Decision Making at Mach-2: An Air Force Fighter Pilot Teaches *You* To Think Clearly | Hasard Lee

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26:18I've probably heard in almost every single domain of life, someone saying, man, I was such an idiot. So like, for instance, in poker, you lose a hand and you lose like a thousand dollars, say, oh, I'm such an idiot. Like I hear that kind of negative self-talk all the time in business, in hiring, in firing, in investments, relationships. so you mentioned self-talk and you mentioned maybe this is one of the things that you would have laughed at 10 years ago but what is self-talk and how do you do it how do you do it in the moment how do you avoid thinking oh this is bullshit while you're doing it and how do you do it yeah it's it has to do with you know that internal dialogue that you're having so as fighter pilots one of the biggest things is having confidence in what you're doing you're flying a piece of metal that can get you know twice the speed of sound so you have to be confident in what you're doing.

27:08Confident is different than arrogant. So you really want to be able to have that internal confidence, how you talk to yourself. First thing is being able to focus on what's going through your mind. So if you're constantly saying in your brain, you're an idiot, what are you doing? What are you thinking? First is being able to identify that. Once you're able to identify it, for me, it was a process of, because I did that a lot, certainly, being able to switch it. So So pretend like you're talking to your son or pretend like you're talking to a close friend. I bet most of us would not talk to our kids or our friends how we talk to ourselves.

27:46So being able to consciously identify it and then make, here's a good key for success, make a complete sentence. So don't, you know, even if you have a quick thought that isn't like in words, make a complete sentence that's the opposite to be able to really lock that in your brain. So that's one technique that's helped me. And I know some people record it or write it down, the counter example to them berating themselves. I think there's multiple ways to do it. You prepare self-talk. It's the opposite of what you think is your common self-talk. Yes. Like, what do you say to yourself when you find yourself saying, oh, I'm such an idiot?

28:23It really depends on what aspect. If it's something that I'm not familiar with and it's like, well, it's something that I'm learning, that I'm getting better at, I'm an instructor pilot. So it's the same talk I would have with a new pilot that's flying. So they're going to make lots of mistakes. Nobody is good when they first learn how to fly. So I try to find three things they can work, ultimately boil down to like, because some of our debriefs last like eight hours, but I boil it down to three things they can work on and three things they did well. So you can always modulate it to be able to push yourself, but at the same time, not break yourself.

29:02What about though, if you're in the middle of a decision that you have to make right now? So like you see one of your students who's whenever they're about, you know, they start to spin out of control or whatever, they say, oh, I'm such an idiot. I should have done X, Y, and Z. A, they should be aware that they're spiraling into negative self-talk and B, they should form a complete sentence that's the opposite. What should they say to themselves? I'm going to save it for the debrief. There'll be plenty of time to be able to dig into all the mistakes that you made. So don't worry about that now.

29:32You can't fix the mistakes that you already made. You've entered a new reality by making that mistake. So now your job is to look forward to the next decision, the next three decisions to be able to get yourself out of it. So I think the biggest thing when you're in the moment is to realize that this is not the time to debrief. You need a set time. And that's one thing that a lot of organizations don't do is set aside time to debrief, turn it into a sterile environment, and allow people to vent how, you know, the mistakes they made, how they're going to do better. You don't really want to mix it together.

30:06It's the same thing with what we're doing with the cross check. You don't want to be multitasking and try to do 50 things at once. You want to cross check different aspects of it and move on. So the same thing applies to if you're making a mistake in the moment, just think, you know, and it's difficult, it takes training to be able to say, all right, made a mistake. Now, how do I get myself out of it? But how do you restore confidence at that moment? Oh, I'm an idiot. Is the lack of confidence to maybe go forward making a good decision? You know, it depends on how extreme the moment is. If you're out of control in a jet, that's not the time to worry about confidence.

