And of course I only open the recording things on Wednesday, and there we go.

And on Wednesday, October twenty ninth, twenty twenty five, at ten oh three am Eastern Time, with mister Tom Burbisch, who you know, you've you've been on here once before.

We talked about your book, The Inside Story of the F thirty five, that the Lightning too.

That link is in the description.

It's on audible.

It's from my generation who can't read it.

It is on audible.

And yeah, we're just kind of talking beforehand about different different machines with personalities, and I was telling you about how this camera only works when it's colder out and the SR seventy one and machines having personalities.

But also another thing that I was just thinking of last night for for people that are, for lack of a better phrase, kind of you know, us air Force heads to just geek out at all the aircraft.

We kind of are in like a little golden age right now, with the F forty seven, the next generation, the GAD, the B twenty one, the X fifty nine I believe made its first flight yesterday, and then the ex Bat which I saw last week, that vertical takeoff and landing uav or but not manned.

I mean, I guess what you have or autonomous.

It's kinda I'm kind of geeking out right now.

It's all these things are coming together, which you know, sometimes you feel like you'll see sometimes you feel like you'll never see one hundred years.

But I'm going to shut up.

Could you please introduce yourself because you have one of the more wild backgrounds of any guest I've had, and I don't think I'm going to do a justice.

Okay, TLAs, Well, thanks for having me.

And my background is I was a Navy brat, raised in a Navy family, and my father was a current naval aviator.

Most of my role models were naval aviators, and when I left high school, I had two objectives.

One was to play Division one football and the other one was to be a naval aviator.

And I got to do both at the Naval Academy and I graduated there at the end of the sixties sixty nine exactly, and had a tour flying E twos off aircraft carriers.

It was the first T two guy to get selected to go to the Navy Test Power School, and I did that for the year of nineteen seventy four, went back a board a carrier as catapult and the rest of gear.

Officer had one hundred and forty one hundred and fifty young sailors that a number had had a choice of going to jailer going in the Navy, So it was a leadership challenge.

So we had a great team and set records on the catapult and the rest of guar operations aboard the USS Eisenhower, which at the time was a brand new ship.

It was his maiden cruise.

Today it's a relic and the new carriers are coming out.

It's been a while.

But then left active duty, went into the reserves through a seven's for the Navy.

Iut in Point McGoo, California and worked for Lockheed before they were Lockheed Martin the course of that thirty year career, I ran the F twenty two Raptor program fallowed by the F thirty five Lightning two program, Which is why we're talking today, because after I retired, we wrote a book about the human experience of that non technical generally speaking, non technical story about the journey of the F thirty five, which is probably one of the more remarkable programs in history, and that it involved all three US services, nine initial allied countries.

Today it's almost twenty and it's lived, It's gone through it's growth spurt and has become an adult or is becoming an adult program, which is the hardest part to get to the point where programs like that actually realize the potential that they started with, which is joint service allied operations around the world and the ability to form global coalitions that no adversary can really pete with in terms of numbers and participants.

So that's where we are today.

I've been retired for about I'm retired in twenty thirteen, so retired about twelve years.

Sitting a couple of interesting boards, one of which is AeroVironment, the drone manufacturer.

You mentioned drones a minute ago.

The next wave, in my view, is piloted and unpiloted aircraft flying together in a flight, which requires a very robust control link between the piloted and the unpiloted aircraft, which is probably the biggest technical challenge of that.

But there's all kinds of interesting ops you can think of where you could if I'm flying in my F thirty five and I have an unmanned U CAB on my wing.

I can send that UCB in.

It's a treatable, that's the current word, much more so than an F thirty five, And I can have the enemy light off the systems and I can prosecute them.

What did you say, It was.

A treatable that means I can afford to lose.

Generally speaking, I can afford to lose it more than I can afford to lose the high end F thirty five.

So there there's lots of interesting things going on in that world.

And if you think about it, the contract for thirty five was two thousand and one.

This is twenty twenty five, so we are twenty four years later.

There's over twelve hundred I think there's twelve hundred and thirty plus F thirty five is flying in the world somewhere.

And the reality of being able to join up, whether you come from from a land base or or a small ship or a big ship or an allied country, once you join up, you're all the same in the fight.

That's a really powerful operational change in the way things have been done historically.

So that reality is now here, and I think we're seeing the world start to exploit that.

I think, you know, it's almost a trope to you know, rail against any big program that the Pentagon has and sometimes their merits for it.

But I think the F thirty five really didn't get a fair shake just from the public at large and even people that are you know, I have a biology degree, but I've always just geeked at about this stuff and reading about this stuff.

It's a pretty tall order what you had just said, right that all the services, and it has to have variations for everything from you know, land based runways to aircraft carriers.

It's got to be we're gonna sell to other countries, which we don't do with the F twenty two, and then you're gonna wrap it all up and you're not even producing something that's thirty years old where it's like, yeah, we can kind of.

It also has to be cutting edge, so it has to be cutting edge fulfill the needs of all the services, not be so I guess bleeding edge like the F twenty two, or I guess they have different roles.

It has to be interchangeable and it has to work all the while.

You were not in a vacuum.

This isn't a video game where you can redo.

You're also in real world environments where threat factors are changing.

And then you got to do it all in a country where, you know, I suppose this is where it would be nice to be the Soviet Union or China.

You could just silence anyone that talked about it.

You're in a in a republic where the funding is for the most part looked over.

It's a pretty insane order to deliver, and then once you do deliver it, you really don't even know that you need one.

You don't even really get an apology.

Right.

It's the truth goes through three phases, right, It's it's mocked, violently, ridiculed, and then accepted as self evident.

And I think the last one is the most important.

It's not just that it's accepted.

It's accepted by the people that hated it are now going, well, you know, it's very clear we always need the F thirty five and kind of sitting there like you you're retired and you're like, these people are horrible, you know, like you never get the hats off on it, and anything you could brag about is probably classified.

So it I mean, it really is kind of a it is a humble and depth I at least get to brag about like podcast stats and analytics.

You don't even get to do that.

I think you're exactly right.

And what people really don't understand is the contract was awarded in two thousand and one was much not much, but a good portion of the technologies were not mature or production ready at the time.

So then you go through the engineering phase and you design airplanes that are supposed to operate in three radically different environments.

You know, one can land vertically, one can withstand the stresses of catapults and arresting gear, and one you know, it takes off and lands on runways, so it doesn't have to worry about all that structural weight.

But when you get in the cockpit, if you were an F thirty five guid, I had all three of the airplanes lined up there.

When you're in the cockpit, if you're blindfolded when you got in, you wouldn't really know which one you're in.

From the human to the airplane interface, that's common, okay, what's not common is the airplane itself.

And just as recently as this week, I was correcting somebody in the blogosphere who was saying that we've never had a successful airplane where one airplane can serve all three services.

And our response is, if you think the F thirty five, A, B, and C are one airplane, you're dramatically mistaken.

