a derivative of what we were doing at We Are the Mighty. But like all super groups, it kind of flamed out. Very strong personalities. We couldn't build consensus about what our strategic direction was. And so I sort of got tired. of having fights with everybody.

It's like the Beatles and let it be. You know, I just want to, since we're talking about this subject about like military veterans and media, etc. And we're talking about it a little bit before the show and we don't have to like name names or anything get salacious necessarily. But I do want to just touch on the point that there's this sort of like interesting dynamic or this like push pull between guys. like you or myself in some instances who are veterans and we want to write about the military.

We want to write about it the right way. But you're interfacing with entrepreneurs and business guys who some of these dudes, as I think we've both encountered, they're the type of people that like they can go to a dinner party or they can read a self-help book and poof beyond like a completely different direction the next day. And you come into work and like you're there writing about military stuff. and like the next day they want you to write a finance newsletter for instance like that's something that really happened to me i'm like well wait what i don't know anything about that yes yes so that's

the distasteful side of the business and it's not like the military right so you'd be right you know in garrison with the bubas and all of a sudden you know and one of your one of the guys like is all of a sudden this total sycophant right yeah yeah the guy wanders off you're like bro what was that What are you doing? Yeah. You know, they sort of have this sort of, what's the word? They have this ambition. Right.

Right. That's dangerous. So in the post-military vet media space, we saw guys that maybe we never were Bubba's, but they gave the illusion when they were in uniform that were pretty mercenary in terms of, you know, this thing called Calais. capitalism, right? And they would mansplain you how your idealism was holding him back, you know, and how you don't get a check. But but, but, but isn't the sad part word is like actually at weird, as you were describing it, we are the mighty. You're showing that this can be a very lucrative business that I can work.

Yeah. No, it can. Yeah. But the problem there, because it was working, but because me and the founder didn't have. Mm-hmm. census and his team because I I mean in his defense he thought I was going to move to L.A. Like full time and that was never in the cards. That was never in the cards. And so I was out there one or two weeks a month. So other folks sort of became his go-to. Right?

And I would show up and like assume that I enjoyed his trust and loyalty and I did not. And it got worse as time went on there. And so that's life in the big city. But that was just a function of not building consensus about where this momentum should go. Right. What you're talking about is whoever the guy is that founded or started it, the guy who answers to the board, the guy who's trying to return results to shareholders has this sort of myopic view. right and like you said it's like last guy to the dry erase board so he'd go to a cocktail party he'd talk to some guy who's about to do you know a VC guy who says hey I'm doing this and I might

be able to get this guy to do a ad campaign with you but you got to do this right so it's like suddenly you're all in on a finance channel like that's not what I do and I don't think I didn't think that was what we do right so suddenly we're going to have a finance vertical and this entertainment sign I was just going to see right through that. I was told to recommend stocks to people. And I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, I, and I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, my reply to this was, you know, that's illegal, right? Like, you have to have a license to be a financial advisor. Like, I can't just start telling people to buy Raytheon stocks.

It doesn't work like that. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's kind of where our idealism is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, right during the course of it. So that's part of it. I think the only thing that saved me at military.com during my time there is the site was growing hugely. And I was in close comms with the sales team. And I was pitching them with ideas.

So I didn't wait to be told. I was telling them this is what we need to do. And sometimes I rode shotgun for visits to the agency. And, you know, for instance, they had a campaign with General Motors. And they were like, what should we do? I'm like, General Motors has an amazing military heritage. You know, in fact, the company became the military industrial complex during World War II in a way that I don't think people remember. Yeah, those weren't most the tanks were, I mean, am I wrong?

Every division, every division of General Motors became a military company. Allison Engines, those duck landing craft you see, the tourists on them. Those were made by basically General Motors. Yes, tanks. B-25s, you know, all of this stuff was different divisions, stopped making Pontiacs and started making weapons. Yeah. Like overnight.

Yeah. And Big Jim was the president. He accepted FDR's offer to be like an official cabinet member in charge of the military industrial complex with the board's concurrence resigned and then was punished at the end of the war for doing so. Wow. You know, so that's again a lesson in, and capitalism, you know, and how heartless and mercenary it is.

So this, again, to Jack's point, is just part of the whole business. Yeah. You know, and so if the founder is a guy you assumed was fellow vet, you know, a guy who was in it for the same reasons you were, and suddenly he shows up and it becomes painfully obvious that he's only in it to make a profit. Right. you know, in that naked, heartless way, then it kind of shatters your motivation. I've seen it.

I've been part of a startup where I'm, you know, a shareholder and a stakeholder, so I care about, you know, the growth of the company. But I didn't do it at the sort of, you know, expense of what I believe our organic growth pattern was, you know? And sometimes the guy that Jack's talking about, who were cryptically, cryptically not mentioning, was just like, he'd show up out of nowhere and be like a good idea fairy. Yeah. You know, and it'd be like, this is what we're doing. And I don't want to hear any pushback, do it, or you're fired. Right. So there's nothing fun about that, you know. Yeah. So that's part of, and the other thing about when, when Jack and I were in the space, this was

gen one of military media yeah yeah right this is this this is this is pre social media so what i'm proud of is we kind of wrote the playbook right how do you incorporate blogs how do you do offline events like the middle blog conference right um and then along the way here comes twitter and facebook i remember chris michael the founder of military dot com ordered us all to have facebook accounts i'm like why what why would i do i'm not in college why would i do that right She's like, no, do it, and I want you to understand it intimately, you know. And so there you go. And then we figured out, how does the organization have a Facebook account?

And what do you do with it? Right. So all of that was happening. We were building the airplane in flight, and it was great. So because we were seeing such gains, we could dictate to the parent company what was happening. I had some audiences with the CEO of the parent company in the Boston metro area. And this guy was a well-known bastard. He was not a nice guy.

And again, their job was to eke out every bit of share value that they could from military.com. The only property that was turning a profit in their entire portfolio. Yeah. And so we said, this is what we do. If you don't get it, that's your problem. And if you do what you're suggesting and trade on it insincerely, we're going to suffer and revenue is going to suffer. And so they trusted us enough and they were scared enough. And that's the only thing.

I saw fear in the eyes of the CEO, right? A very powerful man, you know, who's, who made millions of dollars a year, who drove, you know, he was chauffeur to work from his mansion in Revere, wherever it was, you know, in west of Boston. And he was scared to death. And so I was like, I'm not going to be beholden to that guy, whatever I do. and I know enough of what I should be doing and I have enough swagger in these meetings that I think they were like afraid to fire me. Right?

And that's a good place to be. It's like, I dare you to fire me. Yeah. Right? So that's how I was at military.com. And then when I got to Wear the Mighty, now I'm like one of the original, you know, I was the first hire from the founders.

And so I didn't, it wasn't me against them. It's like, we're all in this together. you know and the only thing we couldn't build was consensus about what are we doing right you know it wasn't me against the man it's just and that was what was even more heartbreaking is we couldn't build that consensus um and so after that i left we're the mighty to help out a friend who uh owned a or had founded a military spouse uh site that was acquired by a moving company a moving company in Jacksonville, Florida. And they didn't love her business savvy.

And so they were like, you need to find somebody to like help you. And so she and her executive director reached out to me innocuously enough here in Annapolis. And I was looking for a reason to tell the people that we are the mighty that I quit. That's a bad don't run from things, run to things. Yeah. And so I was just, I wanted that moment where I go, I quit. Right.

You know, without thinking, okay, what's the other shoe dropping there? You know? So I had that phone call. They were surprised. And I got hired to be the president of this company called Military OneClick, which was a bad situation because the founder was kind of a dirty dealer, not a nice person. And so we didn't get along. I was now her boss. She would do go to the parent company and badmouth me and take my hour. terrible reputation and try to ruin it on social media and it was not pleasant. So I was there for only six months. We grew this site manyfold. And the guy that we're hinting at wound up acquiring the site. And so I didn't want to work for him. So I wound up accepting a sort of running offer that the Naval Institute has.

So the Naval Institute, as I mentioned, they were my publisher. I contributed to the magazine. It's right here two miles from my house on the Naval Academy grounds. I love the mission founded in 1873 by the guy who was the CEO of the Monitor during the Civil War. A brilliant organization, a rich heritage. So I went and became their outreach guy. And in that capacity, I was able to talk to Mids and the guys at TBS and the fleet. and it was really a blast and was doing that for five years.