30:42That's the time to execute and try to save yourself. So if you have five minutes between decisions, maybe now you can start thinking about, all right, I need to boost my confidence a little bit. But if you're doing something quick and you're trying to save your life, you don't have to worry about confidence in that moment. So save it for a set time. I would say, regardless of what you're doing, if you have that kind of negative self-talk, you can set aside time, you can put it in your calendar that I'm going to write down the things that I said negatively, and I'm going to write down the adjustments to it.

31:16So I would say it's It's unfortunately, it's a depends answer for that. Oh, let's take the poker example. Some guy just loses a poker hand. He feels he played it poorly. Yes, there'll be time for a debrief later, but he's still in the game and has to get himself back together. Or this could, again, be in a sales meeting in the middle of a public talk, whatever. Yeah, I think a couple other techniques that we have are one of the most difficult things for a new fighter pilot is learning how to refuel. So we will fly up to a, it's like an airliner filled with fuel and it has a probe out of it. And you have to touch this other probe and connect with it so it can transfer fuel to you.

31:59Really? I didn't know that's how it happened. Yeah, you're taught your whole career to never touch another aircraft flying. And now you're purposely doing it. And you can't actually see it touching you because it's behind you. So you have to hold this position really close to this giant aircraft because you're in a pretty small jet, F-16s, wingspins 30 feet. So I don't know, a couple of cars. And you're behind a KC-135 or KC-10, essentially an airliner jet. And so you're holding that position. And if you screw up, you can snap off the boom. You can crash and, you know, you're playing. It's filled with hundreds of thousands of pounds of fuel.

32:38So this can go really poorly very quickly. And so one of the things we teach new pilots is it's simple. you know, wiggle your fingers, wiggle your toes and do box breathing. So wiggle your fingers and toes. It's easy to clench up. And once you start clenching up, you're not going to have that fine motor acuity that you need to be able to maneuver in close proximity to another aircraft. And then that breathing is really, it's one of the few things that can calm you down because breathing is something we do consciously and subconsciously. So you it's connected. So if you're able to slow your breathing down, now it depends, you know, some people are like five seconds, four seconds, box breathing, triangle breathing.

33:16So box breathing is four or five seconds in, hold for four or five seconds, exhale for four to five seconds, and then hold for four to five seconds. So it really depends on your oxygen demand. So if you're in the middle of a dog fight, you're going to need a lot more oxygen to breathe a lot faster than if you are flying straight and level. So the key thing is to be able to slow and deepen your breathing down. And that's when you start regaining your motor acuity. Same thing with your mental capacity. When you're stressed, your heart rates... We put on heart rate monitors last year, and sometimes our heart rates go above 180 beats a minute.

33:54So it's like a flat-out sprint. But when your heart rate's that high, you're not thinking in an optimal way. So you really want to find a way to relax and to calm yourself down. And the best way that we've found is through breathing. And then you mentioned some others. There's this one part, reframing, And that's where you mentioned, replace it with a counter example, maybe from the past. So maybe they could say something like, hey, I've done this a million times. I can do it. The easy hack is just to talk to yourself like you would to your kid. That works for me. Just talk to yourself like you would your kid.

34:29For me, that changed everything because we work with a lot of high performance people. It's probably like lawyers, doctors, things like that. And you really want to do well. We work with a lot of students that really, really want to do well. so they put a lot of pressure on themselves. They perform well, but then they end up choking where they screw up something they know they know how to do. And so that's one thing we really want to avoid. We don't want to have good decision, good decision, good decision, terrible decision, good decision. We want to try to find a way to eliminate those and to make it smoother.

35:02And so for people that put a lot of pressure on themselves, especially with that negative self-talk, they will choke, they'll crumble, they'll make a terrible decision. And when you're flying, that can kill you. So by changing that self-talk, we still want people that are putting high pressure on themselves in a training environment, but to understand when you're going outside of that optimal band of performance and to be able to rein it back. One thing that worries me with this is that if you are already losing confidence and then you start saying to yourself, oh, I know how to do this. I should just do what I've been prepared for and trained for.