They're quite different in terms of their structural and engineering that goes behind the airframe itself.

Yes, the human machine interface is the same, software is the same, weapons are the same, sensors are the same, and that that really reduces your infrastructure, cost of training and maintenance and those kinds of things over the life of the airplane.

So so there's there's a lot of things that get forgotten and we're in that phase three of acceptance that you mentioned now and people say, well, we always do is they're going to be a success, Well that's not true.

Basically, it was a bit of of a fight during the early years, and if you think about it, the European aerospace industry didn't want to see a US dominated international market with the Eurofighter having just come out around the same time, and the competitors the north of Gumming, Boeing, Lockeing Martin didn't want to see a single airplane necessarily led by one company.

When defense infrastructure needs to be competitive in the long term, so that's what led to all the complicated teaming arrangements and things like that.

Even the engine side, you know, with Pratt Whitney building the engine for both the F twenty two and the thirty five, basically they have a lock on the fighter market until some kind of an engine upgrade is required, which is about to happen here, and then that opens up competition with General Electric and other engine manufacturer.

So there's a lockdown phenomena that goes with the industrial base when a big decision like this has made that that's unusual, backed down thing.

It has never been done before.

We're like it, like it has been on F thirty five.

But the flip side of the flip side of that is we you know, we had the Allies and their embassies in Washington were strongly supporting the program, and the US infrastructure was now moving from components to sub assemblies and assemblies.

So we have there's about probably twenty twenty five maybe states in the United States that have work on F thirty five, whereas there's fifty that have work on the B two or the F twenty two because they're US only.

So that could you sorry, could you repeat that stat.

Yeah, there's about I don't have the exact number and my figure, but there's about twenty to twenty five US companies that provide major components for the F thirty five, and many of them have Internet national sub elements to them.

Because industrial participation was a government to government commitment for any ally that joined the program.

A US only airplane like an F thirty five or army's not like F twenty two or a B two or B twenty one.

At this point primarily is a US supply chain, and so there's a much larger number of states involved, there's much stronger political support because each of those states has a congressman, congression types and senators.

In our case, we had to substitute some of that with Allied embassies in US that there were participating in the program and had a stake in the program.

So it's funny how the political support for a program changes, you know, based on how the program is actually constructed.

Yeah, and even that, you know, the common criticism you get is it's almost I rolling at this point, but oh that's the military industry.

It's like, I view it as this is an insanely complex puzzle, and you have to work in the parameters that you have, and it's again, okay, you could look at something like a totalitarian dictatorship.

Yeah, you could just clamp it all down right.

Those countries also historically don't produce the type of innovation that comes in a free and open society, so you can't have one without the other.

And yeah, when it's a when it's a full stop, all built here.

I remember seeing something a while ago.

I forget what it was.

There's something one of the defense contractors was talking about.

They had this entire department and it was all about making sure programs had had pieces from factories in all states so that you could call the political support, which again is just another piece of the puzzle.

And then I think it was in skunk works by Ben Rich and he's talking about you know, predecessor Clarence Kelly Johnson and they're coming in and they're talking about the F one seventeen, and you know, ben Rich is all psyched and it's you know, it's got the radar cross section of a ball bearing, and you know, the Pentagon they loved it so much that they slapped special access program on it, and Ben Rich is like, this is awesome, and I think the exact quote from Clarence Kelly Johnson is Rich, you dumb shit.

You have no idea what you just did, and it completely They talked about how he couldn't go to the bathroom without two people signing out, and you know it's the whole thing.

But with an X, you know, an extreme program like that.

I think John McCain said, you know, what do we know about the B twenty one raider and this is obviously years ago.

We know that it flies, meaning it was so locked down that he couldn't get you know, his eyes on it.

That's also makes it the flip side.

I think what you're saying is relatively I mean, none of the stuff is easy.

It's relatively easier when it's just this is American made, this is you know, this is the bleeding edge.

You get that full congressional support, and you also have all those supply chains locked down.

The F thirty five is, I guess, an easier way say this is man, When you're in college, it is so much easier when you and one friend decide what bar you want to go to, versus being at a party ten miles out and you all have to share the same like uber, you all have degree and you all have the same attention.

It's not even like you're wildly do you all want to go to the bar and drink and see women.

You can't corral that.

How can you corral this?

And I think that's kind of another thing about is that that really is a wild application.

And like you said, none of this, this isn't an old plane that we're you know, like I ran still find the F four Phantom, this isn't an old thing.

You're also doing something that is a next generation fighter and it's you know, again not to kiss your ass, but like I said, you're not even going to get like the thank you or that was cool.

You just they'll maybe stop attacking you.

Yeah, I'll tell you an interesting vignette about the F one seventeen.

When I went to work for Lockeed in nineteen eighty, I went to work in the Lockeyed company in Burbank, California.

I went out there to be a test pilot, but they weren't testing anything, so I got off into the business development management side.

I was a lunchtime runner and I would join up with my buddies and we would run around the campus there at the Burbank Airport, which is where Lockey was located at the time, and there was this one building that we would run around and the windows were painted over.

I never knew what was going on in there, and we didn't know that there were some cameras that were up on a hill and outside the property in Burbank that were filming all the time, and we didn't know who long those and so it was all kind of mysterious.

And then one morning I came in to work early, like four point thirty in the morning for some business it was coming and the airport was normally closed between ten at night and seven in the morning, but it wasn't really closed, and there was a C five about to take off on the runway, and if you know Burbank Airport, it's a very short runway.

But what was happening was the F one seventeen was being built in that building that I was running around.

I had no idea it was actually there, and the airplane would be pulled out in the middle of the night and put in the back of a C five and flown out the Tonepau, which was the site in the desert where the airplane operated out of For years, it was not known, and I continued in my career.

I was there for about eight years, and I went to Washington and I was called back to Burbank to be brief on a classified program so I could talk to the House Intelligence Committee.

And I went into the same building I'd been running around for years, and I went through an airlock, and I went through a second airlock, you know, a two person id kind of thing.

And here's the production line building F one seventeen's in the middle of Burbank Airport and nobody knew it was there.

Nobody knew what they're doing.

So, in fact, the Skunkworks under Kelly Johnson and then later on the Ben Rich was an embedded management structure.

If you if you looked at the Lockheed or chart, you wouldn't see a Skunkworks head.

He was a VP for something, VP of engineering or something like that, but he was actually the president of the Skuntworks.

Then when when Lockheed and Martin Marriett emerged and they moved the headquarters to Maryland and shut Burbank down, and they basically moved the scunt Works out to Palmdale.

It came out of the closet, so to speak.

And it's known now that the skunkworks exists in Pomdale.

Is still not well known what they actually do, but the whole test of branges up there, you know, in that part of California are are still quite active on what they're working on.

So with that story, I always used to tell folk said, I never had no idea what was going on inside that building until I was called back to get briefed on it, and there was full airplanes being built in there and taking out in the middle of the night.

