back to indexDavid Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #122
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The following is a conversation with Commander David Fraver, who was a Navy
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pilot for 18 years and commander of the Strike Fighter Squadron 41, also known as
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the Black Aces, a squadron of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people.
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He's also famously one of the people who with his own eyes
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saw and chased a UFO, an identified flying object in 2004
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that is referred to as the tic tac and the incident more formally referred to as
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the USS Nimitz UFO incident. His story corroborated by several other pilots
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from my perspective as a curious scientist and an open minded human being
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is the most credible sighting of a UFO in history, at least that I'm aware of.
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He's a humble, fascinating, and fun human being to talk to. I put out a call for questions
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on Reddit and many other places and tried to ask as many of the questions that
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people posted as I could. And overall I really enjoyed this conversation
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and I'm sure if the world wants us to and if there's more questions to be had
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we'll talk on this podcast again. Quick summary of the sponsors, Athletic Greens,
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ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp. Please check out the sponsors in the description
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to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that
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the world of UFOs and UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, and aliens in general,
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is foreign to me because of the high ratio of outlandish conspiracy theorists
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to actual hard evidence. I'm a scientist first and foremost but an open minded one,
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often looking and thinking outside the box. I'm often disheartened by the closed
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mindedness of the scientific community. And in equal part, I'm disheartened by
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the lack of rigor and basic scientific inquiry and study on the part of the
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conspiracy theorists. I believe there's a line somewhere between the two extremes
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that, more inquisitive minds should walk. I think we humans know very little
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about our world, what's up there among the stars, and the nature of reality,
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and the nature of our very own minds. The path to understanding can only be
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walked humbly. The very idea that there is a possibility that David witnessed a
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piece of technology, whether human made or alien made, that moved in the way did,
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should be inspiring to every scientist and engineer on this earth. There may be
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propulsion and energy systems yet to be discovered that, once understood and
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mastered, will put distant galaxies within reach of us human beings. Paradigm shifts
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in science and leaps in understanding can only happen, I think, if we open our
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eyes and allow ourselves to dream, to think from first principles, and remove
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the constraints and innovation placed on us by the scientific conventions and
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assumptions of prior generations. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on
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YouTube, review the Five Stars on Apple Podcast, follow us on Spotify,
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support our Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman. As usual, I'll
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do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle.
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More and more, I'm trying to make these ad reads unique and interesting,
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and less adzy, more personal, but I give you timestamps so you can skip. But
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still, please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the
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description. It is honestly the best way to support this podcast.
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This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens, the all in one daily drink to
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support health and performance. I drink it every day to make sure I'm not
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missing any of the nutrition I need. Now, let me take a hard left turn and
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talk about fasting. I fast often, sometimes intermittent
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fasting of 16 hours and then an eight hour eating period of two meals,
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sometimes 24 hours, that's one dinner to the next.
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I've been even considering doing a 48 or 72 hour fast that some people I look up
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to have done. People who have done it tell me that outside of weight loss and
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the different health benefits, it's a chance to meditate on the finiteness of
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life. Not eating somehow is a reminder that
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we're immortal, that every day is precious. I certainly
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experienced this with a 24 hour fast and I think it goes even deeper for the
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48, 72 and even week long fasts. Anyway, I always break my fast with
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Athletic Greens. It's delicious, refreshing, just makes me feel good.
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So go to athleticgreens.com slash Lex to claim a special offer, a free vitamin
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D for a year. Again, go to athleticgreens.com slash Lex
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to get free stuff and to support this podcast.
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This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Get it at expressvpn.com slash Lex pod to get a discount.
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You probably know there's a show called The Office that I fell in love with first
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but if it isn't, you can use ExpressVPN to access it.
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Again, get it on any device at expressvpn.com slash Lex pod
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to get an extra three months free and to support this podcast.
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sessions. Now, hard left turn, let me talk about
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Desert Islands. Whatever you think of it, I love the movie
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Cast Away with Tom Hanks and the idea of spending time on an island
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alone with potentially no hope. The natural question is, if I could, what
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would I bring to this island? The answer is complicated, but let me pick
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one thing, the first thing that popped into my
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crazy mind, which is the Introduction to Algorithms book,
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also called CLRS for the first letters of the last name of its four authors.
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I find algorithms beautiful, like a little toolbox for a simple world inside
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computers, when the real world outside is an
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impossible, chaotic mess. I would love pondering the
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puzzles in that book for months, far away from human civilization.
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Anyway, check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com slash Lex
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to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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And now, finally, here's my conversation with David
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Fravor. You're a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapon School.
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Yeah, I am. But are known as Top Gun.
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Let me ask the most ridiculous question, how realistic is the movie Top Gun?
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So it's funny, we used to joke and a friend of mine who was a Top Gun
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instructor said this, there's two things in the
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in the original Top Gun that are true, that are very realistic.
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One, there is a place called Top Gun, and number two is
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they do fly airplanes there. Other than that, you know, I went through
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in 97, class 497. There's actually a log of every single
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person that's went through, kind of like a SEAL training.
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You know, there's a list. So people, because there's a lot of posers out there,
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I was a Navy SEAL. No, you weren't. Well, I went to Top Gun. You can actually go to
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Top Gun. And matter of fact, just to get a Top Gun patch,
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the real patch, you have to have gone there.
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So a lot of the patches you see running around are not real. There's
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the real ones are controlled, the people that make them
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honor that. And when you go in, they look up your name.
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If you want to get one, they look up your name, you just tell them, they go,
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okay, here, no solemnty. If you are not on the list,
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you ain't getting no patch. Because it is, it's a pretty big deal
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to go through. But it's, for me, probably one of the best experiences of
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flying, because everyone there is extremely competent.
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It's very, very challenging, but it's what we all signed up to do.
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So it's, it's just the entire group that is, when you want to be that,
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you know, that level, you know, where you go, everyone really cares. And everyone
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really wants to be good. Is it competitive? Like, was it in the
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movie? No, it's, when you go through, it's, you
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know, it's, if anything, it's more of the students, you know, and then there's the
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instructor side. And the instructor sides are really, you know,
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they're guys that you know, they just chose to stay up and
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fall in. And it's extremely difficult job,
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because they have, they have a very small tolerance for
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not being good. So they're brief, the guys, when they give a lecture. So
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let's just say there's a fighter employment lecture, which is one of the
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hardest ones. It takes about two days to give the fighter employment lecture.
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The guy who gives the lecture goes through multiple, they call them murder
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boards, where he's scrutinized by his peers and he practices.
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By the time they actually stand in front of a class,
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they pretty much have their 250 PowerPoint slides memorized,
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and they don't even turn around. They just click and they know them in order.
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And they repeat the same thing over. It's, and it's standardized.
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So they are extremely, extremely standardized when you go through the
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school. And there's a reason for that, because what they're doing is they're
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training. So when you come out of Top Gun, you're
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called a strike fighter, weapons and tactics instructor.
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Okay, so your SFTI. When you come out of that, your job is to go usually to one
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of the weapons schools on the east or west coast and train the fleet squadrons,
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and then you visit the squadrons and train and do upgrade rides and all that.
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So there's a, there's a reason that they're extremely particular
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when you go through the course. It's, it is literally one of the best things.
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And it's not, it's not a rank based thing, because think, oh, Navy,
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you can come in as a, you know, like an 04 Lieutenant Commander. The lieutenants,
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the hierarchy, well, it used to be, I don't know how it is exactly today,
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but I imagine it's the same. The hierarchy is actually based on seniority at the school,
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not necessarily rank. So when the tactical decisions are made,
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which are based on fact and trying things out in the Fallon ranges,
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they set the top X number of folks that have been there seniority wise.
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And I mean, time wise are the ones that actually make the decision. And when the door,
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you may not agree, but when the door opens and everyone comes out
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from the staff, they all speak the same language. It's, and it has to be that way,
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which is why the school has been so effective since it was founded.
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So it's just a, it's an incredible group of individuals.
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So there's a bar of excellence that, that the instructors demand.
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Oh, very much so. And they're held to it. So it's not a, hey, I'm now an instructor,
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so I can do what I want. There is a standard and they have to live up to that standard.
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They have to, and I mean, every moment of every day. So if they go someplace, if they go from
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Fallon and they come down and do, they're called site visits where they come down and they'll come
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to LeMore, California, which is where the West Coast Fighter Wing is at for the Navy.
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And they go around and start flying sorties with the fleet squadrons
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to kind of pass on some of that knowledge. That's that same high level of standard. It's,
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they can't just drop your guard because you wear the top gun patch and people know that.
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And they wear light blue shirts. So it's pretty easy to identify them when they're out there.
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And, you know, and then everyone else who's been through the school,
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including them, have the patch on their sleeve. So there's a standard that's expected when you
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come out of there. So you were a Navy pilot for 18 years. Yes.
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Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a pilot?
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Yeah. So, you know, first I was enlisted. I was a Marine. And then
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the Marines actually sent me, recommended me to go to the Naval Academy. So it's always better
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to be lucky than good. But I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished. And I've had that
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dream to fly. So when I got selected, they've always dreamed of flying. Yeah. Since 1969,
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when I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, I was, at that point, I asked my mom,
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I remember watching it. I was just prior to being five. And I said,
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wow, yeah, it's so cool, mom. And she said, well, you know, they were all pilots.
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And then at that point, it was like, I'm going to be a pilot. And if you knew me growing up,
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because I was a little bit of a delinquent, people are just like, yeah, right. I used to joke,
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I'm going to fly, I'm going to fly jets, I'm going to drop bombs. Then, and if people that knew me
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when I was a kid, they'd be like, yeah, and they'd be like, not a chance. And then when I did,
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I actually had a, this is a funny story and I'll get to it and I'll finish my career. But
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I was at my cousin's wedding and we all grew up in the same neighborhood. We kind of,
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they had Italian side of the family. That's how we grew up. So it was my house right down the
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street. It was my cousin Chad and right around the corner is my cousin Ray and my aunts and uncles
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and stuff. The guy two doors down from my, and I was a paper boy in the neighborhood. So they
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all knew me. And I went to my cousin's wedding and he, and Mr. Race looks at me and he says,
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David Fravor, I go, Mr. Race, how you doing? He goes, you fly jets, top gun and all that. I go,
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yes, sir. He goes, man, I figured you'd be in jail by now. And it was kind of a, to me, it was a
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little bit of a badge of honor going on. And I kind of overcame that. But what do you attribute that
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to? So you, I've heard you before and just now I'll say that it's better to be, it's better to
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be lucky than good. And you talk modestly about, about just being lucky. But if you were to describe
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your trajectory, maybe in a way of advice, like retrospectively, how'd you pull it off to be
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like, to be truly a special person? The easiest way is one never, never take no. Don't let anyone
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put you down and say, you can't do it. Or those, I mean, I knew, I knew what I was capable of inside,
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you know, and if I really believe if you want something and you want to do something, then you,
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you can achieve it. Not in all cases, like if I loved basketball, and I really wanted to be in
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the NBA, there's a realism that says, I'm five foot eight, and I got like a really short vertical
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leap. And I'm really not that good at basketball. It's probably not ever going to happen, no matter
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how hard I try and practice. It's just the way it is. Or for me to be in the NFL, I'm not fast,
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you know, I'm not that big. It's just physically, I'm incapable of doing that. But there's things
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that don't really tie to a true physical ability as far as size and strength, but it's, it's mental.
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And I'm not saying you have to be a genius and super smart to be a fighter pilot. As a matter
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of fact, you don't. It really comes down to the ability to think very quickly. 80% solution is
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typically good enough because if you overthink it, you're behind. And then in an air to air fight,
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that's what happens. People try and overthink it. And before you know it, because it's happening so
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fast, you don't have, you can't get to the nth degree, you know, six decimal places. 80% solution
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is good enough. You build up a really strong gut for the 80% solution. Just yeah, I'm a big believer
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in the 80% solution. I love that. If you get 80% you can go and then you can always adjust,
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which is exactly what, like if you're fighting in BFM, the 80% solution is, it's like a chess
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game, but it's a really, really fast chess game where you go, I'm doing this. And then I know
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that if I do a maneuver, if he's going to counter it correctly, he should do A. If he doesn't do
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A, he does some degree less like BCD. And then I know how bad his, his error is. And then I
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capitalize. So my, my, I don't have to be perfect. You know, I don't have to go, I need to go to
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47 degrees, nose high. If I just kind of get above 40, then I'm good and I can watch how he reacts
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and then I can adjust for that. And you, and you continually work that problem and you chip away,
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because if you start neutral, you're just basically chipping away and gaining advantage,
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advantage, advantage. So eventually, you know, and if you're really, you know, fighting, you know,
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just guns only rear quarter where you got to get behind the guy, kind of World War II dogfighting
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type stuff, then it's, it's literally, it's a, it's a very, very fast chess game that happens at,
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you know, 400 knots, 300 knots depends. So to get to be one of the rear individuals that are able
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to do that, he just had the dream and didn't take no for an answer. Well, you know, you know, part
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of it is family, you know, my dad was, I used to call him a fire ready aim guy, you know, he'd smack
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me and then ask me what I did wrong. Back then, you know, I joke and people look, because, you
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know, at times it was kind of tough, you know, because he can be pretty demanding, but on the
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other side, you know, I probably needed to be rained in a little bit at times. But then everyone
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else, my family, you know, my mom was really awesome when I was a kid. My, my grandfather,
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who is a big, big part of it, my mom's dad, who he taught me a lot. And you have a question
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there that we'll talk about him, but huge, huge influence, very, very positive. And a lot of
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the stuff that I do today and decisions are based on things that he taught me. And, you know, I
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figured, you know, it was the first funeral I ever went to, and it was about three miles long and
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the church was overfilling and people were out. He was a beer delivery guy, dead serious. And you
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go, someone asked who died the Pope. So a lot of people loved him. So back to, back to my career.
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Yeah. First question, because I'm getting down at rabbit hole. No, I, when I was at the, I was
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going to, I was going to stay in the Marines. I really wanted to go, man, I love the Corps. I
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think it's of all services. It's that one, everything is in a ball and they're very, very
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professional and it was a great, great organization to join. But I went out to the Nimitz on my
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freshman cruise. After your freshman year at the Naval Academy, you go out on a ship and you,
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you're an enlisted person. You get to experience that half when I was enlisted. So it's fine with
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me. Because it comes up a lot. You mind saying what the Nimitz is, what a ship is. Yeah. So
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Nimitz is an aircraft carrier. So it's four and a half acres of sovereign U.S. territory that floats
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around the U.S. oceans. Does it have weapons on it? The air wing is really the weapons.
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It does have defensive weapons, but for the most part it's a giant moving airport is what it is.
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So I was out there watching the airplanes land and take off. And I'm like, oh, and the squadrons
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that were out there, one of the squadrons was a VF 41 and F 14 squadron, VF 84 and F 14 squadron,
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and then a couple of A6 squadrons. And we actually ended up part pairing up and hanging out with some
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of the A6 pilots and BNs. So it was really a neat experience. And I said, I want to do that.
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And the way to do it was to not, to go in the Navy because there are marine squadrons that go out
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to the aircraft carriers, but most of them are land based, you know, to support the Marines,
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because they're that, that unit, that whole unit, you know, the Marine Corps is at one surface as
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at all. And so when I graduated and I got to, you know, I worked hard through primary and that's
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where, you know, I knew Missy. We were in, actually went through together, Missy Cummings.
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We went through primary together. And then I went to Kingsville. We all selected the same time.
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I went to Kingsville. There was another guy, Scott Weedemire, the three of us. So I went to
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Kingsville, Scott went to Beaville and Missy went to Meridian. So the three of us that we had all
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went through, we got, we selected out of primary together, we all ended up going jets. And that's,
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that's how, besides from school, I knew her at school too. The long story I got done, got winged,
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it took me two years to the day from the time I graduated the Naval Academy until I got my wings.
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And through some luck, I ended up getting A6s on the West Coast, which is a side by side
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bomber. So it's a pilot on the left seat and the Bombardier navigators on the right seat. It was
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built in the 60s. It is all weather and it flies low at night. It's got a terrain mapping radar.
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How many, I guess, is that a good term to use fighter jets as a broad category for,
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for the public? Yeah, that's fine. How many fighter jets are side by side like that?
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That was, in the Navy, that was the only one. The Air Force, the F111 was a side by side,
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but the Navy, it was the A6. And then there's the EA6B, which is a derivative of
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that. Now that those are all gone. The EA6Bs just went away a few years ago. And now the E18G
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Growler is the replacement for the EA6B. There was never a replacement for the A6 that I flew.
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It really became the F18, which the A6 could go quite a bit further distance wise by fuel.
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Then the Hornet. The Hornet is the F18. Is there usually two people in the plane, but they're
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usually like in front and behind? In the modern two seaters, yes. But most of the tactical
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airplanes in the world today are single seat. Single seat is just one person. One person.
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With the exception of, I'll probably, someone will yell at me, but really with the exception of
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the F15E Strike Eagle and the F18F Super Hornet, which is the F is a two seater. And the G is also
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a two seater, but it's more of an electronic attack by, say, full up fighter bomber.
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So most of the time that you've flown in your, like I said, 18 year career, was a two seater?
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That was about half and half. So I started off an A6 was a two seater. Then I went to single seat
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F18s and I flew those all the way up until 2000 and let me think, 2001 to the end of 2001.
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And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets and I've flown both of those,
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the E's and the S, but I deployed when I had command of VFA 41. I had the two seat. They were F squadron.
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So you eventually ended up commanding the, the strike fighter squadron 41. I love the, the name,
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the black aces. What, is there some parts of that journey that are amazing parts of it that are tough
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that kind of stand out? To me, it was, one, it was a huge honor. And I got to serve with,
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you know, I got pulled up because the guy, the people that are exos, because we fleet up,
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you go from the number two guy to the number one guy. So the exo becomes the CEO. So the
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executive officer becomes the commanding officer. So I had worked with, now soon to be Vice Admiral
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Weitzel, was the, he was commander Weitzel at the time was the exo. And he really wanted,
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because he knew there was a little bit of a problem when the Super Hornets came into LeMore.
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LeMore had been a single seat fighter community since the forever. And now all of a sudden you've
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got the F18F coming in, which has the weapon systems operators in the back that are not pilots,
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they're weapon systems operators. And there's a difference. And Kenny is a weapon systems operator.
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And Kenny knew because of my A6 background that I have a switch that I can go one seat, two seat,
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one seat, two seat. Because when you fly two seat, there's a lot of stuff that the pilot will
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offload and take the advantage of the weapon systems operator. And it's not that one plus
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one equals two in that environment, because it really, there's a huge amount of capabilities
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that the single seat has and the autonomy that comes for the ability to make decisions quickly
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and how well the airplane flies. But it does, it does equal more than one. And I would say
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that one plus one with two people as well is a minimum of 1.5. Because you've got an extra head,
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you've got extra eyes, you've got someone that can monitor systems, the airplanes can do two
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things at once. I mean, there's an incredible amount of capability that we add when we do that.
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Can we just pause on that? Just for me, from like a human factors perspective and also an AI
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perspective, what's, how difficult, so there's like, when there's two people, there's also a
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third person that's the AI part, the some level of automation, like autopilot, maybe that's correct,
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maybe you can kind of talk about the psychology of like, you said, making decisions really quick,
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80%. How do you deal with another brain working with you? And then also the automation, is there
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interesting interplay that you get to learn? And also as that changed throughout your career,
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I imagine it got, it gotten better in terms of the automation, or perhaps not?
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Well, I can tell you, so let's start. No, this is good. This is good. And this is,
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I'm enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other than a tic tac. So
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let's start with the A6. The A6 was really an analog airplane that was built in the 60s.
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All right. And there's been studies done on the crew coordination, which is the interaction
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between the pilot and the bombardier navigator. So we would fly low at night in the mountains.
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So I was stationed up in Whidbey Island, Washington. So you've got the Cascades and
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incredible amount of time. And we would get in the simulators because unlike, normally people
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think terrain following, and there's the radars, the 111, the B1 has a system like this, but it'll,
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the radar can see and it'll fly, it basically flies a straight line. So it goes up and over
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mountains and back down and up and over mountains where the A6 was really manual.
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So you do this low level routes where you're going to, you're going to fly in the mountains at night,
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you're going to be at, you know, 500 to 1,000 feet above the ground, ripping through like fog
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layers, because you don't need to see outside. You're, you're literally flying a little TV screen
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and a radar. What are you looking at most of the time? So just as a screen? It's this really
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primitive. If you look at it now, what we did, you'd think, wow, that was crazy, but it was really
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fun. So is it similar to like the FLIR stuff? Is that, are you? No, this thing is totally
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radar based. Now the airplane had a FLIR ball, it's a target recognition and multi sensor,
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it was called a tram. So you're looking at like basically like dots of hard objects?
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No, actually what it is is the, the bomb of your navigator had a radar and he was getting raw feet
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off of a pulse radar in front. Okay. So it's just basically mapping the mountain. So if you look at
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a mountain on a radar and you're coming up on it, the front side is going to be, it's going to give
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you a really bright return. And then the backside, it's just going to be a giant shadow because you
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can't see on the other side. So the bombardier navigators would do that and they would have
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charts and they could shade their charts knowing that, hey, if we turn a little bit left here,
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we can get in this valley, we can sneak up this valley and then go around the backside of the
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mountain, which is what the airplane would do. And sorry to interrupt, I'm going to just keep
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asking dumb questions, I apologize. But the pilot, can you at a high level say what the pilot does
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versus the bombardier? Yes. So you're actually just controlled. I'm flying the jet. I have the
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throttles, the stick and I have a, it's about a probably a four inch or six inch wide by maybe
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four inches, five inches high. It looks like it's literally a CRT. That's how old it is.
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A CRT screen and what it would do, what the radar would do is the, the, the bombardier
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navigator is looking at his radar and he's looking at about 12 and a half miles in front of the
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airplane. So he has the range really scoped down because the radar can see a lot further.
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He's looking at about 12 and a half miles when we're in the terrain mode where we're
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dodging mountains and stuff. And what the pilot has is there's, they're called range bins and
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there's eight of them. So the very far range bin is the 12 and a half mile, you know, and
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the closest range bin, it's a thing and it'll be like between like a half a mile and
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a quarter mile to three quarters of a mile. And the next one might be three quarters of a
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mile to two miles. And then it just keeps going out like that. So if there's a mountain in front,
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let's say we're on a flat plane and there's a mountain out in the distance at 15 miles,
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and we, we're just driving right at it. So when we get to the point where it hits 12 and a
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half miles where the radar is going to see it on his scope, my 12, my range bin for that would
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pop up and it would show like a big bump, like a mountain. And then as I got closer to it,
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the next range bin would pop up and show it. And I could see that that bump was moving towards me.
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And then if I turned a little bit, you know, to go over here, I'd see the mountain go over to
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the right hand side and I could do that. But it wasn't like a video game. It was, it's literally
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like, if you think of the original Atari's. Yeah. But you build up, I imagine that you start to get
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a really deep sense of like the actual three, three D environment based on that little Atari.
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You're exactly right. And you have to, you have to train. So there's been studies.
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As a matter of fact, a lot of the basis and people probably argue with me, but it's true.
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There were studies done watching a six crews in our simulators, we call it the WIST,
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the Weapon Systems Trainer. And it was not even a motion, it just kind of sat there and
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you just, you could fly these things and they had trained that they would inject into the system.
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But the crew coordination, so you get, so my first fleet, Bombardier Navigator, who I'll name him,
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his name is Crusado, he's works at Apple, pretty high up, MIT grad. I think computer engineering,
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he's scary smart. So Chris could really work. As a matter of fact, all the guys that flew us,
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so there's another guy, Matt, who also worked at Apple, who's now at SAP, we did our first
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night traps together. The bond between us, I mean, it's one of those things that you just,
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you're never going to forget, but Chris and I, when we started flying together and we were
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actually the most junior crew in the squadron, we'd spent a lot of time training and Chris was
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amazing at how he could work the system. One, because he was extremely brilliant and he had
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that inquisitive mind of, oh, we could do all these different things and there's all these
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degradation modes. But we spent a lot of time to see how good we could actually get because,
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and it's, you almost talk in partial. So as the BN is looking at his radar scope, Chris would say,
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I've got rising terrain, that's just what they say, showing rising terrain at 12 miles. And I'd
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see the little bump and I'd say, got it. This is going to go to your question on the autonomy and
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how you work with two heads. Yes. So when you first get together, the interaction, it's almost
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like you have to rehearse it, you have to know, and you talk in full senses. The more and more
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we fly together, Chris could go, I'm showing, and he'd get like rising out. And before he finished,
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I'd say, I've got it. So you end up starting to talk in partials because I have to trust him
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like, I mean, I had, there can be no, I can have no doubt that he knows how to do his job.
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Because I'm literally looking at this little scope that's not giving me this continuous
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picture of that mountain moving. Remember the mountains here, and then it's going to pop up
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here. And then it's going to pop up here because there's gaps in the coverage on how the system
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was set up. Remember, it's an analog system to where he is telling me, like, I can't see all
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the way to the left, and he's got a wider scope on the radar, but my screen doesn't show that.
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So he's telling me, start a left turn, or start a hard turn, you know, and we would do that. So
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my trust is all happening quick, very quick. Well, you're doing, we would typically fly between
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420 and 480 knots of ground speed. Well, for 27 miles a minute. Okay. Or between seven and eight
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miles a minute is what you're flying at night. I mean, I broke out of clouds. I mean, I remember
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him and I flying. We were on its IR, it's called an IR route, an instrument route that's low.