35:40Which side do you believe? Maybe you're bullshitting yourself. So my question is, does the self-talk actually work? Well, I think if you're just bullshitting yourself, it doesn't. So I would say, go back to the kid example. So you don't want to completely bullshit your kid. You don't want to say that they can dunk a basketball when they're five feet tall. That's a recipe for failure. So you want to be realistic with what you're saying. You want to find a path forward. So for me, that's going back to the ends. What goal are we trying to solve for? For us, it's building a wingman that's going to survive in the 2030s.

36:15So you can work backwards from that and be able to shorten that into actionable steps. And you don't want to be delusional with your self-talk. You absolutely want to be realistic with it. But you want to do it in a way that isn't berating yourself. You want to be like a coach. you want to be like a parent you want to you don't want to just be an evaluator so clearly preparation is one aspect of a decision confidence is another aspect you know it seems like uh one thing you go heavily into and this is what really reminds me of the poker analogy is you try to figure out what's the expected value of all your possible decisions so understanding the basics of not quite statistics but just how statistics and probabilities work uh you don't need to know the exact math of real life situations because that's hard to know.

37:04But understanding the concept of expected value seems very important part of the decision making. Yeah, I think expected value is a great way at looking at decisions. So what is the upside multiplied by the probability of that happening minus the downside minus the probability of that happening? That's a good way to walk a balance between a statistical, you know, complex computer model and just our gut intuition because we're constantly doing that, going back to the line example, we're constantly looking at what's the expected value of it. But a lot of times, especially I think as humans, we try to push ourselves and make things more complicated than they should be.

37:43We bring in other factors. I think it all just boils down to what's the expected value. A lot of people get hung up with uncertainty. There's going to be uncertainty in just about every decision that you're going to make. So when I am looking at a decision, especially if there's not a lot of time, I'm trying to eliminate as many options as possible. Once you get down to three, four options, you know, you might then certainly might be too high to be able to find the best one. So in that case, I think it's usually best to be able to just pick one of those decisions and move on. One of the concepts we talk about is no decision is a decision.

38:20And it's usually the worst one to make. If you're constantly just mulling over and not getting new information, then just make a decision. You'll probably set what I go into is the law of diminishing return for understanding a problem. If you're looking at it for the first couple minutes, you know, we're talking about a quick decision, the first couple minutes, you'll be able to take in most of the information. But if you know, three days down the road, or three years down the road, depending on some decisions, at some point, you're going to reach the law of diminishing return. It's not worth your time anymore, make the decision, reset the diminishing curve, and then try to make another decision to correct what's going on.

38:58So that's, I think, a good way of looking at decisions. So you mentioned working with lawyers, like what's an example where a lawyer is in the courtroom feels it's not quite going his way, maybe sensing the jury isn't with him or the people he has on the stand, it's not getting the reaction he would like. How does he calculate expected value in that situation? And what What alternatives might that lawyer have? Well, I'm certainly not a lawyer. So I probably am not the expert to speak on that. But I think it can apply to really any decision. So you're going to be able to, with expected value, let's talk about just driving across town.

39:34So if we're trying to drive from here to a set location, there's a million ways to do that. 99 % of those are going to be terrible ways to drive across town. So the expected value, first, you have to define what that is to you. So is it speed? Is it scenery? Is it the shortest distance? And then you can start finding the expected value in terms of what's the estimated time? What's the chance of running into traffic? So I think looking in terms of expected value, it doesn't have to be accurate. So that's where a lot of people get hung up with is trying to find a statistic for what's the probability of encountering traffic.

40:13So I think that's when you really have to rely on your intuition. So really, the book is about a focus on experts and on preparation and becoming an expert in a field and the value of that as opposed to just handing your brain off to a committee or computer model. So as an expert, if you've been in this field for a long time, you're going to have a gut answer to what's the probability of something specific happening. I think people should go with that.