And in the meantime, I started a YouTube channel as a way to do sort of proof of concept to grow the Naval Institute's YouTube channel. COVID hit. And, you know, we were ordered to work out of our house. You know, I lived here in my attic for a year and a half or whatever. And I had the misfortune of having my YouTube channel explode. So I went to the CEO as a retired three-star ship driver, got in Pete Daly, great guy, and said, Pete, I don't want to be an asshole, but I can't afford to work here anymore, you know, because I need to be creating content like every day,

you know? And so we came up with a five-month sort of descent plan. I actually hired my relief at the Naval Institute. She's a good fit, and it's working out great. and now just entered the world of being a full-time YouTuber. And in this capacity, I'm leveraging everything I've ever done. I mean, everything. It really is sort of the culmination of my entire adult life,

or maybe my entire life, because, you know, being a Marine Corps junior informs what I do as well. So all the earned media I did. I mean, I was on Fox News a lot back in the day when I was the editor of military.com and the other NBC ABC. I knew my way around North Capitol Street very well. I did a lot of radio.

I still do XM radio with Julie Mason, but that started when I was the editor of military.com. So I know how to take a topic with very little prep and talk about it for 10 minutes at a time. I honed that skill at military.com. And so I've always been creative. that's sort of lived in peril as I described with my career. I know how to write a headline.

I know how to do a thumbnail. I know how to do the arc of an episode, you know? So if you watch any of my episodes, I liken it to writing a novel, you know, what it's like doing a 10, 20-minute episode. It starts with great hope. You get to the middle where you're like, this sucks and nobody's going to care.

And then you get to the end, we're like, oh, I think this is actually pretty good. Right? And then you launch it to the world and they decide. So some of my, oh, by the way, episodes have been smash hits and some of my sure things have been flops. And so I'm an industry veteran so I don't get too wrapped up about either of those outcomes, right? And lovingness and it's a good life. We just want to say, because earlier you said you were a fan of our podcast and we are a fan of yours.

Like the content, you have such, you know, I mean, obviously you have. of the air topics covered. And not just, not just the cool, interesting stuff for people who are into aviation history, but also sort of modern day, like what's going on in Ukraine, you know, what, you know, in terms of sort of,

especially the air perspective. And, and you have on great guests. I mean, your dissection of top gun maverick and, you know, and things like that. Like, it's, you have such a fun channel. And it's so interesting.

Well, thank you. Thank you. Coming from you, that means a lot. So some of that is just survival, right? So, and my wife was the first to come to me and go, you're out of your Tomcat stories. So now what? Right. Right. I told every Tomcat story I had. I talked to all my Tomcat friends like Reb Edwards and Scott Kelly, you know, even the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Sandy Winifeld. Nasty Manazer has been on channel a number of times, you know, retired two-star Tomcat pilot. So that population is finite and our stories are finite. Right. And so if you're going to have a channel that is your job, you need to have an editorial calendar that's more robust. So again, I'm leveraging the fact that every morning as the editor of military.com, I woke up with a blank canvas. And also when I was the editor-in-chief at We Are the Mighty, even more so at We are the Mighty. because we didn't really have

it's like who are we what differentiates us this is the problem with a startup you have no heritage right it's like what are we that is different than military dot com and navy times and task and purpose and all the other fledgling sites that were exploding at that time

you know in the mid-hots and we weren't always sure what the answer was so all of that sort of you know feeding the beast making the donuts as Chris Michael says it You know, you've got to make the donuts, and you also have to explore new pastries. Yeah.

And so I know how to make the donuts, but I also know to explore new pastries. So, okay. But you're also at the mercy of what will the audience tolerate you talking about? Now, there are other YouTubers in the aviation space, some of who I benchmarked against in my early days, that the audience has rejected them in any other concept. Really? Interesting. Yeah, there's there's there's there's one guy who wants to be a race car driver. Um, and his is, his, you know, what was 500,000 is now 500,000 or is now 5,000. Wow. Right. So, so that's not going to, you know, keep you from having a day job. Ward, on, on, on, this is a little bit insider baseball, but I think it is maybe a little bit interesting as far as this topic like that. veterans in the media, as you said, you were sort of like patient zero. Like, you were in it really early on. You know, my trajectory after military.com was as part of a semi-infamous special operations

news website. But that was, as you say, notorious. That was that was 2010 forward, right? Yeah. What has changed, I think, in so many ways is the explosion of social media. And, when I look at what we used to do back in the day, so much of that today, if you were to try to recreate it, would be Pass A, because there are now so many voices, in a sense, it's a really good thing. There are so many veterans out there telling their stories and they're expressing different things and they're talking about what they did in the service. Whereas like 10 years ago, I'd write an article like, hey, here's like five things you need to know about your school. and it was like the only thing out there about it.

That's no longer the case. That's simply not the case anymore. That sort of information is like you find on Wikipedia. It's very much like a sort of passe sort of thing. And I think that lends some explanation to what you do. Also, what we do here at the team house, that all of these guys kind of went off and they're doing their own thing now and kind of communicating in a very direct way with audiences.

Yeah, the landscape. changed radically right i mean that's an understatement i i timing is everything and as you say um i was in the gen one of the military digital media space um you know and and i'm i'm grateful for that because we were i mean military dot com is still the biggest military website but there are so many other places to get information including you can just follow somebody on instagram or twitter Twitter and get very focused information. And so you can tailor your fusion in accordance with who it is you trust, who do you like, who turns a phrase in a way that you find credible.

And I think that's been the secret of my success on YouTube is people trust me because of the way that I present things. You know, and that it's, and when you realize that you're, what's the same? your reach exceeds your grasp, right? And so what I realize is the Ward Carroll YouTube brand is impact beyond what I myself deserve. You know, and so you have to embrace that fact and respect it. So it's my job to get it right. It's my job not to go off on some political.

tangent. It's my job to make sure that my own outlook doesn't taint the inform and delight charter of having a YouTube channel. So again, I think because I've been in the space so long,

I've been in the digital media space as long as I was in the Navy. Yeah. Right? And so because I'm so scarred and I bear the scar. In fact, you know, you're talking about that that channel that you or the site you were part of you know that was a chaotic period uh in my digital life um and and uh you know i still bear the scars of the creation of that

um you know there's some trauma on the military dot com side when that went down yeah i know you capture some of that in your book um some of it you you don't and i told you this at the time some of it leads out some details of this guy there's some things i wasn't aware of also Yes, well, let's just say that. Okay, so I mean, you can feel free to fill that blank spot in if you want since you're here. I'll say the challenge because, you know, you guys are just kind of speaking around a couple things that a lot of our audience may not know. But I'll say the challenge is when you guys are honestly trying to do your job under whatever brand it is, that people, if that brand goes off the rails or somebody with a higher position in that brand goes off the rails and that brand loses integrity, you end up losing integrity by proxy

where people blame you for the things that are happening and they say you were a part of this thing and people like Ward and I are like when you start something up and you're a part of it you get emotionally attached to it and you're like just like that military mentality like you are dead set I'm making sure this thing can be successful but when you work for people who aren't quite rational

it's uh or ethical It's a tough enough. And worse than that, well, and worse than that are are mendacious, right? Liars, ambitious to the point of not being trustworthy. Right. To David's point, you know, it's like if you're on the Houston Astros when they get caught for cheating, even if you're the bad boy, it's on you. Right. You're not going to wear that jersey out in public for a while until whatever time frame passes.

and you can come back from Sicily or whatever you got to do. You know, and so, you know, I can relate to the feelings Jack had because you are like, this is a cool site. We got a cool name. We're starting these verticals that are really great on every warfare special. We got good talent as both editors and contributors. And then suddenly there's this expose about how the founder isn't paying anybody. Right.

And lying to people. And, you know, this is starting to eclipse everything we're doing here with the good part of this brand. And now it's synonymous with a guy who's, you know, just ambitious over everything else and willing to lie, cheat and steal to get whatever it is he want. Whether it's a watch deal or a loop box or whatever, right? I mean, you know, it's all kinds of like, yes. So that was disappointing for me on a personal level because when I first met that guy, I thought he was. was awesome. And we had a plan at military.com to make him the kid. And he got inside. He was like a Trojan horse. He got inside and then tried to attack everybody. And that that was that was,

that was, that was, that was, that was reflected poorly on me because I'm the guy that introduced this virus to this otherwise healthy body. Right. And so that that, that, again, I can relate to what Jack's talking about. So this is, this is, This is all about, you know, kind of a taking the, walking the path less taken, right? So guys like Jack and me, and David, I don't know your backstory, but I imagine you're the same kind of way, is that we hate the idea of a day job. You know, and for me, it was like when you get out, you can go work for Raytheon or Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin. And you can be at the booth at the trade show and hand out the squeeze balls and wear your tie and BS with your other buddies. and, you know, but that's like not dignified.