That at my first thought, when you said you're running around, I'm like me, You're lucky you weren't shot.

That's something I feel like I would do if I think in twenty twenty, right when I a couple months after I started the show, I was I'd like to think I'm wiser now.

I was just so I would just contact I try to contact anyone I wanted to.

I think I I and I think I remember I called North of Grumman.

I literally called North of Grumman and started asking about the B twenty one, and I just remember as a woman with a British accident just tore me a new one, and I was like, I just want to yeah, And you know, since then, I've talked to people and like the CIA and you know, Defense Intelligence.

They're like, yeah, you're absolutely like probably labeled as a probe.

And I was like, well, you know, but that that is Yeah, it's that In Skunkworks they talk about how they they seize the coffee mugs because somebody had made some coffee mugs for the people on the inside and it had the silhouette of it, and they were like, you cannot have this.

And it's that, I guess to compare something like the F thirty five, I got to imagine, and I'm not I'm quite on firm ground with this to a degree.

I imagine that it's almost easier when a program is locked down like that.

Well, yeah, you don't have all the oversight.

You you don't go through all the program reviews, and most of the time classified budgets are are not accessible by you know, the general budgeting process, and so they tend to keep their fundy.

On F thirty five, it was it was interesting.

I call it the Ruby's cube.

It's the Ruby's Cuba programs.

You know, which if you're not adept, the Rubik's cube is very hard to pick a Rubus cube line up and everything, But it's kind of like that.

It's got so many different variables in it.

But what was different about it was the US government invited closest allies who were at the time are at the time flying US frontline airplanes frontline fighters, to join the program and actually contribute funds to the development of the F thirty five.

In return for that, the government, the government agreements committed to best value participation as industrial partners.

Well, now you've got to rethink your whole process about, Okay, how do I do my supply chain on this.

Most international aerospace and defense suppliers are not equivalent to US in terms of their tolerance control the modernization of their tools.

There's a huge modernization ever they had to go on amongst the principal partners so they could actually build parts that could go on in F thirty five because the precision that's required for stealth several orders manitude more than a Sea one thirty or or or another airplane that they may be working on.

So there's huge investments going on, some of them by the governments themselves.

In some countries the government was willing to invest in I take an example, Norway, they were they were willing to invest in Consvert, which is the primary defense company in Norway, and fund some of their factory development.

And in one year we opened up a world class factory in Turkey, a world class factory in Norway, world class factory in Denmark that were remade factories that could now produce either metal or composite parts for an F thirty five.

You don't normally go through that.

Normally, suppliers bid little bid gets it unless it's a very high tech thing, and all that was kind of out the window.

So what we had to do.

It's interesting.

I think on F thirty five was I was the general executive.

My title was executive vice president general manager F thirty five, so I controlled it.

I was the F thirty five.

In the first couple of years, you're doing mostly engineering design.

You're basically designing the airplane.

You're not building much.

You may be building a couple of test airplanes, but you're not anywhere near a production rate.

And then about the fourth or fifth year, we were finding those little pieces of technology that needed to have a breakthrough that we hadn't broken through on yet, and one of those, which we can talk about later if you'd like, was the tailhook for the Navy airplane.

There was some dynamics associated with trying to hide a tailhook inside an airplane for health reasons that you don't have on an faighteen or any other airplane the Navy's ever had.

So we were able to go through that breakthrough, but it adds engineering time and therefore you start seeing the term cost overruns and stuff like that, and even the ability to take stealth to see when you think of two of the three F thirty five's are going to see either on out class ships with the Marine Corps on the B version or maybe aircift careers.

And there's no temperature in humidity control the hangar space on a ship, so you had to make the lol we observe bility elements much more saltwater friendly if you will.

Then you have to do on a B two or at F one seventeen or a F twenty two that you can take inside a hangar and you can control the control the environment.

But those things had to happen along the way as we as we came on to them.

There was inadequate technology maturity in a couple of areas.

So while you're doing that, you're also trying to set up your global supply chain and find out what companies could actually do work and how do we get them to the point where they could be a valid and a capable supplier because the government said, the US Government agreement said that we would do that as the prime contractor.

So about two thousand and four or five years into the program, we decided we really couldn't manage the program with one person in charge.

Somebody has to be in the conference room on the daily staff call, making sure that the engineers are working and doing the right things and that problems are identified, and somebody needs to be on the road, whether it's either in Washington or in one of the nine partner countries, because if you think about it, every one of those countries has its version of the Pentagon and has its version of the Congress, and the budgets that they're proving to go into the F thirty five program have to go through the same kind of mini process where it's supported by the operator, it's funded by the government.

So it was a huge, huge task.

So we split it up, so was I became kind of the outside guy.

I lived in Washington during the budget cycle when the US budget was going on, and I'd be on an airplane going to Netherlands, Stan Martin, Norway, Turkey, Canada, Australia.

And another peer of mine who had a similar title, he was Executive VP, General Manager of the F thirty five program.

I was Executive VP, General Manager of F thirty five program Integration.

We had one word difference in our titles.

But my job was outside his job as insight.

For the last ten years, maybe the last eight years I was on the program.

That was my position, which is really what opened up the book, you know, because I was actually living the human journey every day as set of the technical journey journey as we got into the later stage of the program.

I guess there's like two quick conclusions you could draw from that, well, like the first, I mean, I guess the third.

The first is, you know, wildly impressive that all of these and again it's for people listening that maybe aren't entirely too red.

You're also not doing this with like a hum v or like a jeep during World War Two, where God blessed, but it was wasn't classified.

It was just plugging in playing.

You're also doing this with a next generation fighter, so I guess the So the first conclusion that it's oppressive.

The next two would be it had never been done before, and we did it, and we showed it could be done, and now you have somewhat of like a homogeneous to a degree air force of all the allied countries.

The other conclusion would be this was awful.

We're never doing this again.

Like is it are either of those?

Or is it somewhere in the is it somewhere in the middle?

Is it you know, it's like you said, it's to reach that kind of adult program where the truth is self evident.

That's a that's a pretty incredible achievement.

Is that like is that on the table again?

Well, I mean, I guess so far away, But theoretically, is it something where it goes we did it?

I can't believe we did it.

We can do it again, or like the early ICBMs get better and better and better versus something like the Apollo program.

It's like, we did it.

That was amazing.

Yeah, we're not doing that again.

I think it's somewhere in between, you know, I think the environment at the time late nineties early two thousands, all three US services had their own development program going on.

You know, the Air Force was developing multi role fighter MRIF, Navy was developing.

At first they were told to develop a naval variant of the F twenty two, but since the Air Force had the lead on that, Navy doesn't like to take Air Force airplanes and make them carrier capable.

The Navy had their own program, which was the A twelve I think it was, And then the Marine Corps was heavily involved in trying to get a replacement for the Harrier and was under contract.

In fact, that's the whole X twenty two X thirty five story they had.