40:57So let's say one of your examples where you're flying in, I think it was Afghanistan, it's getting dark. You have to make a decision about how much fuel you have to get back or what height you fly to not lose fuel. And you had a bunch of things going on. Maybe describe that story and the various decisions you had to make. Yeah. So I think that story that you're talking about is when my wingman and I were coming back from a strike mission in Helmand, Afghanistan. And we were coming back. We were low on fuel. Now, usually we always have backup airfields that we can land at. Tonight, though, one of the airfields, the runways was closed.

41:34Our alternate airfield, Kabul was closed for maintenance. We were coming back in the middle of the night and we were carrying a lot of ordnance on the jet. Now, some of the ordnance that we had were the latest weapons in the Air Force inventory. So we weren't allowed to drop them, to just dump them in the dirt. Now, when the F-16 is coming back, it has really small wings, really small brakes. You can easily light those brakes on fire. So we have to get to a certain weight to be able to land, especially since that night we had to land on a short really short runway so for us that meant there's going to be a five minute gap where we're going to be low on fuel we're going to use our afterburner burn down all our fuel so that we are light as possible and land that would mean for five minutes we would not have an alternate airfield we would have to land at that airfield now as uh fate would have it as soon as we were about to land where we had burned off our fuel the base came under attack.

42:28So there was mortar fire into the base. And we had a mortar anti-defense system called C-RAM to try and shoot down those mortars. Middle of the night, coming back, those machine guns, they each have 20-millimeter rounds in them, started opening up fire, pointed at our jets, and you could see them exploding. So it was like being in the middle of a firework show. Like the afterburner, get above this whole thing. And now we're critically low on fuel. There's not a lot of options. And so we're trying to assess the value of what we should do. It really came down to the airfield was hit. The runway was hit.

43:05Should we land on it? Should we eject? Should we try to find another alternate solution? First thing was finding a baseline decision that would be a decent jumping off point before trying to find something more elaborate. So first you come up with like, you come up with the plan B actually before the plan A. Yeah. Like worst case, I'm going to do this, but let's find a better solution. Correct. Yeah. You want to work from big picture to small. So the first thing is let's find something that's reasonable, that's going to work. And then we can start going down rabbit trails of trying to find something that's an excellent solution.

43:39So what's a good enough solution to get me out of this problem? Because I only have a few minutes left. For us, that was 15 minutes before we were going to run out of fuel. So we talked about the decision, putting the jet out of control. That's a bang, bang, right away decision versus this, 15 minutes, a little bit more time to really parse through the information and try to find a solution. So first decision, are we going to have to eject or should we land on the airfield? And so I go through kind of a quick math example in my head of, all right, so the average mortar shell probably puts about a one foot hole in the runway.

44:14They had said it was hit by one or two mortar shells. All right. Between my three wheels, I'm using up about three or four feet of the runway as I'm landing on the runway. So there's really only a one in 20 chance, 5 % chance of actually hitting the crater that the motor shell left. Now, if we did that, there's probably about a 50-50 chance that we're going to cartwheel the jet. If we cartwheel the jet, we're probably going to die. So, you know, at this point, it's not a terrible solution. So even though the runway has been hit, it sounds bad, people are panicking, there's really only a 5 % chance that something bad is going to happen.

44:54You know, as soon as I calculated that, I felt a lot calmer. It's a lot better than the alternative, ejecting out of the aircraft. We have a great seat in the F-16, about a 5 % failure rate, so about a 95 % chance of being able to successfully eject, but you're losing the jet and you're ejecting in the hostile countryside. So with similar probabilities, it's much better to go with the landing on the runway. At least there's medical services there. So that's how I made that initial quick decision. And then now that I had that good one, I gave myself 10 minutes. We had 15 minutes before we ran out of fuel.

