Hasard Lee: A Fighter Pilot's Stealth Secrets to Business DOMINATION

You're going out with potentially 100 other aircraft. And it's multi domain space, cyber, ground, sea, everything working together against an enemy that is also multidomain as well. So I would say if you really had to boil it down, 10% is dog fighting and how good your hands are. The rest of it is being able to coordinate these large forces of exercises. And typically it's the fighter pilots that are planning these exercises. If you boil down my job as a fighter pilot, it's to make decisions. And I think it's more important than ever now. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Welcome to all three of you joining out there, wherever you may be. We are joined today by two special guests and myself, Brian Keating, your host, your fearful host of the into the Impossible podcast, discussing the impossibly delightful, delicious, enjoyable book by today's guest Hazard Lee, just called The Art of Clear Thinking. And I'm joined today by a very special guest live in the into the Impossible studios, making his first ever podcast appearance. And this is my good friend, Lieutenant Commander Ariel Kleinerman, graduate of many, many disciplines and places, but including and not limited to past guest on the show, David Spurgels, Princeton University. Ariel, welcome to the podcast. Thanks.

Pleasure to be on.

Thanks. And it's a very auspicious day to have a Hazard on the podcast for many reasons. One, when this comes out, not the live version, which is coming out today, it will be the release date of his first book, The Art of Clear Thinking. And hopefully there'll be many, many more books to come. It's been endorsed by many, many people that are just incredible. But I want to point out past guest astronaut and Dr. Scott Parazinski, who's an incredible human being. My mom fell in love with him when he was on the show.

I'm sure she'll fall in love with Hazard as well. Hazard, welcome to the show. Major Hazard Lee.

How are you, Brian? Thanks for having me. This is great.

It's great to have us here. I love this book. This has been such a treat to read it and to really plow into it, both as a private pilot here in Southern California, a big fan of the Air Force, and my stepfather was an academy grad back in the 60s, flew tankers and phantoms in Vietnam. And there's a lot of that in this book, as well as lessons learned for individuals of all kinds. But, you know, I'm a scientist and your father being a physicist, you know all about that. And the science in this book is what really stood out to me and made it so delightful and such a quick and easy read. But the storytelling is what really stands out in this magnificent book. So the first question I have you know, we have a segment on the show.

Whenever an author honors me by coming on, I always ask them to judge the book by its cover. Something you're never supposed to do, right, Ariel? You're never supposed to judge a book by its cover. What else do you have to go on if you've never written a book before? This is your first book. So we do a judging books by its cover, where we ask you to go through the title, the subtitle, and the COVID art, if any. And the most important thing I want to ask you, why did you choose the art of clear thinking, not the science of clear thinking? So take it away. Help us judge this book by its wonderful cover.

Yeah, I love that because that's the first thing you see when you go into a bookstore. So, yeah, I really wanted to show that there's a lot of books on decision making out there, but this is one through a little bit different of a lens, somebody who is in the hot seat making these decisions. So for me, it's a little bit more of an art than a science, although I talk through both. So there are opinion based decisions, there are data based decisions. But for me, when you're actually in the moment when you don't have time to fully analyze and process every single variable in detail, a lot of it comes down to the art of making a good decision. And I think a lot of people struggle making decisions. I did growing up. It wasn't until I became a fighter pilot and really found a good framework for making decisions.

And I think, as Ariel was saying, I'm interested to hear your take. When you fly, especially when you solo, as soon as you take off, you know that you're the only one. Your decision making is the only thing that can get you back to the ground. So for me, as soon as I soloed, it really changed the way that I see the world. That's something that's important. And I wanted to convey that with the COVID with the F 35. I am an F 35 pilot, so that's where the plane came from. And then a stealth fighter pilot's.

Timeless rules for making tough decisions. So I wanted to showcase a little bit of my bio in the subtitle. So some of it was technical, some of it was, as I talked to you, opinion based decisions. But I think it I'll leave it up to you. But I'm pretty excited for what me and the team at St. Martin's Press came up with.

Yeah, it's really a tremendous accomplishment. The reason I didn't mention but the reason Ariel is joining us today is he is a retired lieutenant commander in the Navy where he flew the Super Hornet. So we have actually two real life American heroes on the podcast today. And I brought this bag here, which I got from an author by the name of Russell Monroe for his recent book. He makes this cartoon called Xkcd, and it's for use in case of motion discomfort. And I solicited questions from my audience. But the first thing I want to do is point out that today Hazard, you may know or not know, is the 33rd University of the release of Top Gun today, May 16. So it's an auspicious day to have a Navy fighter pilot on as well.

So I want to turn the first question over to my friend Ariel, and I think we had kind of a similar discussion over lunch, at least at one point. I remember hearing from my neighbors here in San Diego, john and Martha King, that the day you become a pilot, your identity has changed forever. So I want to ask, as a fighter pilot, as a fellow fighter pilot, what came away from reading this book? What kind of commonalities do you perceive between maybe Air Force stealth fighter pilots and following the super Hornets that you engage with? What kinds of similarities are there and are there any important differences that a layperson like me effectively would not take away from this wonderful new book?

No. One of the things I enjoyed is I created mental bottles for myself as I went through training, things that I thought made me successful and how I approach problem sets. And then I found that Hazard did a very specific job of putting that down and writing much better than I've ever done. But these are models that I developed through flying and then also Instructing. That was another part of the book that I really liked, was the stress on Instructing and how to be an effective instructor. I didn't get a solid background into how to be a proper instructor, and I approached it with the wrong mindset at first and over time, through trial and error, kind of came to a similar area that Hazard did. As well of trying to reinforce the student, build them up, approach them from a different aspect, as opposed to what we do pretty frequently in the fighter community, which is evaluation. Every flight is essentially a test.

But no, I found the book to be the quick mental math problems I had a fun it reminded me my students would be there with a Whiz wheel, which is essentially an analog computer for calculating distance, time, fuel. And I would do fun games with them of like, hey, I'm going to do this in my head. You do it on the wiz wheel, we'll see who does better. And inevitably, using very similar techniques to what Hazard puts in the book, I would come up with a better answer than they would get two minutes later on the wiz wheel with their heads down low. Situational awareness.

So Hazard, one of the things that I I took away is that there are these different, you know, kind of ways, mental models, shortcuts, et cetera. But one thing I always remember hearing from, I think it was from a fellow F 18 pilot of Ariel's, which was, you know, if you're relying on hand eye coordinate yeah, people say, oh, Hazard, you must have like, this phenomenal hand eye coordination. You could just make split second reactions. The book, I came away with a very different perspective. And I wonder, how much do you rely on that? On kind of the base primal limbic system versus deep ingrained systems, training, thought processes, acronyms, et cetera. How much is physical, mental? And if you could give us a breakdown. Like, I came away very interested in your training routine. Both you guys are in exceptional shape.

The shape that I can only aspire I'm lucky, Hazard, because unlike you, I'm always pulling like two G's. I've got enough math on me that I'm always pulling two G's. But anyway, tell me, please, what is the physical and mental relationship? How much is hand eye? How much is intrinsic innate? And how much do you have to rely on actual cognitive processes versus physical ones?