The original Harrier prototype was called the X thirty two, and that requirement was then rolled into F thirty five, So there was already a prototype, you know, and that's why the numbers are three digits apart.

But yeah, so that was happening.

At the same time there was a sense that the Cold War was over, you know, the wall came down.

We don't need to be buying single mission airplanes like F twenty two's.

They truncated that program about one hundred and eighty two airplanes, and I was the VP General manager of that program first, which was very interesting because when you finally get an airplane to come down to cost curve and you're at the lowest, you're at the flat part of the curve where the airplane is now affordable.

That's when it was canceled at the right, right as it reached that point.

So the F twenty two was canceled.

And there was a thought that we don't fly and fight alone.

We we fight as joint with US services, and we fight as joint allied with our closest allies whenever we're doing peacekeeping or long term combat operations.

So why not have an airplane that all of them can operate, that are interoperable, and we'll share this next journey on the F thirty five.

So the environment was right to do that.

If you look at what's happening right now, you know you have the X, you have the F forty seven.

First politically numbered aircraft that I know of, because there is an actual decree in Department of Defense, Department of War now of how airplanes are numbered.

Oh really there is.

Yeah, that's why the X thirty two and the X thirty five or three apart there was two other programs in between there that you didn't hear much about.

Yeah, as such a bad precedent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So now you have the F forty seven, which is a boweing contract, and you have the FAXX at X forty seven, I guess is the lead on en gad this connected.

You have the FA xx, which is looks like it's going to get restarted.

It sort of got shut down in the last budget cycle, but now the Senate has appropriated I think a billion four or something like that to restart that effort.

So now if you look at it, the Marines, the F thirty five B air forces off developing next generation, are dominant fighter navies separately developing FAXX, sort of back to where they were in the late nineties.

Every service wants its own airplane.

They don't want to be second in line for something that's modified for their use.

I would argue that the F thirty five was never that way.

Those airplanes were designed from the very beginning for the environment they had to operate in.

It was just the human machine interface that I mentioned earlier that was common, common sensors, you know, common weapons bay but structurally the airplanes are quite different, so that it's interesting that we've sort of come full circle.

So now now will somebody in a few years say, we don't have enough money to do all these delevement programs, Let's do one airplane again, and they do.

They do the forensics and see whether it's actually cheaper or not.

One of the things that drove a lot of cost on the F thirty five was, if you think about it, historically, the Air Force and the Navy have radically different test organizations.

You know, the testing tends to be done out of Edwards Air Force Base for the Airporce.

It tends to be done on the Packs River for the Navy.

The Navy has congressional language, legal language that makes them the purveyor of any airplane they gets put into Naval service because of the expertise of having to go to sea, you know.

Their fur was probably the last example of an airplane that was modified.

It was built for the Navy but then lightened structurally lightened for the air Force version maybe you could say the F one eleven, but it never got into use by the Navy.

So there's not a good track record of airplanes being developed from one service and then being adapted to another service, as opposed to the F thirty five process, which basically designed all three airplanes separately for the operational environment and then made them as common as you could make them from a pilot's perspective, and.

Then existing in the same timeline as the B fifty two.

Yeah, it's just yeah, right, or just to just keep trucking.

And I guess for something like that, there might be he kind of nailed at once, you know, like they're still using the U two in South Korea.

I guess some things that I don't know.

Maybe you hit the ceiling relatively early, so it's a beef, it's a bomber, it's not.

Yeah, sure you have the B two, but I mean in terms of just like you know, a bomb truck, you have the B fifty two.

But and obviously this isn't a novel idea, but it really does seem like we're coming up on the I don't know, the leading edge, the shock wave of unmanned and I mean for most of my life I was born in ninety But you have the Predator, the Global Hawk, the Reaper, all that stuff, But with both the advance of of AI and what we can commercially see is impressive.

So God knows what's being done privately or under classification as well as it's kind of interesting that they're both kind of happening at the same time.

Maybe they were always going to.

I would imagine you're also hitting the upper ceiling of the maneuvers of craft can make without just pulverizing the pilot.

Yeah, how many?

It's widely impressive if you can make a plane do that, But there's a limit I would imagine to the amount of gs a pilot can take.

And do you want to risk a pilot blocking out?

And one hundred billion dollar aircraft?

Are we seeing the final and I'll never be completely over but the final wave of piloted in the conventional sense.

There's a couple of theories about that, Thomas.

A One is that if you fast forward to a world where there's nothing but unmanned aircraft combat aircraft, then do you really are you if you don't hold human life at risk?

Are you really in combat or are you just playing a game?

Are you littering the ground with metal from unmanned airplanes that have shot each other down.

But I think there was an interesting Star Wars episode years and years and years ago, way before.

Unless you're a Star Wars fan, you wouldn't have recalled this, but where two countries were at war with each other and they were all using all unmanned aircraft, and they would keep a score and whoever won, they would march the losing side into a gas chamber and kill that many people because human life had to be tied to the combat result.

So as you get into an extreme unmanned aircraft world, then you got a question whether you really have whether it's really combat anymore or not, you know.

On the other hand, I think there's lots of missions that people would rather have an unmanned aircraft do.

There used to be an acronym for it.

It was it was I can't remember.

It's like three d's and one of them was dirty dirt, dirty missions and I was flying into a heavily radiated area or those kinds of things.

So there's there's certainly an application for him.

And the more you put, the more capable you put into an unmanned aircraft.

Where you look at a Global Hawk, where you look at a at a at a reaper.

Those are almost the same size as manned aircraft, so it's not a cost issue.

It's really do you want all the peripheral equipment that goes along with keeping a human alive in an airplane?

You can take that out and put more weapons on it.

Those kind of trade offs are going on, you know.

So so I think you'll see a combination of pilot in and unpiloted aircraft going in the future.

Having worked on the flight deck of an aircraft carry it's hard for me to imagine a flight deck full of unmanned airplanes.

But there's obviously it's got to be a controller.

So every unmanned airplane has to have a body with a box that's moving the airplane around on the flight deck.

Well, how do you do all that?

You know, there's still and if you can jam the control signal, which is kind of why the world that I sort of see out there is a man and an unmanned aircraft flying together with a low probability of better set data links, sort of like the thirty five pass.

Today, I can fly f thirty fives up to forty miles apart and still communicate with each other without emitting any of my sensors, I could do the same thing and controlling an unmanned airplane.

You know, but if you can jam the control signal, you have turned the unmanned airplane into an unguided airplane.

So that's always been the limitation sending a wave of unmanned airplanes into attack a heavily defended air defense system.

All you do is jam all the jam the control systems and shoot them down.

You know, not that the lasers are becoming the weapon of choice.

You know.

What doesn't make sense is to fly and recently in the Red Sea and other places where that you have an aircraft carrier flying against drones and you shoot a two million dollar missile at a five hundred thousand dollars drone that the economics don't work out in the long term very well when that's the exchange ratio, you know.