45:3110 minutes now to be able to find a better solution. And that involved my wingman talking to Kabul, seeing if we could land there. We weren't able to do that. me going up on SATCOM trying to find if there's a tanker in the country that had flown in for the next vol so we always had two f-16s airborne this was 2017 we always had two f-16s airborne we'd fly in tankers from other countries i was able to find another tanker about uh 75 miles away which put us right on the edge of being able to refuel and so i go into the story of being able compare that expected value to landing on the airfield. And we chose to refuel from the tanker.

46:11Fortunately, we're able to refuel, get a full load of gas, and then they're able to patch the runway we're able to land. But the framework really helped me to be able to calm down to understand this wasn't a life and death decision. Even though the runway had been hit, people were panicking. There's still 95 % chance that's still pretty good of making it out. So no need to panic. Like, let's go through the steps to be able to put this bird on the ground. And were you confident? You said you were right at the brink of losing, running out of fuel by the time you would hit the refueler. Were you that close to the brink?

46:47Or did you know you have like maybe one minute leeway or two minutes leeway? Yeah, well, that is interesting as well, because we could have flown to the tanker and bet the farm on that. And if we weren't able to refuel, which there are a lot of instances where you're not able to refuel from the tanker, we would have been out of luck, had to eject. So what we decided to do is to fly a max endurance profile, so pretty slow, keep ourselves within range of Bagram. So if we weren't, Bagram was the base that we were landing at. If we weren't able to refuel by flying slow and letting the tanker come to us at maximum speed, we could have split off and landed.

47:23Now, I had given myself 10 minutes with a five-minute buffer to land. We chose to go all the way to the last minute with this. So we flew max endurance, flew at the tanker, it was able to fly at us, we were able to run an intercept on it, arrive right behind it, we had to do a really what's called a hot intercept. Usually we don't like to do that, we like to be a little bit further aft, but we didn't have the fuel to be able to run a colder intercept and then slowly ease onto the tanker. We had to do a really hot one turning right onto its tail. So if we were not able to refuel on the tanker, we would have had barely enough fuel to be able to land.

47:59So it was really a free chance to refuel from the tanker. The only downside is we would have only had one chance to land if we had not been able to refuel. Typically, you like a chance to do a go around if you have to. So but it's interesting, though. So like, you found your plan B, the base plan. And in fact, you had two base plans. One was to eject one was to, you know, land on the runway. But you found of plan you could do while still keeping maybe 50 to 60 % of the old plans still active in case the better plan didn't work. Yeah. Yeah. I think of it like a Venn diagram. Like you really don't want to jump into a plan where you have to completely sacrifice the first, especially that baseline plan.

48:39For me, always finding an out as we call it, flying fighters, find that out. What am I going to do as a last resort? And then you can stack on top more elaborate, more creative, more complex solutions. But at the end of the day, you always want to have that out where if all those things fail, because you're starting to add in complexity. I was having a talk with the tanker crew. They're having issues with their radios. They, you know, I had to be pretty clear on what they were doing. They really, you know, imagine them, they're just flying into the country. And then they have this fighter pilot call them up saying you have to fly this direction right now.

49:16Fortunately, they were fantastic and they did exactly what I said, but I could have easily seen them saying, you know, what's going on? Why should we do that? They had to fly into Kabul's airspace with Bagram. So they did a lot of coordination on their end. So it wasn't a super high chance. It wasn't 100 % that they were going to be able to execute what I wanted them to do. So it was great to be able to, in this case, have that baseline plan and then be able to find a better one that still maintained that baseline one. Right, because your overall expected value improved a lot, even if that was only a 50-50, but your initial plans had a 5 % chance of total failure, whereas your overall expected value increased when there's no chance of failure if the 50 % chance that you hit the refueler works.

50:06Yeah, absolutely. And so it was creativity that was able to solve that. So we found that creative solution that was able to increase the expected value because the typical ones would have been land or eject. So we found that one and then we were able to slightly decrease it in that we would have only had one chance at landing instead of two or three chances. So it's slightly lowered, but then it raised considerably because if we were able to refuel, which is a pretty high chance we were able to refuel, then we wouldn't have any problem. We could stay airborne for the next 12 hours if we had to while they were patching the runway, get enough fuel to land at a different airfield.