That's like you have totally sold out just to pay your mortgage. I hate the idea of that path. Just put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, you know? And so I never wanted that. And I was provided the opportunity to not do that by Chris Michael, which is like, come be the editor of this website. And I remember my classmates, I'd be at homecoming at the Naval Academy. And again, this population is not.

not a bunch of free thinkers. It's not like I went to, you know, Berkeley. Right. Randis. You see Berkeley. Yeah. So they're like, does that job pay you? Right. You know, your blog. They'd call military.com my blog. Are you still doing your blog? Yeah. I'm like, what? You mean the biggest military website on the planet? The $50 million business that pays me a salary like twice what I made in the military? That place, you asshole? Yeah. I'm still there. Right? So, you know, people don't get it. And these are guys who worked at defense companies. They were the biz dev guy at defense companies. Right. So they knew what the RFP was going to be. They knew where all the Pentagon dudes were going. They knew that Beltway landscape intimately.

Right. You know, and that was the sum total of being a player. And then that somebody comes that's not in that world, they kind of view it with some derision, you know, some disdain. which is, again, Philistine in nature. And so I love weaking them and succeeding in these unorthodox ways. So now being a YouTuber, you know, nobody gets that. And when I went to the retired three-star and said, sir, I'm quitting the job here. And I'm going to go just do my YouTube channel all the time. He's like, really? I'm like, yeah, because I'm making more money as a YouTuber than I am working for you.

That was the third highest paid guy on the payroll there. But it sounds to somebody who does not understand, you know, the... A retired ad moan. You have, you know, like, you have six times more subscribers than we do. Like, you have a, you have a exceptionally successful channel. In a world where there are a bazillion channels. And for somebody not in... this community.

When you say you're going to do your YouTube channel, they think, well, my 16-year-old has a YouTube channel. Like, how are you going to make money from a YouTube channel? The media environment changed. And they don't understand the operational environment. And real quick, just let me be, because we've mentioned it and people listen to the podcast instead of like look at it, watch the live stream,

your YouTube channel is at Ward Carroll that's C-A-R-R-R-O-L everybody check it out I promise you if you're listening to our podcast you will find something on Ward's channel that you will enjoy immensely well thanks very much for saying that and again back to the way I've opened the aperture of subject matter right so out of Tomcat's stories told the story when the canopy blew off the A4 I was flying and told the story of when I was airborne, when another Tomcat had the Ray Dome, you know, open in flight and hit the front canopy and all those things. Talked about my career, talked about what a Rio does, talked about, you know, dissected Top Gun Maverick trailers for a year and a half, you know, and basically figured out the movie before it came out. And so now it's like, okay, but if you're going to have exponential growth. And the other thing I should mention is I had a mentor in YouTube, a kind of an unorthodox mentor, a guy named Rick Beato, B-E-A-T-O. Rick is a music YouTuber. So I was subscribed to his channel because he would talk about, here's how you improvise, here's music theory, here's how they recorded this album, super cool guy. Well, it turns out he's a closet politico.

And while I was writing for bulwark and dispatch, he wanted to talk politics with me as I was subscribe to him. So he wound up coming to Annapolis in 2018 and we sat down at a bar downtown called McGarvys, which is an aviation bar, and realized we're brothers from different mothers. And he said to me, why are you doing so much Twitter? Why don't you have a YouTube channel? I said, well, I do Twitter because it supplements my writing. And I at this point, you know, I had a huge, like, who I was following and who was following me was heady stuff. It was all. all the, you know, the kind of hashtag never Trumpers, again, Bullwork and dispatch. So, you know, Charlie Sykes and, and, you know, Bill Crystal and all that, those guys, Steve Hayes at the dispatch, all the hosts at MSNBC, right?

They were all like, we were in comms and I would say something and tag him. And they go, yes, right. And so that was kind of my identity. I was a Republican. Now I'm a former Republican. Democrat. I'll just say that up front, right? So I believe in strong national defense, free markets, so forth and so on. I don't believe in too much entitlements. I'm a, you know, I want to believe I'm just looking for the party apparatus to basically unscrew itself. Yeah. And I don't see any chance of that

happening. So before your commenters start freaking out, just chill. All I'm saying is, this is how I met Rick Biano. Okay, so Rick says start a YouTube channel. I'm like, what do I do? He goes, well, it's pretty easy. Just take your phone, push video record, and talk into it. And so that's what I did. And I sent him the pilot. I'm going, how about this? He's like, that's awesome.

Now post that to YouTube. So I did it. And I was doing that three times a week about whatever was going on with current events. You know, I was doing, here's what gerrymandering is. Here's what the compromise of. 1876 was and this is how it's being mangled by Ted Cruz here's the conundrum that Pence faces I presaged the insurrection I did and I didn't mean to but turns out I was right you know and again I'm not I may have said I may have said on this podcast that we're

heading towards a constitutional crisis yeah that's putting it mildly right but you could see it coming right and so because of the rhetoric of the and the cruises and the you know gozars of the world i was like this is this is these people are are really playing with fire in a way that they're not going to be able to put it out they're not going to be able to put this thing out so i did all this on the channel and in the middle of that i'd go here's how i play guitar here's how i got my novel published and i did one episode when i talked about the west point cheating scandal because i've been accused of a of an honor offense at the naval academy and i explained the nature of those things and

That's the first episode that went over a thousand views. I think all the parents of those accused watched it and shared it. There was some solace there for them. And then I did one called The Truth About the F-14 and Goose's Death, where I talked about I used this model right here, right, the big F-14 model, to talk about the aeromechanic tendencies of the F-14 and how Goose didn't do one of the steps in the bold face and this kind of thing. in the middle of all these other random renaissance episodes, right? So my channel really didn't have a theme per se.

Right. It was kind of like Ward, this eclectic guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Heirs about all kinds of things. Right. Right. And again, Rick's like, just keep going. The algorithm will find you.

You're doing good. This is right. I'm like, 40 people are watching. I have like literally eight subscribers at this time. He's like, no, no, you're good. Keep going. So, okay, I did. And then I posted that Goose episode.

Christmas time 2020. And I literally called Rick in early April of 21. I said, I'm going to stop. Nobody cares about my jive ass. You know, I don't have the bandwidth to keep doing this for no feedback and no return. And he's like, no, no, stick with it. The algorithm, it will find you. Just keep going.

And literally two weeks later, that Goose episode, through no effort of mind, had 95,000 views in a single day. Wow. Wow. So I call Rick, what's going? I said, I told you this would happen. The algorithm, not people, the algorithm has triangulated on you. So F-14 Tomcat, aircraft carriers, top gun Maverick, whatever. So I go, what do I do?

He goes, kill everything that is in aviation, like unlisted. And I had like 40 episodes at that point. So, okay? And now do more aviation content. content. He said, I'll never forget it. The audience gets a vote and they want you to have an aviation channel. He goes, is that all right? I go, that's great. I don't like being in politics. It's, it's like ridiculously corrosive and thought thankless. And so that's, if you look at the bottom of my homepage, you know, the Chuck Yeager episode and the other episodes, I just started rapidly

iterating. And I had a bunch of stories inside me, right? So I did all of those. and it turns out the gaming community where my first core fans the digital combat simulator community which is an amazing system I have a simulator right over here as a matter of fact that I am now an active member of that community

I have a Twitch channel people watch me fly the top cat right so I'm a super gamer now you know the company gave me all that stuff for free you know I mean I'm 64 years old and I'm a gamer right

it's great I'm living my best life. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is fantastic. So anyway, that was it. And then my subscriber curve just went off the charts, right? You know, I got 100,000. Yep, we see it.

All right, so we need to delist every video that's not a Navy SEAL stat. Yeah. Get them off here. No, no, no. I mean, you should be data driven to see. You got to do what you want. No, but, yeah, you're, no, you're absolutely right, Ward. And, yeah, we're people, our audience like to see,

special ops stuff. So, so one of the things, and we'll just say that we understand sort of the data driven part of it, and we see other podcasts, similar, you know,

or YouTube channel similar to ours who mostly focus on that special operations facet. But Jack and I have the goal, and we talked about this a long time ago. We have the goal of, you know, because we started out the same as you, where we would just like talk about some news

stories and get drunk and whatnot until we started, you know, inviting people on and interview him. And then we decided that our goal was to capture history at the personal level. So while we know that if we only had, you know, the tier one, like the spec ops guys on here talking about, you know, there I was knee deep and hand grenades. And we had those that that would boost our numbers. it would boost us in the algorithm it would you know it would it would put us on but we're hesitant to get into that grind right but the other thing is we we want everybody's history so we'll have on analysts we'll have on drugs we know that we somebody that we'll have on you know that they might get four or five thousand views but it's an important part of history for us you know yeah

yeah that's a good I think you got to be oriented that way yeah is what I will tell you and you guys know this and this is when you trade in public taste, if you think you can reverse engineer that, you're wrong. Right. Right. And so that's why I say I'm surprised by the success.

Like my balloon video, the Chinese balloon shootdown has 1.2 million views. And that was a cast off. That was a six minute. Oh, by the way. That's amazing now. Before going to work out on a Saturday morning. Yeah.