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They're all around the country. There's IR 344 that we used to fly, which would coast in off of
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Oregon. You'd fly from the land, you go out over the ocean, turn around, and then you could practice
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actually coming in on a coastline. And we were flying, and we ended up in the clouds. Keep in
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mind, we're between 500 and 1,000 feet in the mountains, and we're in the clouds. Like, you
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can't see anything. And it had to turn off our red lights that flash, you know, they're called
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the anti collision lights because it was reflecting off the clouds and it starts to bother you.
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It just gets annoying. So I turned it off and we were flying, we're flying, we're flying, we
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break out of that coastal marine layer and we break out. And it's a decent night. And this is
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right by Mount St. Helens. This is kind of where we're coming in. So we're coming in from the east
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and we're just north of Mount St. Helens is where the route goes. And you look up, you know,
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because you can kind of see the silhouette of this mountain that's right next to you,
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but you're flying along here just like, you know, you got to trust. And you can see houses,
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you can see the lights that are above you. We're literally below people's houses flying down these
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valleys and stuff. So just incredible experience. So when you take that and then you move into
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an F18F. So now we're into modern technology that was actually built in this century
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in your flying. So now, you know, the WIZO is behind us and we're not doing those night low
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levels, but that same type of crew coordination that has to happen because what you're doing is
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you're sharing the load. So most of the communications that go out of the airplane,
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the WIZO does all the talking. He's got actually, he uses his feet. That's the
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weapon systems operator in the back of an F18F. So he's going to run, well,
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the radar kind of runs itself now, but we have a situational awareness display and it's linked
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to all the other airplanes. Just a curiosity, what's the situational awareness display?
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Because that term comes up a lot. Think of it as a God's eye view. So if you have a,
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the back of the Super Hornet has, well, the Block 2s has about an 8x10 display for the WIZOs
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that they can look at. The pilot is smaller. It's down between us. It's a 6x6 between his legs
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and they're, they're getting ready to redesign that Boeing is, but when you look, it'd be like
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if you put your airplane and you're looking down. So all the stuff, like if your radar seeing bad
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guys out in front of you, it'd be like looking down, going, oh, I'm right here and now there's
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bad guys out here and my wingman is over here and it shows everything. It's just like, it gives you,
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you can look at that display and go, oh, I can see where everything's at. I can see if one guy's
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trying to target another guy, it shows you all this. It's an incredible amount of knowledge that
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comes up for the crews to maintain the overall picture of what's going on.
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The big picture sense of what's going on.
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Because it's happening so fast and this is with that autonomy piece. This is the third brain.
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So we're all looking at it and the third brain is doing fusion. It's pulling stuff together,
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going, oh, this is all this guy. This is this guy. This is this guy. It's sending it out through
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the link. So all the airplanes are talking to each other through this digital network,
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you know, that we don't even see. It just says that airplane says, hey, I'm over here and it
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tells us and we go, oh, he's right there. And then we can go, his airplane says, oh, I'm looking at
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this airplane, this bad guy and it shows us. Oh, he's over there and he's looking at this guy.
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I mean, it's an incredible amount of visual intake because your eye, you can hear a lot,
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but when you look down at stuff itself, you know, you can sell the picture really quick.
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The third brain is doing the sensor fusion, the integration of the different sensors and
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gives you a big picture view. What about the control? Like, is there, and I apologize if this
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is a dumb question, but, you know, people use the high level term of autopilot. How much is there,
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let's use a loose term of AI. How much automation is there? How much AI is there in helping you
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control the airplane? The AI piece would be more of a control loop because of the digital flight
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controls. So the airplane actually, they had to make the airplane easier to fly. And when I say
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easy, it's relative because people go, I can do it because I did it on FlightSim. Real life is a
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lot different. In FlightSim, you have no apparent fear of death. You'll do things in the simulator
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that you would never do in real life. But the autonomy in the airplane to allow you to manage,
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I mean, because you think about it, you've got a radar that's feeding you data. You've got a
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targeting pod that's feeding you data. All that stuff is hooked to your head because you've got
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a joint helmet mounting queuing system on that basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit
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so it can tell where your head's at looking. So if I turn my head to the right, the radar will
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actually look to the right. The targeting flare will look to the right. And oh, by the way,
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the backseater has a helmet on too, so he can look to the left and he can do things. So depending
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on what sensor he's controlling, so if he's got control of the targeting pod and he looks left,
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the targeting pod looks left. But if I have something where I want to lock a guy up that I
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don't see that maybe the radar didn't see, but I can get over and now point the radar,
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you know, get the, because it's a phase array radar, now it doesn't really scan.
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There's all kinds of cool stuff that technology brings because if you just,
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if you went back 30 years and said, hey, or 40 years ago and said, hey, we're going to have
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this helmet and you're going to be able to slew everything to your head. And I don't mean a
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mechanical setup, but I mean literally you're just going to map magnetic resonance and go, oh,
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look, and, and I can, I can literally slew my sensors this fast and then mash a button and
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transfer, you know, high quality coordinates from a system into a joint, you know, a JDAM,
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which is a joint direct attack munition that is the GPS bombs that you see all the time and then
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let that thing fly and I'm, I'm solving this problem in seconds, vice minutes or hey, I got it,
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we're going to have to menstruate coordinates and you know, you bring back the data and then
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they do all the targeting for it and then they send another group out to get it. Instead of all that,
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now it's that fast. So there's a, okay, I mean, we probably don't have enough time to talk about
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the beautiful fusion of minds that happens when two people are flying, controlling the plane.
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But at a high level, this is a really interesting question for people who don't know what they're
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talking about like me, which is what is the difference between a human being and an AI system?
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Like what can, what is the ceiling of a current AI technology for controlling the plane? Like,
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how much does the human contribute? Is it possible to have automated flight, for example,
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like what is the hardest part about flying that a human does expertly that an AI system cannot
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in warfare situations, in, in flying fighter jet line?
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So I would say AI systems are usually black and white. When you write the algorithm for an AI system,
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it's, it's, it's, it's really, it's basically you're taking thought and turning it into a
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giant math problem is really what you're doing. Right? So you've got this logical math problem.
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Math problems are, there's, there's, there's a line it says I can or I can't. And it's a,
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it's a very finite line, you know, but you can go up to the line where a human, we all have gray
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areas where we go, maybe I'll try it. So humans can operate within that gray. So if you took,
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if you take an airplane and say, and I'll just take a Hornet for a while, a Super Hornet,
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it doesn't matter any airplane, and you go, here is the flight performance model of the airplane.
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So if you know an, an EM diagram is the energy. So it basically says the airplane can fly as slow
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as this, it can go as fast as this, it can pull this many Gs force of gravity, you know, so one,
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two, three, four, five, six, seven. And then based on the airfoil design and everything else and how
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it can pull, here's how it's going to fly, you know, because it's really physics based.
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Well, if you, depending on how you write the AI, but typically AI, you don't want the airplane
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to leave controlled flight, right? You want to maintain it so that it is flying in a controlled
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envelope where there are times, and you can go back to World War One, where people intentionally
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departed the airplane from controlled flight in order to obtain an advantage, which is that's
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where the human goes, can I do this? I know it's outside of where I would normally go,
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but I can do that. So you can do some crazy things now, especially since the flight control logic
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in modern airplanes with digital flight controls, they're extremely forgiving. So you can literally,
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I've done things in Super Hornets that literally even as a pilot inside the airplane, you're just
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like, wow, I cannot believe it just did that. Like it'll flop ends, which defies most logic. And I
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guess, you know, in a way you could probably program it, but I still think that when you get to the
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edges that may or may not give you an advantage, there are things that a human will do that AI
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won't. And I don't think we've got to the point because how do you map illogical solutions? You
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know, most AI is logical. It's based on some type of premise. When you write the algorithm to control
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it, there's bounds. Yeah, there's this giant mess. Like you said, the difference between the
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simulator in real life also gets at that somehow, that there is somehow the fear of death, all of that
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beautiful mess comes into play. Like, is there a comment you can make on commercial flight,
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like with Sally landing that plane famously versus the simulator, all of those discussions,
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is there some? Well, it's very, it's very similar to what I was talking about earlier with the A6.
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So one is when you're flying with a crew, there's standardization. So you got to remember when
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Sully flew when his first officer, that's the co pilot showed up, you know, the first time they
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met. And this happens all the time in the commercial world. You know, there's six, seven
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thousand pilots at United Airlines, you know, your chance of flying with the same guy all the time is
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slim and none. We're in the Navy, we were crewed. So I had a primary and a secondary
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whizzo that flew with me for months. Oh, yeah, for like all of the deployment. So because you want
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to use trust and all of those things, it increases the capability airplane. It's not to say we can't
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swap out. But for true effectiveness, especially in very complex missions like a forward air
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controller, we're in the air actually controlling ground assets and supporting ground troops.
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If you're in a high threat area, which is crazy busy, you have to be melded when you do that. You
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have to have trained to do that job. Otherwise, you're going to be ineffective. So when you get to
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the commercial world, and I've got tons of friends that fly commercial, there is a standardization.
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Like we know that at this point, I'm going to put this switch, you're going to do that. And
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everyone, they know their rules. Captain's going to do this, first officer's going to do this.
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He breaks out. So in Sully's case, when they take the birds and they know they've got a problem,
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and if you've listened to the cockpit recordings of him, the two of them talking,
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you got to remember, they're talking to each other when you hear the full tapes, but they're
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also talking to the air traffic controllers in the New York area. And it's like, we got a bird
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strike and the first officer already knows, hey, silence the alarm. They silenced the alarm. The
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first officer is pulling out the book. He's going through the procedures while Sully's actually
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flying the airplane, knowing that they've lost their motors. And you got to think of his decision
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process, like they're trying to get him to go into an airport in New Jersey. And he realizes,
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not happening, we're going to put this thing. And he made a decision soon enough
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so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane that he was going to put this thing
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in the Hudson River. And he did it flawlessly. I mean, every single person walked away from that
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wreck. The only thing that didn't survive was the airplane, you know, and it got fished out of
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the Hudson. But what is it about those human decisions he had to make? Is that something
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you put into words? Or is that just deep down some instinct that you develop as a pilot over
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time? It's when we, when you train, you know, an aviation is a self cleaning oven. So if you
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make bad decisions, you're, and the list is long and distinguished of those who have died by making
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bad decisions. Oh man. So when you look at what he did or the way we train, because the commercial
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industry and the Navy and the Air Force for all that, we have what's called, we have emergency
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procedures that we have to know. Like the engines on fire, the first three steps, you just have to
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know what they are, right? So they know the airline, same type, you know, they go, Hey,
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I know this is they pull the book out because the airplanes are designed, they're built to have some
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time. But there's a point where you have to make a decision and you can't second guess it. So when
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he decided, I'm putting this in the Hudson River, he couldn't all of a sudden halfway through it go,
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Well, maybe I can get over to that airport. He looked, he made a quick assessment. This is that
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80% solution where you go, these are not, you know, it's kind of like a multiple choice test
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when you go, Oh my God, I don't really know the answer. But I know A and D are wrong. Yeah.
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Gone. So the Jersey airport and going back to LaGuardia, gone. Yeah. So what's my next option?
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Well, the Hudson River is there. That's probably looking pretty good. Or what is my other one?
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Can I get a restart on the motors? And then if I can get a restart, now can I take it someplace
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else? He had to make really, really fast decisions. And then once they as a, they go that 80%
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solution, you realize, all right, I'm going into the Hudson, there's the 80%, get the book out,
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let's see if we can get an air start because if you listen to the tapes are trying to get it
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air started, the closer he gets to the water, the more he's going, I'm ditching the airplane.
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So the original decision to this is my best option right now. This is where I'm going.
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And you start eliminating anything that could possibly change the events,
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which they tried to do. And then he gets to that last minute says, we're going in the water,
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they changed the plan, they secure the airplane, they do exactly what they're
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doing. And he does that basically flawless landing on the Hudson. But you got to remember
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every, it's every six months for commercial, they go back and they do research in the airplane
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in the simulator, were they trained to the airplane being broken, you just lost a motor,
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you just lost another motor. So they go through this extensive training, you know, and all these,
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and it's, you know, we used to refer to it in the Navy as the pain cave where you're going to get
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in, because you know, that when you get in for your check ride in a simulator that the airplane
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is going to break, you're going to lose hydro and it's sometimes they're a problem like, oh,
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I just lost this hydraulic system, but I'm having an issue on the other motor. Well,
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if I shut down this motor, I've got a hydraulic, you know, because there's two hydraulic systems,
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one on each motor. Well, if I've got an issue with the left motor hydraulic system and my right
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motor is starting to give me indications, do I want to shut the right motor down because that's
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going to kill my hydraulic system, that's good. And now I'm flying on a good motor with a bad
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hydraulic system and with a hydraulic airplane won't fly. So they, it's a really, they're
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challenging problems that you have to think through in real time. And of course, the weather's
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never good. It's always dark. It's always crappy. You're going to break out. I mean, it's just,
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all this stuff gets compiled on top of you and it's intended to increase the level of stress,
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because when things happen, like in Sully's case, we like to joke, it's going to stem power,
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you know, where the functional part of your brain shuts down and you are literally on
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instinct like an animal. Well, if you've trained so much that that is the instinctive reaction
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that you're going to have, when the main part of your, your, your cognitive ability start to shut
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down, you're, you're running that instinct is ingrained so much into you that you know exactly
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what to do. And that's literally how it happens. So there's no, how do I put it, fear of death?
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Like in Sully's case, do you think he was at all ever thinking about the fact if his decision is
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wrong, a lot of people are going to die? You know, I can't speak for him, but I would say
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there was so much going on at the cockpit in that time. His, his mindset was probably,
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I can do this. I'm trained. I'm going to do the procedures. I've practiced this before. I've done
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these things. And I, you know, I'm assuming that in his mindset, because I never thought about
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when things were really bad, you know, if you're having problems with the airplane that, you know,
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that I was going to moor, you know, and, and plant it into the ground. It was always, you know,
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maybe it's an ego thing where you think I can do this. I mean. So you never, have you experienced
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fear during flight? Like, I mean, one, one way, we just offline mentioned Mike Tyson. I mean,
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he talked about like, uh, as he's, uh, walking up to the ring, he's like, he starts out basically
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in fear and, uh, yeah, worried about how things are going to go. I mean, it's purely to put in
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towards his fear, but as he gets closer and closer to the ring is the confidence grows and grows until
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the ego basically takes over to where you think there's no way anybody could, uh, defeat me.
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So like that's, that's his experience of overcoming fear. But do you, uh, did you
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experience any kind of thing like that? Or is that, or do you just go to the part of the brain
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that goes to the training and then you just go to the instinctual 80% solution?
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I wouldn't say I was never afraid. I think that would be, I can't, I couldn't tell you that
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anyone I know that wasn't afraid at one time. And for most of us, especially Navy carrier pilots,
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it's just, it's, it's usually, especially when you're new and you got to go out and it's night
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time and there's no moon and the weather sucks and the decks moving, you know, the, the ship's
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going up and down because it will scare the ever living shit out of you. Can I say that?
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You definitely say that. So it's about landing and take off that.
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That is if you, even the, they used to wire people up. They did it during Vietnam,
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you know, guys that go flying missions, you know, when they were flying low and crazy stuff was
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going on and people were getting shot down a lot. The highest, the highest anxiety and
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heart rates were coming back to land on board an aircraft carrier.
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How hard is it to land on that? It seems impossible. Like for, for a civilian, I guess,
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like me, just seems crazy that a human can do that.
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The problem with night is, and there's different degrees of night, just like day. I mean,
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there's the clear full moon night, you know, where it's like, whoo.
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You know, this is not that bad, but you got to remember at night, I think everyone can associate
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with you're driving in your car and it's just a, it's, it's an overcast, dark night and you're on
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a country road with no side lights. Most people have a tendency to slow down just by nature of,
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oh my God, because you, what you'll do is you'll out drive your headlights because it is so dark,
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you know, and you can get outside a, you get outside a city and get up in New Hampshire,
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especially when the roads are curving, you know, and the lines probably aren't that good.
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It's, you know, now take that and multiply it by like a million because you have no depth perception.
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What you think is fixed, the runway is actually moving.
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Up and down and left to the right.
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Yeah. Oh, and when it's really bad, you can actually see it move. And we have two systems,
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you know, there was a, there's an automatic system that's actually, it stabilizes with
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the inertials on the ship. And then there's the ILS. Now, civilian pilots will tell you that ILS
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is a precision approach, which gives you azimuth and glide slope, you know, you come down, it's
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like a plus on the carrier. It's not, it's really just a beam that goes out and it's considered
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a nonprecision approach. It's not stabilized at all that. And I've been where you can actually
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watch the needle and the, and the, the tack and needle will move. There's all kinds of stuff moving
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because the, the base that it's all sitting on is doing this. And ships don't just go up and down.
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They, they, they do this. So the bow goes up and down in the tail, like you normally see a ship.
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And then there's, so that's pitch. And then it has roll. So it's doing this. And then it has
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heave. So the whole boat is going up and down while it's pitching and rolling. And you're gonna
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land on that. So, and it's, I mean, I remember landing us, I was with Chris Sado and Chris and
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I, we were off the USS Ranger, which is now decommissioned. It's sitting, getting turned into
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razor blades. We're flying the old A6 and we come in and it was off of San Diego and it was just
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ugly night because San Diego always has a marine layer that is about 1200 feet. It was lower than
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that that night. And it was pouring down rain. It was an El Nino year and there's thunderstorms
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all around. It was just the craziest night I've ever seen out of San Diego. And I remember landing
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and your adrenaline is so high that you're shaking. I mean, you literally can't stop.
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And we had spun around out of the landing area and we parked, we call it the six pack. So it's
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right in front of the island. So if you've seen aircraft carrier of the island and the number
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of the ship on it, we're sitting right in front of that and we're looking at the landing area.
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So it's like, you get front row seats to the concert. And, and this, this, this EA6B comes in,
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you know, ugly pass, he ends up catching a one wire, which is the first one you never want to
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catch the first one. It means you're not really high above the back of the ship when you landed.
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And it comes in and the exhaust on any A6 or an A6 actually points kind of down and it blows and it's
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blowing all the standing water on the aircraft. That's how hard it's raining. And you literally
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could not see across. I mean, I could see the front of my airplane, his airplane, and then it
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was just white because of the water being blown off the deck. And I'm shaking and I, I'll never
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forget. I looked over at Chris and I said, Oh my God, I go, Hey, dude, man, 10,000 foot runway
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looks really good right now. And I go, and I'm shaking my hands like this. And I said,
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I'm not even, this is, I'm not faking this dude. I know that's literally, I cannot stop shaking.
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I said, that scared the Evelyn out of me. Yeah. But you, but it scares you afterwards.
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You don't, during it, you're not, I'm not, you don't have time to think about that. You're doing
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it. You got to do as we, you know, kind of the quote from Tom Hanks and what's that, the girl's
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baseball movie where he goes, there's no crying in baseball. Well, that's our joke. There's no
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crying in naval aviation. I said, you can fly around and cry all you want at night. But,
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but you know, there's only one pilot in those airplanes and you got to land it. So you cry
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all you want, wipe the tears away, you know, put on your big kid pants and it's, it's time to,
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it's time to, you know, man up and land the, land the jet. Sorry for the romantic question,
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but going back to the, the kid that dreamed to fly, what's it like to fly an airplane?
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What it looks incredible as a human, like a descendant of eight, I sit here on land and
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look up at you guys. It seems incredibly human being can do that.
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You know, people ask, you know, I'll be sitting around with my friends and they're like,
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well, as I said, the greatest job on the planet. I said, you know, it's, it's an office with a
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view because you're sitting in a glass. You can do, you know, it's like roller coasters,
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you go, oh, it does all these cool stuff. So we take people flying every once in a while.
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And it's like, oh, yeah, I like roller coaster. Like, oh, no, take any roller coaster,
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coolest roller coaster you've ever been on and multiply it by a thousand. I said, it's an experience,
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you know, to put your body under, you know, you know, the jets rated at seven and a half,
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but it'll pull up to 8.1 before it overstresses depends on fuel weight. So, I mean, you routinely
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get up there towards eight Gs. To be able to do that to your body, I mean, it takes a toll,
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like I can't really turn my head real good anymore and stuff like that. But would I trade it? I mean,
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it was a childhood dream. And how many people get to do that? You know, professional, I want to be
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an NFL, you know, and you end up to the NFL, which is a very small percentage with, well,
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I want to fly jets and, and to fly, you know, at the time when I was flying the Super Hornets that
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we had on our squadron were brand new, like literally right out of the factory, I'd come off
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our first Super Hornet cruise, we had went to the Boeing factory in St. Louis where they were
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building my new jets that I was going to get and actually signed the inside of one of the wings
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while they were putting it together. So I'm meeting the people that are putting the jet
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together that's going to get delivered to me in a couple of months that I'm going to fly. So
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just, I mean, the whole of it is incredible. I'll tell you what, when I left, when I decided to
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walk away. Yeah, do you miss it? I told myself I wouldn't. I promised myself that, you know,
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once you get through your O5 command, you're flying really starts to tag to come down. You know,
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even if you and you're an airplane commander, which is we call them CAG, carrier group commander,
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you're not flying as much as like the normal pilots, nor should you be. I mean, there's young
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people that are coming up and it's training your relief because that's the next generation. So
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like currently, I have friends of mine that we serve together, their kids are flying Super
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Hornets, right? So to me, that's really neat because I watched them when they were little.
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Yeah. And now, you know, one of them who was good friends, I won't get his last name, but Joey,
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who lived down the street from us, was a top gun instructor. And I'm like, hey, Joey's a top gun.
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You know, and I'm like, that's cool. Because, you know, I went there and I knew him, he would come
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down to my house. And now to see these kids that are, because typically military breeds military,
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you know, because the kids grew up in it. I mean, the only reason that my son is not doing it is
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he's colorblind. So it disqualifies you for being a pilot, being a seal, because he'd talked about
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doing that because he's an incredible swimmer and he likes doing that stuff and water polo player.
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But he's, you know, both of my kids are, well, my daughter is a doctor and my son's in his third
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year or so. But there's a, I suppose, I mean, from my perspective, a bittersweet handover
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of this incredible experience of flying to the younger generation. So you don't, you told
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yourself you're not going to miss it. You miss it?
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There are days I do. When I hear jets, like if I'm around a base or a jet flies over,
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but I have all the memory. So I can look at it and go, it can't go on forever. You know,
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Tom Brady can't play football. There's going to come a time where he has to stop.
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I know, he seems to have done it for a long time.
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But, you know, typically when you look at ego, I had the opportunity,
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and I think as automation moves on, especially with AI, that, you know, when will, when will
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the last manfighter be built? You know, and that's that big question. You know, we just did F35.
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It's over budget. It's seven years late. There's all kinds of issues when we try and do it.
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And then you look at some of the new stuff that's coming out that the Air Force is working on with
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smaller, cheaper, a treatable platforms that you can go, oh, we can, because if you don't put a man
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in the box or a person, because there's a lot of incredibly talented women that do this too.
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So I'll just say that as person. Yeah. So we say man and he, we mean both men and women,
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because offline you've told me about a lot of incredible women that flown. So it's,
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I had, I had three, three female, actually four, one of them didn't fly anymore. She actually lives
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right around here. She, she's, she ended up going into aircraft maintenance when she couldn't fly
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anymore. One of the girls who everyone knows is incredibly, she's one of the most gifted people
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I've ever met in my life. She is the vice president of Amazon Air. You can see her on TV or named
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Sarah. Incredible. And then I had a page who ended up taking command. She got out of fighters and
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went into other platforms. And she was a commanding officer. And then the other one is a,
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a, teaches leadership and she is all three of them, actually all four of the women that were
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direct. I'm home not forgetting. I don't think I'm forgetting someone.
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Incredibly, incredibly talented and a great addition to the ready room. So anyone who gets
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into the, oh, you know, women can't do it. That's all total horse crap. Hey, you know,
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we can talk about the original integration and stuff, which was not done well by the military
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nor the Navy. So women can fly as good as the guys. Yeah. You can't tell if you pass another
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airplane, you can't tell if there's a man or a woman in it. It really comes down to stick and
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throttle the ability to extrapolate where the vehicle is going to be, where the airplane would
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be. If you're fighting another one, you have to be able to think fast. Anyone has those characteristics
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can do it. And then I think most important besides that, there has to be a desire.
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Yeah. And I'm not saying that everyone, if you took, because we used to track. So when I ran,
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we call it the RAG, it's the replacement air group. It's where, so the, the Super Hornet
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Training Squadron, there's two of them. There's one on the East Coast, 106. And there's one on the
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West Coast, which is VFA 122. 122 is the first one. So I ended up going there and I ended up
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being the operations officer and training officer. Okay. So we tracked the last hundred students.
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Right. So everyone goes, ah, it's funny to hear students talk because, oh, he's awesome.
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He's great. If you took the hundred, there's three at the top of the list that are just
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naturally gifted aviators. They're well, well, well above average. It's like the person in
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a math class that sits down in complex math and they just get it. You know, at the bottom,
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there's the three at the bottom that are going to struggle and there's a good chance they won't
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get out. And if they do get out, they're going to have to work really hard to just maintain
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kind of average. Sometimes it's just the way your mind works. Not everyone is good at everything.
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If you took the 94 of them in the middle, they're within one mean deviation of, you know, it's there.