Yeah, that's a great question. So a lot of people think that when we take off and fight, thanks to movies like Top Gun, which is a phenomenal movie, but that it's. This one V, one cage match. We're going up, we're pairing our best pilot and our best jet going against Russia, China's best pilot and their best jet. But it really is that systems thinking. You're going out with potentially 100 other aircraft and it's multi domain space, cyber, ground, sea, everything working together against an enemy that is also multi domain as well. So I would say if you really had to boil it down, 10% is dog fighting and how good your hands are. The rest of it is being able to coordinate these large forces of exercises.

And typically it's the fighter pilots that are planning these exercises as well. So we'll plan them several days, sometimes several years out with dozens, sometimes hundreds of people, all trying to align towards this common goal of overall mission success. So it's a lot less than it used to be. If you go back to World War II, we have a lot of systems and sensors in place. You're using the F 35. It's a flying system. It's a flying computer. It's phenomenal how well it can do that.

And if you're busy just yanking and banking the whole time, you're losing that cognitive processing ability to be able to maintain situational awareness. So about 10% hands, you still have to have good hands. We're still training to dogfight. It's something that is very possible, but it's a lot less important than it used to be.

You talked before. We start recording and then Ariel will have a question about your Ace framework versus the OODA loop framework. But we were chatting and I watched on your Instagram feed. By the way, everyone has to follow his YouTube channel, his podcast, and his Instagram is just it's just like you live vicariously through Hazard. It's just so delightful. But one of them is a video with one of my heroes, tito Ortiz, UFC MMA. Just an incredible guy. Huge.

He's probably my weight, but 1% body fat gets in the commercial, I guess a civilian g machine. I forget the name of it. Hazardous health in a second. And he g locks at or we should explain what that is, but he passes out at like, nine G's. And I'm like, Hazard. You're like, yeah, that's just breakfast for me. But talk about just the physical training. What is like, routine? You're going flying in the morning, and a lot of my listeners are astronomy, and we might think, oh, we got to really be ready.

It's life or death. We hit the telescope, but sometimes we have to sleep. If I'm using a telescope like the Keck telescope, it's $10,000 an hour. If I'm not at my cognitive peak, it's going to be a tremendous cost to my grants or to my funding agency. How do you deal with the physical demands of your highly intellectual pursuit? The brain uses most of the calories in the body when it's at rest. But do you have a physical training routine? And do you have any tools, tips, techniques to get sleep when it counts? That's really important. And then, Ariel, I want you to ask about the UDA loop versus Ace.

Yeah, absolutely. So flying a fighter, a lot of people are like, you're just in a seat. How difficult could it be? But we are pulling upwards of nine G's, nine times the force of gravity. So right now, I'm at one G, I weigh about 200 pounds, 230 with my gear on. At nine G's, that's over 2000 pounds of force just crushing you into your seat. And as you saw, Tito Ortiz, one of the most fit people on the planet, 9th person ever to be inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame. He wanted to come out and see what fighter pilot training was like. So we put him into the Nasdar Centrifuge, and this is all credit to him.

He wanted to do the full fighter pilot profile. He didn't want the old man kind of tour of it. That only goes up to four G's. So nine G's, nine times the force of gravity. He ended up g locking. So that's a g induced loss of consciousness. So with the forces that we're pulling, it's vertical. So it's pulling the blood out of your brain and putting it into your extremities, and it's doing it with enough force that it can rupture your blood vessels.

So after a flight, it'll look like I have chickenpox on my arms and my legs. And that's from that pressure of the blood rupturing those blood vessels. But the real threat is passing out. If you lose enough blood, you'll pass out. And at the speeds we're flying, typically we're going to be oriented with our nose down in full afterburner. So that's 40 plus thousand pounds of thrust pointed pretty much straight down, and you'll be incapacitated for about 30 seconds. And speeds we're flying, it takes about 20 seconds to impact the ground. So unfortunately, we've lost about one pilot a year to a GM deuced loss of consciousness, where they pass out and they impact the ground going 800 miles an hour.

So it's something that we really focus on. And it comes down to physical training, it comes down to nutrition. So just being 3% dehydrated can reduce your G tolerance time by 50%. So you have to stay hydrated, you have to eat well, you have to work out with your legs a lot. How we're flying, it's typically pulling a lot of G's, resting for a little bit, pulling a lot of G's, resting for a little bit. So it looks a lot like hit training. So we'll do a lot with that. And this is probably the biggest thing that's changed in the Air Force over the last ten years.

When I first joined, it was a little bit like golf might have been in the 90s. You had a lot of John Daley types, people that were really talented, good pilots, but they didn't treat human performance seriously. And I remember some of the instructors early on saying, you didn't really have to train for Jeez, just go out and smoke a cigarette before your flight because that would reduce your arteries and use your blood pressure. So over the last ten years, we've really focused on human performance because of all those people dying. And so we now have nutritionists that work with us. We have physical therapists, because you do have a lot of back and neck issues. A lot of people have to retire early. Sleep is a huge factor, as you mentioned.

So probably the average fighter pilot could pull 1010 and a half, maybe eleven g's. But each one of those things, if you're dehydrated, if you have a lot of stress, if you didn't sleep well, it lowers the bar for you, and it just takes one time of going over your limit that can, unfortunately, in you. So sleeping is a big thing. We'll sometimes have briefings at five in the morning. When I was flying in Afghanistan, I would fly the graveyard shift. So I would go in and I would fly from 11:00 p.m. To 05:00 p.m.. We do have some drugs that were prescribed for extreme things like that, dextromphetamine, but it's not the best thing to take continually.

So for me, getting a good night's sleep comes down. It's probably what most people have heard. Getting off your devices, having a routine, exercising during the day, and then having a sound machine is important, especially if you're on that graveyard shift. Everything seems to conspire against you. It's probably something that you experience being in a telescope at night. I'm sure they want to maximize the amount of time they can use that. So when you're working in the middle of the night, everything, especially if you have kids, conspires against you to try and wake you up in the morning. So having blackout currents, keeping the room cool.

So all the standard stuff that people have heard. But I think it's just staying disciplined and making sure that you're checking all those boxes.

Well, you got to kind of take up the mantle of my friend and local celebrity jocko Willink here. You got to start making supplements. Hazard, I see that in your future. Ariel, you and I were talking about UDA. You were trying to explain what UDA is. Besides, it sounds like a character in, like, an Oompa Loompa. But what is this and the Ace framework that hazard, can you compare and contrast those? And how could we apply those of us that are just flying Microsoft Flight Simulator?

Yes, the Udaloop was developed by John Boyd, one of our most famous fighter pilots. I believe he also helped lead the team designing the F 16. And I'm sure Hazard could correct me being an F 16 pilot here, but Udaloop is observe, orient, decide, and act. And then Hazard, your Ace framework is the assess, choose, and execute. Correct?

Correct.

Wondering if you could kind of walk us through. What are the differences? What are the improvements on the OODA Loop model with the Ace framework?