Right. And it's something that I stress about has 25,000 views. Yeah. You can't predict it. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, we've, you know, like, we understand, like, yeah, if we have a guy who's, like, a Delta operator or a SEAL Team 6 dude on, like, that's going to get a lot of attention. But we still want to have, like, a combat weatherman on the show. Yeah. Or a CIA analyst or a reports officer, you know, that people who were involved, you know, like I said, in hit.

Because if we were just to chase the numbers like this would stop to be fun very quickly, I think. Yeah, I think so. You know it absolutely would. And you'd feel like you're... It's a job. It's a real job. Yeah. We don't want to have a real job.

Also, it's just like when you write about things that you don't feel. Right. Or when you play music and songs, you know, sometimes we do songs that I'm like, I can't sing this. I don't like this song. It pains me. It physically pains me, you know. And that's when I'm writing, I'll be honest, this book, The Aid, which is my, I'm sorry, militia kill. This was a pain to write.

I hate this book. Because it wasn't your thing. These people suck, you know? And that was just commerce. It's like, I own a book. You know? I'm like, Ethan, can we like bail? Like, we'll give the advance back.

And I'm like, well, funny thing, we already spent it. Right, right. So like then deliver the book. Yeah, but you're not, you're not having fun writing it. We're not going to hear your cover. Yes. We're not going to hear your version of mbop. No.

So, no, you will not. So, Ward, what, I, as like, an OG in this sort of like veterans and media space. I'd like to talk a little bit about like where it stands today. Because we have all these websites that are in some incarnation. They're still around. But as we've both said, it's also very different now. Where do you think it is today with all these, I mean, there's, you know, it's, and it's a good thing. There's all these younger guys who are coming out and they're getting into this space. I mean, where do you see it today? And where do you see it going in the future?

So I think the difference between, let's just say, the mid-aughts and now is the way that we get our information is wildly different. So I'm thinking, as you were talking, Jack, I'm thinking of the latest high-impact story that taught my attention, which is Jim Leportez's story about the USS Boxer Water Contamination. Yes. Right? And so how did I discover that? I saw him posted on Twitter. And then I, that link drives me to, in this case, was military.com.

And so I read the story and it's Pulitzer level work. I mean, you know, Jim's one of the good ones. And I've been friends with him for a long time. And he's, you know, gone various places. Most recently. Check, check out his interview on the team house. We've had him on here. Okay.

Roger, you guys get it, right? I wanted to have Monty's like, well, you got to talk to my people. I'm like, that sounds like work. I don't talk to people. You didn't get the memo. And so, but it, the destination is a web page, just like it was in 2005. But the way you get there is a completely different path. Back in those days, you had, you'd go to your browser, you'd go to the homepage.

The homepage is really mattered back in 2005. Right. Right. But now it's the person. You think it's the person that people are following? No, no. It's it's it's. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I mean by the person, people you follow on social media. Like, like Jim, Jim is the guy. I'm following him because he's pretty solid. He posts an article. I'm reading that. Right. Or Jim shares stuff from other people that you know he'll make good choices. Right. Right. Right. So it's like we all have a, a circle of really cool friends. That's what social media is. You know, like in high school, that was like three guys, you know, and you'd go to their house on the weekends and sit around because nobody had a girlfriend and listened to Black Sabbath albums.

And somebody would go, have you heard this band Genesis? Like, what? You know, and you play that and, you know, that was your cool friend. Or Kansas. I remember my friend Van Reed was like this cool band, Kansas. And I heard it just blew my mind, right? And this was even before. left overture there was an album before left over sure that nobody knew about right and so anyway that's what

twitter is for me right a guy like jim la porta or molly young faster whomever these are the cool kids who know stuff right i'm just at the end of this this chain consuming their choices their opinions their their view in a way that makes me smarter, right? And so that's the value of Twitter to me. I don't do Facebook anymore because there's too much space for people. It's useless, right? And all that is, all that is done is make me lose friends, both former squadron mates and classmates that are basically fascists,

it turns out, right? And so it's disappointing. It's heartbreaking. Yeah. I can't talk to them at homecoming now. I'll see them across the tent, you know, the beard tent, be like, oh, shit. And you just, you know, what a bummer. And you were really super close to all these coming of age moments you had together.

And now because of Facebook, that's all ruined, right? That's not what Twitter is for me. And I think it's because I've tailored my follower feed better, you know, and also your character limited. And now the post blue check thing, it's all, that's all gone to hell too. Yeah, I mean, Twitter's going to go down the Facebook route eventually, right? Free Elon Facebook I'm talking about. We're going to move on to a something else. Yeah.

Yeah, right. Right. And I'm not sure what that is. But again, I think that there is still great journalism happening by veteran journalists, you know, like Jim. And, uh, and Marty, uh, you know, at Black Rifle and the other places where he's, he's reporting. um at task and purpose and so forth right i think the other thing we're seeing is consumers are brand agnostic they don't care what what the what the byline is they don't give a shit they don't care no right and so i look at what if you google something what you know when i'm doing research

i'm doing an episode about the queen elizabeth aircraft carrier and how they're trying to put catapults and arresting gear on that ship and uh and why and so if you google that you get these kind of backwater sites that have amazing information by subject matter experts. So if I was to cop a two about, well, this isn't Jane's fighting ships or the Naval Institute, you know, then then I wouldn't be exposed to this stuff. But I do not care. Right. You know, and I care insofar as it reads factually and so forth and so on. But I don't immediately brush it off like maybe I would have or influencers and ideators would have back in the day.

So that's completely changed. I don't think it nets out to be worse information as a function of that. The responsibility is in the liability, as we're seeing in terms of this bifurcated nation we're living in, is if you create, if you tailor your intel fusion, let's call it, in a way that just reinforces your already narrow point of view, then you're going to be a liability to the public dialect. I picked the discourse, democracy. Sure.

Right. And so I'm seeing that. But insofar as is information still getting out like it did back in the day? When we would have a post that did 500,000 page views in a day, you know, that was eventually millions of pages over time, that still is happening. It's just the way that the awareness is created is different. And so even if you don't follow Jim Laporta on Twitter, you will see this because now CNN is talking about it. Right, right.

And, you know, Brianna, what's Brianna's last name? She's an army wife who's one of the correspondents. Oh, yes, I know who you're talking about. Yeah, she's awesome. So she had Jim on and we're actually both advisors on the Blue Star Families board. But so now people who just watch broadcast media have seen Jim. They're aware of the story. they'll read the story.

So it's happening kind of the inverse of how it used to happen. Before, your awareness came from whatever broadcast media chose to talk about. Right. Now it's inside out. Right. So broadcast media is time late. That's sort of the media of record at the end of the day. And I did tweet the other day that any media that is time constrained,

should be avoided. Right. Right. And I just was on XM radio the other day in the studio with Julie. And we're in the middle of some things you want to talk about my political trajectory and growing up in the Netherlands and how that made me a little more sort of progressive and, you know, voting for Reagan the first time and all this sort of stuff. And I'll say, that's great. Okay, we got to go. I'm like, right.

What? I'm not done talking. Right. What do you mean? You know, what's this? That's what this whole podcast or YouTube thing has switched up, right? Is we sit here and we could talk for six hours if we wanted to. Yeah, right.

There's no constraint on, you know, you can say whatever you want, talk as long as you want, Ward. Yeah. Well, I know. You look at my, again, look at my homepage of my YouTube channel. I have six minute episodes. I have three minutes episodes. I have an hour and 19 minute episodes. Yeah.

Right? I don't even know going into it what it will be. I'm surprised at the end of post production. what it turns out. Like the one I'm working on now, it started as a 45-minute B-roll, and now it's like 26 minutes. And I'm like, oh, that's not long enough.

I've got to add something. I'm like, that's it. Yeah. The end. Well, that's good that you're disciplined enough to do that because I'm like the guy like 10,000 words. Here we go. Well, again, that's a different medium

if you're being paid by the word. No, no. I have some expectation. Very rarely if I've been paid by the word. Yeah, no, that's more New York Times, the Atlantic type of stuff. Mostly like, I'll give you $300. Right. But, yeah, again, it's freeing up.

This is what I love about podcasts. This is what I love about YouTube channels is we aren't constrained by time. We can go venture down these tributaries of thought. We can talk about other subtopics in a way that we could otherwise, you know? Yeah, veterans in the media is like the perfect. example of the sort of like niche subject that normally not going to hear about it. No. And again, you and I were in the early days, the pioneer days, which were caused by the 9-11 conflicts and folks transitioning out post-service, right, as the wars were still going on.