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They're all, you know, it's a, the bell curve doesn't look real good. It's just a big hump and it
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comes back down and everyone's right there within one mean deviation. And then you have the outliers
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usually not on the high side because they're going to get through, but the outliers on the
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low side that don't make it through. So for the most part, the Navy does a really good job as
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does the Air Force of screening. So now what they do, when I went, you just showed up and
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you started. Now what you do is you actually go fly a Piper Warriors low wing to see, can you,
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are you adaptable to this? And there's an evaluation that goes through. And then if you
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hit a certain mark, then you're good to go. And then they put you into primary. It's kind of like a,
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it's like a precheck, you know, like the preset, the pre SAT to go, Hey, how am I going to do on
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the SAT? It's, it's very similar to that, but it's more of a hand skill. Can you adapt? Because
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although we live in three dimensions, like this table is not, you know, we, this is, you know,
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this is all has depth with all that. We're, it's really relative to aviation. We are two
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dimensional, very two dimensional. Can you explain that? So our perception is actually
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more limited than the, than that of an aviator. Very much. And here's why. So we look at, let's
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look at a tall building. Let's look at one World Trade Center in New York, because that's the,
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everyone knows what it looks like, big tall building. That's what maybe 1800 feet tall,
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even the Burj El Dubai, which is like what 20, some hundred feet tall, it's not that big.
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So a super hornet to do what a split S is, which is I'm flying, I'm just going to roll the airplane
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upside down. And then I'm going to do basically a C, the letter C, I'm going to go in the top and
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out the bottom. So, and I'm just getting basically a vertical displacement of the airplane. So I'm
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going from high to low. It's very, very tight. And it doesn't in about roughly about 2,500 feet.
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Give or take a little. So you go, that is, that is a really tight vertical turn.
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For example, the A6 in order to do that was about 9,000 feet. And we look at a building
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that's 2,000 feet high and think that is tall. Right. All right. So in aviation sense, when
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you're starting to do vertical displacement maneuvers going from 35,000 feet down to 20,000
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feet in a matter of seconds and maneuvering the airplane, because the human brain thinks
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we really are, we like to be flat. I see what you mean. We think 2D. So if I'm fighting,
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how you really get an advantage when you're fighting another airplane is to work in the
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vertical because most people will do like one move in the vertical and then they want to start
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to flatten out because that's where we're comfortable. Yeah. So they're profound. Do
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you still think in like stacks of 2D layers or no? Or do you, do you truly start to think in
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that third dimension like the rich 3D world of like a fighting? Like do you start to actually be able
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to really experience the 3D nature? You do because you have to project where you're going to be. So
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you have to know the performance of the airplane knowing that, hey, if I do this maneuver that
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I'm going to go, it's kind of like when I, when I talk about when we were chasing the Tic Tac.
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So the Tic Tac's coming up and I'm at about, you know, and I've been doing this for
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at the time 16 years. So I'm looking and I'm going, hey, I'm here, he's there on the other side of
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the circle. I'm going to do a vertical displacement. I'm going to go like this. I'm going to cut
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across the circle and I'm not going to him. I'm going out in front of him. I'm going over here
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because I know that by the time I get through this maneuver, that's where he's going to be. And
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I'm trying to, you know, basically join up on him. But I also had to look at it to go,
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do I have enough altitude to do this? Because what I didn't, if we're here and I do this,
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I'm going to end up over here and he's going to be above me. And then, you know, I have to get
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that energy back to get up to him. And when you're doing a max performance, it's a trade. So you have
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this, this is really important when you're, when you're fighting airplanes and you're really
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max performing. So when you go to an air show and you see the air demo, he's literally playing
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with it. He's got a finite amount of energy, right? He can add some with the motors and stuff,
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but you're, what you're really doing is it's a trade off and you can trade off kinetic energy,
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speed for altitude, which gives you potential energy. The other piece is, is I can trade some
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of that kinetic energy for performance. Because I know if I do a nice easy turn, the airplane will
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make it at what doesn't bleed energy. But I know if I do a real tight, that 2,500 foot split s,
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that it's going to cost me energy. So if I enter the split s at 200 knots and I do it right,
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I'm going to come out at the bottom at probably 200 knots. Although I lost 2,500 feet of potential
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energy, I converted that to that to kinetic and that kinetic was transitioned and bled off the wings
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in order for me to get that high performance turn. And you have to constantly evaluate where you're
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at and it's your overall energy package. So you can have a guy that's behind you that looks like
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he's going to kill you, but if this jet is at 400 knots and this jet is at 110 knots, this jet's
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just going to pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds, right? It's, it's overall
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energy package. And that's that you got to be constantly evaluating where you're at. And this
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is that 80% solution. Can I afford to do this or not? Yes, no. And you have literally a split second
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to make the decision. The most incredible dance of human decision making is just incredible.
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I know a million people want me to talk about Tic Tac and I definitely will, but let me ask the
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one last ridiculous subjective question. What's the greatest plane ever made in history?
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You don't get to like. From pure speed, I would say SR 71. I think it's an engineering marvel
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that was actually developed in the 50s by Kelly Johnson, you know, Skunkworks for what that was
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able to do. And then when you get into history of it, you know how they actually built the CIA
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actually made like six companies in order to buy the titanium from Russia to bring it back and
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build an airplane out of titanium that we would fly over Russia. To me, that's, it's an incredible
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engineering marvel. I think that like the X 15, you know, by the way, that's, that's sorry, sorry
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to interrupt this, SR 71 still holds the, the speed record for any plane as far as I can
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understand. Yeah, what's funny when you get into it is it's, remember, fast is relative.
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When I say that, I mean, so if you're going 3000 miles an hour, 100 feet above the ground,
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you're going 3000 miles an hour through, you know, that's how fast you're going.
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When you get up to altitude, there's an indicated airspeed and there's a, you know,
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your ground speed. So your indicated airspeed is really how fast the air is going past your airplane.
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Well, the air is so thin up there, you may only be showing like 300 knots, but at 300 knots,
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you're really doing 2500 miles an hour over the ground. So, you know, like, we would take the
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airplanes up to 50,000 feet when we had to do full, the maintenance check flights on them.
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So when you're doing 200, you know, and you know, some odd knots, you're, it's actually slow for
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the airplane. It's, you know, you're getting, you know, it's kind of like, it's not, you know,
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there's maneuvering speeds. You know that if I hit a certain speed and a super hornet that I have
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the full capability of the airfoil. If I'm below that speed, I'm going to stall the airfoil before
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I get to the maximum G. Okay. So when you look at something like that, you go, well, is it really
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going fast? And when you look at an SR 71 that's flying upwards of, you know, 70 plus thousand
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feet, the air is so thin, you know, just like the X 15, you can get to a much higher speed,
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but the relative speed of the air going over you is actually relatively low.
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So the stresses on the airframe are not like they would be if you were down low.
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But because you're going fast to get enough air over your pedostatic system to show that
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you're going 300 knots, you're, you're screaming. I mean, the fastest I ever got was I was with the,
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well, soon to be vice admiral white. So we had taken a check flight and,
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and I got it up to 1.78. I got a super hornet up to Mach 1.78. And it was,
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and we were just right by Pebble Beach too. And then it...
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What's that feel like? When you get that fast, it started, to me, it got a little bit weird
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because you realize in your brain, and I did, that there's no out. If something happens, I
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can't eject. The ejection would kill me. Isn't that kind of liberating in a way?
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Or maybe not. You always want to push the limit. You know, it's like, how fast, I could have got
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going faster. It was, it was literally still accelerating when I stopped, but I had, it was
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fuel limited and space limited because I, you know, I'm off the coast of California,
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Big Sur, and I'm going and I can see Pebble Beach out in the distance, you know, the whole Monterey
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Peninsula. And you're doing almost 18 miles a minute. I mean, you're screaming. I mean,
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that's, and then you have to turn, well, the airplane didn't have anything on it. It was
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a slipped off super hornet. So it was basically just the airplane, no pylons, no pods, no nothing.
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And then we had to get it turned around because we got to go to the exit point for the area.
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And I'm trying to get it down below to subsonic. And there's a bunch of things that are disabled,
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like the speed brakes that normally we pop out when you're going that fast. They don't,
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because the super hornet really doesn't have speed brakes. It deforms the flight controls.
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They don't function. So you really, you're trying to maneuver. And when you're going that fast,
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you can't turn because a 7G turn at 1.5 Mach is a pretty big turn. So it's just, it's crazy.
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It's incredible that a human can do this. And a human can engineer that, the system,
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which allows another human to control that system. It's, to me, it's, I think it's just,
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it's, it's one, it's a great experience. Was it sad to see the SR71 go? I think it was during
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your career. I mean, do you guys romanticize the different planes? We would see it flying when I
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was flying Hornets because we, West Coast flies in, it's called R2508, which is, covers the
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Navy China Lake area and Edwards. It's a huge area. It's, it's actually, I think the, we had a guy
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from Switzerland come out because they were, they had Hornets and he's like, this is bigger in our
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whole country because it's a pretty big area in California that you fly. But you would see the
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SR71s, they had a loop because NASA was flying them out of Palmdale and they would take off and
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they'd go up towards Washington state and Montana and they do a loop. And so you'd see them coming
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back down. They descend out of, you know, above 60,000. You'd see them, you'd, they get contrails,
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you know, the white lines behind airplanes. They'd come down and hit the tanker and then they'd go
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back up. So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying. But, you know, I think with
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money, age, the advent of satellites, you know, because they're everywhere now. I mean,
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you've got commercial companies putting satellites up. How much of that need was really there?
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Because you got to remember when those things started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn't flying around.
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You know, it was, it was the U2 and the SR71 that were out there doing that work.
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So at the time it was needed, it was at the, if you think about it really, it was an incredible
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feat of aviation for that time. I mean, literally we have yet to pass that. And you also asked,
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well, is there a need to pass that? I go, I don't know, we got stuff in space. So
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do we need to make an airplane that goes that fast? I think the next one is you get into the
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hypersonics where you don't have to put a person in, it does all kinds of crazy stuff.
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You know, the work with automation, all that kind of stuff. Yeah.
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So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of, at least in my view,
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one of the most credible witnesses in history of somebody who's witnessed a UFO, literally,
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an identified flying object. And not only witnessed, but got to, how do you put it like
link |
chase it essentially? Chase it. Chase it. So let me just lay out, I think it's easier than you
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telling the story, maybe me and my dumb simpleton ways trying to explain the stories I understand
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it. And then maybe you can correct me. So on November 10th, 2004, the USS Princeton,
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which is one of the carriers. That's a cruiser. It's a cruiser. So you can't land on a.
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No, helicopter has a helicopter pad on the back. Got you. So it has weapons on it. Okay,
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got you. It shoots the missiles up, but it has a nice radar just incredible spy one system,
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phased array, four panels. So it looks in quadrants. Perfect. So they started noticing
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on November 10th that there is a few objects flying around at 28,000 feet with speed of,
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what I guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an hour. I don't know what that's in knots,
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but on the coast of California. So, and they kept detecting these objects for just about a week.
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Then comes in like your part of the story, which is on November 14th,
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from the, I guess it's from the USS Nimitz. You flew and witnessed a 40 foot long white
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tic tac shaped object with no wings, flying in ways you've never thought possible.
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And in some interview somewhere, you said, I think it was not from this world. So there's
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a mysterious aspect to this object, to this entire situation. There's videos involved, the
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video of a flare forward looking infrared receiver, as also the visible lights, you can switch
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as a TV mode. So that gives you visible light and then as an IR mode. And chat Underwood recorded
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that video. So, and those are the videos that were released by the Pentagon later, one of the
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three videos, the two other videos go fast and gimbal were recorded in 2000, something 14 or
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15 on the east coast of the United States. They had different kinds of objects, but they're weird
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in the same kind of way in terms of at least the videos and the experiences that people have described
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or similar in the degree of weirdness. But the differences is actually on the east coast of
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2014 case, very few people have spoken about it. And even in your situation, very few people have
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spoken about it. So there's a mystery to it. But it's in some sense, this is a quite simple story
link |
without much resolution to the mystery. And it's fascinating. And there's a lot of opinions,
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there's division of opinions, because it's a mysterious, I mean, it's truly is a UFO in
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the sense that you AP, what is it, I unidentified aerial phenomena. So can you maybe correct me
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on any of the things that got wrong, elaborate on some key things and describe that experience in
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general? So here's what I know. So yeah, we went out on our mission to go train. And they canceled
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the mission. And they sent us on, there's all kinds of rumors out here. There's all kinds of,
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after this has come out. So originally, it was the four of us. There's two jets, two people in each
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jet, their F18Fs. Okay. There is no video from our event. It was all four sets of eyeballs staring
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at this thing. And then when we came back and told it, when Chad and his pilot took off,
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that's when Chad got the video of it. And we're like, that's it. That's exactly, that's it.
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So when you say eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing.
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Yeah. So as we're flying out, we get, we get vectored, they come up and tell us,
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hey, we're going to cancel training. This is a USS Princeton. So this is the Seages cruiser.
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So we're talking to one controller who is like, Hey, sir, first you ask what ordinance we have
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on board. And I laugh because we don't carry live ordinance and training typically, because
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bad shit stuff happens. Usually someone forgets to put a switch on and then the missile comes off
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and hits a good airplane and it's not good. So we had what's called a catam 9, which is really
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just a blue two with the aim night seeker on the front of it, which is an IR missile.
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So there's only two ways to get it off. You can beat it off of the sledgehammer,
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you can take this thing and you put a wrench in it and unlocks the lugs and pulls the lugs back
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in that holding on when it really fires the impulse from the engine actually throws the lugs
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forward and breaks that release and it comes off down the rail. That's how it works. So they said,
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Hey, well, we have real world tasking. So as we're going out, my wingman, the other pilot,
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she maneuvers the airplane to the left hand side of me. So she's kind of stepped up like this.
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And I'll use your mic box to start. So as we're going out, their calling ranges are called bra calls,
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bearing range and altitude. And they're telling us, Hey, it's at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40 miles
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and 30 miles. So they're saying, Hey, two, seven, zero, 30, 20,000. That's all they say. So we got
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our radars and we had to, we had to mechanically scan radars at the time, APG 73. Good piece of
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gear, APG 79 new ones way better. But anyway, and I apologize if I interrupt the story. Hopefully
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it's useful. But they're telling you a location of a thing that you should look at. Yep. They're
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telling us they have a contact on their radar. They don't know what it is. They just have a blip.
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They have a little blip. Well, they've been watching these things. And what he told me is
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they had been looking at these things as we're driving. I said, sir, we've been tracking these
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things for about two weeks. That's we had been at sea for two weeks. Because this is the first time
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we've had planes airborne. We want you to go see what these are.
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Gotcha. So they kind of interrupt the mission to say, check it out.
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That's exactly it. So we start driving out there. And as we get down to, he's going, you know,
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20 miles, 15 miles, 10 miles. And then you get to a point where they call merge plot,
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which means we are inside of the resolution cell of the radar, because radars don't see everything.
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So they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution, right? So, and it's basically think
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of a little cube. So they can, and the whole sky is made of all these little cubes. And they're
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looking. So if you're inside a cube with something and you're both inside the same little cube,
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then the radar can only see one thing. Does that make sense? So they call merge plot. Well,
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when we say merge plot to us, it means he's right around something's around you, get your head out.
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So we're not looking at radar scopes anymore and the wizards, the wizards can look, but everyone,
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it's heads out. When they say merge plot, you're done looking at your displays inside,
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you're doing this and you're trying to find it. So as we look out to the right and you look high
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and low, because he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up. Now, keep in mind, the
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ship is like probably 60 miles away. So it can't see the surface and you can do your standard
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radar horizon calculation and go, hey, it's the thing is 40 feet off the water, the panel.
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Can he really see, you know, there are radars that can see around the curve, but let's just say that
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it can't at this time. So you go, is it, you know, where is it at? So as we're looking around,
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we see, you know, this is a, it's a clear day. There's no clouds and there's no white caps.
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It's just a calm, it's actually a perfect day. If you owned a sailboat, it was that five to 10
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knots of wind and you just want to kind of go out there and you're not going to get beat up and
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have white water come out. It was the perfect day to own a sailboat.
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How many miles out do you see like seven, like you see just, it's a clear day.
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That's 50. It's unrestricted visibility. You can see literally all the way to the horizon. It's
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just clear. It's nothing. And we're basically off the coast. If you look at a map and you go
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San Diego and then inside of Mexico, we're kind of in between that. And we're probably about, by
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the time this all hits, we're priced, I don't know, 80, 100, I don't know, but somewhere out,
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it's pretty far off the coast. Perfect visibility.
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But from 20,000 feet, you'd be amazed. You can do the calculation. You can see stuff,
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you know, you'll see land 50 miles away. You can see, you know, and when you're looking at
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a continent, it's really easy to see you're not looking at an island. I mean, you're looking
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at Mexico. And you can see on the white caps in the water, if there is any.
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Oh yeah, they're easy. Yeah. For us, we look at it because we know if it's natural wind or,
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so if it's a really white cap windy day, then the ship's just kind of barely be moving when
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we land on it. It makes it actually easier. If the ship has to move or it's got a big weight,
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because it has to make its own wind when we land, which is the day that it was this day,
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you go, oh, okay. And it creates what's called, we call it the verbal, but when the air flows
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across the flight deck, it drops behind the ship, you know? And then it kicks back up.
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So when you're coming board the land, it's going to make you go up a little bit and then you're
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going to fall and you got to anticipate that to stand glidesome. So we're pretty conscious of
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what's going on out there with the waves and the wind. So there's no waves, there's no wind,
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there's no white caps, and we look down and we see white water. So if you put a piece of land,
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a sea mount below the surface, like, you know, even 20 feet below the surface that's big enough,
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as the waves come in, you know, waves have height and length. When they come in, that's what happens
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on the shore. When a wave comes in, it hits and then it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave
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height up because it can't go anymore and then it breaks over the top. And that's where you get the
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white. So what happens is at sea, when you get a sea mount, you'll see stuff come in, the wave
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will crash and you'll get white water. You can go out when it's high tide and any one of the coast,
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you can go out here off of Boston and go, hey, at low tide, I can see those rocks. And at high
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tide, I can't see the rocks are covered, but there'll be white water around those rocks. You'll
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be able to tell there's something underneath the surface. Does that make sense? Yep. So that's
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what it was. We see, we don't see an object because there's all kinds of, oh, they saw this,
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they saw another craft below the way. We didn't see anything below the water. We just saw white
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water. But the white water, and I like to shape it, you can say it was a cross. I say it's about
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the size of a 737. So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet below the water,
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so the wave is breaking over the top and you're going to get white water where the plane is at,
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you'd see this kind of shape. So it looks like a cross. So as we're looking down off the right
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side, the back seater in the airplane, Jim, says, this is that talking in partials again,
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he says, hey, Skipper, do you, and that's about what he gets out of his mouth. And I go, what the
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hell is that? Do you see that essentially is what he's saying? So we see the white water,
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and that's what draws our eyes down there. Otherwise, we'd have never seen it. So we see
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this white water. I would have loved to see the look on your face when you see that.
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And then we see this little white tic tac because we're about 20,000 feet above it,
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and it's doing, it's going basically north, south, and then east, west, north, and it's abrupt. It's
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very abrupt. So it's not like a helicopter. If a helicopter's going sideways and it goes
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once, it's going sideways, left and right, what it'll do is it'll go, it's got a speed,
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it slows down because there's inertia and it stops and then it goes back the other way.
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This thing's not. It's like left, right, left, right with no...
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So moving in ways that doesn't, doesn't feel intuitive to you at all of the things you've
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seen in the past. So as a pilot, the first thing you think is it's a helicopter, right?
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So you go, oh, what is it? Because when we see it, it's moving. We're like, oh, helicopter.
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So the first thing you look forward to see if it's a helicopter when they're doing that,
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because usually when they get down there towards that 50 feet, you'll get rotor wash.
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You see it in the movies when the helicopter's by the water, it kicks, the water comes up the
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sides because the downdraft, you know, like a thunderstorm will do that, it pushes the
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air down and then it has to come up the sides. So you see it and you go, well, there's no,
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there's no rotor wash. What is that thing? So by this time we're driving around. So as we're,
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if we were at the six o clock, we're driving around towards that nine o clock position and
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we're just watching this thing. And it's just, it's still pointed north south and it's going
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left, right. And it's kind of moving around the object. And if it had, if I had to say it
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biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half. So if you've got the east west and then
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the north south kind of across, it's hanging out on the southern thing that's hanging out.
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It's just kind of moving around up down left and it's crossing over it. It's going up. It's just
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kind of, so now we're like, what the hell is that? So then I go, hey, I'm going to go check it out.
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And the other pilot says, I'm going to stay up here. And I said, yeah, stay up high. Cause now
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we get, we get a different perspective. So she's up here and I'm down here as I'm descending.
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She can watch cause right now all I'm watching is the tic tac. She can watch me and the tic tac.
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So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on, which is really important.
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You can hear people say it's high cover, whatever. She's watching me, which is,
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it's perfect as the story goes on. Cause it gives us two perspectives, you know,
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of a perspective that's about 8,000 feet above us when that thing disappears. And they don't,
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you know, cause if it's just like, oh, I lost it. And they go, no, it's over to the right.
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We can still see it. We all lost it at the same time. So as we come down, we get to about 12
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o clock and I'm descending and it's an easy descent. I'm doing about 300 knots, which is a
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really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering. Cause I have, I have everything
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available to me at that speed. So I'm coming down and as I get to 12 o clock as the tic
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tics do this, it literally, it's like, it's aware of us and it just goes and it kind of points
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out towards the West and starts coming up. So now it's obviously knows that we're there,
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whatever this thing is, it knows that we're there. So as we drive around, it's coming up and I'm
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just coming down and we're just, I'm just watching it. Now you gotta remember this whole thing is
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like, this is like five minutes. This is not like a, we saw it and it was gone or, oh, I saw
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lights in the sky and they were gone. We watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four
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trained observers. Watch this thing fly around. So we're like, okay. So I get over to the eight o
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clock position and I'm a little, I'm a couple thousand feet above it and it's about, so I'm
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probably at about 15 K. I think it is. I think that's my story is about 15. It's just estimating.
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So you can see it's really easy descent because. So what's 15 K 15,000 feet. I thought it was 8,000.
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The other plane ends up about, so they're still at about 20,000 feet. So they're
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driving around. And I'm descending, they're staying up there. So I'm kind of doing this as
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they drive around. Okay. So I'm looking at this thing and it's about the two o clock position.
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We're about the eight o clock position and I'm like, oh, I've got, I've got enough altitudes.
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I'm going to, I'm going to cut across the circle. I tell the guy in my back seat,
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dude, I'm going to, I'm going to do this. He's like, go for it, skip because I was a skipper.
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So I cut across the bottom. So I'm kind of almost coming out co altitude as this thing's
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coming out. I'm going to meet it and I'm driving and I get to pry. It's, I'm probably about a half
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mile away, which you think, well, a half mile is pretty far. Half mile in aviation isn't,
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it's nothing. That's, I mean, you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane. You can see all kinds of
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stuff at a half mile. You can see pretty good detail. So I'm like, right there and it's coming
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across my nose. So now I'm basically pointing back towards East. So I'm cutting across because
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I'm going to the three o clock position. It's at two o clock and I'm going to meet it at three o
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clock. So as I do this, it goes, it just accelerates and disappears. So it's, this happens at
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around, estimating about 12,000 feet. So they're at 20. So they've got about 8,000 foot of altitude
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above us when this happens. And it just, is it crosses our nose? It just, it accelerates in
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literally in less than, you know, probably less than a half second. It's just goes, and it's gone.
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And so we're like, and I had the first thing is, dude, do you guys see it? The other plane's like,
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it's gone. We don't, we have no idea where it's at. So we kind of spin around real quick. I go,
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let's see what's down here. And I turn around, we're looking for the white water and we can't,
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the white water's gone. There's nothing. It's literally all blue. So now you go. And I remember
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telling the guy in my back seat, I go, dude, I'm, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty weirded
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out because this is, I mean, you know, I had, at the time, like 30 some hundred hours of flying,
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I'd been doing it for 18 years. It's nothing like anything you've seen. No, no. So as we turn, we go,
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well, let's just go back, you know, because now I got to put on my real hat, which we have to train
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because we're getting ready to deploy to, you know, overseas. So we got to get our training done. So
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that's my mindset, especially as a CO, because I got to get, I get it training out of the flight
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time because I'm responsible to do that. So, hey, let's go back. And the guy who's going to be the
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bad guys is the CO, the Marine Squadron. And so Cheeks is at the other, he's listening to all this
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happen, you know, because he's just like, because he, they, when he first went out, they were going
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to do him, but the little Hornets, the legacy Hornets, the F18Cs don't have as much gas as the
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Super Hornets. So he had launched first and they were going to do him. And then when they knew we
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were off the deck, they just told him, hey, go to your cap point down south. And we're going to send,
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we'll pass this off to the Super Hornets. What's the cap point? That's where we hold. So it's called
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a combat air patrol point. So we're just going to hold at one end. He's going to hold at the other end.
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It's kind of like, hey, you guys are going to, it's a football field. We're going to sit on one
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goal line. He's going to sit on the other goal line. And when they say go, we're going to run at
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each other and try and do something in the middle of the field and then go back to our set reset
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points. Okay. So you're talking to him. He's listening to the all. He's just listening. We
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don't talk to him at all. He's just listening. He just dials up because they know that we all
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know the frequencies. So he's listening to what's going on because he's like, because they canceled
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training. So what else is he going to do? He's just going to hang out there and do circles while
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he's waiting for him and his wingman. So they just, they're listening to all this go on.