I don't want to say there are any improvements. The one thing about Air Force pilot training is that we're not really taught on what john Boyd the history of John Boyd. I have his book over my shoulder. He's one of the forefather fathers of decision making theory. So he's done a phenomenal job. But I think the Air Force is unique in that it doesn't really adhere to dogma. So we take whatever we can and are always moving forward. And so Boyd had a huge impact in it, but he really isn't taught per se, and unfortunately, he didn't write a book.

But anybody that goes to Air Force pilot training and goes through fighter training is taught a framework similar to the Ace helix. So assess, choose, and execute. So in order to be able to consistently make good decisions, you have to first be able to have a high fidelity understanding of that problem. So as pilots, we call that the cross check, being able to see which variables are important, discard the other ones. So I talk in the book about finding the nonlinear ones that have an exponential return, for instance, ejecting, lots of things to do. Most important thing, just slow down, because it does not increase linearly, but it increases force, increases exponentially with speed. So being able to assess, then choose. So part of choosing is being able to develop a lot of courses of action.

So that's where I have a chapter about creativity and developing those courses of action. A lot of people choose to skip this step and just they want to act. And there's a lot of reasons for that. One of the big ones is that it's tough to measure progress when you're brainstorming. So people just want to pick something and start moving on and then lastly, being able to execute on that decision. So there is a lot of psychology here. When we're flying missions in Afghanistan, there might have been a thousand people that touched that mission, from spies on the ground to satellite operators, to people in the chaos, to tankers launching from other continents, all to get you on target on time. And so that's a lot of pressure, a lot of eyeballs on you.

It's not like the old days where nobody can monitor you, so everybody's monitoring what you're doing. And so there's a lot of pressure. And being an instructor, I've seen a lot of students choke. And so it's about being able to control your emotions and being able to execute while under pressure. So that's the framework that we use as fighter pilots.

Both of you guys are instructors. And that's kind of self identification for me personally as an instructor, in addition to being a father and hopefully a decent husband. But instruction comes up a lot in this book. And when I think about instruction, I think, at least in my profession, hazard of being a professor. Things haven't changed in over a thousand years. Back in the year 1080, in Bologna, Italy, the first major university in the west that's still in existence today, there was a guy, and he would stand up with a piece of rock and scrape on the wall up here, and he'd scrape in front of on another giant piece of rock or slab of stone. And how little has changed in 1000 years. And we don't even have things like simulators and things that have really advanced knowledge.

But I wonder when I think about education, I've spoken to some of the greatest educators in the world, including Carl Wyman, winner of the Nobel prize, who's devoted his career after winning the Nobel Prize, to teaching how to teach. And he called education modern day professoriate class, kind of the equivalent of medicine in the era of bloodletting and leeches. And I wonder, where do you see the future of education? Inside the cockpit. We were talking before this show aired that when you put on the helmet, you guys claim that you lose 20 IQ points. I say that leaves 50% brains power, 50% brain on.

Okay?

So that then leaves me at negative capacity. I find the same thing in front of a chalkboard. I'm sitting up, there stuff I could do sitting in my sleep probably, and I'm in front of a class of students and trying to scrape some stuff on a chalkboard. But it comes down to kind of different platforms of education that roughly align with Maslow's hierarchy of needs at some level. But I wonder what you guys think about the following proposal if it's so effective to teach, according to Maslow's, needs to have physical safety, to have emotional safety and support. What if you could kind of do the opposite and see the so I've often thought in the simulator, we should have, like, an M 80 go off, like when you crash the simulator. Like, I do it for fun, you know, I'm going to fly underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and my F 18 and Microsoft flights, but if I really, you know, if there all of a sudden was a joy buzzer that went off on my butt, maybe I'd have more visceral reaction. Hazard wouldn't think the future of education inside the cockpit and outside the cockpit.

What would you propose to bring it more into the modern era?

Well, that is a great question, and that's what I worked on on my last assignment in active duty. So pilot training had not changed that much in 60 years. And with the F 35, it was a big opportunity. We had multiple communities coming together. A ten f 22 f 15 Luke Air Force Base is also an international base. We have Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, South Korean, everybody coming together, and the F 35 is going to be the backbone of our air power for the next 50 years. And so we had a once in a career, maybe once in a lifetime opportunity to reimagine what pilot training was going to be like for flying the F 35. So we actually had a lot of those questions that started with, what's our ultimate goal? To build a F 35 wingman that can survive and thrive into the late 2030s.

So that changed what threats we're worrying about. And we used a lot of technology. So one thing that was interesting is we, as you said, have used simulators quite a bit over the years. These simulators now are incredible. They are $50 million pieces of art. They are domes that are two stories high just for one simulator, and the cockpit is exactly the same as the F 35. And then it's on tank tracks, and it rolls you into the middle of this dome. As one general said, this is a monument to human engineering.

So they're phenomenal, and they do have their place, but the problem is, we didn't have anything that was less fidelity so students would learn the way they always did, memorize textbooks. They'd have a little bit of time in these simulators because they were so expensive. We could only have a few of them, and then they go fly the F 35, which is $50,000 an hour. So one thing that we came up with was having a spectrum of devices. When a student is learning how to start the jet, they don't need this monument to human engineering. We gave them gaming laptops, something easy, something quick to get out there. We declassified it so that they could take it home with them, gave them hotass hands on stick and throttle. We came up with other devices, well, virtual reality devices that were a step up, and we were flying with 360 cameras in.

The F 35. Security aspect was difficult, even though it doesn't sound that difficult. And then they'd be able to play back. We do a lot of flame out landings in the F 35. They'd be able to see exactly what that site picture was, as opposed to the old way of doing it using a dry erase pen on a sheet showing how to do it so they could actually see the site picture of an experienced instructor doing it. And then we started layering in some other things, like overlays of where the instructor was looking, how they were doing it. And now I've been working with the basic pilot training. They're testing some new things, using AI to be able to find some key trends in what the student is doing.

And it's not 100% solution, but it can find a few things that it thinks the student might be screwing up, and then the instructor can look at that and say, oh yeah, he is screwing that up, or can choose to discard it. So Air Force pilot training has really changed drastically in just the last five years or so.

Aria, what about training from your perspective? From Navy perspective, perhaps.

JTAC was probably where I was most recently involved in, and we had the same issue, $20 million JTAC SIM, which actually went down because there were some issues with the contractor. Alternatively, there was a former Seal who think his name is Brad Denn, who developed a augmented reality. And then they were working with guys out of Hollywood to create a four dimensional platform where you would actually feel the platform would move as bombs dropped near you, danger close. You'd actually have a heat wave just to increase the intensity as you're in that process, and also becomes much more affordable and mobile. We took some of these platforms with us to Iraq, where now the Jtax can do practice their training, practice their calls, anywhere, almost anywhere. You have a room, you can now start training.

So we talked Hazard earlier about your encounter with heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz, but you also trained at the United States Air Force Academy, and that was part of your undergraduate curriculum. You were, you studied boxing, you took, you were, you know, took up the hobby, but it became part of this book and I assume a large part of your mentality. And there's one quote that you use, but there's one quote I was surprised you didn't use. So one quote you use is, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. And the quote that I was surprised you didn't use, given your boxing heritage, was the famous fighter pilot Mike Tyson, who said, everyone has a plan till he gets hit in the face. What can ordinary people, maybe that aren't as. Fearless, heroic as you take away from the similarities between dog fighting and physical fighting, are there commonalities? Are there ways to keep your cool so that you don't lose as much of your plan or you don't lose your plan altogether when you step into the room with a formidable foe like Professor Tyson?