Very interesting dynamic, very intense, needed people to get it right, needed people to stay dedicated to serving in other capacities. And so you had, you know, the not-for-profit space, what we call the Sea of Goodwill. You had the political space. You had the military. And then you had the media, both print and digital, that was over all of this trying to figure out how do we cover it, who's leading, who's following, who's the big boys in the space. You know, military outcome was dismissed as just a digital medium at first. People are like, you don't have a print arm right so why would we take you seriously you know i mean that's that's very pretentious thinking obviously which is crazy because then you look at like buzzfeed and vice and even though

they're having issues now but how highly valued how much at the time yeah they sold for back at the day when that's all they were were digital you know buzzfeed well again this is true entrepreneur true entrepreneurs are able to presage those trends yeah right um and it was fun to watch and a guy like chris michael is a true entrepreneur and you listen to him talk you're like my mind doesn't work like that it's just he he just blows me away with the way he approaches problems on everything what what do you see is the next step ward as there is a younger generation of veterans now who are as they say digital natives they grew up with smartphones they grew up with broadband what do you think the next step is

If you were to put that entrepreneurial hat on or just from an information standpoint or where veterans exist in that media environment, what do you see is perhaps the next step? So I think the mediums will continue to evolve, right? So Discord servers, we chat, other sorts of over-the-top medias instead of cable. my son doesn't have cable TV and he's very informed my oldest son he you know he has YouTube TV and he tailors his feed with news programs on YouTube YouTube channels are how he stays up to speed on current events and I look at that I'm like that's smart it takes more work but I many times wake up in the morning and will will bounce between BBC America Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and just be

the Atlantic, yeah. Be dissatisfied with every bit of that broadcast TV, right? And if you know something about a subject and you watch how they cover it, you're like, is this how they're doing every subject? Because this is really terrible. You know, and so all of the criticism is valid. So I think,

assuming that this is my fear, is digital natives are exposed to a lot of stuff without any context or wisdom. It gives you the illusion of wisdom. And so I talk to, you know, Midsk a lot. And they're supermodo. They're really earnest. They want to do right. But then they'll say something that just shatters all of the credit I give.

You know, I'm like, oh, no, oh, no. You know, and you just want to go, put your phone down and read. Catch 22. You know, read Carrowack. Read Nimitz's biography. Read about the Civil War. Read about the rise of the third right. You know, you are exposed to a lot with no context and you think you're smart and you're actually woefully ignorant.

And so that's my fear. But back to the question, I think the ultimate way that facts are forward. it remains the 800 to a thousand word article right so where does that live does it live on a server does it live as an attachment to a text or email or is it at a website like military dot com is that a twitter thread is it an article is it a twitter thread right i mean some of those are just amazing you go you look the the somebody i don't know will get retweeted by you know Aaron Ruper or something like that and it'll be like thread you know one of 28 and you read it you're like this is incredible this is pure pure intel right pure fact unbiased from the source like this guy's was staffer who's in the room he saw it here's what he knows so information is being proliferated it's just not through the prism through the templates of a major newspaper or broadcast media.

So insofar as the population remains somewhat educated and grounded in a unity of ambition, compassion, the American experience, which is another thing that's kind of getting shredded in various ways. And that's not to point to one side of the aisle or the other. this is just what's happening. So if we can maintain some, there's a book called cultural literacy, which talks about there are certain things that all Americans should have

at least a conversational knowledge of. And in the back, there's this index. You know, it's all kinds of things. Like the Battle of Shiloh, the Beatles, soupy sales, Tiny Tim, you know, the BGs, MTV, you know, do we share these things? What's the Venn diagram across the organization?

You know, and I celebrate diversity, but if you celebrate too much diversity, there is no unity. Right. You know, I mean, I love going to my local, you know, Peruvian chicken restaurant and watching some bizarre soccer game in Spanish. I love it. You know, it's kind of cool. I celebrate it. But then I'm like, would I die for these people? Would they die for me?

What do we have in common? their experiences that all my stories have no they're like what what are you even talking about right and i'm like so what is your thing i mean again i think this is the challenge i'm not saying good or bad i'm saying the atomization this is the challenge this is the challenge to the national experience the american experience now i think our conception if you're saying leave it to beaver and happy days and those are that's when america was great that's inaccurate and living in the past and again right but even living in the past the past the past wasn't the past yeah that that that was the predicate there was subjugation of whole classes of americans

you know um and that was all a big lie you were born on third base and thought you hit a triple you know so the american experience should be open to all and we need to fix education and we need to make sure that that experience is available to all. And I think just with broad brushes, we just cut people out and we decry the urban experience because the homeless problem and crime and everything is out of control, and it's all about woke and Gavin Newsom and so forth and so on.

But that leaves out the fact that we did nothing, nothing for the inner city population for decades. We left them to their own and we let them figure it out and then you pull the lid off and they figured it out wrong and now you're going to criticize it. Okay, that's that's not a fix. And now what we realize is we got we got to deal with it. It's not it's not a problem that we don't care about now because of the growth of minority populations and the way that suburbs are blending into the urban areas, it is your problem. And I think that's that's okay. That's fine. I'm dealing with it here in a naples. You know, Annapolis has got a burgeoning homeless problem. We have all kinds of public housing that surrounds us, and these populations are exploding

without the right guidance and mentorship. And so increasingly, there are shots ringing from a cross-forest drive, and it's like the war isn't over there. You hear about, you know, the Central American gang population has exploded here. I'm like, when did that happen? You know? And so it's now my problem. I live in downtown Annapolis.

I love Annapolis. But now it's my problem. I know that's the same way that Chris Michael feels in San Francisco. That's the same way that some of my friends who live in Baltimore feel, right? So suddenly the chicks come home to roost. And you realize we probably should have paid attention to education like 20, 25 years ago. Yeah. You know, and we probably should have because you hear about, oh, there's this midnight basketball thing happening in the inner city.

Like, oh, I'm glad they solved that problem. right that's not a solution that's a it's a bumper sticker right so at once the criticism of the right is right and woefully wrong further the criticism for the left is right and woefully idealistic and unaware of how people keep the lights on and give you paved roads and that cell phone that you're holding on to, right? So again, I don't decry social media. I don't think that's the end of Western civilization, but we have to attend to what underpins content, what underpins information in terms of, you know, timeless truths, the great thinkers. And when I, again, cultural literacy, If I ask a 19, 20-year-old at the Naval Academy, a basic question about what I believe to be core American experience and they whiff on it, it concerns me.

Yeah. One of the challenges I think we're finding, though, with social media is that for me at least, I can't just like read a story from somebody left or right. I can't just read a story and accept it. Like I, then I have to spend two hours researching, like, what the facts are behind it. That if, if, you know, the Republicans or the Democrats, like, shot down or voted against something for veterans or firefighters or this or that, that it's probably not, it's probably not as simple as the other side wants to paint it. that, you know, that one of the challenge we're seeing, I think, with social media is that if somebody makes a mistake, if somebody says something and whether it's intentional or accidental, you know, it'll get massive amounts of, you know, views, likes by the people who can, you know, who agree with that. and then you can read down through the comments and find somebody who actually says, well, this actually isn't true, but that post isn't going away. The person isn't going to act with integrity and correct themselves or remove it.

And we see this on both sides, like that almost everybody, I feel, who has, like, very large followings are operatives, even if they aren't intentionally being an officer. that they are, they have a way of viewing the world. You know, they pay attention to things. If you hate Trump, you're going to pay attention to things about Trump that Republicans aren't going to pay attention to. If you hate Biden, you're going to pay attention to things about Biden. The Democrats aren't paying attention to. And we just, we've come to a point, I feel,

where people are less willing to, and I don't know less willing. because I wasn't alive in the 50s. So I don't know, you know, but we've come to a point where people are less likely to challenge their own views. Yeah, I think that's true. That is, that goes back to the liability of these stove pipes that social media can create.