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And then at this point, you move on. Yeah, we come back up to train. We go back as we're flying back,
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the controller, because we're talking to the kid on the Princeton, they're called OSs,
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they're operation specialists. They're the ones that run the radars. And we're talking to him
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and he's like, Hey, sir, you're not going to believe this, but that thing is at your cap.
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It showed back up and just popped up. This is like 60 miles away. It just reappears. We're like,
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Oh, okay. So we got the radars out. We're looking for it. We get out there. We never see it. We
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never see it again. We do what we need to do. We come back to the ship. Of course, now we're like,
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Oh, this is going to be, you know, I told him, I told him, I go, dude, you know, we're going to catch
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we're going to catch shit for this. When we get back to the ship, words going to get out and we're
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just going to catch maximum shit. And we did. And it's kind of that joking. You know, so the
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ship plays movies. We have movies on the boat and they do 12 hours of movies. So they repeat
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because there's a day check and a night check. So the same movies in the morning and night plays.
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So you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat, which drives my wife crazy
link |
because I'll watch stuff on TV that way too. I'll be like, Oh, here I've seen this and I'll jump
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into a movie in the middle and then I'll pick it up later and I'll see the beginning and I'll put
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it all together because that's how we have to do it because we're so busy. Well, the movies became
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and I was met in black aliens, Independence Day. Definitely going to catch some shit.
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Oh, we did. But let me just ask some dumb questions. So just taking because it's
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whatever, whatever the heck you saw, whatever the heck happened, it's, you know, one of the most
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fascinating things, events in recent history. So whatever it was, it's interesting to talk about
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at different kinds of angles. There's no good answers, but it's interesting to ask some dumb
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questions here. So first of all, you mentioned, see, you saw it at some point, X, Y, and then
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somebody in the Princeton said, you're not going to believe this, sir. It's at your cap point.
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Now that's a different place. How the heck did it know what your cap point is?
link |
That's a good question. That's the one of you, no one, you know, we don't tell it. We don't
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broadcast it. We have a waypoint in the system. But I don't know, maybe it knew where we were
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going because we use the same one day after day after day. But it obviously knew. But you never
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saw it there. Never saw it there. Chad, when he took off, when he got the video, we landed,
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we told them, hey, look, we just, we just chased this thing. They're like, what? I go,
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chased it. And they're like, well, I go, dude, and I go, and I told him, I said, dude, get video.
link |
And he goes, so, and that's how he is. He's like, oh, I'm going to go. And he was, he was determined
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that he was going to find this thing. So when you look at his video, and this is the stuff that
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isn't out that they don't see because not all the, all you see is the FLIR tape. That's the
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targeting pod, the forward looking infrared receiver. I'll probably overlay the video.
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When he goes out, it's, you know, what he's looking at on his displays is he has basically
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two radar displays up. He has azimuth and range on the right one, and he has azimuth and elevation
link |
on the left one. So this is called the ASL display. And this is called, this is basically the PPI,
link |
which is the, you're at the bottom of it. You're at the bottom of the square. It's really taken
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this, it's taken a cone because a radar really looks left and right from a point and it squares
link |
it out. So the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us because they do this, they square
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it off. So, so he goes out. And when he first sees it, he gets a radar return on it because
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when he's not trying to lock it, so the radar's just throwing energy out and getting it, you know,
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it's a Doppler radar. So when it's in search mode, that's all it's doing. It's going,
link |
hell, I can see you. I can see you. And it's looking for return. So he gets a return. So he
link |
wants to see what it is because all you get is a little green square unless it builds a track
link |
file on it. But a little green square is just sitting there. It's not moving because it's,
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it's sitting in one spot in space. He locks it up when he goes to lock it up. Now he's putting
link |
a bunch of energy on it. But he's telling the radar, stare down that line of sight and whatever's
link |
there, I want you to grab it and build a track file on it, which will tell us how high it is,
link |
how fast it is and the direction that it's going. Okay. The radar smart enough that when the signal
link |
comes back, if it's been messed with, it will tell you, it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed.
link |
So that's all it is. As you send the signal out, something, it manipulates the signal either in
link |
range and velocity or whatever, and it sends it back. And the radar was smart enough to go,
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that is not a return that I'm expecting. Something's messing with me. I'm being jammed.
link |
And it shows you and it puts strobes up, it gives these lines on the radar and it does some
link |
stuff. So you can, well, it does, it goes full into it. It's being jammed at about every mode
link |
you can possibly see because everything comes up and the, this aspect gets along. It's all kinds
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of, I don't want to get into details, but you can tell it's being jammed. So as you said on
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Rogan, by the way, that jamming is an active war. Active jamming isn't, when you actively jam
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another platform, yes, it's technically an active war. Feels like you should be freaking out at this
link |
point. I mean, so, well, he does it. And then in the back seat, so they don't have a stick and throttle,
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they have what their sidestick controller, so they can control all the sensors and they can
link |
just toggle around and do stuff. So he can, he has the ability to just move one switch real
link |
quick and it will go from that azimuth elevation on the radar to the targeting pod. Well, as soon
link |
as he commanded the radar to look at that target, the targeting pod goes, oh, what's over there?
link |
And it'll stare because it goes down the line of sight because all the systems are hooked together.
link |
You can decouple them, but they're going to automatically couple up. So when he castles over,
link |
he, it's a switch, it looks like a castle switch was a castle. So when he moves that thing to the
link |
left and he swaps the displays out and he says, instead of looking at the radar, I want to look
link |
at the targeting pod. He sees it on the targeting pod because the targeting pod is already looking
link |
there. And now he's on a passive track because he's not literally sending any energy out. He's
link |
just receiving IR energy from the tic tac. And then the system itself will track the pixels
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and the contrast differences. It depends on what mode you're in. So it says, oh,
link |
and that's what those little bars you see in the video where the bars come up left and right.
link |
I was doing some vision based tracking. That's exactly what it is. So, and then he goes through
link |
changes, zooms, changes the mode. He goes through all the modes. So there's a narrow,
link |
medium and wide. So wide is far away, medium and then narrow. And then there's the TV mode.
link |
And he goes from IR mode to the TV mode. The cool thing with the TV mode is narrow IR mode
link |
is only medium TV mode. So you can actually get closer with narrow TV mode. It's got a
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better zoom capability when you go into TV mode. So he goes through all those things.
link |
And that's when you see it going from a black background to a white background.
link |
Trying to figure out what the heck is this? Well, yeah. And he wants to get as much data
link |
as he can on it based on the different modes instead of just staring at it going. What is that
link |
thing? So the video has been out. It actually was on YouTube for years before the government
link |
released it. It was leaked 2007. No, I got the guy that was in my backseat sent me an email
link |
and I had retired. So this is about, no, because I was working, I was working down in San Diego.
link |
So this is about 2008, early 2009. He sends me a link to Strangeland.com,
link |
which is not suitable for work. Oh, yeah, it's top notch. And he says, hey, I can remember the
link |
email. Hey, Skip, does this look familiar? And I look at, I'm like, how the hell did that get
link |
on Strangeland.com? So next thing you know, it ends up on YouTube, which was cool because you
link |
can send a YouTube link to someone. You don't send Strangeland.com to someone because you don't
link |
know what you're going to get. It's like Googling kittens. So it ends up there somehow. So it gets
link |
on YouTube, which was cool because I would go out with my friends and we'd be drinking and they
link |
go, dude, what's the coolest thing you ever saw flying? It's kind of like you were asking what
link |
it's like. And I go, oh, dude, I chased a UFO and they're like, get out. And I'm like, no,
link |
serious. So this is literally how it happened. So I was sitting with my friend, Matt. So Matt
link |
and I did our, he was the guy in my right seat of the A6 when I did my very first night trap,
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right? And we were friends to this day, right? Because when you do stuff like people like that,
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you know, you had to have faith in him. He had to have faith in me. You know,
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they become like your brother. And these are guys that literally, you know, I don't talk to
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them on a regular basis like Chris who works at Apple. If Chris called me up tomorrow and said,
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dude, I need help. I need this. I'd be like, all right, let's figure this out and let's do it
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because they're like family. You do it. And most Navy guys, we don't, we don't send letters to
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each other weekly. You know, I have friends that could, I haven't talked to in 10 years that they
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showed up on my door, you know, pop a bottle of wine, grab a beer, shoot the shit, take about
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first 10 minutes to catch up. And then it's, it's like old times and it's, it's amazing how fast
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it's happened. So incredible. So I'm out to dinner with Matt. And I'm telling him this story and
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he's like, get out of here. So he goes back and he tells our friend Paco. Paco has fightersweep.com.
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It's a blog site. So Paco's obsessed. Like he is way into UFOs. So Paco calls me up. He says,
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dude, I was talking to Maddie. That's what we call him. He goes, I was talking to Maddie.
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He goes, dude, you got to tell me this story. So I'm like, all right, so I spend a chunk of time.
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And so he calls me one day and I'm like, I get a voicemail. Hey, give me a call. So I call him up
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and he answers the phone, but I can hear people in the background and I go, hey,
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dude, what's going on? He goes, hang on, hang on. I got to put you on speakerphone. I go,
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what are you putting me on speakerphone? He goes, you got to tell the story. I'm having a dinner party.
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You got to tell the story. So he's literally having a dinner party with his cell phone in
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the middle of the table as I tell a tic tac story. So he calls me up again. He says, hey,
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I got this blog and he just writes about fighter stuff like he wrote about that we call him the
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shit hot break. That's a guy that when you land on a carrier comes and turns and gets ready to land
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really fast like breaks it off right at the back of the ship. And one of the guys when we were
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junior officers on the USS Ranger, one of the apartment heads, the other squadron is a guy,
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Nasty. And Nasty was notorious for coming in in a Tomcat and cranking off the shit hot break.
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Right. So he literally wrote a thing about the shit hot break with Nasty and there's another guy
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or MAV was our, one of our landing signals officers for the air wing. It's just, it's a good
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article on how this was and how, you know, it kind of forms you in naval aviation. It's kind of
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being part of the club. So he's like, I got to write about this thing. I'm like, what do you
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guys, I got to write about it. I go, all right. I go, because at first I would say no. I'm like,
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dude, I don't want this out. They're just. You haven't really before then talked about it much.
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My wife didn't even really know the whole story. Why? Just as a comment, is it just because you
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caught some? No. It was just, I'll tell you what, three days we had the incident for about two days.
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They played the goofy movies. There's a comic on the back of the air wing schedule that they would
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put. It was like, first one was a far side and the second one was me and the guy in my back seat
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and it was men in black, but it had our names, you know, protecting, protecting the Nimitz
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battle group type stuff. It's just funny shit like that. So to me, it wasn't that big of a deal.
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It was like, okay, that's weird. We're never going to know what it was. I want to get out
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because this is important because there's all kinds of rumors. There's a group of folks that
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no one ever came out in suits to talk to us. Nobody looking like me. No. Came out on a.
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No. No one came out on a helicopter. No one came out on an airplane. You know, you get,
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oh, I was told to turn over this classified. What's funny is all the COs and several of them are
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still in the Navy. There's one that is a, I think he just finished up. He was a captain of an aircraft
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carrier, you know, so he'll end up making Admiral and all that stuff. Those guys are all my friends.
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I talk to them daily. Just to clarify, so just for people who don't know, there's a story
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that both on the Nimitz and the Princeton folks in a helicopter landed, they showed up, they took
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the data, quote, unquote, so all the sort of recordings associated with this incident,
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and they took it and presumably deleted it. There's a kind of story to that. And then
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from what I've seen, you said that you believe just like we were talking about offline,
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the jokes spread faster than or just rumors spread faster than anything on these ships
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that it might have been a joke that started and. Well, they did. So here's the joke. Yeah.
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So they had come down, right? We had the tapes and they were Chad's tapes. So we use those tapes
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over and over again. You know, they're consumable. But remember, I have a budget as a squadron,
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so I have a budget. So I have to buy those tapes. I have to, all that stuff that we use,
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I'm accountable for. And the tapes are actually classified secret because of the data that's
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on them. So we had the tapes. So the intelligence guys, the intel officers came down from what's
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called Civic, CVIC, which is Carrier Intel Center, came down and said, hey, we need the tapes. These
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guys are going to come and get them. So we're like, oh, whatever. So we hand them the tapes.
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And then someone, because I have, you know, you know, people shortly after they came and got the
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tapes, someone came to me and said, you know, they're, they're messing with you. They're playing a
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joke. So I said, oh, let's see how well that goes because, you know, I'm a CEO and they're not.
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And so I went down to Civic and it was a, I think he was a Lieutenant or Lieutenant JG. So he's
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way junior to me. And I said, hey, I want my tapes back and that he looks at me and I go,
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I know you guys are pulling my leg. I know you, there's no one came out and I go, and you have
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about 30 seconds to get me my tapes before I start tearing this place apart. That's literally what I
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told him. And I said, and if your boss has an issue, he can come and see me because it's not
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going to go well. I said, because it's bullshit and I need those tapes. Then he literally walked
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right over to a filing cabinet and opened it up. They weren't to say if he opened up a filing
link |
cabinet and pulled him out and handed him to me. I said, and I basically said a few things to him,
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like, don't ever fuck with me again. And I left. I had the tapes. So this, no one came out. There's
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no flying going on when all this is happening. And I took the tapes back and then I copied the tapes.
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So I took two brand new eight mil tapes and I copied the sections that I want. So there's a
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rumor too that, oh, the original FLIR video is 10 minutes long and there's some, one of these
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pediosters is saying, I saw it. That's total crap. The original video is about a minute, 30 seconds
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long. What you see on the release video is the entire video. So you have mentioned, I apologize
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if I say stupid things, please correct me, but you have mentioned that, like on Rogan, I think,
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that you watched it on, you know, on a bigger screen. It felt like it was higher definition.
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So let me ask the question, is there a higher definition version do you think of the FLIR
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video that would give us more pixels and more information, presumably because of the
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I would doubt it because I don't know where the stuff that the government released. I don't
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know where they got. Okay. So the stuff that was on Strangeland and YouTube, you know, someone
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pulled off of a secret. It looks like a rack. You know, there's tape machines in there and it gets
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converted to digital and stored on a hard drive and they pulled it off that hard drive and they
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put it on YouTube. No, it's just like, you know, anytime even a digital media, the more you copy
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digital media, there's some quality that gets it degrades. So this, you don't know how many times
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this has been copied. So we were looking at the videos I've seen are right off the original.
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They're high eight tapes. It's basically pulled off the back of the display. So it's not filmed
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with cameras. It's literally a digital feed that's pulled off the back and put onto a high eight tape.
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That's how the recorders work. Now it's actually digital to digital. It's not even on tapes anymore.
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They said it's a digital recording system, but we were still in that process of slowing up because
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originally we had little cameras here that shine. So if the light hit, it would wash out the displays.
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So this is, it's a pretty good feed. When you put it on, so we're, instead of looking at it
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on your tiny little computer monitor or whatever, I'm looking at it on a like a 19 inch because
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it was still normal TVs back there. We had just put flat screens in the ready room that I had bought
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so we could watch movies. So because a nice huge 19 inch screen is maybe 20. It was nice.
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Wow, that's huge. Gigantic. I can get for like 50 bucks and get like 60 inches.
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This is 2005. So you look at this big thing and you could see, so when you get to the TV mode,
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when I say there's little things coming out of the bottom of it, you could see those.
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It was very clear. But in terms of the actual
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visual on the tic tac, was it, did you get much more information from the higher, from the clear
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little things out of the bottom? We didn't see the bottom of information. So when you see it,
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because he's coming almost co altitude with it, you can see the bottom of it. It looks like little,
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you know, like if you look at a session, there's little antennas hanging out of the bottom,
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kind of like that. There's two little things out of the bottom. There's nothing on the top.
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There was no plume, no IR, no, no visible propulsions, even heat signature,
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you know, it's all that stuff. And then the other thing that people didn't see is they didn't see
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the radar display, which that really raises a classification love, especially to see what
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the radar does when it's being jammed. You know, and I matter of fact, when they did the unofficial
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official investigation in about 2000, and let me think about 2009, I had gotten a call on
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my cell phone from a guy who government employee and said, Hey, he told me who he was, he's still
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in the government. I'm friends with him. And he said, Hey, we're going to investigate your tic
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tac thing. This is literally five years later. Yeah, five years later. And I said, Okay, whatever.
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And he did a pretty good job. I caught the unofficial official report because
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it was really never official. It wasn't. But I'll give you the history of why I say that and why
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it never came out in FOIA requests. So he does the report, he sent me the report. And all he said
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is, Hey, I'm going to send you this report, please don't distribute this report. I said, Okay,
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the report is now out because Harry Reid got it to George Knapp. And they were good enough to
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redact it. There's a few versions of it unredacted. And I'm very protective of the other people that
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were involved in this. So Jim has talked, but he's off the grid. He doesn't talk to anyone now.
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The pilot of his airplane, she has come out on unidentified, but they don't release her name,
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although people are starting to do it. And she's had weird shit happen around her house. She's got
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kids. You know, so I'm very protective of her. And I've told people like Jeremy and George, if I
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know that the names ever came from you, I will never talk to you again about this. And Jeremy's
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been really good about it. And so is George. And then, but George, George knew the names were
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because he had, he got the report from Senator Reid. And then the other crew. So the pilot of
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the airplane that took the video that Chad was in, if you talk to that individual, they really
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don't have the recollection, they were just out flying that day. And it wasn't a big deal.
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So it's, it's you, you need to protect, because not everyone wants people knocking,
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I don't want people knocking on my door. And, you know, and there's rumors all you talk to
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everyone. I think you're about the 23rd person that I've talked to total. And that includes,
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you know, the newspapers and stuff. And I've been selective because there's so much. I mean, if,
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if I turned down like, I turned down Russian TV, I can give you her name when we're done here.
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But she, she called, she not only called me, she called my wife, she called my daughter,
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she called my son and she called my son in law because they're persistent. So I'm, I'm pretty
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protect, I'm very particular. I mean, the reason I'm talking to you is because I knew we would
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have a conversation that wasn't based just on the tic tac and the incident, but we could actually
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talk about some of the science and some of the theoretical to get into, to get more people
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involved to go, because I think there's, you know, and when you talk to, you know, Lou Elizondo or
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Chris Mellon, you know, the group at TTSA, you know, the, that whole thing was, that's to the
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stars Academy. That's the Tom DeLong group that got started. So, and you go, well, you know,
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because I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this, but he's actually, when you talk to him,
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he's, he's, he's very smart. And I ask him, how'd you get into this? And he goes, oh,
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when I was traveling around with Blink 182, he goes, you read a lot of books when you're laying
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in a van as you're driving to your next gig before you make it big. And he goes, and he read, he
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was reading books and he read one of them on UFOs. I'm trying to think the title, that's one of the
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big ones that's out there, real popular. And so he started just, he started asking more and through
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his fame with Blink 182 in the band, he got more and more connected. You know, if you talk to Chris
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Mellon, who is an Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and he's part of the Mellon, you
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know, dynasty, you know, from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart. He knows, he, he, he definitely
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knows how the government works because he worked there. And so when I went down to DC to talk to
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people, he's one of the first people I'll go to. When I did Tucker Carlson about a month ago,
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a month and a half ago, I asked, he texted me. I texted him, Tom, Lou, to go, hey,
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because they were like, you got to do it. Because I turned, I had turned Tucker down a
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couple of times before and his, his producer had called me and I'm like, all right, I'll do it.
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Because those guys are like, you got to, you got to do this for us.
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So from my perspective, just to give you some context. So to me, there seems to be some stigma.
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So I come from the scientific community and I really appreciate you talking to me today.
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And I think the people who listen to this include, you know, fellow faculty at MIT and major
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universities. And it feels like there's some stigma to the subject from, from the scientific
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community. A lot of people, especially when they hear your story are like, wow, this is really
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interesting. But you don't even know, one, you're afraid to talk about it. And two, you don't know
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what the next steps are. Like how can we seriously try to think about what you saw, how to think about
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how we further look for things like it, how we develop systems and plans for how in the future
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we can immediately collect a lot more data and try to react properly, you know, try to communicate,
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try to interpret this in the best way possible from a scientific perspective. And I just would
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love to remove stigma from this subject. Well, I think that's the first step. We have done in
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this country an absolutely terrible job with these things. So you go, and I joke, you know, go back
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to Roswell. So the first reports that came out of Roswell was we have this crash flying saucer.
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That's literally what came out. And then magically the next day, it's a weather balloon and they're
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showing your pieces of mylar. And you go, well, that doesn't look like what they showed us yesterday.
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Then you get into Project Blue Book, you know, so there's that whole series about Project Blue
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Book. But the bottom line of Project Blue Book is it really did two things. It investigated
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sightings and it did everything it could to debunk and disprove to the point where it actually went
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to discredit, you know, to make you look. So there's always been this, this, I don't know if you'd
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call it an aura around it or a mystique about UFOs that if you're talking about them, they're nuts.
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With ours, because I'm not a UFO guy. I'm not a junkie. If you ask me, do I believe
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that there's life outside of Earth, I would say you probably have a better chance of winning
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the Mega Ball Lottery than we're the only planet that has life on it in the universe.
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It's just the odds are against it. If you're, if you do just do the math, you have to accept,
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because if there only has to be one other planet that has life on it,
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and then I win and you lose. And the more and more science has shown that there's habitable
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planets out there, that yeah, everything we've learned so far, and we know very little, but
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everything we've learned so far about the planets out there, exoplanets, Earth like planets,
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it seems that it's very likely that there's life out there. Intelligent life is another topic,
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but life. Well, we, we as humans, you know, and even more as Americans, we have this hubris about
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us that says, we are it. And you go, not so much. Maybe we're not so intelligent.
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Because we are, it's just how we learn. So, you know, our main mode of transportation and what
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people figured out, you know, years ago was the internal combustion engine, which led us to jet
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engines and solid rocket fuel. What if you're in another planet where you didn't, you figured out
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the ability to create a gravity field or you used, you know, because electromagnetics are
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becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, you know, catapults on ships were steam powered,
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and the new Gerald Ford is electromagnetic. Roller coaster used to use a chain to get you
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the top of the hill. Now you, they shoot you with electromagnetics and you're going. So,
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there's a whole new realm of propulsion that, you know, sometimes it's our ability to develop
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the technology to support theory. You know, we are just now proving, you know, recently
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theories that Einstein had where people actually joked about them. And now we actually have the
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technology to prove that gravity can bend light. You know, we have proven that. So, you look at
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that way and you go, well, does that mean that, you know, 70 years ago, Einstein was wrong or
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eight years ago, Einstein was wrong? Or do you go, we just didn't have the ability to look that deep
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into space to actually find something that we could, to actually measure and, you know, and
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I've seen this. And that's just a hundred years and the kind of things that can happen in a few
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centuries. Look at what we've done in the last 20 years. Yeah, it's crazy. Let me direct, because
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it's such an interesting topic from a career perspective, from a science perspective.
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You're, I mean, you've spoke, you've been brave in, you know, telling your story, not some dramatic
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thing, but just telling the things you've seen. Did it encounter, did it impact your career?
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Is that why more people haven't come out? Like you've mentioned, Roswell, like, how,
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what advice do you give to people, to the community, to me as a scientist, for ways to go
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forward about this topic and still have a, you know, not to being put in a bin in society,
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that he's a loon or she's a loon or that person? Mine is to get away from the little green men,
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divorce the two little green men. And, you know, I've talked to Lou Elizondo about this,
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you know, and the group that they're working with, which is incredible. I mean, they've got
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Steve Justice, who used to run Skunk Works, where they built, you know, projects.
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Now, Lou Elizondo, which you mentioned, was a program director.
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He ran the ATIP program at the Pentagon. And ATIP was a program that was tasked with investigating
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any kind of UFOs, UAPs. So what's funny is the unofficial official report that I joke about,
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the guy who wrote the unofficial official report was actually an original member of ATIP.
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And the original stuff that ATIP did was FOIA exempt. And people go, how do you know that?
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I go, because I stood there with the memo in my hand that said these are,
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it literally, I watched the DOD memo that said it and it was signed. So he was one. So that's
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why the, that's why I caught the unofficial official report. It was never, it was never
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releasable. Cause people go, well, I put in a FOIA request and I didn't get that. I go,
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well, just cause you put in a FOIA request and get it. I go, because how much, how much time
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do you think that guy's going to spend to get you the information that you requested if you can't
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find it? I actually got called by the Navy. I had a commander and a Navy call me about,
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right before the article came out in the New York Times. It was, this was starting to come back.
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And she had called me cause there's been, there was a FOIA request for stuff about the Nimitz
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incident. And I said, do you know of anything she called me? She goes, do you know of anything
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else besides the, the situation reports that come off the ship? And you know, and you got to
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remember when the situation report comes off the ship, that's like third hand. So we tell someone,
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they tell someone, that person has to write it up. So there's all kinds of inaccuracies in it.
link |
But then there's the unofficial official report that's actually pretty well written. There's
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some errors in it, but it was, you know, I didn't help write it. I just did it. And he did a really
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good job of researching it and figuring out who's who in the zoo and the players. So she called me
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and said, is there anything out there? And I said, officially out there, she said, yes,
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I said, I don't know of anything. I knew of the unofficial official report, which is that one.