Yeah, I love that. We're all yeah, just kidding. He. Yeah, there's a there's a lot of commonality there. And, you know, as as I talked to I the Air Force Academy is located in Colorado Springs, which is also where the Olympic Training Center is. And I talk about a chance encounter I had with a sports psychologist and we really worked on staying in the present moment, visualization self talk, all those kind of things, that it wasn't something that I really focused on as a boxer. I really wanted to just work on the technique. But this emotional side of things really made a big difference in my boxing.

And so I applied that to Air Force pilot training because Air Force pilot training, they're stressing you to the limit. They want to see how you do when you fail and so they will make you fail at some point or another. And so there are a lot of great pilots there. We had commercial pilots that were flying for American Airlines before, so they had a tremendous advantage over people. But at some point in the curriculum you get to a point where you have not seen that site picture before and you will probably fail. And so what they wanted to do is see what these people's character was like. And so that boxing, sports psychology background and training gave me a big advantage there. I mean, it gives me advantage in any high stress situation because there is a narrow band of excellence if you go too high talk in the book.

The Air Force has done a lot of studies where if you are too stressed out, you really start losing, as we talked, 20 IQ points. But it changes based on what you're trying to do. So the biggest area where it decreases is your spatial intelligence, understanding where different things are in space. And that's huge for flying. So that's the first thing to go. High stress can help you with some moderate to easy tasks that you have down pat. So there is a benefit to stress, but too much and it really hurts you flying. So being able to regulate your emotions, regulate your stress, your self talk is really important.

And that plan, as I talked to, as the Air Force has moved to this human performance aspect, all pilots, as soon as they show up, they start this sports psychology training that we've adapted to flying fighters and that carries with them throughout their career. And I've seen a big difference in the past. There'd be students that would be flying with they'd be great and they'd make a mistake and the train would leave the tracks. And so now they're a little bit better at being able to be able to regulate themselves. You don't want to be worrying about a past problem. You're dedicating bandwidth to a past problem that you can't affect now. So you need to be worrying and using that bandwidth towards solving the problem that's in front of you.

I had an instructor and I was puttering around in a Cessno 152. Actually, it was a 150. I can't even fit into that anymore. But I've had a bunch of kids, so I have an excuse. And he used to say, when I make a good landing, he would compliment himself because he felt it was the instructor that ultimately had to take credit. And as you point out many times in this book, sadly, many pilots have been lost, including people that you've known and loved. And you two, Ariel, and our hearts break for them, but you say a piece of all of us goes with them and we're responsible. At some level, I wonder how to not internalize that and how to kind of move on.

I remember reading a wonderful book by David Mindell. It's called Digital Apollo and it's about all the techniques, technology that both went into the Apollo landing missions and the technology that came out of it for civilian use, including the autopilot. And it turned out back then in the they could have landed the Apollo landers, all of them, the Eagle, they could have landed themselves, but they built in the capability that the Lunar Command Module pilot could actually take over at the last minute if he needed to. And they found that every single pilot, even when that footage would later prove them wrong, would say, oh, at the last minute, I saw a crater, I saw a big boulder, I saw an alien. No, didn't see any aliens, but I saw this out of the corner of my eye I had to take over. And it's because they said in the mandel makes a point in the book that landing is kind of like the consummate ultimate expression of the pilot. In other words, that's the most piloting thing a pilot can do. So of course they want to take over and do this thing and land it and not let some stupid computer how do you teach your students to view an autopilot, these augmented systems, as not a threat to their masculinity or femininity? There's a lot of female fighter pilots, as you guys both know well, but how do you let them overcome and see it as a partner? And I'm going to obviously dovetail into AI and augmented stuff.

How did you handle that to teach them that? Actually, no, it's not a I can't speak diminishing your own capability as a pilot. It's nothing negative about you, but instead it's something that should be welcomed. Did you ever encounter that?

Ariel not probably the best example we were forced to actually land manually behind the boat every night to get practice. But theory was a time where my skipper specifically said, I want everyone in the squadron in the next week to do a little blank. Anyway, there's an automated approach and I'm blanking on the name of it right now, where the plane takes over and flies you in into the wires at night, which as most people could probably imagine, landing behind the boat at night is never really fun. You're descending into a dark black abyss. You only have a couple of lights behind the boat. The boat's moving away from you at 30 knots and it's moving up and down. So it's never a fun process and it's definitely one of the most stressful things that you do as a Navy fighter pilot. And that night I selected in autopilot plane is coming down and I mean, it was the nicest approach I've flown and it was humbling.

It's like, yeah, this thing can actually do it better. Now, that system is not always reliable, so you still need to develop the skills as a pilot yourself. But you slowly start incorporating these systems, you start noticing that, yes, it's value added. Now after a seven hour combat flight, I'd be a little bit less worried about coming back to the boat because if I am having we talked about go pills, which I generally try to avoid but would take if needed. Now as you're coming back to the boat, you can go, okay, hey, if I'm not on the top of my game anymore, I have this backup option. If this backup option is working, it's going to get me on. I'm going to have my mid rats, which is our midnight meal, probably one of the most important meals on the boat and one of the main motivators to get yourself onto the deck.

So Top Gun Maverick would never have happened if that existed back in the Tomcat days because the guy that Maverick leads onto the boat at night in the weather, he could have just said, screw Maverick, I'm just going to go myself, ended up at Top Gun, the rest would not be history. Hazard any way to advise students and I'm asking self interested as well. It's not threatening, it shouldn't be a diminishment, as I say or try to say, of your ability, skill set or identity. Is there any tips to kind of help the psychological factors?

Yeah, that is interesting question. And by the way, in the F 35, it's so precise, the guys landing on the carrier are wearing out the skid pads because it hits every time in the same spot, but that is.

The same landing system.

I think it's magic carpet, but yeah, I think of myself as kind of a modern fighter pilot. You are organizing and utilizing all this technology. So I don't see a lot of people staking their masculinity on being able to manually do maneuvers. It would be interesting to go back and talk to some of those Apollo pilots because they probably grew up in the when it was fully manual biplanes that they were learning how to fly on. But now I think it's just so ingrained in us. When I was going through pilot training, I grew up with real basic video games, Nintendo, all of those things. And we could process a lot more information than my instructors and my instructors would say, your class just can understand this a lot better than I can and can retain more information. The same thing today.

So we're getting kids that are in their early twenty s and they've grown up with an iPad in their crib. And so the F 35 is essentially a flying sensor. It has two giant iPads in front of you. You can talk to it and it does things augmented reality helmet. So I don't think there's that necessary barrier to being able to rely on technology. Every once in a while I'll see a student that likes to manually get the setup parameters done for BFM, and if they can do it, I say more power to you. But usually they'll screw something up and I'll say, look, you can have the option of relying on the auto throttles. It's not a knock on.