You know, this is how we get, well, again, I have this book here called The Hitler Book, which was written by two of Hitler's bodyguards when they were captured by the Russians after the war, World War II, and Stalin made him sit down and write it all out. Fascinating book. Because it goes through the rise of the Third Reich

in a way that sort of is a procedural for how do you create a fascist regime. and it starts with, you know, sort of mangling the process of democracy, demonizing the justice and the other, you know, agencies, demonizing part of the population. And they didn't have social media then, right? So what you can do now is with great, with light speed, you can reinforce your, your, your point of view. Right. And totally be ignorant of the other side, right? And under the auspices of this is ground truth. But I think, Dave, what you're talking about is, is the responsibility of, of good people is when you hear something, then run it to ground. It will take some effort. But this is, if you tailor your feed, if, you know, just in terms of Twitter, both sides of the aisle,

and I think mine's a good example. I have some right-wing, you know, opponents and some left-winged proponents and between them because I'm not a homer for either side, right? And I like you, you'll read something like, is that true? Right. You know, like Jim Jordan said this. And you're like, that can't be true. And then you'll find out from somebody else that they'll parse it out. Like he said this, but the full story is this. And Marjorie Taylor Green said this, but she's, you know, this is propaganda 101. And what she's left out is the context of that statement, which is actually 180 out from what she used it for, right? That kind of thing. And then the other side, you're like, President Biden

said this and this is it. And somebody else to go, this is a misuse of the authority and that sort of thing. And you're like, okay, I'm now fully informed, but it took some effort beyond just listening to one point of view. Right. Right. And I think. to your point back in the day it's like we trusted walter kronkite yeah he was the guy right all you do is watch tv for 30 minutes a night and you were balanced and you knew that walter wasn't going to sell you out right because walter was not a homer for either side walter was the guy that said you know there's vietnam war maybe it's a bad idea right he told the nation that right and so everybody's like oh what walter okay so we don't trust anchor men anymore like that

you know I mean Lester Holder or whoever who cares you know and and so now it's proliferated to the point that if you're going to be informed you're going to have to have more intel fusion you have to have more irons and more fires it's doable all harder all of this is the it's the anxiety that comes with living in a free society that it's inevitable if you have been an authoritarian government you wouldn't have that anxiety because the decisions that you're have been made for you. Well, and that's where people like Jesse Kelly tweeting, let's be honest, I think it's time for a dictator. Yeah. You know, that kind of talk is profane because Jesse'd be hung from a lamppost at the end of all of that. You know, do research a little history, Jesse, and tell me how those things went, you know. Yeah, the French Revolution.

That's just obnoxious. That's just those guys are misusing their pulpit, you know, in a way that's really profane and negligent and that understates it. So again, I think we have too many people with too many megaphones, too much star power. You build a constituency, there's many, you know, these pockets of an audience and you think, you know, I'm a big star on Newsmax, right, or OAN, or my own little channel on this backwater Discord server, you know.

And you can labor in that cesspool and believe, that you're somebody until it proves to be either unproductive or like life-threatening or damaging to the American fabric. Or you just pull the classic move of a rebrand, which Benito Mussolini did perfectly, started out as a socialist and then switched over to fashion. So he found he could get more traction there. And it's really, I mean, in a sense, it's like there's a kind of macabre humor behind seeing these people try to do things like that.

Well, it's macabre until it starts to matter. I mean, you could find humor in Trump. You know, that town hall was kind of a clown show. And you can go, that's just a megalomaniac narcissist with a bunch of homers in the crowd, you know, and bat on CNN for giving him the forum. But then you're like, except he could be president again, right? And so you start to go, this is an existential threat, you know.

And again, I was a Republican. I'm not saying that I think everybody on the other side of the aisle is correct. And the squad is the way. I'm not saying that, you know. I'm just saying that that's an example of where we get misinformed and constituencies form that would articulate, maybe we should just put a TV timeout on the Constitution and allow a dictator. until we get it all squared away. That's how fascist regimes come to.

I mean, the Weimar Republic led to poor economic circumstance, led to demonizing the Jewish population, led to a weak leadership by the chancellor, led to a conniving, too smart by a half guy named Adolf Hitler, who was able to work the system and got the support of the population. He didn't do it one. It wasn't just him and Goebbels and Himmler. It was the entire population that allowed this to happen.

You know, and this is a smart population. You know, Emmanuel Kant was German. Beethoven was German, right? So this didn't happen in some sort of a third world country. Right, right. You know, and so America is not a third world country, but we have demonstrated both the capacity for communism on the left and fascism on the right.

And to your point, Jack, democracy is hard. Democracy is a transient state. So we're always faring towards socialism, communism, or authoritarian fascism at any given moment. We assume because we believe our hype about, you know, the grates and the framers and all of this cartoon narrative that we were sold in elementary school. And we didn't bother to dig in past that at all. And you can look back into the commentary going back to the Cold War that we've always been veering. either towards communism or fascism, depending on who you're listening to.

Like, we've always been in that state. Well, if you listen to the Ultra Podcast, I know Rachel Maddow is a controversial figure, right? So I'm not saying Rachel Maddow is all that. I'm just saying that this podcast series is amazing in that there's solace in knowing that we've been here before. So the American political dynamic in the mid-30s all the way until the Pearl Harbor invasion, the Pearl Harbor attack, was a lot like what we're seeing in terms of the America First MAGA movement now, except worse. So I entreat viewers to check that out. Also, the other thing about military and politics, if you look at the year, 1947, when Truman was president, and we had the revolt of the admirals. And this is what I love about having the channel is it forces me to do like deep dives on subjects that I've kind of known in past.

And this was one of those where you start to look at that year and how did the revolt happen and what was in play. Well, the Department of Defense was created. The CIA was created in 1947. And because we quickly pivoted from the two axis, you know, war in the Pacific War in Europe to the Cold War, the service chiefs woke up one day. They're like, oh, you know what? We may not be players in this war, particularly the Navy, who had won the war in the Pacific with carriers. And suddenly, the Air Force, who's now exists out of nowhere from the Army Air Corps are like getting the ears of lawmakers saying, you know what, we have these things called B-36s. That's the future. Carry nukes, fly. You don't need aircraft carriers. And so give us the lion's share of this budget we now share

that we didn't share during the Cold or during World War II. The Army was funded under the War Department. The Navy was funded under the wait for it. Navy Department. They didn't have budget fights in World War II. And suddenly, it's 1947, there's only one bucket of money. And so it got really ugly. In fact, Arley Burke, later Chief of Naval Operations,

for whom a class of ships is named, was in charge as a captain of a literally office of dirty tricks that was writing stuff about the B-36 that was factually incorrect. Test results. So you look at that, you're like, we got nothing, you know? I mean, you think Secnav or SecDef or the chairman,

you know, Millie is a political actor these days. He's chill compared to the folks back in 1947. I mean, the Secretary of Defense was so despondent on the cancellation of a ship class and the fact he got fired by Truman that he jumped out of a window of the Bethesda Medical Center. That was forestall, right? We don't have secretaries of any service jumping out of windows these days, right? So I think we're going to be okay.

I think it's the bottom line. But we have to understand our history. Again, I've had the occasion to tour battlefields since the summer of 2020. And I felt a bit like I don't understand that history well enough. I don't feel like pushing over the statue of Robert Lee, and I don't feel like carrying a Confederate flag. So I endeavor to understand this part of our history better. And when you do that, you start to realize this is a complicated part of American history that is necessary to understand. Should not be erased, should not be celebrated in Dixiecrack kinds of ways, which it was.

And a lot of it was put up to shut up and get along in the 50s and 60s. That's why I have carriers named Vincent and Stennis. That's good old-fashioned politics by Reagan and others. Nixon, Reagan, Johnson. You know, that was just called getting it done without putting your finger in the chest and going, what are you doing locally to ensure equal rights? Right. That question was never asked.

So basically for 100 years after the Civil War, we labored with Jim Crow and other things. Right. So we got to solve that. But the way we're doing it in this digital media, social media, media environment is binary. You know, we just choose aside and we literally fight each other in the streets. Well, that's the beginning of the end. You mentioned like Aaron Rupar and Mitch Matta and Molly John Fas.

Are there people on the right? Like, who on the right do you respect when you read their writing? So when you say the right to me, I'm talking about the center right. So that's Jim Swift, Stephen Hayes, Charlie Sykes, Bill Crystal, the people who write at bullwork, so forth and so on. You know, that's Nicole Wallace. People like that. The far right, I'd have nothing in common with. Yeah. And I listen to them talk. This is a dumbed down, ill-informed, mean-spirited narrative. Right? So if that's what you mean by the right, I can't abide. I don't know. I don't know what the right is. Like I,

Well, okay, that's true. To me, the two parties are basically like self-feeding beast at this point in time. The parties kind of decide the parties are their own entities. And I just mean sort of politically. So I would say on the right is individual liberty over social good. And on the left is social good over individual liberty. That's sort of how I make that distinction. Yeah, I think that's true.

That's sort of the banners under which those two parties exist. But then in execution, it gets pertubated in a way that's just about a media hit on Fox News. And I think money in politics has mangled that truth. Because you can go, look, free markets are great. And then you have the Industrial Revolution where people are literally dying in the streets. and that's what caused the labor unions and workers' rights to rise up. And then there's an overcorrection in terms of now you can retire 50 at full pay and we're going to charge the taxpayers to fund you. Right.

Right. And suddenly the tax rate is off the page. You guys live in New York so you know this. Yeah. You know. And you're like, how did that happen? Well, that's workers' rights run amok. So the tension between those two extremes is the American experience.

Sure. So we have to be able to fight elegantly and productively. And that's what's not happening. You know, because if, you know, if Gozor is seen talking to somebody on the left, he's going to get primaried, right? And so that's kind of what's happening here. And it's all about these identity politics and acid tests and so forth and so on. It's not about outcomes.