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But I'm not, you know, if you don't know about it, I'm not going to tell you because that's not
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my job. And nor did I care. I mean, did in that whole situation, you mentioned Lou, I mean,
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did you think about your impact to your career? Like just to get back to the question, do you
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think others, other pilots, other thing, other people like in the Roosevelt are thinking about
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this kind of thing? Why aren't they talking about this? Why are people afraid to talk about this?
link |
Well, honestly, the military and the press, there's a distrust. I'll just tell you that right now.
link |
We typically don't like talking to the press because if I talk to you, you know, especially
link |
when I do even the TV shows, you know, because I've been on a couple of shows, when you look at it,
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you know, they come to my house and they film me for two hours. And then what you see on the screen
link |
is five minutes. Well, and the, and the other thing with the press, let me give you my perspective
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from autonomous vehicles is the clipping happens. Yes. But also the incompetence. Let me just call
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out journals. They're not thinking. I mean, so here's the thing. I've, I have a PhD and I've taken
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painfully too many classes from like physics, math, and I also have a deep curiosity about the world.
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I read a lot. That seems to be missing with journalism. So you're talking to a person who
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is not going to push the story forward in an interesting way, not the story, but the actual
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investigation of perhaps one of the most amazing things that humans have witnessed in history.
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Like you, it might have been nothing. Who knows what you witnessed might have been from a sort of
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debunking perspective, might have been some kind of trick of mind. If you and others have hallucinated
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something, it could be some simple explanation, but possibly it was something not of this world.
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And to not do justice to this story from a scientific perspective,
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it seems at best negligence. And so yeah, that's true for journalists. That's true for other
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scientists. It's just a human nature. Yeah. If we, if we can't, if we see something that we can't
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explain, then sometimes if you just, eh, maybe it's just me and you let it go away and you
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don't think about it, you know, maybe it'll just, you know, it's, it's, you ignore it.
link |
The other side is the inquisitive mind that says, well, what was that? And I want to,
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I want to dig more into it. You know, and if you, you, you look at it or you're going against the
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norm, um, you can get ostracized, you know, and if you look at, you know, Einstein's the perfect
link |
example. I mean, when he started coming up with some of his theories, some of the top physicists
link |
in the world were like, dude, you're, you're a nut job. And he's, he's literally proving them,
link |
but he didn't have, you know, he proved them in theory, but he didn't have the means to actually
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do the experiment to prove his theory. There's a great book that I recommend people read called
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Proving Einstein Right by Jim Gates that, uh, talks about like the hard work that people try to do
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years after, uh, to try to experimentally validate the predictions that Einstein made with, uh,
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with his theories. It's fascinating. But yes, at the time it's kind of crazy. What are you saying?
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Yeah. If you look at it back at the time, don't we, we look at it now and go, well,
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the guy was a walking genius and he was, but if you go back in time when he was doing it,
link |
it was like, what are you talking about? You know, and, but one of the challenges is
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your eye witness, one of the challenges is you're essentially an eye witness account.
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Like we don't have good data. We have very limited data of, um, of the incident that you've
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experienced. So let me kind of dig in. Let me just ask some questions of, um, maybe to see if
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there's just to paint more and more of the picture. One, you kind of mentioned the tic tac shape.
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Let's break apart two situations. One is the video. Let's look at the actual eye account,
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the, the eye witness account that you saw with your own eyes. What's the, what can you say about
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the shape of the thing? Is there interesting aspects outside of the tic tac? Like, is there any
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appendages? Is there, um, some texture to it that no smooth white tic tac, you know, we don't,
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you don't see, there's no, no wings, no visible propulsion, no windows, no probes that we could
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see. We don't notice, like I said, we don't see the little things on the bottom of it until we
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see the video in the TV mode when it zoomed in right before it's shortly, you kind of seem to
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zoom in. You don't see it typically on the YouTube stuff that's out there. Um, but remember,
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we're looking at the original tape. So there's not, there's basically no degradation.
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But when you saw with your eyes, there's no kind of appendages.
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What about like somebody asked, a lot of people asked you questions. So, uh, I appreciate you
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spending your time here. Let me ask some of them. Uh, did you, I mean, you chased it. So,
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when you flew close to it, relatively speaking, was there, did you feel any wake, like any,
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did you feel it in any way in terms of your interaction, like aerodynamically?
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No, nothing, nothing. So, uh, another aspect of it, there's an interesting thing you've developed
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to feel for, for objects in the air. Did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival or did it,
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let me ask a few questions around it. So did you, did it feel like the thing was surprised?
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Did it feel like it wanted to be seen almost to show off its capability?
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Did, uh, and did, what did it feel like relative to if you were doing a, um, uh, an air fight
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against, uh, sort of like a, I don't know, a foreign jet?
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So one, I think it, I think it knew we were there when we showed up. It's just, it's me.
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It's kind of like an animal. If you've ever been around deer in a field, you know, the deer will
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look up and if it sees you and you're on the other side of the field, it'll actually go,
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no threat and it'll start eating, you know, they don't put their tail up. As you move closer to
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the deer, then it goes, oh, it's there and I'm going to react or I'm going to move. So as we
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were up high and it's down doing whatever it was doing, um, you know, which I don't know,
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someone asked, what do you think? I don't know, maybe it was communicating with something. I
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joked on good morning America. Maybe it's like talking to the whales, kind of like Star Trek,
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you know, and actually use that clip. It was kind of funny, but yeah, we're a little human
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centric. We think like it would, it'd show up to talk to us, but maybe he's talking to the dolphins.
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Yeah, whatever, you know, because it was hanging around that whitewater and I don't know if it
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was, or something there was a seamount. We just didn't find it again. I don't know.
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But once we started to descend and it actually reoriented its, its longitudinal axis and it
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started mirroring us coming up and it was obviously where we were there and it was really
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coming up just, you know, you figure I'm at 20 and it's coming up and it ends up getting up to 12,
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12, where I cut across the circle. I think it was very aware that we were there because it
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interacted. We call it a two circle fight when you're fighting another airplane. But, you know,
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were we afraid? I don't think so. I mean, and to me, it was more curious.
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You know, the curiosity overcomes any fear that you would have. And I always felt, to be honest,
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if I was inside the airplane, especially as long as much time as I'd spent inside the airplane,
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flying and doing stuff, I felt totally, it was like a safe zone. I mean, I felt totally comfortable
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inside the airplane as most, you can't, if you're in the airplane and you feel scared,
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it's not the job for you. You have to feel that because the airplane is part of you now.
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You know, I am inside. I have the stick. I have the throttles. I've got my wisdom in the back
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seat. He's running all the displays. We are a team. We're in the state of the art airplane,
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you know, brand new. You feel pretty good. And then you get something that, you know,
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can climb from the surface up and then accelerate like it did, like it was like no big deal.
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You know, for an airplane, if you just put me from a standstill, let's just say slow flight,
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just get me at 100 knots above the water. And for me to, you can't just start to climb. I'd
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have to lower the nose. I'd have to accelerate. And then I'd have to start coming up and
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this thing just like, just did it like it was like no big deal.
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Yeah. You mentioned that like kind of your reaction to it was it like it's something
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that you would love to fly almost. So this object, just the curiosity you experience is like,
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like what it almost like, what the heck is that piece of technology and I want to fly it?
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Like what made you feel like it's something that you could fly? Do you think it's something
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that a human could fly? Like in terms of interpreting what you saw as a piece of technology,
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because another perspective on it is it was not that the thing under the water was the key thing.
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And what you were seeing is some kind of projection or something that like,
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I don't think it was a projection. I think it was a real object.
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It was an physical hard object that you could be fly.
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Oh yeah. Yeah. I think all four of us will say the same thing. This was not because you go,
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okay, let's just go on. It's a light projection. Well, if we were both sitting next to each
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other, we were just looking at it from the exact same angle and all that. And I go, okay,
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there's the in theory you could have that. But with an 8,000 foot altitude difference flying,
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you know, and there, you know, she's probably not directly above me. She's kind of hanging out,
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watching this whole thing happen. You know, you're getting two different perspectives from two
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different altitudes over a clear blue. You know, if you've ever been at sea, and I don't mean like
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coast, I mean, like when you get out at sea, the ocean is the bluest. It's incredible.
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You know, you got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean. You got pretty high contrast.
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And for this thing just to disappear, it's wasn't I'm telling you, I would, I mean, I know we
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we all have the same recollection of what happened. You know, there's some details because it's so
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long ago. But for the most part, we know what we saw. And we all came back and looked at each
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other like, what the hell was that? What if I mean, do you think about the thing under the water?
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That's not often talked about. If there's something under the water, couldn't have been something
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gigantic? It could be what like, do you ever see this big ship? That's why as a person,
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so I love like swimming out into the ocean by miles and Olympic swimmers, like,
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I love that feeling, but I'm also terrified when I swim because the abyss, it could anything could
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be under there. I like, there's not enough focus on that, perhaps because there's no visibility.
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But is it, is there anything interesting to say about the possibility that was anything
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underneath there? Could be. I mean, think about it, if you're going to hide on this planet,
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where's, what's the least explored spot on the planet? Two thirds of it's the ocean.
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There's literally, I mean, come on, the Malaysia airplane, the 777, it was the 777 that crashed,
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you know, they turned, they didn't go where they're supposed to and they just disappeared and
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they've been searching for it and they found pieces of it. But you would think there's large
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objects that, you know, when that thing hit the water, depending on how it broke up, there's big
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pieces that would be, you'd find something, they haven't found anything except what floated.
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So to hide something underwater, I think would be easy.
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So, okay, let's go a little bit in speculation land, but it's the best, it's the best we can do,
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which is the basic question of what do you think was it? So if you had to put money on it,
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is it like advanced human creative technology? Is it alien technology? Is it an unknown physical
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phenomena? You know, like ball lightning, for example, there's a lot of fascinating things
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we probably just don't really understand. Is it, like I said, some perception cognition that led
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you some kind of hallucination that made you to misinterpret the things you were seeing?
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Let me put those things on the table. Or is it misinterpretation of some
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known physical phenomena like an ice cloud or something like that? What do you think it was?
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No, it's definitely, I don't think it's an ice cloud because ice clouds don't fly around.
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And react to you. Do I think it was a light? I'd say no, because of the aspects and what we looked
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and watched it do. I'd say no. What do you mean by light?
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Like a light ball, you know, some type of perception, you know, there's their experience,
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like plasma, you can do plasma and you can go, I can see it, but it's really not,
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you know, it's plasma. I don't think so. You would see distortions, I think, as it moved.
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Maybe not. I mean, I'm not a theoretical physicist and some, you know, I'm not an MIT.
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I would say, no, I mean, it looked from all my experience and I had quite a bit of it when
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this happened. No, I think it was a hard object. It was aware that we were there.
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It reacted exactly like if I was another airplane and I had to come up and do something exactly
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what I would do. You know, it mirrored me. It wasn't aggressive. You know, there's taco.
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It flopped behind us. It was never offensive on us. It never did that. It just mirrored us.
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So as we're coming out, it's just like, you know, you're kind of, you know,
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you said you do martial arts, you know, or wrestling, you know, you see people out on the,
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when they get into the ring, especially with collegiate wrestling, because my roommate in
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college was a collegiate wrestler. So I de facto became a wrestler because he beat me up every
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night and we joke. I talked to him literally probably three, four times a week. But, you know,
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you see wrestlers when they get out, they kind of, you're kind of feeling each other as you walk
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on boxers do the same thing. It was doing that same thing. It's like, what's going on as it comes
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around, as it comes around. And then it was like, Hey, we're going to get here. And when I got too
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close to it, you know, it decided I'm out of here. And then it did something that we've never seen.
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The other question is, what if I didn't cut across the circle? What if I just kept going
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around a circle? We just keep going. I could have just watched it. I mean, my one regret out of the
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whole thing is we have a camera in our helmet and the joint helmet. There's a little camera,
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but we never use it because it's nauseating to watch because you've ever put a GoPro on someone's
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head where they're looking around like this all the time, it'll, it'll nauseate you. So we never
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turn that on and all, you know, it's the one thing I didn't do is reach down and hit the switch.
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You know, and then we didn't go back and because our tapes didn't have anything because we didn't
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get it on radar because I tried to lock it up because I can move the radar with my head, but I
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couldn't, it wouldn't lock the radar would lock and so. So then the question is, and this is unanswerable,
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but let's try to get some hints at it. Do you think it's human, like advanced human created
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technology that's simply top secret that we're just not aware of? Or is it not something not of this
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world? So you, if you to ask me in 2004, I just said, I don't know. If you ask me now, so we're
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coming up on 16 years ago for a technology like that, you know, and let's assume that it didn't
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have a conventional propulsion system in it because I don't think it did. I would like to think that
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if we had a technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds from what we normally do,
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then it would start coming out. But to hide something like that for 16 years, you know, and I
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understand, you know, and I don't speak for the United States government and I never will speak
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for the United States government, but I understand how some of that stuff works for classification
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levels and why we classify stuff. You know, is it detrimental to national defense? But there's a
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point where you have to look and go, if we had a technology like this that could literally change the
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way mankind travels, how we get things into space, our ability to do things, you know, you talk about,
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you know, are we going to go to Mars? Well, if you have something that has the ability to go,
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because remember, these things were coming down when the cruise retracted from above 80,000 feet,
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which is space, and they would come down and they would come straight down, they'd hang out at like
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20,000 feet, and then three or four hours later, they'd go back up. We don't have anything that
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can come down, hang out in once, you know, and I'm talking, hold out in a spot. Well, we all know
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there's winds, they're not drifting like a balloon, they're just sitting there. And then they would
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go back up and they tracked up to the, when I talked to the controller, he's like, we've seen up to 10
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of these things. There's other guys and it was raining and all this other, let's just say they
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tracked a groups of these things coming down, hanging out and going up. So it's not just propulsion
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and the way it moves, it's also fuel. It's everything. So the whole, the whole of it indicates
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of a kind of technology that's highly advanced, but you don't think in your sense that you actually
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don't know, but you know more than a lot of people in your sense, the top secret military
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technology, if we think about Skunk Works, if we think about like that,
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cannot be more than 15 years ahead.
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I would say for a leap like that, and a perfect example in modern times is the 117,
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because now a lot of the data on the 117 is out, like it was developed at this time.
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It flew for this long before it was actually acknowledged by the United States government.
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That's the stealth fighter, the original stealth fighter, not the B2, but the stealth fighter.
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So if you look at that, you know, yeah, you can, I think you can hide things for a while,
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but I think a technology, a leap, I mean, this is not a, hey, we developed this and we're kind
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of pushing the edge of technology. This is a giant leap in technology. And the other one is,
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do we have the basis to do that? Because usually when you have a technology like that,
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universities, especially the one you're working at, MIT, a lot of the leading edge stuff is
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coming out of the top tier universities. You know, so you've got MIT, you've got Caltech,
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you've got Stanford, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, I'm just naming schools,
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Naval Postgraduate School is another one. There's usually indicators, there's papers of, hey,
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this is where we're going. I don't think there's a whole bunch of papers on developing a gravity
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based propulsion system that literally I've got an object because how do you, how much power would it
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cost to create a gravity field of your own that could actually be strong enough to counter
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the giant orb that we live on? So by the way, you mentioned gravity based. That's kind of like the
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hypothesizing that people do in terms of propulsion, like what kind of propulsion would have to be
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involved in order to result in that kind of movement. To me, all the gravity discussions just
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seems insane from a physics perspective. But of course, it would seem insane until it's not.
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But because remember, we only know what we know.
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Yeah. And which is very little. And as someone has to think out of the box to go,
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is this possible at all? Yeah. Well, okay, so this, so you're saying that if you had to bet money,
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all your money, it will be something that's alien technology. So it's not human created
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technology. Well, I don't like to get into little green men, but I would say that I don't,
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I don't think we've developed it. I don't have to be little green men, right?
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I don't think we've developed it. I just, you know, because the other one, someone asked me,
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they said, what if there wasn't, maybe it was just a drone, maybe it was a UAV
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that got sent here from someplace else. I mean, we've got stuff out there flying around.
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So I don't, I don't know. I mean, I'd like to sit around and talk to some of the
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giant brains that think this stuff up. I was supposed to be on a podcast with one of them.
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Which topic? Which, you mean the drones for? Just space travel, technology,
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because if you look at where we're going, you know, because everyone talks about Mars.
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Are you okay? And, you know, we're, hey, are we going to be able to colonize, you know,
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and I know Elon is big into that. Yeah, what do you think about,
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what do you think about Elon, SpaceX, NASA? We put humans back up, back up there.
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My theory, so it's funny because I know one of the guys that was, he was one of the original
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employees at SpaceX. He's a friend of mine and I won't say his name, but he knows Elon. He knows
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Elon and he actually worked on the entire Falcon 1 project. He's one of the lead guys on that.
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So he's got some great, as a matter of fact, there's a movie, there's a book coming out
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that comes out in about a year on this, the original, the first years of space, first six
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years of SpaceX, you know, and he's named in the book, you know, and they're supposed to make
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a movie on it. So I'm like, hey, who's going to play it? But what he's done, to me, it changed the
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game and here's why. Because I said, you know, in, I think it was 62 when Eisenhower warned of the
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industrial defense complex, you know, which it has become everything he warned us of,
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you know, it has become. And it's really driven by, there's the big three in defense, which is
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really Northrop, Lockheed, and Boeing. Those are the big, those are your bigs. And Raytheon's kind
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of right, like a subset of that, but Raytheon's pretty big too. But in U.S. defense, those are
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the big guys, right? That's actually where a lot of military guys go and they retire, they
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go do stuff like that. So when you look at that and you go in the way government contracting
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is working and how we charge and, you know, why things cost so much. And then you go, you got
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Elon, who's got an ego, you know, and he doesn't like to do things certain way. And I've talked
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to the guy that worked there on, you know, because the government likes to have oversight of contracts
link |
where he was like, no, just tell me what you want. I'll build it and I'll give you a bill when it's
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done. And then if I do it for half the price, I make a ton of money because he's money driven guy,
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which I like capitalism at its best. So now you look at the two things. So you got the space
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X, which is the dragon capsule, right? And then you've got Boeing. So Elon did what Boeing is
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contracted to do in less time for half the money. And oh, by the way, because he can reuse the
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boosters because they come back and land and you don't have to like Morton Thycall, we've
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reused them on the space shuttle, but they had to take them all apart and do a bunch of stuff
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because they landed in saltwater and then you had to put them all back together where Elon gets
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them down because I was joking with this guy. I go, what do they do? Do they like re rehaul,
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you know, overhaul me because no, actually they clean them up and they can use them again. They're
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reusable systems. Incredible leap in technology that no one thought of, but here's a private company.
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So being able to put people on and the capsule and the space suits, I mean, it's literally like
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sci fi when you watch when they went up. So I'm a huge fan of what he and his company have been
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able to do because, you know, the fact that we were paying huge amounts of money to the Russian
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government, you know, and oh, by the way, if you didn't know, because I have some friends that are
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astronauts, they all have to learn Russian, right? And they have to do, it's what level five where
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the test is a phone call where they call you up and they, you know, because they would go,
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so I went to the pinning and two friends of mine. The one actually had a mission date,
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the one got one later. So it's cool when you're watching your friends doing a space walk, you
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know, because I would pull up because if I knew it was going on, I'd pull up the NASA thing. I was
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in a meeting one day and I've got NASA on and makers out there floating around, you know,
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doing his stuff. And I saw one, he's in the space station while they're doing a space walk. So it's
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kind of cool when you go, oh, yeah, I know that dude, he's up there in space, floating around.
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So when you look at what those, they're capable of doing and then you go, what Elon is bringing to
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the fact that now it's back in America, it's actually, to me, it's cost effective for us to
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be able to do more stuff. I think it opens the door to, do we go back to the moon? Is there a
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reason to go back to the moon? Personally, I think if we're going to, if they're really going to go,
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you know, in years from now, go to Mars, I think that the moon is the stepping stone to go back
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to start proving some of the technology to go, hey, we can build this, we can get on the moon,
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and now we can get back off the moon because we did this on a less than a compact computer in the
link |
60s, which is the whole reason that I flew because I'm obsessed. Matter of fact, I have the giant
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Lego Apollo at home and the Lander and I have one that my dad built me in 1969, right after that.
link |
And Neil Armstrong's an Ohio boy and so am I. Matter of fact, I have a picture of him in a
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car in Wapa Caneta, Ohio at the parade after he walked on the moon because his parents didn't
link |
live far from my aunt and uncle in Wapa Caneta and they were out at the parade. So I've been obsessed
link |
with this since I was a child. Do you hope to, do you think, do you hope that you'll go out to
link |
the space one day? Me, if I had the opportunity, I'd go in a second, you know, I am not. Because
link |
I mean, that's one of the hopes of the commercial spaceflight is that, you know, like people like,
link |
I mean, it would be a tourism, but you certainly wouldn't want to, in terms of, you're not kind
link |
of a civilian, right? I mean, in a sense that you're just a normal person, you're not a fighter
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jet pilot currently, but it seems like if we send a civilian up there would be somebody like you
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in the next like 20 years. I'd be, you know, if Elon wants to throw me all those things,
link |
I'd be all over it. I don't know what my wife would say, but you know, sometimes you gotta,
link |
gotta get your kicks while you're alive. I'd love to hear that discussion with your wife.
link |
Listen, there's the pros and cons. She's, she's, I mean, I've known her since high school. So she,
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yeah, she knows how I am, you know, most people that know me are like, yeah, you're pretty much
link |
the same person you were in high school. You know, I was a class clown and I still am that way.
link |
Okay. So, let me ask you this question about, so I'm talking to Elon again soon. I'm curious
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to get your perspective on it. If I wanted to talk to him about Tic Tac, about these weird
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out there propulsion ideas, which are obviously just like you said, if there's something to it,
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if it can be investigated somehow, it would be extremely useful for us to understand in the
link |
effort of developing propulsion systems that can get us cheaply to out the space. What,
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what should Elon think about this stuff? What should he do? What should people like him?
link |
I think people need to open their aperture up and stay off of, take the next step and go,
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you know, we are tied to fuels and either solid rocket or liquid or whatever we do,
link |
but it's a thrust generated where we rapidly expand gas to create thrust,
link |
which is really in layman's terms, you know, we can get into what, but that's what it does.
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If you have something that you can contain that is a fuel source that would last a significant
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amount of time, you know, those rocket boosters go and when they're done, they're done. There's
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enough to get them back down. That's it. There's not a huge, you know, not coming back and go,
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oh, I still got three quarters of a tank. Let's bolt them on and do it again. His system is not
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doing that. But, you know, the way, the way contracting, especially in the government,
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the government has tons of money, but you got to remember the government has to justify how
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they spend our tax dollars for the most part. There's times where they can hide money in the
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budget to get stuff done. But then when you look at, and I'm just going to throw a few out there,
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but if you look at what Amazon, you know, does with Bezos and you've got Elon,
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there's some, there's some big money out there. I mean, you're talking, you know, Bezos alone
link |
could buy companies like big companies, Apple's another one. These companies had huge, huge
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amounts of money and then just go over to the Gates Foundation and they've got gazillions
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and gazillions of dollars. We've got universities. There's so much money out there. If we really
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wanted to do it, aside from what the government wants to do, because we do live in a free society,
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I think there's enough to go, how do we do this? And because when you work outside of what the
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government would want to do, we're not working on this necessarily for the United States,
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although I am a huge giant. I would never, yeah, I am an American.
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You're talking to somebody born in the Soviet Union. I can't believe you agreed to this.
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But I haven't killed me yet. Yeah, well, you're here. And you've been here for a while.
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No, I'm joking. I'm an American citizen. I'm actually pretty much American.
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But see, when you do that, so you look at, let's just look at American universities.
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Yes. So there's some brilliant minds and we'll just use MIT because you worked down there.
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There's some brilliant minds, but there's a huge chunk of those brilliant minds that are not American
link |
citizens. So if you want to get into government stuff and you are not an American citizen,
link |
it gets really, really, really hard. But if I take money like Bezos money, Elon money,
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and let's just say they want to work together, they can split it up 50, 50, the two of them,
link |
when the technology gets developed. But now I'm not constrained by who has to do the work.
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I just want to make sure that I try and keep it in the United States because
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technology is technology. And if it gets developed and gets over to where
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a country gets ahold of it and then just basically uses it for their own because
link |
you save them all the research time, you don't want to do that. But if we can get to the point
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where we do it on the International Space Station, we realize that space was too expensive
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for one country to do alone. So we made the International Space Station and we have
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conglomerate. It's the one thing that the Russians in the US actually work together on.
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Think about it. That's it. We work together on space because we realize it's way too expensive
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for us to do alone and effective. So we've got this thing that's been out there floating around
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for God now. What is it? Like 20 years that things been up there floating around? So it's
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getting old. We're going to have to replace parts and do stuff. But if we can pool the money together
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and come up with something that would literally change mankind and change travel and allow us to
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actually do a more effective thing of exploring. Because if you develop that technology, you don't
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even have to send a man person. If you can develop a technology that's so with our automation and
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where we're progressing and our computing power to send something out that's not just floating
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around when it can react a lot quicker. Something that could actually go down to the surface and
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come back up. So right now everything we get out of Mars, it goes down there and then it just sends
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data back. Get an analyzer. But if I've got a technology that can go up there really quick,
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I'm not worried about man, I don't have life support systems and all that. But it can go down,
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it can go, it can cruise around, it can hover above, it can take samples, and it can actually
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take Martian soil and then bring it back. So we can analyze it here. That's a game changer.
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It's a complete game changer because it opens up all the planets. Exactly. So in the sense that
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the Tic Tac is a symbol. So whatever you think, even from a debunking perspective,
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there's a nonzero probability that it's alien technology. And in that sense, it serves as a
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beacon of hope and a reason to, like you said, widen the aperture and to invest big amounts of
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money into thinking outside the box. Like it's almost a hope to say we can do better propulsion.
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We can overcome physics in an order of magnitude better way. And it's worthwhile to try.