You do that so that you have more mental bandwidth to be able to focus on something that matters.

Do you ever find that some of those lost skill sets end up being important? So I'll bring it from the last three years I was working as a JTAC and we had these devices that would kind of give you a pretty good god's eye view of the battlefield. But there'd be occasions where I set a target that was right below a giant red water tower. And they'll be down there trying to figure out how to prosecute this and get the pilot's eyes onto the target, when it could be as simple as looking up, looking at your environment, going, hey, do you see the giant water tower that's on the coast here? And the pilot would immediately get there. So sometimes I found that the technology can be detrimental and that if you get too soaked into it, you start losing situational awareness over the overall picture.

Absolutely. You want to start at the big picture and work your way down. So if your heads down working through submenu because you're focused on that and that's kind of the process that I talk about in the book. Work at the big picture, get a rough approximation of what the solution is, and then you can always refine that later on. I think that that is a problem. Especially new students that can't necessarily prioritize as well or absorb as much data as well, is that they glom off on the radar. F 16 was a really big problem because it didn't have any sensor fusion. Your brain was a sensor fusion.

So it was a rat's nest of technology from the so unfortunately, we had six times the SeaFit controlled flight into terrain where pilots either passing out or is flying low and is misproritizing and running into a mountain because they're working the radar or the radar warning receiver. So as a pilot, I think, always work at the big picture and then go down from there because you can get yourself into some big problems if you do it the other way around.

So a lot of the counterintuitive wisdom in this book comes from the, as I say, counterintuitive realization that many things in life are nonlinear, that we expect kind of doubling the output when you double the input. But many of these things are exponential and worse. And one of the things that you don't mention in the book, but it kind of instantly came to my mind was also this anecdote from aviation, which is, why is the 787, which cost less and took maybe shorter to develop, why is that proving better for the airlines than the A 380, these giant 500 passenger behemoths? And the reason that I've heard comes down to a very counterintuitive thing, which is that the A 380 has so many people on it that it's very difficult to envision that one of those 570 people at Max Load is not going to have a heart attack or some other kind of emergency versus maybe 250 on a dreamliner. It's less, maybe a third less, or what have you, different configurations. It's less likely to have an emergency. Now, when you land because there's an emergency, you're limited because of the time you have to rest the brakes, if I'm not mistaken, before you can attempt a takeoff again. So the A 380 will have to be on the ground longer because it's heavier. And these kind of the dwell time and the brake heating and stuff goes as the cube of the mass of the plane or something like that.

So trying to optimize it to carry more passengers is actually detrimental. And so airlines are finding they can't get as many sorty, they can't fly as many people net net because of these nonlinear factors. And yet the human mind is very poorly adapted to this. We're used to seeing, yeah, if we struggle twice as hard, if we run twice as fast, we'll get away from that tiger or whatever, we don't see many nonlinear things. How do you endure people or get them accustomed hazard to thinking nonlinearly? Is it a matter of heuristics, of rules of thumb? What kind of advice do you have for people dealing in the corporate world? Perhaps they're going to read, Love and digest this wonderful book to recognize when you're dealing with a power loss situation and then apply the art of clear thinking.

Yeah, I think the biggest way is to graph the data. It's a simple tool that's been around for thousands, hundreds if not thousands of years. So being able to graph the data, and it just pops out to you. So that's what we do for most of the different relationships that we have when we're flying. So our relationship, our energy management, going back to John Boyd is graphed. And we can just overlay that with enemy fighters and we can see where our jets have an advantage versus another jet. Same thing with when we're trying to geolocate Sam threats. What we're doing is we're doing a lot of different tactics.

We're all sensor nodes, and being able to neck it down behaves nonlinearly. So being able to just graph the data, I think, is the single biggest thing. And being aware of how extreme nonlinear events can be. So everybody's heard of the grain of rice on the chessboard or the doubling penny. It just gets to a tremendous amount very quickly. So I think even people that understand those linear relationships, it's good to continually refresh and understand that, because I think we are relying more and more on technology. Software is something that is very nonlinear. These jets, we will get a new software load, and in one case, overnight, everything got 25% better.

So it unlocked the gun. We could pull more g's. So software is something where two average people does not equal one good person. So you can find somebody that is 500 times better than the average person, and it can have a tremendous effect on how capable you can be on the battlefield. So I think these relationships play out throughout every aspect of our lives, not just in the cockpit.

Did you have that?

No.

So we have a bunch of questions. I just want to take a little pause to refresh and let everybody know we're talking with Hazard Lee, who not only as the author of this wonderful book, the article of thinking, also has a podcast, which I am devouring, phenomenal YouTube channel and most delightfully so that you can live that Instagram lifestyle. His Instagram channel is off the hook. I hope you guys will follow him there. And also on LinkedIn, where he dishes out daily doses of business acumen and wisdom. Also one of the well, I should point out you're the first guest I've had on astronauts. I actually had on Jessica my ear, who may be the first woman to walk on the moon's surface. She's a PhD graduate of UCSD, it turns out.

I had her on when she was on the ISS flying overhead a little bit faster than you guys can fly, but only for now. And that was about three years ago now. But she doesn't have a book, but she didn't read from the audiobook in the cockpit or in the ISS. So you were to be commended for that. It's really fun when you're listening to audiobook and you've been hearing Hazard and his kind of calm draw. Then you hear him over the intercom system with the book in hand, and he's got some pictures of himself on his Instagram feed doing just that. So thank you for that hazard. So when you're conveying that in the book, it really feels like you're in the cockpit.

How did you I mean, this is your first time book. Talk about your writing process. Are there commonalities? We have a lot of authors that listen to this podcast talk about are there commonalities, are there ways, tools that you use besides begging the forbearance of your lovely wife, I assume, and your kids who you acknowledge in the book? How did you work to convey that and do it so spectacularly well in your first ever kind of your first sorty out of the box?

Yeah, it was incredibly challenging. So this is ultimately is the end of a six year journey. So the reason I started the Instagram and all of that is because I had gotten back in 2017 from Afghanistan. And so it was a really busy time. We were really active out there. And so I was writing down some of the stories and decompressing that way while I was waiting for F 35 training. So it'd be interesting to write a book, and it turns out if you don't have an audience and you're not like a celebrity or something, you really have no chance of writing a book. And so I was like, well, maybe I can do a podcast.

And that coincided with another thing. Luke Air Force Base was looking for a speaker on Memorial Day to talk about loss and some things like that. And there's a teacher in the crowd and she was like, My students have to hear this. So I started speaking in classrooms, and so those two things coincided and I started a podcast because it was a digital way to get things out. And that evolved into the YouTube and the Instagram to be able to promote that. And I was able to get a book deal. And it was exciting. The book deal part was exciting.

It was like getting drafted by the NFL. We got into a little bit of a bidding war, and that was the last time I heard from anybody for a year. So I spent actually over 500 days in a row writing the book. So every morning I'd write from this office about 4 hours every morning. And it was just brute force. To start off, I would look through some authors I really like. Atul Guande is a really good one. Checklist Manifesto.