And you can do these stunts, you know, the boberts, the Gozarts, the, the, the MGTs of the world or MTGs of the world, there's no legislation. All I can think is their districts must not have anything of consequence going on. Georgia 14 must have no military bases, must have no roads, most have no bridges.

I mean, because all she's doing is this sort of, you know, these stunts, these performance art. You know, and so I'm like, look, I'm not, if you like her, that's on you. But all I'm saying is, that's not what a lawmaker is supposed to do for you. So it must be nice to live somewhere in the wilderness where it just doesn't freaking matter, you know?

And so that's my frustration, you know? So again, when you say the right, David, immediately I go to, I guess, former right, center right, but there's nothing viable there. There's no path to the presidency from that starting point, right? And so for me, the problem solvers, the problem solver caucus is somewhere between, and all these people are out now, like Liz Cheney, Eric Kinsinger, and Mikey Sheryl, you know, and Elaine Luria. You know, between those two polls lives reasonable people who have differing points of view, but are, are, have the ability to come together to solve something in a fair way. way, you know, and so until we get back to that as the dominant force, we're kind of in trouble.

And so, again, history shows, whether it's the fall of the Roman Empire or Western Europe, you know, between the wars or whatever, that if you don't attend to it with educated people and a population that isn't asleep of the switch, then one of two things happens. You either get Mao and Ho Chi Minh or Hitler and Mussolini and Franco. But at the end of the day, you get a dictator. You can call it fascism, fascism or communism. But even in communist governments, even though communism is supposed to be the state taking over the means of production, in communism, you still have somebody at the head of it.

You can't look at a communist government in history. and not associate it with a personality that ran it. Yeah, no, I think you're right. Like, we are sort of falling for these cults of personality and this sense of tribalism. And what really needs to happen is people on the right who are trying to keep people on the left and check, you know, leaders on the left and check,

actually need to be keeping, leaders on the right and check. And people on the left need to be keeping people on the left in check. But instead, it's just, you know, sound bites and tweets and whatnot that enable us to demonize the other side and not use any introspection or self-reflection. Because we all know everything, right? Like, I know that everything that I know is right, because if, If it wasn't right, I wouldn't believe it.

Well, that's called getting old. Yeah. And so it's worse and worse. But I think, but every human being is like that. Like we all think, we wouldn't believe something we didn't think to be true. So therefore, we, everything we know must be true or everything we believe must be true. Otherwise, I wouldn't believe it if we weren't true. And it, but again, back to what we're talking about in terms of social media and that dynamic is,

we get codified and we we forge that that reality that maybe in the old days we would have come into over time quicker younger right to your point because of social media right so if I believe something and then I tee it up on a discord server and 10 guys like yes exactly you just said exactly where I was thinking thank you you're like right yep yeah right and I'm a thought And then they drag in a link to something else. And now all of a sudden you're in some backwater manifesto, you know, and you get radicalized before you even know it. Right.

And just because now this is my circle of friends. I mean, this is that Connecticut National Guardsman who sold us out. Right, right. Right. Because his discord buds. Right. You know, that's his identity. Right.

Right. Because at work, he's nobody. No officers being nice to him or whatever. And he gets on this thing. And like, I know things and I'm a big deal. If I don't show up people. miss me you know that's the problem you know in cells and people who are now identify and their entire being is online right and that's that's it that's a dangerous thing that's the antithesis of

what i'm talking about which is where you can use social media to stay informed against a backdrop of craziness yeah classical liberal education you know and so ward uh you know tell us uh where we can find you, where we find your YouTube channel, what your presence is online, where can people go to find out more? So I have, my YouTube channel is Ward Carroll, two hours and two else, like David said, the Maryland spelling of Carol. We signed the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll and Daniel Carroll. So two hours, two else, that's my main hang, right?

And I also have a Patreon page if you want to support. me check me out on patreon otherwise i'm on twitter hashtag or uh handle at ward carroll and i have a instagram page called youtube award carroll um and uh i am there as well but i think mostly if you want to find out what i'm up to and what i'm doing the best place is youtube and you you go check out punk's war on amazon punk's war is everywhere yep amazon it's available in all formats now is a function of the popularity of the youtube channel the first three books were republished by the naval institute press couple years ago now available as an audio book and a kindle um i'm working on punk four really we're calling punk's force yeah uh i don't i don't

want to tell you it'll be available it's slow go um but uh we are working on punk four punk is the Air Boss, which is kind of fun. What? Yeah. Yeah. And it's going to be a good one. So we'll put the, the links will be down in the description for folks who want to check it out. And we have one, uh, Jeff Skiver.

Uh, thank you very much. Here's buying you a beer on behalf of, uh, Mucci's Patreon plank owners. Uh, thanks, Jeff. Uh, thank you for hosting this. Thank. Well, thanks, Jeff. And thanks, Mouge. We, we, Mood, how did you get your get your call sign. Did you borrow a lot of money with you're young or what? I did. I did. Yeah. That's exactly what happened. So I as I described a couple hours ago, we, we, I went, I was a early draft pick to go right on deployment. So I was not prepared. So we're in port in Palma de Mallorca, an island off of Spain. And I didn't have any of the local currency, you know, and further, I didn't have any money to exchange because I was Lieutenant J.G.

poor. And so we're at the bar and, you know, it's going around. Hey, you're around. And I'm like, and I went to Fuji Landsdale and said, hey, Fuji, can I borrow some bongo bucks? And he said very loudly, you're a mooch. And that's all it took. That was it. That's been, that was my name for, you know, it was my identity like Bono or Cher. You know, nobody even knew what my last name was for the the whole time I was in the Navy. And now I've been able to resurrect it on the channel, which is very cool. So now people call me mooch again.

Did you have a call sign? Like you have a temporary call sign before you get something. Yes. Yes. Mine was stork because I'm tall. And the XO who gave it to me was a big fan of Animal House. So he's calling me stork. And that lasted about two weeks until that scene in the bar in Palma.

And just, I know you've covered it on your channel. And please, anybody, everybody, check out Mujah's channel. I promise you will love it. You'll find something you love. It has a lot of great topics. And you don't have to listen to him for three hours like you have to listen to us. But tell us, tell us about Maverick. and rooster in the F-14 up against Gen 5 fighters.

So or Gen 4. I wasn't prepared. I wasn't prepared to like Top Gun Maverick as much as I did. You know, and Paramount actually sent me up to see it in New York on the Northwest side there a month before it came out. And so that scene is awesome because it's very realistic. So first, as everybody knows by now, that they. you know, get shot down each separately, find each other on the ground, wind up taking an F-14 that this enemy has. And Maverick jumps in, rooster goes through the startup procedures, which reminds me of

some of the things I used to do on across-country when you didn't trust the host ground crew to do things right. So if you were going to leave the ladder down or stairway or not pull the plugs in the right way, the Rio would wind up doing all of that sort of housekeeping. And then you jump in the airplane because you put the ladder up before you got in by jumping on the horizontal stabilizer and then climbing over the fuselage and getting in the backseat the way that Rooster does in that movie, which is very accurate. So I was moved by the fact that they got that right. And I know the guy who is the technical advisor and he is Atom Cat Rio. So of course they would get that right. So they wind up taking this airplane, get it airborne. And now Rooster,

is in the seat his dad occupied for his career which is there's a spiritual thread there that is really cool and when rooster jumps in he goes this is so old and that would kind of hurt me because in my day that was like the technical bleeding edge right he looks he's like god this is so old it was like a modem like dial up motor yeah yeah that's that worse than that right so i thought that was a funny line although i heard a little right so they get airborne and now these su 57s form up on them and that's a fifth generation Russian airplane. The felon is the NATO code name. So a fifth generation airplane has thrust factoring, it's stealth, it has Gucci weapon system, all aspect missiles. A fourth generation airplane, especially that version of the Tomcat,

doesn't have any of those things, right? So on paper, the Tomcat would get its ass kicked, you know, in a 1 v1. But because this is a Hollywood fiction and Maverick is not going to lose, they do some cool stuff about Maverick rolls in, guns them and different things. And then Hangman, Ron Powell, who met actually at the devotion premiere. He's a cool guy. We actually recreated the scene where he walks into the bar and Phoenix says, fellas, this is bag man.

And he says, hangman. And she says, whatever. We recreated that scene. And he was up for it. It was great. Although he got it wrong at first, I was like, come on, don't you know these lines? But he's a cool guy. But in any case, that's the final scene.

It did my heart good because it involved the F-14, which was the hero of the first movie. Yeah. You know, arguably the star of the first movie. And during, as the trailers were eking out all during COVID, there was that one part where a Tomcat flew through. and you're like, oh, what's that all about it, right? And you didn't know exactly to what degree it was involved. So it's very much involved in the end, basically saves the day. And again, as a town cat guy, I'm going to go.