So you're seeing a whole lot of emphasis now on lasers that you can point very accurately and you can basically destroy incoming drone type stuff.

So there's but as I mentioned in early days, I do have the privilege of sitting on the board of Air Environment, which is one of the leading companies in the drone world and watching how the technologies are evolving, particularly in the area of AI.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are really dominating in that space.

And part of it is because you don't have to worry about the keeping the human alive inside the airplane, you can do more things with it, you know, in terms of technology.

So there's lots of interesting stuff happening in those worlds, but how they merge is going to be interesting to watch, you know.

And and will there ever be a world of nothing but an unmanned aircraft.

I kind of doubt it myself.

Yeah, that that that seems to be the conclusion is we're just going to see an incredible advance in jamming and e MP technology over the next decade or two.

It's going to ramp up to Yeah things begin and of course, yeah, lasers instead of firing an actual you know, kinetic vehicle at something, just just beam it.

Yeah, if you're going in and F thirty five and you've got or if you have, yeah, some unmanned if you have some uav is being piloted, that could be jammed, and then I guess there's always the risk of not giving it full autonomy to where it doesn't need a uplink because that, you know, just terminator scenario.

When you're saying that, I was thinking, is like or you, I don't know, somewhere in between.

You make the drones.

They're not piloted, but they're not autonomous.

You give it a pre set flight program and say hit this target, and then I don't know, your Faraday cage the plane so nothing comes in or out, and it just goes and does the mission regardless of what's being jammed.

And I was thinking, like, and if you had to like change the thing, I don't know, maybe I have the equivalent of like refueling, but it's just an uplink, But it just gives it a new mission order.

I mean, I guess you just made it like a copper shell.

It could do that.

But then at that point it's like, well, that's just a Tomawk, that's just a cruise missile.

Yeah, why not just do that?

Yeah, A lot of work is going on in GPS and night environments, you know, because you're not going to necessarily have those satellites if you ever get into a real war.

So so, but the space this is just me talking now.

I don't have any inside information on this, but the fidelity of space photography now you can basically do mapping.

You can have a vehicle that can but its overlay of what is flying over onto a very high fidelity map and basically navigate that way without any satellite input.

Whether you could do that on a large scale or not, it kind of remains to be seen.

But there are things you can do now to reduce the dependency on space assets because that's probably where the next ward to made us.

There's a new movie out on Netflix.

I don't know if you've see.

They're not called House of Dynamite if you say that just this week, but it's it's pretty good.

It's a it's a story about it an unidentified nuclear ICBM that's launched from somewhere in the water.

They don't know where it came from or what country it came from, but it's inbound to the US, and it's all about the backstories of how the people operate when they have when the countdown is going on, there's eight minutes to an impact.

There's seven minutes of impact.

Looks like it's going to hit Chicago.

YadA, YadA, YadA.

You know, So it's a it's interesting to look at the human Alemba.

It ends without any conclusion because they don't think they.

So Yeah, I mean it makes me think of all those like war games that we now know about decades later in the Cold War, where it's like somebody had put the wrong cassette in and next thing, you know, shine mountains, like there's twenty two hundred nuclear missiles inbound, and that was with a cassette.

I mean, it would be pretty I don't know, it'd be pretty stupid to assume that we couldn't have an equivalent with these things that are i mean literally billions of times more complex, and seventy years later it could cascade so much worse than that.

Yeah.

I remember watching this video this Air Force guy talking about someone in the sixties.

It was called Atran.

I would imagine it's atr An.

I don't know, but it was four I think it was for B fifty two's and it was they would get topographical maps, maybe it was for Operation Chrome Doom, for the potential roots you would take, and then they would remake it almost like a little you know, model, like a little you know, like a train model town type thing, and then they would they would roll a camera over these tables that were like ten feet wide and like one hundred feet long and essentially do mapping, and again it's an impressive for the sixties of what it would look like and then upload that to I guess the training programs or maybe even on the plane itself, and it was like, if everything goes down and if you're if the radars are fried from static or bombs, you just have this crude, you know, flying over this little lego town and it's like that's where you're supposed to go.

So I would imagine that's probably advanced in sixty or seventy years too.

Oh yeah, yeah, the simulations these days are incredible.

The simulators themselves are incredible.

But there was a we were doing embedded training or a simulation spot on f twenty two years and years ago, twenty over twenty years ago, and the opening of the video was an actual footage from Japan when they were planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, and there's a Japanese guy sitting in a zero and there's there's ten other people on the ground with a huge map of the Pacific and the Hawaiian islands there and they're pulling the map underneath the guy as he's sitting in the cockpit of the airplane.

Oh, practiced the run, you know.

So that was pretty genius first simulator.

Yeah, but that now I had the experience in Denmark.

No, it was in the Netherlands where the Dutch Research Agency wanted to interest the F thirty five program office in what they call their embedded training, where you could put a software load in the airplane.

You could go out and all your systems would indicate that somebody hostile is trying to shoot you down, and you could actually get into a turning fight using images that were on your radar or ew system as opposed to being somebody real out there.

So I jumped in the back of a Dutch F sixteen and they took me out over the water.

It was a bad day.

It was totally of fart.

It was you know, low clouds and stuff, and all of a sudden this target pops up on the screen and it's a bad guy coming out coming after you, and you do all your training on how okay, how do I engage him?

Is it a fly?

Is it fight or fly?

Fly or fight?

Decision?

Does he see me or doesn't he see me on the F thirty five.

Normally he doesn't see you, so you can if he's not directly coming at you as a threat, you can just watch them go by.

But if they do engage you, then what what's the turning fight?

And how do you deal with it?

So all that was embedded just in a software display using the airplane's own sensors.

You know, we were not there's nobody else in the sky but us.

Nobody else can fly be super enough to fly a day like that.

But that was the start of looking at embedded training for pilots as opposed to every pilot's kind of go to a simulator and you've got to schedule simulators.

You know, I would schedules.

Well, I can just go up into the air now and I can, you know, use embedded training.

So it's not as good as as the flight simulators are today.

They're really really good, very accurate, very realistic.

Used to be the head motion sensors on them, you know, where the where the platform itself would move and the pilot would get the sense of turning.

They've sort of determined that's not really required this day of age because an airplane like an F thirty five.

As I say, I guess to watch.

You're watching the movie and the cockpit of the airplane.

Basically you're not looking at a radar or a EW system.

You look at a big screen TV and the world is going on around you.

You don't know what sensor is giving you data.

It's all fused sensor fusion, and so you're just kind of watching the movie.

And if you see a threat coming towards you, you either take action or you don't, depended on how you assess the ability of that threat.

So you're not really into turning, turning and burning banking.

Yeah, like we used to do, you know, and used to used to be within probably a mile or less of your wingman, always in sight, and you're protecting his six, and he's protecting your six because the centers we're going enough to tell you who's ent your six.

You know.