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I think, and I don't think the money, if you look at a big picture with the amount of money,
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some of that's out there floating around these private companies, you know, I think if you said,
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hey, I've got, let's just say a hundred million dollars, which really a hundred million dollars
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relative to Bezos has got what, a hundred and some billion dollars in that word. So if he said,
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hey, a hundred million dollars, you drop a hundred million dollars and I go, and I'm going to put a,
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you know, like the government will send a broad area announcement out that says, hey,
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we're looking for this technology or a DARPA program. But what if I just said, hey, who's to
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stop Bezos and Elon from doing that on their own to say, hey, I want to go pool universities because
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they have fewer restrictions because it's not tax dollars. They don't have the checks and bounds.
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They can do whatever they want. So they're money. Oh, I'm sorry about that. To go, hey,
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I'm going to put this out and I'm going to get the best physicists that are working at CERN,
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that are at MIT, that are at Caltech at the schools I mentioned. And oh, by the way,
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a few of these guys are propulsion experts. And I'm going to basically, I'm going to fund you guys
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for 10 years. So you get 10 million dollars a year and I'm going to give you your salaries and
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we're going to do that or whatever the amount works. So let's cut it down to five so we can pay
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you well, right? To do the research. But oh, by the way, the research is, it's not classified,
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but it's controlled. So we're not going to publicly just put this out in journals. But if we make a
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leap that we think would advance because although those, let's say there's 10 of them, those 10
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scientists come up with something and they put out a paper, there might be another number 11
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at another university that reads that paper and says, hey, I kind of had this idea. And now you
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can get a thought pool that pushes us in and gets us out of the mindset because we have a tendency to
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we evolve the stuff that we create. But it's like I was joking because I know a ton of guys with
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PhDs and girls. And I said, but you know, how much when a person gets a PhD in like engineering,
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how much new math is really being done? I said, there's a handful of people in the world that
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are really doing, I'm talking, I'm talking Stephen Hawkins type brilliance that is going,
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I'm really doing something that's totally different. That's a big dramatic thing now going on in
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physics that everybody's just, everybody's converged towards this local minima or local
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maximum, whatever you think about it. And it's, it's again, same as with the Tic Tac,
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thinking outside the box is not, is not accepted. And it probably should be.
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But it's hard because if you go back, go back to Einstein, back to the original,
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he was the, he was out of the box. He did not think that he did not thought out of the box and
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came up with some of his theories. Where would we be? Okay, we're jumping around a little bit.
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So we talked a little bit about Elon and Mars and space, but let's let me jump back to a few
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questions that folks had. I have to kind of bring up some debunking stuff, because I think not the
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actual idea, not the actual facts of the debunking, but the nature of the true believers versus the
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debunkers hurts my heart a little bit because people are just talking past each other. But let
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me kind of bring it up. Mick West, I've just recently started to pay attention just in preparing to
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talk to you about this world. And Mick West is one of the better known people who kind of makes a
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career out of trying to debunk sort of he's a, his natural approach to all situations is that of a
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skeptic. I think it's, it's very useful and powerful, especially for me coming from a scientific
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perspective to take the approach he does. It's valuable. And I think no matter what, I think
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there's, I hope that people quote unquote true believers are a little bit more open minded to
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the work of Mick West. I think it's quite useful and brilliant work. So let me ask, he has a bunch
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of videos, a bunch of ideas where he kind of suggests possible other explanations of the
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things that were out there. He has some explanations of the things that you've seen in with the
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tic tac, like with your own eyes, like he says that it's possible that you miscalculated the size
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and the distance of the thing and so on when you were flying on. I don't fight that as a,
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I mean, maybe you can comment on that. Let me do it right now. Sure. So because that comes up,
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like how did you know it was about 40 feet long? I go, okay, so 16 years flying against other
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airplanes, know what stuff looks like, you know, I've looked down on things. So if I know, I know,
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here's the known things. I know when we saw the tic tac, I was at 20,000 feet ish right around there.
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So when I look down, I know what a hornet looks like looking down on them because I've done it
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for all those years. I mean, I got a good idea. So that's why I said 40 feet because it's about
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hornet size. So and as I go around, you get to the point where you have to be able to judge
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distance when we fly out of experience and you can tell if something small or big, you know,
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so I would argue the fact of, you know, pure experience, there's, you know,
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you know, professional observers, which is what we're actually trained to do.
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And having done it for so long, no, it was, and everyone came back with the same thing.
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They're like, yeah, it's about size of hornet. From a human factors perspective,
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how often in your experience of those 16 years, do you find that I, what you see
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is the incorrect state of things. So like, how often do you make mistakes with vision?
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You actually, you make vision issues a lot because you're, and the sad part is your brain
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believes what your eyes see. We are actually trained to do the opposite of that, especially
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when you instrument fly, because your brain and eyes can tell you one thing, but you got to trust
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your instruments. Let's go back to landing at night. So your eyes assume that the runway and
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your brain assumes that the runway is fixed, but you know that the runway is moving. So if I try
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and do stuff visually, I would, you die every time. Well, not every time, but you die close to
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every time trying to land on a boat. So we actually use instruments with your counter
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to your brain. So, and there's actually all kinds of things that we go through in training.
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They have this thing, I think they still use it. It's called the MSD,
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multi spatial disorientation device, or the spin and puke. It looks like a giant
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carousel and you're in these little modules. And when you get out, you think the thing goes
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really fast and they can, you can make yourself think that I'm descending or climbing, but you're
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actually only going around in circles at a very slow rate as fast as a human can talk. But as they
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spin you around in the little sub thing and slow it down and speed it up, your body does this and
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you, you know, and then by visuals of showing you like they can spin it sideways to the outside
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wall, but they can show like lines that are, they can make the line stand still because they're
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moving the same velocity. They can move in the other way and you'll think you're screaming.
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You see it in amusement parks all the time. You do all that because it gives you a sense of
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the A, but you're really not doing, you're sitting there. So we get trained on all that stuff. So if
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you, if you want to look at it and go, well, you're, you're disoriented or this I'd be like,
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I'd argue going, no, I'm not because, you know, when I'm flying the airplane, even as I'm looking
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at the tic tac, I've got a heads up display that tells me what my airplane's doing. So I've got, I
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know what I'm doing. I can look outside. I've got a sense of what I'm doing, but I'm also looking
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inside to cross check of what I'm seeing is in reality what I'm doing. You actually, your brain
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gotten good at combining almost adding extra sensory information. You have to, you have like
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supervision. So you're combining what you're seeing and adjusting what the sensors, what you call
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an instruments are giving you. And that, that in turn is a loop that adjusts the perception system
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that like, that it, that adjusts your brain's interpretation of what you're seeing.
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You'd be amazed at how good. So here's, here's another example. So if we go out over the water,
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so there's no land in sight and we're going to fight. So when we fight, you know,
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two airplanes, we're going to dog fight as an instructor and I was for most of my time,
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you have to come back and you have to recreate it. So we call it drawing arrows. So you have to
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recreate that stuff. So you get pretty good at going, you know, like, I would take off and say,
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right, we're starting heading due East. And I know where the sun is at, because in the short
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couple of minutes that we're going to fight, the sun's really not going to move much. It's going
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to be in a relative zone. I know that the sun is at, you know, let's just say 195 degrees,
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right? So I'm starting going East and it's actually be down off my right hand side.
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So now I know as I'm fighting, because in the water, you don't have any reference like, oh,
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I passed land, I passed land. No, you don't. And you can't use clouds because clouds do move,
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but you got to come back because you go, here's where I started. And then you,
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when, as soon as you end, you go, all right, I ended heading 355. And then you recreate the
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turns and the amount of turns and use the sun relative. So you can create this entire
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battle that went on with arrows so that you can come back and debrief the guy that you were teaching
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on exactly what happened. And you get really, really good at that. So when you come up and go,
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well, Dave, how do you know you were at six o clock? And you went around and he came up here,
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I go, because I'm trained to do all that. And I take all the notes, why I'm flying, you can do
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it. But usually it's, you memorize it all and you get done. And then you read, as soon as you're
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done, you knock it off, you look at the other airplane, you get sent and you start writing
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all your notes down. Yeah. And you're writing it really fast on your cart and you go out with a
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stack of cards and you stick the new one on your knee board card. So you're ready to go. And here's
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the next setup. It's kind of, it's in some way similar to what like at the highest level chess
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players do. I mean, you're, I mean, they, they, they recap the games, but the, the richness
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of the representation that they use in remembering like how the games evolved. It's not like,
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it's much richer than the actual moves. It's like these, a bunch of patterns that are hard to put
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into words, like, like all the richness of thinking they have about the way they game
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evolved. It's more like instinctual from years and years of experience. So they try to put it
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into words, but they really can't. It's, it's just. I understand that. It's because for us,
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if we don't come back with anything, then there's no learning to be had. Cause the whole thing is
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the debrief when we get back and we talk about, that's really where they're learning is. And it's
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the same thing. If you want to go back to chess, you know, when you start off, you try and learn
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because you're remembering what you're doing. If you play against someone, I'm always a big place,
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play with someone better than you. That's how you learn. If you're constantly beating people,
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you're not learning anything. You're just learning that they're not good and you're better. When you,
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when you challenge yourself against someone that is going to, is better than you, you learn. So I
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learned how to fight an airplane with, he's actually one of my best friends. We'll call him
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Tom. I won't give his call sign because I don't, he wasn't. So Tom took me out and taught me how
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to fight because Tom had just left Top Gun. He was the, the, the training officer at Top Gun,
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which so that's the guy, the training officers, the main guy at Top Gun. So Tom was the training
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officer at Top Gun. So Tom, when I learned, cause I had come out of A six and we really don't fight
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because it was a bomber. So I get in F 18s and I want to learn how to fight because it's a whole
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other side of the mission. It's the F and F fighter attack. The F A 18 is fighter attack. So I had
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to learn how to fight. So now I got one of the best fighter pilots in the world who's going to teach
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me how to do it. And he did. And I would do something and then he would go, I'd get to a
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situation where I had never been and then I would go, well, I'm going to do this. And then he would
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destroy me and he would come back and go, here's why you don't do that. And then I would take that
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knowledge and I would put it in my little basket of tricks and over time, cause you don't, no one
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walks out into that world. I don't care how gifted of an aviator and go, I am the man or the woman.
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I am it. No, it's a learning process. And so over all those years, you've gotten good. So I mean,
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so what are the chances that your eyes betrays you when you saw the tic tac?
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The tic tac low zero. Well, I mean, I'm not zero. So 90, I am 99.9%. So 0.1%. My eyes deceive me.
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But remember, if it deceived me, it had to deceive the other four people. So the percentage is even
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lower. Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't find that particular debunking case that you said, but I'm glad you
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put it. You, you said those words out loud. So for me, from my perspective, coming into this world
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and looking at it, I'm a little bit more skeptical. So your eye account, I think is the most fascinating
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story. And that I think that's inspiring to me and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists out
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there. It's on so many levels, just like we said, on the engineering level, that maybe there's
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propulsion systems where we can actually build that can do some crazy, amazing stuff. So it's
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at the very least intriguing and at the best inspiring. I just want to say that. But on the
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video side, it's like, it's the videos for the FLIR video, the GoFast and the Gimbal video,
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they are only interesting to me, to me in the context of your story. Like without that, they're
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kind of low resolution. It's like, it's easier to build a debunking story to be skeptical. So
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that's just where I'm coming from. Maybe you can convince me otherwise. But so to bring up
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Mick West one more time, he looks at the FLIR video and he says that one of the most amazing
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parts of the FLIR video where people haven't seen it is at the end of it, the tic tac
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flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left off the screen off the screen. And what Mick West
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says is that it, you know, Mick West, probably others that the way to explain that is the tracking
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system. Like we said, this vision based tracking simply loses the like the object, the tracking
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loses it. And so it simply allows the object to float off screen because it's no longer tracking
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it. So I find that at least a plausible explanation of that video. Looking at your face, you do not.
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So can you maybe comment to that debunking aspect? Sure, I will. So it's funny how people can
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extrapolate stuff who've never operated the system. No, for sure. And that's like me going,
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because I'm a big Formula One fan, you know, that's like me going, oh my god, Lewis, what were you
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doing? You could have done this with the car and you'd have won the race. You know, and Lewis
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Hamilton right now is defending world champion two times. He's four times, four or five times world
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champion. But that would be pretty stupid of me to try and tell Lewis Hamilton how to drive a car.
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As a matter of fact, anyone driving a Formula One car. So I can't tell you how many times I've
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watched. You gotta remember when we looked at this thing, when Chad came back with the video,
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we sat there and watched it. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I watched it off the original
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tapes going, all right, all right, let's look at this. Because you can look and see where the
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airplane's going. You can see if it's looking left or right. And if you actually watch all that
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stuff, it doesn't do that. It actually, when the vehicle starts to move, the bars, the tracking
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gate starts to open up and the people at Raytheon could probably add to this because they built
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the pod. The tracking gate will start to open up. But the thing, when it leaves so fast off the
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screen, the pod can't move fast enough, it has gimbal rates on how fast that thing can move
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around. Because there's another theory that, oh, the pod's looking forward. When the pod passes
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underneath the airplane, so if I'm looking at you and you pass underneath me as it does this,
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the ball will actually flip around to kind of finish off. And it swaps ends because it has,
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you know, it's a gimbal. It can't just, it's not free floating. But there's a theory on one of
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them, oh, it's here and it flipped over. It doesn't do that when it's looking out in front. It stays
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like this. So yet another debunker who doesn't know this. So, you know, and Mick has had several
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theories on some of the other videos, like one of them, the GoFats as a bird and Jeremy Corbell
link |
actually did a nice job of saying, no, it's not because he's on black hot. So the white object
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is actually colder than the ocean. That's fine. Well, birds aren't colder than the ocean. They'd
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be dead. So the gimbal video to comment on the amazing aspect of that video is the rotation,
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the apparent rotation of the object that is something that is not possible to do with systems
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that we know of. And Mick West suggests that a flare like reflections or whatever can explain.
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No, because what Mick West doesn't see is so when they take, because I've talked to the,
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one of them actually I work with. So I know him, I know I talk to him all the time. So,
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and it's his best friend actually shot the video, one of his best friends for the
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gimbal video, the gimbal video, both of them, the GoFats and the gimbal were shot by the same
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person. Yeah. Okay. So, and they were in each other's wedding. So that's how well they know each
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other. Okay. So what you don't see is so the airplanes, they're flying still super hornets,
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but they have the APG 79, which is the new phased array radar that's made by Raytheon,
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things incredible. Okay. It doesn't, usually if it's, if it's out there and it sees it, it's real.
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So at first they thought they were ghost tracks when they started seeing stuff and then they
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actually threw one of the targeting pods out there. Well, the targeting pod, there's heat
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signature and you go, Hey, dot heat signature, something's there. It's real. It's not,
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you're not picking up some extraneous things. So what you see in the gimbal video of the thing
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and it rotates and you go, Holy shit, look at that thing. It's just sitting there and it's in
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the wind and it's going against the wind. Why it's doing this, you know, someone goes, Oh,
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it's an airplane. No, if an airplane does this, it's eventually going to start to change aspect
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because it's in a turn. This thing doesn't change aspect. It just rotates. It's just rotating.
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Right. The other thing that you see when you talk to them is, so they're on their radar,
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there's an object that they identify as their number one priority or their launch and steering.
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So when they designate that, that's where the targeting pods going to look. That's what you
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get in the gimbal video. There's five other, I think it's five. They're kind of in a V, you know,
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like a geese would fly that are out in front of it and they're actually coming, they're out in
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front of it and they actually turn on the radar and go the other way while they're filming the
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gimbal video, which I know Ryan has come out and talked about it. But when you see it, you go,
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you know, if you take it in context because you go, Oh, it's just the video. Well, if you take
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the video with a radar going, no, there's actually other things out there because there's at least
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60 people that have seen these things on radar off the vacapes. It was, it actually became,
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I called a buddy of mine who was running the wing at the time, the fighter wing.
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I said, dude, what are you guys doing about this? He goes, well, we got to note him out,
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which is a notice to airmen, which means there's these objects out there in the warning area.
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So anyone can, you can fly a Cessna through the warning area. It's all the warning area tells
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you is that there's high military traffic and training out here. It's probably best not to be
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here, but there's nothing that prohibits you from going in there. So these things have the right
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wherever they're from or whatever they are, you know, cause people are like, oh, they're balloons.
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Well, balloons float. Balloons don't sit in 70 knots of wind and stay in the same location.
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They had an airplane because there was two, there's the gimbal thing. That's a pretty big object.
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There's also, they talk about, it looks like a cube that's inside of a sphere.
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A translucent sphere. What the hell is that? And they almost hit one.
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It's almost hit them. So that's another, that's one of the biggest,
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another biggest account is like almost hit a plane, something that appeared to be a cube in a
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translucent sphere. What do you make of that? Again, you know, what, what, I mean, that, that's,
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that's the most dangerous. You're right. The biggest frustration is when you do that and you go,
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okay, so this thing passed between two airplanes and it was, I think it was like 100 feet or
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something like that of the airplane and almost hit it. So what they do is they come back and go,
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hey, I had a near midair. What'd you have a near midair with? Now this floating beach ball with
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this cube inside of it and you go, huh? So they send out a no tam again and they, they do a,
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what's called a hazard report that says, hey, there's these objects out there. We almost hit one
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here and that gets sent off to the Naval Safety Center. What was done? I mean, what are you going
link |
to do? Can you catch one, go out with a giant net and try and bag one? You don't know because
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they've seen them. They've picked them up like hovering on radar and then all of a sudden they're
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traveling at really high rates of speed. So, you know, what are you going to do?
link |
Well, and that, let me ask this because this is what people kind of think about.
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After you witnessed Tic Tac and after this, these incidents, as far as we know, with the gimbal and
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the Go Fast, it seems like people in the military did not, did not react like what, like did not
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freak out. It almost like was like a mundane event. How do you explain that? Why didn't the people on
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the ship not, the higher ups, why wasn't there a big freak out? Or as some people suggest,
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the higher ups knew about it all along and just were not letting everyone know that there's some
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kind of secret military, you know, like tests almost. So let's talk about, so let's say you've
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got this cool new toy. You call it a cool new toy. You typically don't take your cool new toy out
link |
into an area where the cool new toy could get damaged or what if the airplane would have actually
link |
hit your cool new toy and you got two people that are ejecting or dead and you got a, you know,
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$80 million airplane that's now in the bottom of the Atlantic. You know, tests are normally done
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in controlled environments. It's like any test, a lab test or whatever. When you take things out
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into the real world, you know, you're still going to test it in an area where something goes wrong.
link |
So when they started and we'll go back to Elon, so my friend that worked there, they had a rocket
link |
go off. They were out in quadruple and when the rocket went up, a fuel line ruptured in the rocket
link |
and it ran out of fuel before it got all the way up and it came falling back down. Well,
link |
when you're out on an atoll in the Pacific, if it's going up above you, the worst case is going
link |
to land on you. So you're worried about where else is it going to land and it actually crashed
link |
next to the atoll and, you know, Elon wasn't happy and threw this guy under the bus. So
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that's a test environment because you don't know what's going to happen. So because someone said,
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well, when we chase the TicTac, well, it could have been some secret government thing. Well,
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secret government things typically just don't come out and test to where there's unknowing
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pilots. We can't control a lot of things. You're exactly right. So you go, you know, it's, you
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know, it's not the Dr. Evil scientist that's going to throw shit out there to get, there's
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reasons that we do it because a lot of stuff, especially when you get to, there's, there's,
link |
you build something in theory, you model it, you go, hey, this is, it looks like it's going to work,
link |
you get funding, you build it, you test it some more, you bench test it, you know, you, like an
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airplane with digital flight controls before it even leaves the ground, they've got things over
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the pedostatic system that are changing the, what the airplane thinks is the airspeed talking to it,
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and it's probably up on jacks so the gear up. So it doesn't, it thinks it's flying. It doesn't know.
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It's sitting on jack stands and they're just changing the pressure on the pedostatic system
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so they can actually make the flight controls move and they can get all the data back to go,
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hey, it looks like it's going to work. And then there's wind, there's a bunch of stuff that they
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do. That's a control environment which you can do the testing. Yeah. Throwing shit out in the middle
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of where people are doing exercises is the most preposterous thing that I've heard. Is it possible?
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Yes. Is it more really, is it, is it, is it, it's more likely, it's more likely they're not doing
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that. Yeah. Then the other, the other side of that question is why do you think people on the
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Nimitz and in the US government in general not freak out more at the incredible thing that you've
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seen? Freak out in the positive way, freak out in the negative way. Like what are the Russians
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up to again? Or, or more like what is this? Like more turmoil. So if you were to put a Chinese flag
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on the side of it or a Russian flag on the side of it and I said, yeah, it had a big Russian flag
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on the side of it, dude, then it would have got a lot of attention. It would have went high order.
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Yeah. Right. If it was, you don't have to say Russia or China. Just say, if there was another
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country's emblem on the side of this thing that we saw and said, oh, it belonged to them, then
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it's a big deal. So here's what's going on. So we're literally in the middle of workups and it
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was a joint workup. Normally they, we go out for a month, go come back, do stuff, go out for a month.
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This was a two month at sea period where we actually had to beg for them to let us when the
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ship pulled in at Thanksgiving so we could run home up to the Central Valley, have Thanksgiving
link |
with our family and then run back down and do this. Okay. So, you know, and I had just taken over,
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I had had the squadron for a month. Right. So I'm a brand new CEO. I'm the most junior guy on the,
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as far as a commanding officer goes for time in the Navy. And actually at the time,
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I think it was the most junior CEO for O5 command in the Navy. Right. So you go, okay,
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so I'm out here. I got my squadron. I'm running it. I see this thing. You know, we catch shit for it.
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I have a squadron to run. I have the, the, the, the tic tac was over here. And although an extra
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ordinary event, I have 17 aircrew and 300 sailors that I'm responsible for. Right. Their wellbeing,
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making sure they're fed, making sure they're happy, they're birthing, you know, and I'm working with
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my master chief and I'm working with my exo snap. And, and we're going through all this stuff.
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I don't have a lot of time to worry about the tic tac. Yeah. If people need to talk to me,
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so you got to remember, you got the captain of the ship, you got the airplane commander,
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and you got the admiral, those are the top three. And you got the CEO of the, the Princeton, who is
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a major command guy. And that's really your big major command. And then everything else is you
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got all the squadrons, which are O5 command, and you got the small boys that are out there,
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which is O5 command. So in the hierarchy, as far as rank and responsibility of what's going on,
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I'm pretty much in the top 20 with all my peers. And then I've got obviously the captain,
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in the admiral, right. And then he's got some post command guys on his staff that we were
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friends with. You're responsible for a lot of things. Yes. Oh yeah. This schedule. Yeah.
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There's missions. You have to do a lot, get the job done. And there's no time for silly things.
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That's exactly right. So, and we're the, we're the integration, you know, when a, when a battle
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group deploys, especially when you go to the Middle East for what we were doing, the air power is
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the key. It's we take our airport with us, we can park it anywhere we want, and we can do what we
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need to do. So we're kind of key players. So when you get the theory that, oh, all these men in
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suits showed up. So the captain of the ship never said anything to me, the admiral never saying
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to me, the people on his staff that I was friends with never saying to me, the other COs that I
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talked to you on a daily basis never said anything to me. And no one ever came and talked to me,
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and I'm the guy that chased it. So in all the theories and all the debunkers and all the stories,
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because I don't know if people think they're going to get rich on this, because I made a big
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donut on this. I can tell you what I got paid for. I got paid to go out and spend 21 hours of my day
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going to LA and do a five minute talk for someone. And I'm like, and it wasn't for the talk because
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I'll talk for free because you're not paying me. I said, I said, and then I got paid to go to the
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McMinnville Fest because they, my wife and I got to go because it was just look like fun because
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the whole town gets involved. And it's the only time I've ever spoken publicly in front of a
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large audience about this because it was just, you know, it was fun. And I got asked and Jeremy
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and George Nappen went the year before. So I went with Bob Lazar. So I got to hang out with Bob and
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his wife and his wife and my wife. And, you know, we all hung out kind of, you know, talking not
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about UFO stuff, but just getting to know each other as people because, you know, Bob's like me,
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the stuff that he talks about is not the center of his life. If anything, it ruined his life.
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Yeah. You know, he's just a really, really smart guy that's just like the rest of us trying to get
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through life. Yeah. That's nevertheless, I mean, that was one of the sad things reading
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Louis Elizondo's resignation note from his, he was a program director at the ATIP program.
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One of the sad things is that he mentioned that, you know, people in government just don't take
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this seriously as a threat, like UFOs as a threat. Like you said, if it doesn't have a Russian label
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on it, it's a, it's a sad thing to think about that, that we have such a busy schedule that the
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anomaly, it doesn't, is a distraction that we don't want to deal with. And it kind of just
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fades into history. Like literally, it's kind of sad to think that if aliens showed up,
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like, and it just didn't, because they're not like, when aliens show up, they're not going to
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be a thing that's on the schedule. And if they don't start killing people, they just kind of show up
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in some very nonchalant, peaceful way, briefly, people would be like, that's, that's, that's,
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I don't have time for this. That's so sad. That's so sad.