That's a really good way to end a movie. They almost made it seem, because I don't know how, like, the Navy rolled out their aircraft. But they almost made it seem like the F-14 was Gen 3. And then the, what was it that they were? flying the super horn the super horn it's the f 18s right

f 18 yeah were fourth generation so so they made it seem as though the because they were talking about during the mission op like they would be the the super hornets would be going up against

gen 5 fighters which was so they almost made it seem as though the F14 was two generations behind like a third generation Well, yeah, it starts to be a little bit of sort of hair splitting in terms of what equals what generation. Right. You're correct.

You're correct in that superwarn. It's a digital airplane, digital flight controls, digital architecture from the get-go. It's not stealth, but it has all-respect weapons, so forth and so on. It doesn't have thrust vectoring like a F-22 or the SUV-57. And it's not stealth, like I said. So it's like 4.5. Uh-huh. You know, the Tomcat is Gen 4.

Uh-huh. Gen 3 is like the Phantom and the Century Series fighters and that sort of thing. So if you talk to a geek about, in fact, there's an episode where we talk 6 Gen with Paco Benitez, who does go through the, what are the rules associated with the Generations 1 through 6? Uh-huh. So that's a good one. But you are correct that there is a half generation improvement between the Tomcat and the Hornet and the Super Hornet. And then there's a full-up generational improvement with stealth airplanes that have glass cockpits and, you know, visors that are your heads-up display and all aspect weapons that are stealth, right? So that's a whole different.

And they're network-centric and they have fusion and they can do. things. They can control drones and, you know, all kinds of stuff that you couldn't do in a fourth generation airplane. How closely are you following AI and where as like an author, as a or as a Rio, as somebody deep in this world, how do you see, because AI just sort of like jumped. It just made this huge jump. How do you see that or how would you imagine it? How would you like it. What do you see as the future of AI in, you know, the sort of the air space? Well, so, I mean, AI is here, right? That genie's out of the bottle. Right. And I just saw that story yesterday about an exercise that the Air Force did where the drone killed the operator because

the operator was giving him information he didn't want to carry out. I believe also that that, that, that somebody came out and said that was a thought exercise that it wasn't something that actually that the I think that there was sort of a retraction on that um that's probably the air force hierarchy walking it back I think the guy got a little too chatty yeah uh in front of the press it wasn't exercise it wasn't just a thought exercise they actually did it um and when they said that killed the operator didn't like physically kill the operator right it It targeted him. Right.

You know, the thing he's control, he targeted him. And then when that didn't work, it took out the communications tower that transmitted his stuff. So that's like the Frankenstein monster, right? Right. Dr. Frankenstein's like, I don't know what happened. I mean, I just built the guy. I didn't time to go drop the little girl in the village. Right.

You know? And that's actually how the YouTube algorithm works, by the way. So I'm in a Illuminati Discord server for YouTube creators. It's a buy invitation only thing that includes the highest staff of YouTube, including the guy that runs the algorithm whose name is Todd. And so often we will go, Todd, this happened. I just had a spike out of nowhere. I didn't change the thumbnail. I didn't change the title.

What's going on? He's like, I don't know. Send me a screenshot of the curve and I'll put it into the data file. Right. Right. So the algorithm is on its own. So if you're like, I got a heater, I'm on a, and then suddenly just plateaus, like, what happened? That nobody will know.

Right. You know, it's confluence of so many variables by this point that are not human in source. So that's the same of AI. AI will be a force multiplier in terms of loyal wingmen. You know, so if I'm flying my six-generation fighter and I've got Vixen, drones. I can control upwards of eight of them. I've given them a task and they go do, you know, and they're cost effective. Now I have where I'd have two, I have 10, you know, in accordance with the budget and the capabilities, these are all stealth, low observables,

lethal, so forth and so on, right? Unit cost is, you know, a small percentage of what I would pay for a manned aircraft. Not to mention the cost to operate is, is another. small percentage because there's no human being to take care of. Okay, sounds great on paper. However, we see those things like that. What happens when? What happens when there's an EMP pulse and suddenly you can't communicate with any of these airplanes? Right. Right. Which they've shown that we're really over leveraged against things like EMP. And what happens when we get hacked and Brand X now can control these things. Right. You know? So these are real. conundrums, they're real problems. I think sci-fi, you know, they're talking about that war games

and Terminator 2 and all these other things, they're like, see, this is, you know, fiction is actually true. I think it is at some level. So I think, for instance, unmanned, it's happening. There's no going back, right? Because of something, well, we need humans in the loop. Really? Because the smart guys are already way ahead of you. Right. And they've already sold this to the Pentagon and decision makers and influences in a way that you can't, that toothpaste isn't going back in the two. Right.

Right. So unmanned is here. This episode I'm working on now about the Brits. The reason they want cats and traps is not for manned aircraft. It's for unmanned aircraft. You know, and the Ford Class carrier is all about, can we arrest landing and do catchouts with very light things, not heavy things? the the you know the mq 25 that's why e-mouse took so long it wasn't because we got to shoot 72,000

pounds tomcats off the front is we got to shoot an 11,000 pound drone off the front right and so it's happening you can't go back so how does a drone interface with an airwing now these are the devil in the details how do you do mobility tech notes how do you do daytime recoveries and launches not to mention night time we haven't solved that right have this technology and we can land an unmanned aircraft on the carrier one at a time. And then so what's the next step? We haven't figured it out. AI.

AI is a misnomer. We don't have AI, right? There aren't sentient machines that can rival what a human brain can do yet. They just, there aren't. There's very sophisticated, programmed stuff, but it's not like replicating the human brain in terms of impulse, in terms of decision making, feelings, remorse, guilt. Right. It doesn't exist.

Right. So AI and the full-up sci-fi like Westworld or Blade Runner, like you can't tell a difference. It doesn't exist. Now, will we get there? Perhaps, but not in our lifetime. And it certainly won't be part of military hardware in our lifetime. You know, so I don't think we have a lot to worry about. and when it rears its head in a way that creates a headline,

that can be attended to. Right. So I guess it's all going to be all right, you know, at least for the next 40 years. And we will see more drones. We will see more autonomous drones. But it won't be the revenge of the machines. Well, and it's interesting because a lot of people equate it to like sky net.

But I think there's sort of that I-Robot, you know, that asthma thing that, well, how do we best protect? Like, it's not destructive, but it's like, oh, protection through tyranny. Like, because, you know, it's sort of like the example you were given this exercise where this AI was supposed to take out anti-aircraft sites, right? I think that was the thing. Yes, yes. And then the operator said, yes, it's an anti-aircraft sites. aircraft site and yes it's in a hostile environment but it's not currently a threat don't take it out so the ad goes okay i'll take out the personnel around it no don't do that and the ad goes i'll take out

the communication towers so you can't talk to me yeah yeah right because again they're like well because we incentivized it to say you get points if you kill a sam site right right and it's like it was sort of myopically focused on that it's like you told me that this is what matters right right And it's like, no, no, listen. Like, Hal, now I want you to do this. You know. And it's like, no, you told me. This is what I'm doing.

Right. Right. Again, it's sci-fi. It's like suddenly the monsters out of the castle. Yeah. You know, it's the scary part. So guys, I hope you will come back and join us on Tuesday. We're going to be here with Michelle Taylor, served in the Army intelligence community,

and then in the FBI for 14 years. So we'll have here on her here on Tuesday. Ward, thank you so much for like this wide-ranging conversation. Yeah. Thank you guys. We went all over the place. Yeah,

yeah, this would be the case. No, it's good. No, have fun with post-production. Yeah. There is no post-production.

It's out there. Is this a live stream? Yeah. Lazy as fuck. Like, yeah, this is a live stream. Great.

All right. Yeah. I appreciate you guys indulging me. I want to come up to Brooklyn and, Do it, man. Hang in person. I want to smoke a cigar in the lounge there with the comfy chairs. We would love it.

I was just up there. I was in Queens for the Westminster Dog Show a few weeks ago. We had a dog. We had a dog in the show. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Well, man.

German wirehead pointer. Next time. Next time I let me know. Yeah. Absolutely, man. So thank you, Ward. Go check out his novels on Amazon. Go check out his YouTube channel.

There's some links down. the description for you to go check him out. We promise you you'll love his YouTube channel. Promise. And also join the team house guarantee. That's the team house guarantee. Also join us Patreon. Yes, like Jeff.

Jeff's my, he was patron number two, I think. Patreon number one was Doug Sherman. First responder in Gloucester Mass. For less than a cup of coffee a month. Yeah, I don't even care. Just give me something. Give me a dollar.

Give me $100. You can feed mooch. Feed mooch. All right, guys. We'll see you all of you on Tuesday. Take care. Thanks, everybody.