Now, airplanes flying thirty forty miles spreads, if one of them has to happens to get detected, then it's up to the back and decide, Okay, is the other one thirty miles that way or thirty miles that way?

Yeah?

Are they there at all?

Are they're there at all?

Yeah?

And That's the other thing is the whole cyber you know, science that now can inject threats out though.

That's what I was thinking of, is like how good are these simulations?

I mean, at what point do you turn that into an offensive weapon?

At what point do you have an F thirty five?

You have something physical flying?

But if you're looking at the rate are I mean, is that one F thirty five?

Am I seeing three hundred and twenty f sixteen's?

Is that a B fifty two?

Is that even there?

Is it?

Not?

There?

Is it?

Well?

I'm tracking five F thirty five's, But aren't they stealth?

Why am I seeing this?

Shouldn't I not be able to see this?

Yeah?

Man, that's it.

That starts to get hairy.

That starts to how do you even in a weird way, it almost seems like we're just gonna have like a global balkanization.

We're just kind of kind of assumed that it's so advanced it might be like a form of mutually sure destruction of you do me and then you and at the same time you really could have And that's you know, when people say aircraft carriers are are are outdated?

I think we're just gonna see them outfitted with one hundred thousand little drones like that that why would they do that?

Start to tell how they're going to go.

You know, the new always been the argument on where the carry is vulnerable, vulnerable or not.

But if you ever get into a real war, you'll operate a carry a little bit differently in terms of approaching threatnings.

But you do have this huge air winger board.

Yeah.

If anything, you just.

Makers of sovereign property anywhere in the world.

Yeah, and if you Yeah, if anything, I would imagine at the very least is almost a form of extended you know, border security.

If it's really a hot war and you don't want to risk these things, you can at least just push the east to west coast out one hundred miles and be like, you know, you get a little more of an early warning.

And so Yeah, this is.

One of the things that I think is really interesting about the promise of an F thirty five, which is which is just now becoming reality, I think.

I mean, I'll give you a couple examples on a second, but the promise of it is in the in the emerging hotspots of the world.

Let's say that I would say, the two that are most talked about are the Arctic and the Paci.

Okay, you could argue the Middle East, but that's probably the third.

On the Arctic when Ukraine, when Russia went into Ukraine.

Every country surrounding the Arctic is now an F thirty five owner or in line to get F thirty five's, with the exception of Russia.

So you can start with Canada, you can work the way all the way around Gay Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, all of them are now at thirty five.

So you can marshal a significant air force quote unquote in the Arctic.

If you look at the Pacific, these are not allies that fly in fight with US.

That tends to be a European phenomenon.

In the Pacific, you have security cooperative participants, people that are security partners of ours.

Starting with Japan, it goes Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Australia, and you have ten US carriers, all of which could be outfitted and probably more than ten if you put the L class ships in there.

With the F thirty five B you have a very large cooperative force that F thirty five's in the Pacific now growing every day, and then if you look in the Middle East, the carriers are deploying.

The interesting deployment that I was reading about was the HMS Queen Elizabeth, my BA system's deputy that lived in Fort Worth with me when we were doing Starting Off the program.

Later became the Queen Elizabeth's project manager for VIA.

His name is Nick Ord.

He's now the CEO of a company in the UK.

But that ship deployed to the Red Sea and it didn't have enough The UK hadn't bought enough F thirty five bs yet, so they had two squadrons of marine US Marine Corps thirty five b's and one squadron of UK F thirty five bs, total three squadrons on the ship, and they went to combat deployment off as Syria.

As they were coming back to the u UK coming through the Mediterranean, the Italians flew there after thirty five bees out landed on the Elizabeth.

So on one day you had the Italians, Brits and the US Marines all flying together off of the same ship.

The ship.

That's kind of wild.

It's kind of wild if you think about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fully.

Interoperable they and jumping onto another ship and being fully integrated into their operations.

Is there's a learning curve associated with that, Yeah, all of them being in the same airplane, there was no real learning curve.

Yeah, it's not in nineteen forty five, Like that's insanely impressive for modern day, right, It's I would imagine the way it because there's you know, there's what we think should happen, and then there's also with defense and weapons, for lack of a better phrase, it is sort of an inevitable, you know, race to the bottom.

It's like, I think we could all agree it's like, yeah, thermonuclear warheads on missiles aren't good, but they're doing it, so we have to do it.

And that's kind of right in the real world, you do have to do that.

It's it's ideally we wouldn't have, you know, a gig a ton of weapons pointed at each other, but it is what it is, and it's not kind of worked.

It's actually worked very well for mutual a shirt destruction.

Seeing last week that the x BAT, which looks like just the kind of the you know, the the UKE have we've all kind of imagined, like a really little b twenty one, and the fact that the three things that were wild about it to me was the vertical takeoff, not not the help.

I mean literally it's just on a pole and it goes straight out like okay, that's wild.

It lands on that pole too.

And then it's not piloted.

And I don't mean like a it's it's not even piloted from some with like a remote control.

It's it's actually autonomous.

Those three things right there.

That is such and I geek out on that stuff.

That is such a wild advancement.

And the guy that was watching said it.

He was like, now, if you're a foreign adversary you have to worry about every twenty by twenty foot patch of land on Earth, you don't have to go.

You don't have to you know, it's easy to spot a runway, right, it's you can find it.

That's insane.

It takes it's it's like those like Russian ICBM long you can just drive that thing around, take off vertically, and then land vertically and it's not controlled by human at all.

Now objectively it you know, this seems horrible, but like nuclear weapons may be able to work out.

That to me was startling and I know nothing about it.

I think for the most watch by classified.

It's called the x BAT and I don't even I mean, I'm sure you know, but I don't even know how you is that what we're gonna see?

So you're saying, you know, with all these things are are unmanned on an aircraft carrier flight deck, you'd have to have somebody controlling all of them, right, like the big connex boxes, and that would be difficult, okay if they're not on the carrier and they're on you know, back home, and I have to worry about the data link or what if you just had an aircraft carrier just legitimately with just boxes of these things that you just shoot off vertically like a missile salvo, but they're autonomous aircraft with like a three thousand mile that is that's creepy.

I don't even know how to go about this, but it seems like that's sort of the if we don't do it, they will.

I don't know.

It seems like we're going over a very slippery which I guess is what people have always said about weapons technology.

But it seems like we're going over some sort of event horizon.

I think we're in the middle of a big transition.

You know, there's something.

I don't think that it's very clear what that is yet, but there's a transition definitely going on.

You know, carriers.

You know, if you look at the carriers and you know the amount of real estate that's taken up by catapults in the resting gear and all the things that are unique to Navy airplanes that the launch at heavyweights and recover at lighter weights but still heavyweight.

You could take all that out and open up a whole lot of space, but the airplant, the ships and carriers are pretty mission adapted to the mission of an airport CARRIERA it might be better to put the boxes you're talking about on a cruiser or or or some other ship that's got missile batteries already.

Boxes and yeah, because it's it's expensive to operate.