If you haven't read that, it's a fantastic one. So I would look at how he interwove stories and just break down every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter. Same thing with Malcolm Gladwell. And after that, I was off to the races. I'm a slow writer. I would write about 500 words a day. Sometimes it would be 1000, 2000. And then I would come back the next day and say, oh, this is terrible and have to delete it, but most authors say that the key to writing a book is to just get a crappy first draft out there, and that's what I did.

What they don't tell you is, now you have a crappy first draft and you still have a lot of work ahead of you. So I went through nine revisions to really hammer this book and to condense it and make it as precise as I could. So it was an amazing journey, very painful, but in a good way, where you're proud of something you've done.

Yeah, well, it really leads to growth. And again, I think they say about writing a book that it's years of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, or that's only when your kids come in the room. The C in A stands for choose. I wonder if we could highlight and maybe we'll bring this in if YouTube doesn't give us a copyright strike. One of the best ever songs about decision making is, of course, Rush's Living in the Limelight, where it said that even when you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. I don't know what the other lyrics are. I won't sing it because I have gotten copyright strikes before. I remember saying for my stepfather, who's an Air Force grad, as I said, and also in Vietnam, he used to say, you could be right and you can be dead.

Meaning that the air traffic controller can be telling you to do something and you feel like, well, he or she is an authority, I'm going to have to do it, but I'm actually right and take the initiative. But maybe sometimes they're right and you can make the right choice. Sometimes it'll leave you dead even though you did it. And that night my stepfather Ray would say, the controller is going to go home, he's going to cry to his wife and say, had a bad day, and next day he'll be back at work and he'll be dead. So how do you handle those situations? How do you know when you shouldn't choose? Sometimes the best option is not to choose. And I'm sure you guys have both heard this saying, the first thing you do when there's an emergency is they used to say to the pilots in World War II, wind your watch. Mainly take a pause, take a how do you know when to make a choice and sometimes when not to make a choice? How do you know when to execute the C or not to see if you will?

Yeah, well, in the F 16, actually, there is still a wind up clock in there. So I talk about how instructors would say, wind that clock. Another saying is you can always make something worse. So you don't want to just start jumping to action. So, yeah, being able to, I think, assess leads to figuring out what choices of action courses of action that you are choosing. So when you're looking at the assessment, it follows a diminishing return law. So you can stick around for in the case of flying two minutes, five minutes, trying to figure out the decision, but at some point, you're the point where you're spending more time trying to assess that decision. You should probably make some sort of decision and hopefully it resets that diminishing return law and you start gathering more information and then you can make another decision there.

So I think the key is discerning between is this something irreversible or is it something that you can update later on? If it's irreversible, you want to spend more time making that assessment. If it's something that you can reverse, it probably makes sense to gather the information, make a decision, reset that diminishing return law, and then to go from there and keep iterating as you're moving forward.

Like Patton's quota, a good plan executed violently today is better than a perfect plan executed tomorrow. So sometimes in aviation, like, flew a lot of single engine aircraft. If something goes wrong with the engine turn, get towards the field now start assessing your problem.

Set.

But, yeah, once again, F 18, same thing. We had two engines. There was nothing, almost no emergency that required an immediate action. Like make sure you're going to shut the right engine down. Make sure you're going to right.

You were saying once a lot of pilots pull the wrong engine and they do the shutdown right. That doesn't happen to hazard because he's flying single engine. You shut down the engine. Yeah.

But you can always lose that engine. So you're always five minutes away from having to outrun the Taliban.

Talk about the phenomenon of tunnel vision. When you have this kind of get their itis. I always say to my wife, the most dangerous things I'll ever say when I'm putting around a little Cessna is I'll be home exactly at 05:00 p.m.. Because when you do that, you're committing. You've got the sunk cost fallacy. You got to make it. I'm going to let her down. The dinner is going to get cold, and I don't miss many meals.

How do you guys deal with that tunnel vision, that monomaniacal focus? What are some tools, tricks for mortals to deal with tunnel vision and breaking out of that again? The hard part is maybe one of these guests that I hope to have on one day, Derek Sivers, he used to say things like, if knowledge were all that was required, we'd all be billionaires with six pack ABS. So it's not just knowledge. How do you know when you're in the tunnel? How do you know how to punch out of that tunnel? Any ideas, guys?

Yeah, I can go. So you don't rise to the level of your expectation, you fall to your level of preparation. So I think a lot of it comes down to training yourself and inoculating yourself to that stress, both being prepared for that moment and understanding all the aspects of it, but also from a kind of a metaskill of understanding how to withstand that pressure. So I think working out is important. Even if you're a scientist and you're not using your muscles, it's a stress there that carries over and your ability to be able to manage that stress. So I think that's one aspect is being prepared. And what we do when we're flying training missions is to make it far more complex and a lot more difficult than it is in the battlefield. We try to push ourselves because there's really no way to replicate how stressful it is in combat.

So you can push yourself as much as possible theory so that when you get to combat it's a little bit less difficult if you didn't do that. Secondly, some minor tips. One is a lot of students have issues when they're refueling for the first time. So we'll have airborne gas stations, essentially, and it's a fully manual maneuver. There's essentially an airliner full of fuel, hundreds of thousands of pounds, and you pull up behind it and it's really easy to crash into it and cause a giant fireball. So a lot of students are really nervous. The tip that we give them is wiggle your fingers, wiggle your toes, because you start really clenching everything, clenching your jaw. And you can reverse that stress by wiggling your fingers, wiggling your toes, taking deep breaths.

It really depends how much oxygen demand you need. But an easy heuristic is box breathing 5 seconds in, hold 5 seconds. 5 seconds out, hold 5 seconds. But the big thing is just not hyperventilating. So trying to slow down your breathing as much as possible. And then lastly, for me, it's literally expanding that tunnel vision. So looking out of the corner of your eyes, it's called tunnel vision not just because cognitively you're focused on a single thing, but your vision shrinks down. So I find when I look out of the corners of my eyes and open that vision up, I start to detach and breathe.

And that's a really important thing when you're showing up at close air support firefights, the troops on the ground are under a lot more stress than you are. So when we show up, we have to be that calming force detached and be able to think through it because they're dodging bullets down there and it's our job to be able to make good decisions and to be that calming force that's detached from what's going on in the ground.

Yeah, I'll add the only thing I'll add is also command climate. So in your wife's example, making sure that she understands the danger if she gives you a hard deadline and you see that in commands as well, like there are times where a skipper or someone is a bit more totalitarian and authoritarian, wants you to do what. They want you to do, and that can drive you to make those tunnel like decision making. So making sure that everyone's on board, that in the end, you're the aircraft commander, and they understand and will respect the choice that you end up making. So you don't make it to dinner, hopefully you don't hear about it for the next week.

That's right. And if that's the worst thing that happens on a flight, that's nothing to be too ashamed about. So, Hazard, there's undoubtedly millions of people watching this on either one of our different platforms. They're thinking, look, you guys are commanders of multimillion dollar aircraft. I think what F 35 is close to $100 million a unit. Is that right? Yeah, correct. What can he possibly teach me? I'm running a sticker business where I do wallpaper and paint supplies. Talk to people out there.