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It's like anywhere in the world. So, you know, go back, let's go back way back,
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way back in the time machine, you know, there were people kind of scattered around the globe,
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you know, in Europe's a perfect example. Why does France speak French? And then right next to them,
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Spanish, you know, Spain speaks Spanish, and then you'd kind of jump over in Germans or German and
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the Polish people, everyone speaks a different language, because if you look at the way the
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train kind of subdivided the original people that were there, you know, thousands of years ago,
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they speak differently, right? You'd be like the US, but see, the US is different. We all speak
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English, because what happened? We came over and we started on the East Coast, and we migrated
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West. We won't get into the, you know, what happened. And, you know, because the Native Americans
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all spoke different languages. You know, it's that same type of thing. So, but anytime we have a
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tendency to show up, you're, you're actually, you think about, you're an alien. If I go to a
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different area, if I just, you know, go back 500 years where, you know, or a thousand years where
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travel, we weren't traveling across oceans at the time. We're, well, we don't think we were. The
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Vikings probably were, because we had limited, you know, we had to have supplies and the boats
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weren't as big. We had to build them by hand. We didn't have power tools and all that stuff. So,
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you know, if you show up someplace, like when the conquistadors from Spain came over into South
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America and you've got, you know, the natives, you're actually an alien, you know, and then you
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look at what typically happens when aliens show up in, in a human alien world, you know, and when
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I say alien, I mean, you are not from that area. The other, we, we take what we want. And that's
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what happened. I mean, we literally defuncted civilizations because that's how we are. You
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know, humans are, we're an interesting group. So, you go, now what, what if something is from
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someplace else? Just, let's just, let's just go off the grid and go ask, let's say there are
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little green men. What are their intent? Guy, Lou asked me this when we were talking to Lou
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Elizondo and he said, what do you think they were here for? I said, I don't know. He goes, what,
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I go, oh, they were observing. They'd come down, they'd hang out and he goes, well, what if they
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were prepping the battlefield? What if they were observing to figure out what we do? And you go,
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that's interesting. The other theory is maybe there's a more advanced civilization out here and
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they just check in on us because the threat to an advanced civilization is when a civilization
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that's inferior to them actually develops enough and fast enough to become equal or above,
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because now these, they become the threatened type. So, you watch us grow until we start getting too
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much. You know, it's kind of like you go, well, because they always have a tendency to hang out
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around nuclear, right? And you go, well, you know, they're, if this is an advanced civilization,
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I'm going to go science fiction kind of comical. They come down and watch us and go, look at the,
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the crazy upright monkeys now have developed the atom bomb. Let's hope they don't destroy
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themselves. Yeah. If I was an alien civilization, I would start paying attention with the atom bomb.
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That's why the, I mean, there's certainly an uptick of what is it, UFO sightings since,
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since the nuclear. Since the nuclear. Yeah. That's, you go, hmm. Let me ask a little bit
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out there question. Maybe it's speculation, but maybe touching on Roswell. Do you think it's
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possible that there is out of this world aircraft or beings that are in the possession of one of
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the governments on this earth, like the US government? Is it possible? So the one perspective
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of that, if it's possible, is it possible to keep a secret like that? I would say this,
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I think it's very, it's highly possible. Because if you go, if you just look at all the sightings
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and let's go, just look at Project Bluebook, go, it was what, you have to forget how many
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thousands of sightings and there's a percentage, it's like 10 or 15% of them, they still can't
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explain. Like our tic tac is one of them. The, you know, they basically, the government has
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come out and said, we don't know what that was. Okay. So, so if you go, okay, of that 15% that
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we don't know and all these thousands are still that 15% makes up a pretty big number,
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what are the chances that not one of them crashed somewhere on the globe and was recovered?
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And I don't care if it's an intact system or you got pieces of it of a metal that we can't explain
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or some, some biological matter, to say the least. It could be intact or it couldn't, but
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the, the odds of that now are starting to go down that, you know, that could never happen. And I'm
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not talking just the United States. I'm talking the globally. So is there a chance that a foreign
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government actually possesses or our government or someone in the, in the world on the globe of
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the seven plus billion people has something that is not from this world. And I'm not talking
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to meteor, but something that was manufactured in some way that allowed transport or observation.
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Could be a drone, could be a foreign drone, you know, like Voyager flies around and does all
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that stuff. And we got stuff that just went past Pluto that's out in the Kuiper Belt. You know,
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there's, there's stuff out there floating around. And what about ours? It's going to crash into
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Jupiter eventually or whatever, because we've had stuff crash into planets. So if that's the case,
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you would think something is out there that we have something that we can't explain. And,
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and according to Lou, there's stuff that we can't explain. You know, and I would assume that Lou,
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who ran ATIP has, has seen stuff that he can't openly talk about because, you know, because I
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had a clearance. When you have a clearance, you were, you sign your name, you're bound to that.
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And to me, that's an important oath that you hold to, you know, and this is kind of where,
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you know, people have issues with Bob. So if, you know, and I leave it to you to determine if you
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believe Bob or not, I'll tell you, Bob is a straightforward, very sane, normal, super smart
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guy. Bob was our, yeah. Yes. There is the other side that says, well, should he have come out
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and talked, you know, to those who will clearance who, you know, are true to the government, you
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would say he should have never spoke. He, he was under an oath to not say anything, but he did.
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If you ask Bob, why did you say something? His, his answer was, I understand there's an oath,
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but I felt that the technology could benefit all of mankind and it shouldn't be locked away.
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And I'll leave it, if you believe Bob, that's, that's kind of what Bob says.
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And that, that's such a interesting key point. If there is aircraft, a technology that's in the
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possession of the, say the US government, should they make that publicly known? This is this note
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in question. This is the question of like, do we release stuff that can potentially change the
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nature of human civilization? Like the, the way we, the way we think about our place in the world,
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also the, if that technology is potentially useful for military applications, the nature of
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military conflict, should we release that information or not? If you were the government?
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So here, well, here's exactly how. So for, for classified information, the government is the
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people that classify it. So I can't go, I can't look at something and go, oh my God, this avion
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bottle is now top secret. I can't, I don't have the authority, the ability or anyone to do that.
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That, that's up to the government. And I agree with that because I worked for the government
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for 24 years in my life. So I understand that. But now you go, there's reason stuff is classified.
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Okay. And it has to do with, sometimes information is classified by how it was obtained.
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It's just like the mob. If I have a spy and I'm a mobster and you're the counter mobster,
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but I have a guy on the inside that's feeding me information, I can't do it. And a perfect example
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is if you've ever seen the, it's the Tom Cruise movie, what is it, Air America or whatever,
link |
but he, he plays the guy in Louisiana who was hauling drugs for Pablo Escobar. And he ended
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up getting a cargo plane and the government, the CIA was kind of funding him to do stuff.
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That's how he got hooked up with Pablo, but they put cameras on his airplane. And when
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Reagan had come out and said, here's pictures, we have proof that they're running these drugs,
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it didn't take Pablo long to figure out those pictures were taken from inside of the plane
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of this guy he had been working with. And that guy ends up dead. Does that make sense?
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So you classify to protect the source, you classify to protect the technology,
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because if the technology would get out, it could be grave damage or there's levels,
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depending on if it's a secret or top secret. There are levels of damage that can be done
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to the US government and our well being as a country. And we owe it to this because we're
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all Americans. You know, to me, no matter what some people will say, even into this country,
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this is the greatest country on the planet. This is the only country that you have the
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ability to do what you want to do. It's just don't be lazy. And I have stories of people
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that came over here and started with nothing. And they're, they're living the American dream.
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And they'll tell you, and they didn't get it because of, you know, like you, you came over here
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from Russia, you get no minority status or anything else, you get, you're a white,
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Anglo Saxton Protestant, whatever your religion, but you come over here. I kind of knew that from
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the last one. But you come over here, you basically have made yourself. You're educated,
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you're working at literally the top research university in the world, to be honest.
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I can do whatever the hell I can create with a bit of, with a lot of hard work, I can do quite
link |
And no one gave it to you. So I mean, and I, I'm a believer that like, I mean, we are a community.
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So like, there is a social aspect to it, but the freedom and the American dream is a real thing.
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And this is this, I, you know, I joke about being Russian, but I, I'm an American and this is,
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I do believe the greatest country on earth. So there's a reason the nationalist pride,
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the pride in your nation is a powerful thing. And around that, this secrecy holds value.
link |
But to me, alien technology is bigger than that. I mean, it's, it's not so much a threat as a,
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you're holding back something that could inspire the world, like a human knowledge.
link |
So let's talk in theory. So I'm going to go back to Bob, because I've talked to Bob.
link |
So Bob is a propulsion guy. Right. Right. Bob has a bicycle with a rocket motor. He built the rocket car,
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you know, so he did that. So if you are trying to figure out a propulsion system,
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let's just say this is, I'm just talking, this is Dave's theory. I am, I own, I have,
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I have custody of this thing from a technology that I don't understand. And I know it's a
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propulsion system. So now I got to figure it out. Right. So who are you going to go to?
link |
Right. You go find someone. So you go, wait, here's a guy who at the time was working at
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Los Alamos, which they have proven, who is big into propulsion. He designs all this. He builds a
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shit in his garage. Hey, he's super smart. Why don't we bring him in? So you hire him on a
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contract and you go, Hey, we're going to brief you into a program and he goes and works on
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wherever he says he worked. You know, that's not important, but you get access to the technology
link |
to try and figure it out. And then you go, well, you know, Bob comes out and says, you know,
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I, we're figuring out these things, but there's a part where our technology isn't advanced enough
link |
for us to figure the whole thing out. So then, you know, and let's just say Bob doesn't come out
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and tell anyone, he works on it until he gets to the point where he's stagnated. He's at a,
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he's at a wall. You go, I can't do it. So sometimes the best thing is to bring in a
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fresh mind. So you go find someone else who's in a propulsion, you bring him in, they work,
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they can't figure it out, or they get to the point where kind of back to the Einstein theory
link |
where, Hey, I've got all these theories on how it works, but we don't have the technology. We
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haven't advanced enough to actually do what we need to do. We still have to advance technology
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more. So then what do you do? You shelf it. You go, Hey, good projects over and the contract,
link |
you shelf it, and you wait another 10 years. And you wait another 10 years until technology and
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our abilities and our research advances more. And then you go find new people to bring in that
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are experts in that field and go, Hey, we want you to work on this thing. And here's what we
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know about it so far. Or you don't tell them anything. Cause you, cause remember, if you were,
link |
if you reveal someone else's research, you can taint their beliefs, they'll start to sway in
link |
that direction. So you go, I'm not going to tell you anything. I'm going to give you this thing.
link |
And now you tell me what you think. And as they progress, if they get stuck on a problem that
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may be Bob and someone else solved earlier, you can go, Hey, what about this? You don't have to
link |
tell them where it came from. What about this? And now they can leapfrog and they get another
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two steps closer to the final answer. And then we get stuck by our evolution of technology.
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Do you shelve it again? Do you think that's the right way to do it? Because it's heartbreaking.
link |
Listen, I love government, but we just had this discussion about Elon and so on. The alternative
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approach is to release this to the world and say there's a mystery here. And then the Elon's of
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the world that Jeff Bezos, we talked about money, but it's also not just money. It's like
link |
this engine that's within, we talked about the American dream to say, I'm going to be the one
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that cracks this mystery open. And like that's within a lot of us. And like money aside, people
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in their garage just will. But you're thinking like a scientist. Now let me shift to, let me
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think like a country. So we have country A, B and C. And you can look at the nuclear arms race. So
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we know that Germany was really close. We know that Russia was getting pretty close. We just won
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the race and we were the first ones with it. And still to this day. And Germany could have won.
link |
They could have won. They could have won, but someone was smart enough to not finish the equation
link |
when they knew they had the answer is literally what it comes down to. Someone was smart enough
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to realize that that got into the hands of the Nazis, that it would be the end. And that's
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a tough call to do that knowing that you have the answer and you can't solve the problem because
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it will go into the wrong hand. And that's kind of the fear when you look at this, you go,
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okay, so if we do this, if we put it out there, we've got this technology. If we don't work on it,
link |
kind of international space station, like we're all going to work on it together,
link |
you know, like Antarctica is really supposed to be treaty free for many weapons or anything
link |
more. We've got the international thing down there. We're all going to work together. If you
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did it in the confines of that and you could control the flow in and out, because what you
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don't want is the someone stealing information and getting it back to where, and countries
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are notorious to do this. Hey, we're doing it internationally, but we're secretly doing it
link |
ourselves to see who can come up with the solution first. That's the problem, because we have this
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inherent thing of power and technology like that is power. It would literally change the game of the
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way the world operates. And from not just a transportation or mankind, but from a military
link |
aspect, it's got huge, huge. Yeah, so beautifully presented. And I feel like there's a tension
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between those two places, the scientists view of the world and the national security view of the
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world. Let me get to this kind of interesting point, which is a lot of conspiracy theorists kind
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of paint a picture of government as an exceptionally, as a hierarchical system that's exceptionally
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competent and good at hiding secrets. And then, I mean, I tend to not subscribe to almost any
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conspiracy theory to the degree at least that the conspiracy theorists do, but there does seem to be,
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and I tend to think of government as unfortunately incompetent, at least the bureaucracy,
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it seems that the communication like the three videos that were released and just the way
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of DOD in general talks about the things we've been talking about, it's just confused. There's
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contradictory. It's not inspiring. It's, it's suspicious. It's just not even the way they
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released the videos, you know, the tic tac, if presented correctly, could just inspire a generation
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of scientists. It's like, you know, us going to the moon, it's inspiring. I mean, it's incredible,
link |
and the way it was released, it was suspicious. It was like low resolution video on a crappy website,
link |
like with some crappy documents. And I mean, why, I don't know how to ask this question, but can
link |
government do better? Why are they doing it this way in terms of communicating the things they do
link |
know to the public? Because I don't think they know how. Especially in this topic, it's been
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hidden for so many years. And I don't think, because I don't buy off on the conspiracy stuff,
link |
I just think that, you know, when it comes in, like I said, you know, the government has a right
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to classify stuff, they classify everything because they don't know. You have something,
link |
you don't know what it is, you don't know. So we just go, well, it must be top secret,
link |
and let's put it in a vault. You know, it's kind of like the Indiana Jones where they take the
link |
Ark and they put it in the, it's in the giant army warehouse. You know, we don't even know what we
link |
have. So, but I also believe that, you know, and I'll say this openly, I don't think that the American
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people need to know everything. I think there's a reason that stuff is classified for the protection
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of this country. And I totally believe in that. So, you know, I was joking with Joe when he was
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talking about the Storm Area 51 stuff. Yeah, that's probably the worst idea you could possibly have
link |
is to just storm a military installation. It's just stupid. There are reasons, there are reasons
link |
that we have things that we don't just let out to the public because if we do, as soon as you do,
link |
let someone know that you have something, they immediately try to counter it. And perfect example,
link |
the US in the 60s developed a bomber. It was a Mach 3 compression lift bomber called the XB70.
link |
Okay, there was three of them built, three of them ever built. It was a like 60,000 foot high,
link |
you know, Mach 3, maybe it was an incredible airplane when you see it. And there's actually
link |
the last one remaining is in Dayton, Ohio at the museum. You know, it would go, the wingtips
link |
would fold on, it looks like a Concorde, but it's way faster. When that got out that we were
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developing it, the Soviet Union developed the MiG 25, literally a high altitude interceptor to
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counter that bomber. And they built an entire fleet of MiG 25s, right? We built three XB70s
link |
and we scrapped the program, right? Because now you go, well, it's, the technology is cool, we
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proved it, but now it becomes obsolete. So it's not even worth building a whole fleet of these
link |
things. You know, it's constant, it's a chess game. We do something, they do something, we do
link |
something, they do something, and it's, we do something, and then they counter it. They got
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to, it's, you got to figure out how to defeat it. So you go, oh, we'll build something. So the more
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we keep quiet, especially from a defense standpoint, the better. We actually, I personally, I think we
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talk too much. And I think the military and the DoD is starting to see that, you know, we're too
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open, you know, you announce, hey, we're building this because there's a budget line and we live
link |
in a free society. But you don't have to release all the specs. And you don't have to put everything
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in open source. But that's a problem when we go to the universities. If we want to go do work with
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MIT, and you want to partner with MIT and your defense company, and you want to partner, you
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know, you guys have a rule that if you create it, then it can be open source because the university
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owns it. And we are an institution of learning, where the defense side might go, we don't, we
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don't really want that published in a paper in Scientific America.
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It's so hard to break it. I talked to CTO of Lockheed, Kiko Jackson, and just, just concords. The
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some of the best, if not the best engineering and science, but engineering really ever is done
link |
in secrecy. And it sucks, because it's so inspiring, and they can't talk about it.
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It is, but some of it's due to funding. The US government has deep pockets.
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You know, some of this new technology that you developed for an open source and lesson,
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this goes back to the original conversation. We now, there's enough money in the private sector
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that individuals control. Bezos, I'm not talking Amazon. I'm talking Jeff Bezos.
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It's single individual.
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It's worth over $100 billion. He has the ability to do stuff. I'll tell you what,
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the Gates Foundation, with between Bill Gates and his wife and Warren Buffett and some of the
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other money, because I think Bezos's ex wife actually donated a huge chunk of her half into
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the Gates Foundation. So, I mean, what's the Gates Foundation worth these days?
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You know, if, and these are guys, you know, brilliant, brilliant. I mean, some of the
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greatest minds that we have to go, what are they doing? Because they have the ability,
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it's a nonprofit. They can go, hey, I want to fund this. I want to fund this research.
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They can look beyond the conflict between nations.
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You can look beyond the conflict of having to have, you know, classification. You could do
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what you want. You know, it's just like, you know, we classify how to do, you know, the whole
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nuclear, you know, how to create a critical mass, right? But there's really smart high school kids
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that have figured it out mathematically and they do their science projects and then the government
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comes in and says, hey, we got to classify your government because we just don't want this out
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in the public domain, which I understand. But they never stopped them from free thought and
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developing that. It's just, we really don't want this out there. Okay, so I understand that.
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I totally understand that. But if they, you know, if Bill and Melinda want to do this and go, hey,
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we want to do this and they're going to work with Bezos and they're going to work with Elon and we're
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going to, you think about it, there's a significant amount of money that could be available to R&D
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and I'm not talking just science like this. I'm talking medical research and all this.
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But then you go, well, who gets it? Because now you're competing against the companies that actually
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do it. And you go, is that, well, are they the greatest minds? I'd say, you know, we have a tendency
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to go, these are the best that we have. And I'd say, well, no, that's the best that we know we have.
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But there's probably people out there that don't want to work. There's brilliant minds that don't
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want to do anything with the fence because they just disagree with what it does. So they go do
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another path. They could do something else. And in the sense that the Elon's of the world that
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Jeff Bezos actually, in a certain sense, much better than DOD at finding the brilliant weird
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minds out there. Because they're not tied to the government. So when you work a government contract,
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the government writes, they tell you what they want and then they work with you on the requirements
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and they usually have an end in mean, you know, they have an idea that this is what I want it to be
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where if you go to like SpaceX, where, you know, they come up with, why don't we just
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land these things on a pad and reuse them? Yeah. Well, if the government scientists,
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if you're on a government contract says, no, that's not the requirements, we're not paying for that,
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we want you to do this, you're kind of controlled. Or when Elon does it, his company,
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they can do whatever the hell they want to do because they have no bounds. The only bounds they
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have is the liability if it doesn't work and it lands on something. So what do you do? You go out
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to Quadrillion and you test it. And if it crashes and it lands in the ocean, hey, we cleaned it up,
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no big deal, we lost some money, but we'll move on. It's, you know, money makes the world go
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around contrary to what everyone thinks. But, you know, there's a lot of money that's sitting
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around that you can do a lot of really cool stuff with. And I don't know. I mean, I'll guarantee
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that, what is it, Blue Origin? Isn't that Amazon? You know, that they're doing some cool stuff because
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they have funny. And I joke with the guy I know that worked at SpaceX and he was funny because
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they were building the first test thing and they were limited and Elon found this like 400 acre
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thing, I think it's about 400 acres down by Waco, Texas. And he's like, I go, how he goes, he goes,
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dude, I worked, he goes, I worked with, he goes, because he's done government contract. He goes,
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there's government contract and then there's working at SpaceX with Elon money. And that's
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what he refers to it as is Elon money where it was like, don't I'll throw them and he would throw
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the money at it and make it happen. And it's, I'm talking this fast. I mean, he talks about,
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he has a great story about this. I mean, this is Elon, but this is how fast you can do in the
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private sector vice the government where there's the bureaucracy is they had a company that was a,
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basically a tool and dye machine shop that did a lot of their high precision parts for the rockets.
link |
They had went to the guy, but he had contracts with other companies. And when the economy was down,
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the guy was actually looking at going out of business. So the guy, I know, he's telling me the
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story. He was talking to the guy, he had to go over there and get something. And he's like, holy
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shit, he goes, hang on. So he calls up on the phone, SpaceX. He says, Hey, is Elon there?
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Can you get him in the boardroom? We'll be there in 20 minutes. So he grabs this guy who's literally
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going to fold his company. They go over to SpaceX and I may be getting some of this wrong if people
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are going to fact check me, but this is pretty close. They go in the boardroom and he said literally
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within like, you know, an hour or two, Elon has bought the guy's company. That guy is now a senior
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VP running his company. And they're going to pull all the stuff into the SpaceX thing so they can
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actually build the parts and they can still contract out to make the money outside. And it
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happened like that fast. And it's not just money. It's because I've seen, I've witnessed it too
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with Elon. I think it's whatever the, whatever the forces of capitalism that allow a person like
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Elon Musk to rise to the top. But like, because I've also worked for DARPA, like for research,
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for in terms of a source of funding, I, there's a weight of bureaucracy when I was working,
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like being funded by DARPA. And with Elon, like I was literally in the presence of like
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anything is possible, cutting across all the bullshit of paperwork of the way things were done
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in the past of the bureaucracy, the rules, the constraints, the, all of that stuff, just you
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can cut across immediately. How much money and time do you waste dealing with the bureaucracy
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when you could actually be doing real work? That's the difference. This is why, honestly,
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when I went back to the industrial defense complex that we were warned about, when you look at it
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and go, SpaceX can do something for half the price ahead of schedule that would Boeing were
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paying Boeing. And you go, Oh, well, this just came out. And you go, well, then why are we even
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dealing with this side when we can deal with this side? Because you've got a fully automated capsule
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that has a manual mode that they got to fly around in. It worked like a champ. It went up,
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it hung out, it came back, it splashed down. It worked perfectly. You know, we're going to dust
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it off. And oh, by the way, unlike the Apollo capsules that were used and put to museums,
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they're going to reuse that dragon capsule. It came down, they're going to dust it off,
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put a new coat of paint on it, slap it on top of another rocket and away it goes. Holy cow.
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It's amazing. It's a shift. It's a complete shift in mentality. And for us as taxpayers,
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we can explore at half the cost. Yeah. It's exciting, especially given putting the tic tac in
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context, like then the sky or it's limitless the possibilities we could do with this kind of mechanism.
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I think it's exciting. Yeah. Super exciting. I think we live in an exciting time right now,
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besides everything that's messed up in the world right now. Well, this is a hopeful,
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like there's so much conflict going on, so much tension. That's to me, space exploration at the
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moment is a reason to get up in the morning and have a hope for the future to look up to the sky.
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And we're humans. We can solve so many. We can solve all of this.
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I was talking about when I was doing the Tucker thing and I said,
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is this would be great? Because when the government had come out a month ago and said,
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hey, this does exist. We're doing this. And oh, we're going to release more stuff.
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And I was texting like Lou and Chris Mellon and those guys before I went on because they
link |
had called me up to be on Tucker's show and I'm like, hey, I go, this would be great. Just come
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out with this. Find the relic of a spaceship. Like pull out the Roswell wreckage if you have it.
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Pull out the Roswell wreckage into it. God, it would be so nice to not have to deal with
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the riots in the cities. And I mean, I know it's an election year and all that, but
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God, it would be something, it would be refreshing to not have to turn on my TV and see
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everything that is just depressing in the world. To begin with, holy cow, we actually do have this
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and we're working on this technology.
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They imagine if there is a Roswell aircraft and they pull it out, imagine the innovation
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that happens in the next 10 to 20 years without any more information than that.
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Just the, the innovation that happens, the look on, you know, Musk's face,
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look on Jeff Bezos's face and all the brilliant engineers.
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It would change the game. It would change the game completely.
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Let me ask the big question. I apologize for the absurd romantic nature of it.
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But outside, I mean, one of the things, the fact that you've laid your eyes on a UFO,
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probably open your eyes to the possibility that some of the other sightings,
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there, there could be other sightings that have legitimacy to them.
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What do you, is the outside of your own sighting is the most interesting
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sighting or UFO related event in history?
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Oh, I think there's several.
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What is it? Ramachan Forest in England, the U.S. guys that saw stuff and actually got
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radiation burns. One guy was medically disabled, but they weren't going to give it.
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And he had to help from Jim McCain. His office helped get the guys,
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disability reestablished. I think that's a big one.
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I think there's people out there that have seen stuff and I'm talking credible
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because there's, you got to remember, there's a huge chunk of the sightings that get
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disproven. They're actually explainable. You know, you had sent me the question,
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the Phoenix lights.
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I think there's...
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What's that? So I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with some of these.
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I'm not either. You want a funny story on that. So I was at a conference and said,
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hopefully he doesn't watch this and get offended. But we had this,
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this, it was, I call it speed dating. So there was a table, about eight people at a table.
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And we would go sit at the table and they could ask us questions and then after 10
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minutes, we moved to the next table. So I was speed dating all these people that are really
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into this. It was kind of funny, but I'd sat down and it's always funny because some people will
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try and dominate it, but you know, you have to kind of push the dominators away so that,
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you know, if you're quiet and introverted, you can ask your question too. So we got into this
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and the guy starts naming all these, well, what about this? What about the Phoenix lights?