And of course that the newer ones were all nuclear that started with the Demons, I guess or nuclear powered.

So yeah, I don't know.

I don't know how it's going to all evolve, you know, whether the mission of the aircraft carrier and the mission of the Navy.

There's a huge thing going on right now on the on the deaf sit and ship building.

Yeah, nothing to do with airplanes, but it's a hot topic now, you know, with the Golden the quote unquote Golden Fleet and all these kind of concepts.

That's another one that's you know, we thought the thirty five supply chain architecture was difficult to set up around the world, but ship buildings even harder, you know, and you don't build them very you don't build building very fast or you know, how long is the how long take to build a ford?

I think it was like seven years.

Yeah, area that just came.

It's now out there floating around it.

So yeah, so ship building is a whole other thing.

And they're looking at the death sit.

Between the number of Chinese ships and a number of US ships, there's like three hundred and fifty verses two hundred and eighty something like that.

So there's so if you're just a numbers person, which I don't think anybody ought to be just a numbers person anymore, because the power of the punch is almost more important than than the boxer that's punching, you know.

I mean, a terrifying thought would be, yeah, because aircraft carr I mean, although they're huge pieces of real estate.

Yeah, they are there, their mission centric, the way they're set up, the you know, the hangars, the elevators that, you know, whatever.

If you could just fit these things in shipping containers, yeah, there's a cost, cutch, go grab any evergreen chip, you know, put put some military you know, uplink on it in the in the bridge.

Surround that with a couple of destroyers.

Man, and you know how many shipping container ships are out a trillion?

You just you know, don't pick a con x box that is like, now you have one of those things launch legitimately.

You know, some of the huge ones, it was like thirty thousand contained a granted they're stacked, but man, that's and then you get really hairy.

Yeah, why even make it obviously a military ship?

Why not just have them going around and maybe maybe make them they actually are cargo ships, but you never know which one you might launching all out, you know, you know, yeah, I mean.

That is a concept that's been talked about.

How do you how do you rapidly expand your fleet if it doesn't require catapults and arresting gear.

He's all the shipping containers or the shipping container ships.

Well as I knew it would.

This this podcast is already elevated my heart rate and got me going down.

I do this.

I do this like every week, having like one guest and like and I know the topic is going to like send me off the deep end.

He give me a heart attack.

But you know, I figured I kind of knew that was common, but I to go for it.

I'm already I mean, I'm in Portland, Maine.

I'm just thinking, like, yeah, you could slap that onto any little tug boat.

I think it's not what Kissinger wanted.

Like nuclear weapons on barges.

There has been a couple of studies done over the course of time on could you do that?

The reason why you couldn't, I guess that they violate some standards of separating military from commercial.

But I mean, yeah, but you know, all's fair in love and war.

I guess what it really comes down.

Then we'll wrap it up with this is all this stuff is possible.

The reasoning why it's not happening is mutual assured destruction.

You know if man, what if China has a thousand of those shipping contents, well, we probably have a thousand in China and if you don't, we'll nuke you or you know, it's the idea of China can could easily destroy our aircraft carriers.

Yeah, that's an act of war.

Though that's not a little not to make light of them.

That's not you know, Iranian speedboats shooting five five six at an aircraft carrier, dig out an aircraft carry.

I mean that is you're gonna get a thromonuclear response.

So I guess with all what I guess.

The piece I try to find is nothing is crazier than multiple independent re entry vehicles of multiple megatons on warheads that you launch from your own backyard, hit the other target in thirty minutes and they come in at mock twenty three.

And the reason, well that how come they haven't been used mutual shirt destruction.

I try to find some solace in that, and that that then applies to everything.

Why is it not happening?

Well, because they'll do it to us, and it's I don't know if there's a lot of peace in there, but I think if it applies to ICBMs, which are still the most terrifying weapon ever made, then it has to apply to you know, shipping container jets or something.

So here's an interesting human dilemma.

I mentioned a new movie on Netflix.

But this missile starts out as a as a ballistic missile and then from an undisclosed origin, so they don't know whether it's China or Russia or North Korea, but it's it just suddenly appears somehow got through the initial initial stage radars, probably through some sort of cyber but then it goes from ballistic to being an ICBM, which puts the impact point anywhere in the US.

But they don't know where it's coming from.

So now they they are in the countdown seven minutes, six minutes.

They launched the B twos, but they don't know where to send them because it's undisclosed origin.

So they've tried to get all the you know, the North Koreas and the Russians and the Chinese on the phone.

So did you did you shoot this?

Did you shoot this?

Was a human to him and reaction is nobody knows, So where do you send your B twos?

They just they're loitering on the station somewhere until somebody figures out who actually sent the missile.

You know, the movie is before you figure all that out, but it is an interesting human dilemma that an undisposed origin is much more difficult to deal with.

And it's coming from Russia, or it's coming from Korea, or it's coming from China, because you know who deserves the mutually assured destruction.

Yeah, you don't know where it's coming from.

Either everybody everybody's on alert thinking they're going to go after everybody, or nobody's on alert.

You know, it's one of those things, you know.

I think the woman that directed the movie was the same one that did the hurt Locker.

Did you ever see it?

Yeah?

Yeah, that was one of my favorite Jeremy Renner.

Yeah, you know, that movie gave me a heart attack, So that makes sense that she would.

Man, that's gonna say in Two days ago was the Cuban Crisis sixty two, So two days ago is the sixty third and aniversary of the It's a shame I can't remember his name, but that the guy that saved the world right the Soviet the political officer on that on that decided against launching a nuclear torpedo because they thought war had already broken out.

I don't know.

I'm trying to find some opeen that like they are good people.

I don't know, you're not helping, you know.

I have the undisclosed Missile Launch.

One little last story before this is the book that we were sort of talking about, And yeah, I pulled this book off of my rack and I opened it up the other day and I don't know, I'll just tell you what it is.

But there's an inscription in it that I wrote here, which is to Charlie Kirk.

Oh.

Wow, Charlie and I never got to send a book.

Charlie Kirk was appointed to the Board of Visitors for the US Air Force Academy.

Wow.

President Trump and I was were sending a couple of the principal too, you know, to the people that had been there.

And so I'm not gonna I'm going to keep this one on my bookshelf forever because written well, I intended to send it and I never said it because he was assassinated before that happened.

So it's just a little no.

No, that's a no, that's a that's a yeah.

That's a kind of a beautiful note to end on is.

I mean, I'm thirty five, you know, I always complain about everything because I'm a human.

But then you look at something like that just in general, I mean, regardless of even what we're talking about, like the fact that I was trying to be grateful for the podcast, that I get to be my own boss and it's cool, and then I get to talk to guys like you.

But even on like a more abstract like we're here.

Yesterday, I saw my mom and dad and it took like a three hour car.

I have metal brother and we just shot the ship and talking about you know, everything from you know, funny memories to what we're doing now.