50:41So by finding a creative solution, we were able to raise it much higher. You mentioned power laws quite a bit in the book. What's the relationship between power laws and decision-making? So I think power laws really go into the assessment phase. There are a few variables to look at for most professions that have an outsized impact in what you're trying to do. So it goes down to, for this S phase, what's the ends? What goal are you trying to achieve? And then that cross-check, what you're looking at, for me, has to do with power laws. So power laws, we're evolved to think linearly. If you walk 30 steps, you're 30 steps away.

51:22But that's not how most things in the world operate, especially when you're starting to leverage a lot of things, leverage technology. When I'm flying a jet, I can travel 100 times faster than I can by foot. I can carry 100 times more. I can see out to the horizons. I'm thousands of times more capable than I could be on my own. Same thing for all of us. The average American uses 12 ,000 watts of electricity despite only burning 90 watts themselves. So all of that is the technology that they're leveraging to make their decisions have an outsized impact. So once you start applying a lot of leverage, you start seeing that most things in life are not linear.

52:03They adhere to one of three power laws, the law of diminishing return, exponential growth, or long tail power law. So you really want to find the variables that those affect. And so for instance, when we have to eject, a lot of different things in the checklist for us to do to be able to eject safely. The number one thing is just slowing down. So speed, the force increases exponentially with speed. So if you are going Mach 1.6, about a thousand miles an hour, it's 300 times the force of sticking your hand outside of the car going highway speed. So it'll just shred your body. Every bone in your body will break.

52:40It's not going to be a good day. So simply slowing down, despite a lot of things in the checklist, just slowing down is the number one thing for survival. So I try to find those few variables that adhere to a strong power law and optimize for that. Actually, I want to go over the example. one of the first stories in the book was the French airline, you know, they didn't find the black box for several months. So nobody knew why this plane just disappeared. And finally, though, they kind of found out what happened and what poor decisions were made. Do you mind going through that example? Because it was very interesting.

53:15Yeah, Air France flight 447 takes off from Brazil, bound for France, and it ends up disappearing over the Atlantic. Nobody knows what happened. They launched search and rescue vehicles. They even, France launches a nuclear submarine to try and find it. And they find it several years later. And I believe it was 14 ,000 feet of water. So it's super deep. Nobody knows what's happened. It's several years later. And they're able to find the black boxes, pull them up. They sent them to Paris under security. And what they find in those black boxes was astonishing. It was everybody's worst fear as a pilot.

53:57And so what they found was the airplane was flying straight and level, no issues. It was going through the intertropical convergence zone. So that's a fancy word for just where the north hemisphere, the weather meets the southern hemisphere. So it forms a lot of thunderstorms. There were 11 other aircraft that had flown through those thunderstorms in the previous hour, had no issues. Now Air France 447 ends up flying through one of those thunderstorms. And the hail in the thunderstorm blocks all three pitot tubes simultaneously. You know, not the best place to be as a pilot, but the airplane was still flying.

54:36No issues. Air still going over the wings at 35 ,000 feet. Everything's fine. If they had done nothing, they would have flown for another five minutes. The hot air would have melted the blockages in the pitot tubes. They would have been fine. Now, what happens though, is that it blocks all three PO2s simultaneously. It's the middle of the night. They have a really inexperienced co-pilot that's in charge of the plane since the captain went to sleep. And it shuts off the autopilot. Autopilot isn't designed for no airspeed indication. So the autopilot says, I don't know what's going on. You have full control of the aircraft, which we can talk to you later if you want, because that's a big issue with automation, especially in the aviation world.