What are the commonalities, what are the lessons, the teachings, the learnings? That's just an ordinary person, not a superhero. Not one of my questions for my audience, which I'll ask now, is, how do you feel that they used your image for Buzz Lightyear and your persona, but they don't give you royalties? Okay, you're like this magical superhero. You guys, what is an ordinary man or woman car dealer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. What are they going to take away from this book?

Yeah, so I try to distill it down, and it's decision making. If you boil down my job as a firepot, it's to make decisions, and I think it's more important than ever. Now, the average person burns 90 watts of electricity, and yet the average American is burning 12,000 watts. And that powers the technology that's leveraging the decisions that we're making. So I think decision making is one of the most important skills and yet it's not taught, I think, from a leadership perspective, that we are moving from an era of management which came out of the Industrial Revolution. Managing. Hundreds, if not thousands of people in a factory to now, I think it was Bloomberg Finance was saying they expect a billion dollar company to be run by three people in the next ten years. So that is due to leveraging AI.

They expect to be an AI company leveraging technology. So three people versus in the 18 hundreds. It probably took 100,000 people to be able to run what would have been a billion dollar company. So technology is leveraging the decisions we're making. It happens when I'm flying my jet, I can travel 100 times faster than I could by foot. I can carry 100 times more. I'm literally thousands of times more capable than I could be on my own. Same thing with your phone.

It can do the job of dozens of people from just a few years ago. Car, you can go ten times faster. Modern combine harvester. You can harvest crops hundreds of times faster than you can by hand. So it really comes down to being able to make good, precise decisions. And that's something that applies to everybody.

Yeah, absolutely. So in a few minutes, I'm going to go teach myself and I'm going to apply the lessons learned. Hopefully, my students will think clearly. So we're going to reach the moment, we're going to ask some rapid fire questions from the audience. So I hope you'll indulge us a little bit hazard with some quick answers and so forth. Okay, so this comes from oh, by the way, thanks for pointing out the billion dollar company. It's good to know that Stewart and I, my super producer, we can do the job of three people, which is two people, and become a billion dollar podcast. So Stewart asked the following question.

Are these myths? I'm going to go through a couple of different things. As a fighter pilot, are you living dangerously? Do you ride a motorcycle? Do you need to have perfect vision? And is Chuck Yeager kind of your avatar hero? So, first of all, are you a dangerous person? Dangerous living person?

Not anymore. I think growing up I really wanted to do something risky, but now I see it as more of a risk versus reward system. So most of the time not. But I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty.

Ride a motorcycle.

Motorcycle? No, it's not worth it to me. It doesn't cross that risk versus reward threshold.

Do you have to have 2020 vision to be a stealth fighter pilot?

Great question. No, you don't. So that's a big myth. That was true back in the day. I fly with people that have contacts, glasses, and have done LASIK.

It's chuck yeager. I used to joke about this. When you get on Southwest Airlines flight, you're flying around the pilot. We're going to cruise up vector 74 up to the coast. Oakland will start our decent. And I'm like you're flying this thing. You push a button 30 seconds after. I know I have a lot of pilots that listen to this podcast.

Love you guys. Is he your avatar? Is Chuck Yeager. Who's your hero? Who are some of your pilot heroes?

I would say John Boyd. Chuck Jaeger, definitely for what he did and being able to get in that cockpit of the X one. But I would say John Boyd. That'd be the one that I would want to go back and see. So, yeah, that's probably the one.

What about you, Brian?

Probably add Robin Olds and then a bunch of the Apollo astronauts who started their life off as fighter pilots.

That's true. Okay, Hazard, what enemy aircraft do you still fear the most?

Still fear? Fifth gen fighter aircraft. So there are a couple of ones out there, 257 J 20. So those are the more advanced aircraft out there. But mass also matters. People understand that. How many aircraft you have? The 1000th F 35 is rolling off the line right now versus these other countries only have a few amount of them. So mass matters.

Would you fly with a completely artificial intelligent pilot wingman or wing woman or wing whatever? Wing it wing wing thing. Would you feel comfortable with that right off your wing?

Depends how good it is. So yes, I would, if it could prove itself. So I don't have an ideological issue with that. I think we have a long, long ways to go to be able to replace the fighter pot. I think we'll be here for a long time, but I do think we'll have some AI wingmen that can help us out, and that's going to be a good thing.

You talk a lot in the book about the F 117 nighthawk, which was only one or two, one, I think, malfunctioned, and one was shot down by a combination, and I'll leave it. I hate when you go on a podcast as an author. The host asks you, well, just explain all your greatest stories in the book, and I'll give my audience a free audiobook version of it. No, we're not going to do that. But it was really gripping. I could not stop listening to that portion of the podcast. F 117, I've heard, is being resurrected even. There's one out here in Palm Springs.

If you ever want to come visit us in SoCal, we'll take you out there. There's perfect restoration of it in a hardened bunker. But anyway, what is the secret to its success? I mean, it was designed in the 70s. You talk about that. The B Two is allegedly maybe more stealthy, but it's also more massive and bigger. But the 117, they seem to have gotten it right the first time. It's even more stealthy than the F 35, right? So why did they retire it? Why not just keep it around?

It was just old technology, so they couldn't model curved services. So if you look at it, it's very angular. So it is old technology. The stealth coating took a lot of maintenance. There wasn't great avionics in it. The weapons loadout wasn't great. It didn't have an air to air capability or a very good one. So there are a lot of issues with it.

So it wasn't maneuverable. So, yeah, a lot of issues with it. There's really no tactical use to keep them as of now.

Navin and I think I told one of my sons once that the F 14, which is his favorite plane, he has two desires in life. He wants to be an F 14 pilot and a rabbi. I said, I think that's going to be tough because the only country that still flies them is the Iranian Republican Guard. I want to ask both of you guys what is in your dream hangar if I could lay upon you that billion dollars. When you start, you turn the professionals playbook into just a money making revenue source hazard. You buy your dream hanger what's in it, and then I'm going to ask Ariel the same question.

So F 16 is still my favorite aircraft, so I recently had a chance to fly with the first civilian F 16. So they exist out there. So I'm definitely going to have an F 16 in there. There's a new company called Black Shape that are making carbon fiber tandem aircraft. They're kind of like the Ferraris of the sky. So I'm going to have one of those in there. Got to have a P 51 or some sort of warbird. You're getting me excited.

So, I mean, I'm going to have to stop there, but I'd have a lot of planes. The wife would not be happy.

All right, Ariel, what about you?

Having gotten one flight in F 16, I can definitely back him up on that amazing aircraft, p 51 for sure. Extra 300 was a lot of fun to fly. I'd probably also put some sort of Gulf Stream so I could fly my family to ski trips.

But Hazard, as you know, on modern podcasting, it's important to talk about AI. We talked a little bit about that and I want to refer folks to my friend James Altoucher's podcast with you, which is just james sets the standard for many of us out there. He talked a little bit more about that there. But the other thing, theory, are other two mandatory topics, AI, Chat, GPT, and then there's also bitcoin, which we're not going to talk about bitcoin. But then the third topic we have to talk about, alien encounters. I am not at liberty to talk about the alien autopsies that I've been a part of or might not have been a part of. What do you make of the recent NASA funded UAP, which is led by david Spurgel, president of the Simon's Foundation, is the benefactor behind most of my research, so I have to be kidnapped. I love David, and he's completely intellectually honest.