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I'm like, I don't know about the Phoenix lights. What about this event? I don't know about that.
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He goes, he looks at me and he goes, well, you're not a UFO guy. I go, no, I'm not,
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but I chased one. So I'm an expert. Have you? And you could see him get deflated because I'm
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kind of a smart ass like that. Yeah. I mean, the first hand experience from a credible,
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in some sense, these sightings have to do both with the evidence and the human.
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Well, I think part of that is to us, that that's a credibility piece because the four of us that
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actually saw it plus, you know, the other two that were in the airplane that shot the video,
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none of us are UFO obsessed people. So when we come out and say, because to me, it's just in,
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it's five minutes of my life. I did a lot of really cool, I've had a really kind of neat
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things I've been able to do. But when you look at it and go, we don't, to me, it wasn't, it's not
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the pinnacle of my life. You know, to other people that they live in the UFO world and it's like they,
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you know, if you talk to people, they'll go that are really into it, who've never seen one.
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And it kills them that they didn't see one. When here we are because, and what's unique with ours,
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which kind of adds that level is it wasn't, we just didn't see it. It wasn't like, oh,
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look, something in the sky and it was weird. We actually engaged with it. You know, it was,
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yeah, that was an engaged five minute thing. And there's other stories from other countries,
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like there's a story in the back when the Soviet Union existed, that they actually
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would chase these things and one of them shot at some, you know, it shot it because they said shoot
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at it and it shot it and then it got shot down. And then they said, don't ever shoot at them again
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and don't chase them. Just you can observe them, but don't go after them because obviously they
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have firepower that we can't control because if you can make something float around and jam radars
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at will and do whatever you want, you know, modern terrestrial weapons are probably not very useful.
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You know, you can go to Independence Day, they had that force field around, oh, we got a,
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we got it. Now you got a cyber warfare, you got to take the bug down, you got to take the warfare.
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So now we can actually inhibit some type of damage. So there's a, I mean, you mentioned
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the Phoenix lights. This is somebody on, I think Reddit said, ask him any thoughts on mass UFO
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sightings like the Phoenix lights. So the interesting thing, like you said with the tic tac is that
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multiple people laid their eyes on this. What are your thoughts about the Phoenix lights or
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many people? So here's a deal with massive sightings. So the Phoenix lights is unexplainable,
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although I know the Air Force had said something about it was an A10 drop and flares. I don't think so.
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Flares don't burn that long. They just come out and they, you know, they detract and they go away.
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Although on the other hand, there's, you know, because clouds can do things. So I lived in
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Central California for 18 years and you would get, oh my God, what was that in the sky? And it was
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really Vandenberg shooting a missile off. You know, they were doing ICBM tests at one time where they
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shoot from Vandenberg and they fly across, then they go land in the atoll at Kwajalein, you know,
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and then they can check the displacement, the accuracy and all that stuff, you know, stuff
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that we do because we're super power. But when you see them go up, you know, especially if you've
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ever watched a rocket really launch on a clear night, it'll have the stream to glow and you can
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tell it's a rocket. But if you don't look up until later, when it starts to get to the outer edge of
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the atmosphere where the plume coming out of the engine is not constrained, but you can watch this
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on TV when even the SpaceX ones go up, it's nice and narrow, narrow, narrow. And then it hits a
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point where it really starts to go up and it starts to come to the sides because there's,
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you know, the forces aren't holding that all into one unique thing. And it looks really odd.
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And then it'll go off because it burns out and then you could stay separate. And then you see
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the next one go off and then it's gone. And people don't understand it because they didn't
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watch it from launch because we used to sit in our driveway and, you know, Vandenberg is,
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it was a three hour drive, but you could sit and watch it go, you knew in there and launch
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and at night you'd watch. You'd watch and it's really cool. If you don't see anything, what you
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see is the weird clouds from the exhaust plume, you know, what's left, the residue that's sitting
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in the atmosphere and the wind starts blowing us. You get these really kind of weird shapes in the
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sky. You know, that's part, but when you go to Phoenix lights and you go, hey, you know, when
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1,000 people see some, you're going to discredit all 1,000 people, or you're going to try and
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explain it away with something else, you know, the, you know, the big, it's a weather balloon,
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you know, it's a weather balloon. Again, just like the tic tac, I think is just inspiring
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for the limitless nature of the science. I think you're, I think more is going to come out. I think
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some of the stuff that the, the Two The Stars folks have done.
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So there's a Two The Stars Academy. What are your thoughts about them? Are they?
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I talk to them quite a bit. I am not a part of Two The Stars Academy. I, you know, but, you know,
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like I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this. Yeah. So he, they're, what's their
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mission? What's their hope? What's their, what's their, when they started, their mission was to
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try and don't look at this as little green men, but let's look at this as a technology
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and let's try and almost reverse engineer and figure out how these things operate and how can
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we explain this from using our knowledge, you know, physics based knowledge to go, how would
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something like this operate? That's really their bottom line was to try and use and then couple
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that with, because they've got the series unidentified, couple that with television to get
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the word out. So you're actually putting something instead of, because everyone has a theory, you
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know, ancient aliens covers all kinds of theories, you know, it's kind of off of, oh my God. And,
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and I've seen the stuff and I've seen stuff that I've said taken out of context on shows that I
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did not talk to. So there's all that because you can take a clip and go, oh, it's this, it's that,
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you know, and if I know about stuff like it, you can't technically use my likeness unless I tell
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you you can. So if I haven't signed something, you can't do it. There was a guy who put something
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out and I was in it and I told him, you can take it down and you can talk to the lawyers because
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I'm not, I'm not supporting you. So they use it to tell some kind of narrative that doesn't,
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it's not connected to reality. Because let's face it, if you're making TV shows, there's two
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reasons to do it. One, you want to get word out or two, you want to make money or three both.
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And so usually it's, I would say the, the make money is probably the biggest thing to put a TV
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show out. And the, the mission of the, to the Starz Academy is to not do that. This is, is to
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try to get some. When I, when they started and I talked to them because I've talked to Tom and I've
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talked to Lou and those are the two main players, it was to basically demystify the fact and get rid
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of the, the stigma that's tied to UFOs and let's look at it from a science base and then use TV
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to get the word out on the progress. And they've done some pretty cool things. I mean, you know,
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they've, the, the Italian government gave them all kinds of files that had been, you know, property
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of their government. They got a bunch from, it might have been Argentina gave them all kinds of
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stuff. Like here's all our records. What can you do with it to try and now pull from country based
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to a more global based research, which is what you were talking about. And then using independent
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scientists that are not tied to a government, I mean any government, but just using independent
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research agencies to start looking at some of the metallurgy because you go, oh, I found this,
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we had this piece of metal. What is it? And some of the stuff has been explained. They've got some
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objects, artifacts that have not been explained. And that's slowly coming out, you know, and I think
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and your hope is the US government will release some of the government is the government, the
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US government came out a month ago and said, you, we have, we have, we have material that we cannot
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explain the origin. They have said that they just haven't released the records from the Roswell
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thing, which I keep joking about. I'm like, huh, it's 70 some years old. I mean, I let it out.
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I think you put it beautifully that in this time, that will be a heck of an inspiring,
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hopeful thing to see. Like people don't just to distract. Yeah. The division is,
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I mean, nothing will unite us humans descendants of chimps.
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Like the idea that there's life out there. Oh, it would literally change. Because I said this
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a while ago, I forget, I think I was at the London sometimes had called me and I said,
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you know, personally, I think this is a global issue. It's not. If there is stuff coming down,
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which we're pretty sure there is, there's enough stuff that we can't explain.
link |
If there is stuff coming down, then this is not a country based thing. And it's not about
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technology. And it's not about who's going to win the next war, because you don't know what they're
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doing. So you got really a couple of theories. One, you've got ET or close encounters. And the
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other extreme is you've got independence day. Are you going to prepare and bet on ET and close
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encounters? Or do you actually try and do stuff in case it is independence day, you actually have
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a game plan. And when you get into independence day, that scenario, you know, and I don't like
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going too much into sci fi, but let's just say in theory that that becomes a reality. It's not a US,
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Russia, China, England, France, Spain, name any country in any continent, it becomes a global
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issue. And the only way you can deny it, just like Americans, we all, you know, we're divided.
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We spend that way forever. So if you think we won't get through this, we'll get through it because
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we've had times just like this before. Until Nazi Germany pops up. But if Nazi Germany pops up,
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or someone flies two airplanes into the World Trade Center, and then all of a sudden we're
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all like United, we all also have very, very short memories. Yes, we do. Exactly. It's when you
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look and go, well, we can do this. And you go, no, no, if you think that everyone on the planet is
link |
good, you need to stop taking the drugs that you're taking. You know, we said this, there were people
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during the rise of Hitler. No, no, it's okay. And no, no, it's okay. We're not going to do,
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we're not going to stop. No, no, it's okay. No, no, it's okay. And you got to think the only thing
link |
that stopped Hitler was his ego by going into Russia. If he just stuck with the path with Stalin
link |
and not went to the east and had to fight, and it was really the Russian winner that crushed him,
link |
and he would have put all his high troops to the other side, there would have been a totally
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different outcome. The man in the iron, the man in the high tower or whatever, it's a Netflix show
link |
where Nazi actually wins it. And you look, you know, we didn't know everything that was going on,
link |
especially the atrocities with the concentration camps and what he was doing to the Jews.
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I mean, it's, you look at that going, if you really want to see evil, and then there's the
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whole side of what Stalin did, because he actually exterminated more people than Hitler did,
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but that never gets the press. And the thing is, we forget this, we forget this history
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in our conflicts today, we forget that there is the nature of evil, we forget that there's real
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evil in the world. And the thing to fight that evil is to be united, to be both, it's like this
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interesting line, like you talked about Joe Rogan, of being both like kind to each other,
link |
compassionate, empathetic, but also being like strong and a bad motherfucker when you need to,
link |
to make sure that you, that like, there's a balance between kindness and force that
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is you use force when force is necessary, but you don't have to walk around like Billy badass
link |
all the time. I mean, some of the toughest people that I grew up with that literally could kick the
link |
shit out of whoever came near them. They never got in fights because one, even people that didn't
link |
know them because they were actually nice guys, you know, they were, they're just good dudes.
link |
But you know, if you cross them, like I had a friend of mine, he was, he's a nationally ranked
link |
wrestler. It went to, went to Naval Academy with me. He's a very, very good friend of mine. And he
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is, when you meet him, and he wrestled at 190 pounds, and he did not lose a match his senior
link |
year until he went to nationals, he just had a bad day. He actually lost to a guy he had pummeled
link |
the shit out of. And he would cross, it was funny, we joke about it, even with him, because when you
link |
meet him, he's like the nicest like local, hey, hey, dude, you know, hey, how you doing? He's super
link |
nice. And he would cross that ring on a wrestling mat. As soon as he crossed that ring, it was like
link |
a totally different person. And he would go out there and just destroy people. I mean, physically
link |
destroy, like put a hurt on. And he would get done, and he's like super humble, and they'd raise
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his hand, and he would, he'd have this blank expression, they'd raise his hand, and he'd walk
link |
off and as soon as he crossed the line, he'd, he'd look up and swung, hey, hi guys, how you doing?
link |
Like he literally just went and could rip someone's arms off. But as soon as he crossed the line,
link |
he was a totally different person. He's like, and he's that way today. He wouldn't even tell you
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he's a wrestler. Yeah. That's kind of a symbol of the best of America. That's what America is.
link |
Oh, he's. That wrestler. He's a. He crossed the line, you're, you're, you can be hard, but when,
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once you're off the mat, you're just a kind human being. Yeah. I know you're super humble,
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uh, saying it's better to be lucky than good, but your story is inspiring.
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That's the entire trajectory of having a dream of accomplishing that dream,
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of having one hell of a career. What advice would you give to a young person to a young
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version of yourself today that listens to this and is inspired that wants to fly
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or wants to go to space and wants to build the rocket? Is there advice you could give them
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about life, about career, about anything? Yeah. Yeah. Um,
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first let me start with, uh, and you had a question on inspirational people. So my grandfather,
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I had mentioned him earlier, huge funeral, a beer delivery guy, um, was delivering beer in
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the 60s riots where the guys, the black in the black neighborhoods where, you know, white people
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didn't go. And my grandfather was just silly and he was one of the first ones in his family
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born in the United States. So my great grandmother and I had aunts and uncles that I knew growing up
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that actually came over on the boat. Um, huge, huge guy and just the nicest, friendliest would
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give you the shirt off his back, obviously proven by his funeral. And I'm talking at his funeral,
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the head of the Black Panthers was at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. The mafia guys were at his funeral
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in Toledo, Ohio. Uh, I mean, it was literally a mix of, of, of who's who. And, uh, he had told me
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once, you know, because when you're little, you start looking and, and I grew up basically,
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I was probably middle class, lower middle class. My dad was a fireman there. You're not rich.
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He's working for the city. It was a paycheck to paycheck living is how I grew up.
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And I was talking to my grandfather one day and he said something to me and this is,
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this is literally how I run my life. He said, it was about money because you'd see, you know,
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back in the day, if you saw someone in a Mercedes, that was rare. You know, they weren't
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everywhere. You know, people didn't, you couldn't lease the car. He actually bought a car and
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usually bought a car with cash. Um, so it was a totally different than we are now. And he said,
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he goes, you know, David, he goes, they're no better than you and you're no better than anyone
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else. He goes, you got to remember that. He goes, everyone's different. He goes, treat everyone
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with the respect and dignity that they deserve. He goes, and if they're poor, if they're homeless,
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he goes, it doesn't make them a bad person. It just, that's, that's who they chose to be. And
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you make choices in your life, but never ever look down on someone because, you know, there will
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always be someone that will look down on you and you should never ever do that. And I kept that
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close to me. He was huge influences, my mom's dad, just a big, big influence in my life and the way I
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carried myself. Um, and he was one that would say, you know, you can be anything you want to be,
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you know, he grew up dirt poor, you know, and the fact that he had bought a house and took
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good care of my grandmother and did stuff like that, you know, to him, that was a success.
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And to me, it was always, you know, trying to better and move on. And he was the one,
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you know, my parents were a big part of this too, was instilling that that anything is possible. So
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when I'm four years and 11 months old in 1969, you know, and I'm watching Neil Armstrong walk on
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the moon and I'm asking my mom and she says, well, they were all military pilots. And, you know, we
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had an international guard that at the time was flying F 100. So I'm dating myself. Um,
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and I was just fascinated with flight. And I just looked at that going, that's really what I want
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to do. And I never lost sight of that. There was always, I could do this or do that. And
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when I was going to go to college before I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I was accepted into natural
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resources at Ohio State. And I'm like, ah, if I can't fly, I'll go be a forest ranger because I
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wanted to hang out in one of those towers in Colorado and look for fires because that's just,
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I like that stuff. You know, it was that or be an oceanographer because I was fascinated with
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Jacques Cousteau. And actually that's my degree, my undergrad degree is Jacques Cousteau. So
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influences are Neil Armstrong and Jacques Cousteau. I have an oceanography degree,
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I got an MBA from the University of Houston, Goku's got to mention them. And so you're looking,
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people go, what are you going to do with that? And I said, you know, I got an oceanography
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degree because I got, well, I'm going to sail on the ocean. So at least if the ship sinks,
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I'll know where I'm at. And that was a kind of a running joke. And then.
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And then those, so these passions and underneath it is the, is the belief that
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you can be anything you want to. You can. You know, I told my kids this, you know,
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when they were young, you know, it was tough, especially for my son. So when Nate was about
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five, six years, we knew Nate was colorblind. You know, my, my wife's brothers are both
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colorblind. It's really color deprived, color to blind you see black and white. He can't tell,
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he has issues with greens, reds, browns. It's funny if you're ever around someone like that.
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Because I'll go, I'll go, what are you looking at? He goes right over there by the red thing. I'm
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like, what are you looking at? I go this, I like, he had a hat on one day. I go, which one are you
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going to get? He had a hat in his hand. It was green. He goes, I'm going to get the green one.
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I go, oh, this one right here. He goes, no, the one on my head. I go, Nate, that one's brown.
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He's like, leave me alone, dad. He got the brown hat because to him, it looked green.
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So he couldn't fly. He came and he said, I go, what do you want to do, Nate? You know,
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you're talking to your kids and you know, what do you want to do? He goes, I want to be a pilot.
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Now, now I got to tell him, because he's looking at me because I'm a pilot,
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do you can't be a pilot? He's like, why can't I be a pilot? I said, because you, you got eye issues.
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You know, so you got to redirect. And the other one was because I had to, I stopped flying. I was
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42 years old and I was like, and it was my childhood dream. So it's like a pro athlete. I know exactly
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what it feels like when, you know, Brett Favre has to walk away from the NFL when you still can do it.
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Good choice of quarterback, by the way, the greatest of all time, but whatever.
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So you do, when you look at it and you go, I understand what those guys feel like when you
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have to walk away from something that you love and you think you can still do it.
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So I told them, I said, look, I was talking to both of my kids and I said, you know,
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find something that you want to do, that you love to do, and that you can do your whole life.
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And you should be able to do good things for other people. You want to be able to help other people.
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That's what I said. So both of my kids, and there's no one in my family, both of my children,
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one of them is, my daughter is a doctor doing residency in internal medicine right now.
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And my son is in his third year and they're both going to be doctors. And so I look at it as, you
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know, people go, oh, you got two doctors. I don't care. I told my kids, if you want to be a garbage
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man or you want to dig ditches, I don't care. Just be the best ditch digger that you can be.
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I said, and be happy doing it. Because what you also find is that we are in this big pursuit of
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money, money, money, money, money, money, money. That's what makes the world go round.
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But what you realize, and I'll go back to my grandfather, who didn't have a lot of money,
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and he was probably one of the most happy people on life. And unfortunately,
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he died at 65. He had a massive heart attack because he didn't tell that he kind of knew
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it was happening. And he just made the choice to do it. It was devastating to the entire family.
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But he didn't have a lot of money. But I'll tell you what, I know a lot of rich people who have
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funerals and there's nobody at them. And my grandfather, who's a beer delivery guy, had,
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it literally, it was like three miles long. It was crazy. Yeah. Who died the Pope? That was
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because he's a Catholic. He's Italian. He goes, who died the Pope? And I go and ask my grandfather.
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And then the next funeral I went to was my aunt, his sister. And it was like, 30 people. And I
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looked at my mother and I said, where's everybody at? She goes, oh, no, this is normal. This is
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what a normal funeral looks like. So for young kids, bottom line, one, be nice. Kindness will get
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you, I'm a big believer in karma. Kindness will get you a long way in the world. It's easy.
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It's easy to be nice. It doesn't cost you anything. I said, and get rid of the hate.
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And number two is follow your dreams because everyone is capable of everything. And there's
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a self realism. If you really have trouble with math, getting a PhD in applied math,
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it's probably not something you're going to be able to do. But understand yourself what your
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own capabilities are and you know inside your heart. Don't let anyone ever tell you what you
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can and can't do. You have to determine that yourself and go for it. And you can do anything.
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It's just, it's a great, the world's incredible. It really is.
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Let me ask the last big ridiculous question. So you've lived
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much of your life, your career is kind of at the edge of life and death. So let me ask kind of
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several different ways, the same kind of question. One, do you, have you pondered your mortality,
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the finiteness of it? And the bigger question to ask even in the context of your tic tac encounter
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is what do you think is the meaning of this thing we got going on here, the meaning of life, human
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life in this sense? So let me start with, have I pondered my own mortality? Yes, quite often.
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And I don't get into my religious beliefs or what I am, but I will tell you that I do believe in God.
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I've just seen too many things in the world that I can't explain.
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And some people will explain it by subconscious. So I'll give you a story and this kind of puts
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in the thing of, do I fear death? So I had a good friend of mine that I used to fly with.
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We were stationed in Japan together and Japan had this incinerator that put all kinds of dioxins.
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So there's a real high cancer rate for those that served on the base in Natsuki, Japan.
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Him and his wife had one son and their son passed away just before his 18th birthday of cancer.
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And I was hanging out with, I'll call him John, and I was hanging out with John. We were in oil
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and gas. He had come to the same company and we were doing an event together. And he was opening
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up to me because we were actually the demo pilots. We do the demonstration for air shows and stuff.
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And him and I were sitting there talking and he was giving me the whole story and how he had
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really changed his look on life that we're only here for a finite time and that we're all going
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to die. Well, unfortunately, after all that, when it was really going, him and his wife had moved to
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a location that would fit there close to the water where they could do stuff. And I won't say
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where. And he was doing what he loved to do and he got diagnosed with throat cancer.
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And I was talking to him, it was probably about maybe two months before he died.
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And I said, dude, you're sad. I mean, this is your friend. And I'm kind of really bummed out.
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And this is the guy, this is the guy that's dying of cancer. And here's what he tells me. He says,
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Dave, dude, we're all going to die. He goes, but I have to look at it. I have to make the
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best of the time that I have. And I said, I understand that. And he goes, with the exception
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of not being with my wife, who he loved dearly, he goes, I'm okay with dying. I've had a really good
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life. And about, because actually the original announcement when he finally passed away,
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Buddy of mine called me because I don't do Facebook and his wife had put it on Facebook
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that he had passed. And about the day before he died, for some reason, I was thinking about him.
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And I had a dream where I think it was a dream or an altered reality, you can get into whatever.
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But he was there. It was just him and I. And I was really sad in the dream. I was actually crying,
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and he was there. And he was actually in his uniform. He was in his whites because he was a
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Navy. And we were just talking and he looked at me and he said, and this isn't my dream. He's like,
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Dave, it's all going to be okay. And this is like, and this is a vivid conversation I have.
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There's people are going to think I'm weird about this, but I know what my dream was. And
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then maybe it's my subconscious creating the dream. But in reality, to me, this was real,
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that it was put there for a reason. And he basically explained everything. It's okay.
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I'm going to be fine. My wife is fine. He goes, this is what's meant to be.
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But in the bottom line was make use of every day that you have because you don't know.
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And literally two days later, I find out that he passed.
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But ultimately, he accepted the finiteness of it.
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He did. Well, you have to. And it's like I talk about money and job position and this and that.
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And I said, you can get in any, you can go to a company. Just remember,
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when you want to be a VP of a company, you sell your soul to the company. You have to.
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I said, if you look, I joke with people at work. And I said,
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I said, when you ever think that you're important or this guy has that, I said,
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when you're sitting on 93 or 95, 128 and you're sitting in traffic and we're stopped,
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which doesn't happen right now because of COVID. But normally it's stopped. It's
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bumper to bumper in your sitting here, like I was coming down here by the gas tank.
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When you're sitting there, look left and look right, you know, and there can be a
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Lamborghini or an S550 Mercedes. And on the other side, there could be some piece of crap car.
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We're all sitting on the same freeway at the same time trying to do the same thing,
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which is just get home so we can be with our family. Because the most important thing that we
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have, it ain't money. It ain't our job. It's not our position. I go, because when it's all said
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and done, you could be, you know, you can be with the exception of the presidents of the United
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States. I mean, name the vice presidents. Most people can't. And eventually they're going to die.
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Or eventually you're going to see a statue of a guy from the 1700s in the Boston area and you're
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going to call, I don't even know who that guy was. Did he impact my life? He probably did. But
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eventually people forget. You realize what's important now. And the one thing that you have
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is your family and your close friends. And that's it. You can take all the money or everything
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else. If you're down on your luck, you know, who is going to be at we eyes as a joke? Who are your
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true friends? It's the person while there's, there's a once that I won't say, but you know,
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hey, you're broke down on a road in the middle of nowhere and it's three o clock in the morning.
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Who are you going to call is going to get in their car without complaining and come and get you.
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And that's life. Those are the people you love. It's, it's, it's the people you truly care about.
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And contrary to, I have, you know, oh my God, I got 6,000 Facebook friends.
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You got about that many real friends that you can count on. And that's it.
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Everything else doesn't matter. No, it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean you don't be nice. I mean,
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I have, there's acquaintance friends that I'll do anything for and then come to my house and
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stuff. But then there's the people that, you know, you know, like my cousins who are like my brothers
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that, you know, at a moment's notice, you know, when, when my uncle passed away at a young age,
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you know, who lived literally right down the street from me and my cousin Chad, and I got
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two boys, there's 14 of us, but there's only two boys. There's three of us together. And we all
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grew up in the same neighborhood, same schools, play football together, all that. I said, if one
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of those, if Ray or Chad ever needs me, if something happens, like when my uncle died, it wasn't,
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it wasn't an issue if I'm coming home. It's I'm booking the ticket. I don't give a shit what
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it costs because I will be there to be there with you. And then those two guys and my college
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roommate is another one that I'm very, very close with, you know, if there's, I have a handful
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of people that, you know, I will drop literally everything, even if my wife would be pissed at
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me at times. She's like, seriously, I got to do it. And now she knows, and it's the same thing
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with her. I mean, she knows that there are certain people in her life that if they really need her
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and she has to go, she would go and I would let her go. So given all that, I'm honored that you
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would come here and talk to me and take the time. Dave, it was one of the best conversations I've
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ever had. Thank you so much. It's a pretty long one. It's probably sets the record for the longest
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one. So I, I mean, I'm a loss of words. One of my favorite conversations. Thank you so much for
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talking to you, Dave. You're welcome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Fraver
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and thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN and BetterHelp. Please check out the
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sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing,
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subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify,
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support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman. And now let me leave you with
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some words from Carl Sagan. Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you
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for listening and hope to see you next time.