And that's a that's a sharp one that kind of brings it all back into focus.

And this is not even about you know, thirty five that that's just a yeah, man, it's it.

It sounds it's such a cliche, you know, every day could be your last, be grateful, but there really is something like that to where I mean, what a blessing it is to have, you know, five minutes ago, I was like, this is anxiety inducing.

What a blessing it is to to be alive and be able to have a conversation that's anxiety inducing, or not to feel emotion, to be at all, and that that's yeah, that was dead that you you kind of blindsided and not in a bad way.

Yeah, well, I appreciate you have me on it, and it's always fun to talk about these things.

And yes, sir, as a time marches on, as they say.

But what I enjoyed the most is talking to some of the young kids that are flying the airplane and knowing what it be to them and to their families that they can come home in that airplane generally speaking, no matter what the direction is that they're given.

So well, it's also, you know, if we're kind of going on this heartfelt ending is I don't know if I told you last time.

In twenty fourteen, I lost my older brother to suicide and he was twenty seven at the time I was twenty three.

I was at the University of Georgia.

He was doing post grad work at Georgia Tech gt gtr I Georgia Tech Research Institute, and was doing stuff.

I believe it might have been Lockheed Martin on.

I mean, I don't know what subdivision of subdivision, but he was the one that was always obsessed with plan and he was active.

Whereas I have a biology he was actually from I mean my earliest memories Is, and my grandfather kind of instilled that in him.

And my grandfather was in a pilot, but he loved it too.

And through my brother John Is Is that's where I got a lot of this kind of obsession with because early on he'd be the one that would sort of show me like why this is so crazy?

And he's the one that got me into like popular mechanics and popsy when I was in middle school in high school, so like like right when we're like invading Iraq that kind of time and learning about like the B thirty seven bomber, and you know, then you know all this stuff way down the road and and yes, I mean in a way kind of doing these up, I get to talk to somebody like you.

I've had on not an F one seventeen pile, like an F one seventeen historian.

I've had on an Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke in a way for me is And I've always loved this stuff, and I loved it before I lost my brother.

But there is kind of another level of it's in a weird way, it's I do feel sort of, you know, some sort of touch to my other and how much he would love that.

He I mean, if he's here right now, he'd probably be like, dude, just don't get this guy to say anything that's gonna land you both in getmo like like but like, you know, so kind of on that, on that more human note is you know, obviously I'm not I'm not a pilot.

I do a podcast, but it's it's cool talking to guys like you because there is you know, what you know whatever ethereal connection.

I do feel that whenever I get to do these shows, and so yeah, it's it's you know, it sucks, but it's you know, when when when Charlie Kirk was shot, I mean, my my first thought was or actually, my little brother said it to me, and I hadn't thought about it until he said it.

He was like, yeah, man, that's I hadn't even thought I thought that about the fact that he was a dad and a friend and whatever, but he was like, yeah, somebody just lost their baby.

And I didn't think about it because he's thirty one.

But as soon as you said that, it made me at thinking about my brother, like, oh shit, like that is that somebody's little babe that yesterday was crawling and today got shot.

So you know maybe that you in that book and me and my brother, it's you know, I know there's a human touch in there somewhere there is beautiful.

That's why this much much less dramatic.

But this book is a is a human story, not the technical story.

Yeah, it is a human story.

It's how do you get all these humans?

Yeah, they're on a journey like this and come up with a product at the end.

So that was actually, you know, actually I really appreciate that you brought that up.

That kind of evoked these feelings and it kind of helps does see that the humans.

I just imagine this like last little five minutes.

This is like the clip I showed to Congress, and I'm like, this is why we can't have on mandate, you know, really tug at the heart strings.

We need more, we need more fighter pilots.

That's what That's what I would that's all, and my brother would want that.

Yeah, use this.

So but yeah, mister Burbage, thank you for going on here and for everybody listening.

You can go into description the links straight to the audible book is there.

Highly recommend it.

You don't need to be an aviation head to appreciate it, and yeah, that's probably be up tomorrow.

I will send it to you.

I'd be great.

I appreciate your time, and it's awesome talking to you, and I look forward to the next one.

Super Well's always good talking to you, Thomas.

I appreciate you, appreciate you.

Appre sire what you do.

Yes, sir, thank you so much for your time.

Man, mister Burbage.

Everybody, guys go in the description, go grab the book.

Give the good man a couple bucks.

Thank you so much, mister.

Higher ultraviolet exposure is associated with lower mortality.

The United Kingdom is a high latitude and low sunlight country.

Researchers there collected data on over three hundred and sixty thousand participants in a study of UV exposure via solarium use.

When compared with non users, selarium users had fifteen percent risk lowered of all cause mortality, twenty three percent lower risk of cardiovascular mortality, fourteen percent lower risk of cancer mortality, and a twelve percent lower risk of non cardiovascular non cancer mortality.

In other words, all other causes.

Quoting the researchers, our study adds to the growing evidence that the benefits of UV exposure outweigh the risks in low sunlight environments.

A link to the original publication is available in the box below the video Get some UV Light this winter.

Immerse yourself in the tranquility of the blue.

Visit a Blue Room soon www dot blue room dot com.

Hey guys, A huge sponsor of the show is Heaven's Harvest Prepper Food.

Clayton lives down on Joy Or he's been on the show before.

It's actually in nearby where I went to college.

They are a huge sponsor of the show.

They give me some money every month, even when I don't sell enough to warrant that paycheck, meaning that the show is not free.

It's just that it's free for you.

If you guys need prepper food.

If you're just interested in supporting the show, I'd please ask you to go to the link in the description.

You go to heaven Sarbist Prepper Food Promo code TPC for ten percent off seventy two servings per pale twenty five year shelf life.

These things are double as dumbells.

Austin prima Vera, cheesy potato soup mac and cheese loaded baked potato casts or chili mac chitterbrocoi soup, cheesy lasagna, terioky yourrice.

You can get bonanch chips with also raspberry strawberries and apples.

There's a bunch of freeze dried fruit, or you can even get seeds to plant your own garden.

It's not a bad thing to have, like gold or ammunition.

It's a good thing to have.

It's a bad thing if you have to use it, but it's it's good.

It's good to have it and not need it, to need it, not have it.

So that's what i'd say.

And just want to support the show, Please go to the link of the description.

Please go support them because they support me.

Thank you so much.

Guys, Hey, guys, real quick, in the end of every episode is this little thing for rc ARC, the Association for the Covery of Children.

It's run by bas and it's been going since nineteen ninety three.

It's real boots on the ground going and rescuing traffic children.

It's not awareness, it's not we're gonna go on with stump speech.

It's legitimately ex military guys going in fully kitted up, armed to the teeth and going and rescuing children.

If you want, you can go to the description you can find it rc A ARC, the Association for the Covery of Children.

It's run by Basil Baz b a zz e l b a z.

You can actually go and help and legitimately stop the most evil thing of the world's happening.

Thank you.