He was my advisor back in college.

And he was Ariel's advisor at Friends and Universe. By the way, Ariel's call sign is Pi pi. And he would have to read out all digits. I never read out the digits because the middle four decimals are my Pin number at the ATM. Hazard, any encounters, maybe not extraterrestrial in origin, but anything that you could not explain or understand during your historic career.

So I'm not going to say I ever ran into aliens, but there are a lot of things that you see in the air that you don't have a full understanding of. So you'll see things on the radar, you'll slow your targeting pod out and see dots out there. So you do see a lot of things like that. I'm not going to say that they're aliens because really, as fighter pods, you're so focused on the mission at hand. I think the same thing happens when you're driving. If you're on a long road trip, you see a lot of things out there that you're like, I don't know what that is. It's kind of a glint off the mountain face or something like that. And you don't have the time to go deviate and go check that out.

So I have seen a lot of things that I don't fully understand, but I'm not prepared to say that they're any sort of aliens. They might have been just some sort of balloons flying around, things like that in the middle of a mission when you're too busy focused on that to really give full attention to this.

What about you and your buddy Ryan Graves?

The balloons is actually probably my closest was I picked up some weird radar returns, locked them up, intercepted, turned out to be balloons. And then another time, right after launch on a carrier, picked up a radar, hit cued my Nine X, it got tone, ended up doing left to left with an Iranian drone. But no, sadly, Ryan and I were squadron mates. We're still good friends. I was at his wedding. I unfortunately never saw the stuff that.

He got to see, even though one of the battleships out there was the Princeton. Right. Okay, we're almost at the end hazard. I thank you for your patience and your indulgence when you're flying by wire, one of the most famous examples again, we're not going to get into it because it's such a cool and amazingly applicable to any domain, aviation or not. The story of the Airbus crash that leads off the book, air France, I believe it was, back in nine and ten. Fly by wire, is that something that's really removing the stick and rudder, the Chuck Yeager? Is that diminishing the pilot's aptitude at all?

Not at all. So fly by wire is something we've been doing since the 1970s with the F 16, and it is pretty eyewatering now. So in the F 35, we're running a continuous model of the aircraft line. And when I put in an input, it's not necessarily the flight controls that are making the traditional flight controls that are making that happen. The jet will figure out the best way to do that. The best example I can use is in that first Top Gun when Mavericks in that flat spin out to sea out of control. We do that routinely. We will do that on purpose and have precise ability to increase the spin rate or less.

So you can never do that without a flight control system. So it really makes you a better pilot. Now the extension of that, of AI and stuff like that, there's a lot of issues, but in terms of just a pure flight control system, it's very beneficial and makes us a lot more agile because these jets would go out of control. They're fundamentally they're unstable system, so you need those inputs from the computer to keep it flying.

Okay, a few more questions here. Do you have a comment, Brian?

I have a sort of controversial topic for the A Ten versus F 35. And I was kind of curious as to your perspective. I know the Air Force has been trying to get rid of the A Ten for a while. As someone who did a tour with the JTAC found the A Ten to be an amazing aircraft. Curious as to what your thoughts are on replacing the A Ten fleet with the F 35.

Yeah, that's a good one. Definitely controversial. It really depends on what we're doing. So if we are pivoting towards great power competition like the National Defense Strategy is saying, then I think we have to be prepared for a higher end battery. And you can see it playing out in Ukraine. Any aircraft flying low is getting shot down. And so I had a chance to do an interview of an A Ten pilot at Dallas Air Force Base, their test squadron there, and they were saying they're not planning on shooting the gun ever in these conflicts. So now the A Ten, you get rid of the gun, the primary thing because it's going to have to fly at high altitude because those man portable air defense systems are going to be shooting them down.

Even though there's a lot of armor, there's a lot of those MANPADS out there. So if we are pivoting towards this great power competition with higher end threats, then it probably makes sense to either kind of mothball the A Ten or to downsize it, depending on how the finances look. But it's probably not going to be that survivable in these conflicts.

Last question for both of you guys that have studied this in great detail. Can Ukraine win this conflict without air superiority? Can they do it with drones? Ariel, I know you've thought about this a little bit. So is a drone kind of a DJI war? Is this a new theater class weapon or how can they win a war with I mean, no war has been won without air superiority, at least in my silly understanding military history. So correct me if I'm wrong. So is air superiority necessary, if not sufficient?

My fear with Ukraine war is that it's become a war of attrition. And without being able to go after the supply lines from either side, you're just going to continually grind down your forces. In terms of air superiority, I think Ukraine can probably get its territory back without it. I haven't given this too much thought. Where air superiority would come into a benefit would be that ability to go into enemy territory, to take out their nodes, to take out their fuel supply, ammunition supply, all their logistics chain that gets their troops into the battlefield to begin with. And obviously there are limitations on the scale of that war.

Great. And Hazard, any thoughts from you on air superiority's university?

Yes, as long as they can prevent Russia from having air security, I think they can win. So that's my specialty, is the suppression of enemy air defense. So in Top Gun Two, the missiles along the canyon walls taken those Sam sites out. And so Russia has failed to do that with Ukraine, and so Ukraine has prevented Russia from having air superiority. So as long as we can keep those Sam sites by Ukraine operating and having missiles, then I think there's a very good chance of Ukraine being able to hold off.

Well, Hazard, I want to ask you if there are anything other topics that you'd like to talk about before we close out and I start to apply these lessons. Not the lethal lessons, of course, but to my class. Anything else that you want to mention besides the podcast? Professionals playbook your LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube channel, which is an inspiration. And this wonderful book, it was really a gift to me. Not just as a pilot aspiring to sometimes have a Grease or landing, but also to be a better leader, manager, and think more clearly. Can you let me know any other things you'd like to bring up?

No, that was it. This has been great. I really appreciate you having me on. I'm really happy that you enjoyed the book and especially the audiobook. The audiobook? I just bought your book. I need to get the audio one. Did you record it yourself?

Not my first book. My second book, I did some of the audiobook, but my third book, it's one third of the 23 hours of conversation with Galileo is me. So, yes, it is a treat to hear your actual voice, and I really appreciate the artistry of it. And not surprising for a book with art and its title. hazardly, your inspiration, your hero. People compare you favorably to Buzz Aldrin, Buzz Lightyear, and you're a phenomenal writer. This is just such a treat. Thank you for your service, both of you gentlemen, and thank you for all for joining us on the into the Impossible podcast.

Remember, you can always ask me questions and ask Hazard questions about the book. He loves to interact on Instagram, especially LinkedIn as well. And please do keep in touch, Hazard. And I hope you'll have many, many books courses. As I said, supplements just give me a little cut, especially motion sickness bags like our friend Russell Monroe. We need some hazardly branded motion sickness, in all honesty. Majorly, thank you so much for joining us on the into the Impossible podcast.

Thank you, Brian. This has been great. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.