55:16So I don't know what to do. It's a thunderstorm. Now you got it, Pilot, who's just been kind of kicking back. He does not assess. So he jumps right into action, which is an instinct that a lot of people have. When you're just assessing a problem, you don't feel like you're making progress on it. He pulls back on the stick, 35 ,000 feet. They're at the maximum altitude, really heavy jet ready to cross the Atlantic. And they start a climb at 7 ,000 feet a minute, blistering fast climb for an aircraft that's operating at its max altitude. How did he make that decision? Because why did he think, so I guess he thought flying over the weather would solve the problem.

55:56And did he not know that these tubes were blocked or what didn't he know? He didn't know. All he knew was that they now no longer had an airspeed. So the way it was blocked, it's been said that potentially there's a high airspeed indication. So he thought he was flying fast. But that's not the first instrument you need to cross-check. You need to cross-check your attitude indicator, so where the jet is pointed. So just minutes prior, he had been talking to the other co-pilot that they could not climb over the thunderstorm. storm. So he knew that they were at their max altitude. Now, when this actually happened, he's a young pilot.

56:36He was in his thirties. He was known as the company baby. He just acted. And so he pulled back on the stick probably because the airspeed indicators said they're going fast, even though that's not the first instrument you should look at when something like this happens. Pulled back. This large Airbus starts going kind of like my jet into the vertical it ends up stalling and he continues to hold back on the stick. So at this point, yeah, they're stalling. They're getting, you know, a lot of alarms going on in the cockpit. They could easily solve it. They're at about 38 ,000 feet, 40 ,000 feet, plenty of airspeed.

57:15All you have to do is relax the stick. So don't even touch anything. The jet will start flying itself. They make fighter aircraft really unstable. They make airliner jets very, very stable. They fly themselves. He doesn't do that. He continues holding back on the stick the whole time. His co-pilot is more experienced than him, trying to figure out what's going on. He doesn't know because the Airbus doesn't have the yoke like some of the older aircraft. They both have their own stick. So he doesn't know that this guy is pulling back on the stick the whole time. And he continues to stall the aircraft for five minutes.

57:50The captain even comes in from sleeping and says, what are you guys doing? And they don't know what's going on. the guy who's holding back the stick is, you know, he's just panicking. He doesn't know what's going on. And the other guys who are experienced, including the captain, they don't know that he's holding back on the stick. And so for five minutes straight, this co-pilot holds back on the stick and they end up crashing into the ground. 51 G impact. Everybody dies because he didn't assess the problem. It would have been such an easy problem. In fact, those pitot tubes had been blocked about a dozen times in the past year.

58:26So A, poor job in the design of the pitot tube. But B, it had been blocked a dozen times in the previous year. No other crew had an issue. This guy just ended up panicking and pulling back on the stick for five minutes, which is eternity as a pilot. So clearly he made mistakes because he was panicking. He probably wasn't breathing to calm down. He wasn't getting back to his training and his checklist and so on. But the captain was in there. What were the mistakes the captain made? A mistake the captain made was as they were going into the emergency zone, he decided to take his break. So that's a time as a captain.

59:07I'm not an airline pilot, but I'm a flight lead. So sometimes I'll be leading dozens of other aircraft. When you're going into a high-threat area, you want to be on the tip of the spear. You want to be making the difficult decisions. He decided to take his break. Now, it's probably standard procedure based on time for him to do that. But once he did, he relinquished all his decision-making ability to the co-pilot. It's surprising during the stall that he was actually able to make it back to the cockpit. Now, between the other co-pilot and the captain, they really started in a hole with this because they had no idea that the original co-pilot, the young one, was pulling back on the stick.

59:44Are they supposed to ask or should they have thought to ask? What are you doing? We're stalling. Is there anything you're doing that's different? No, because as soon as it happened, the young one said, my aircraft. So my aircraft means I'm the only one touching it. This is my aircraft. Everybody else is helping me. So he established that he's in charge. Captain's not there. Captain's asleep at this time. The other guy, he's more of an executive in the airline, so he only flies occasionally. And as soon as he says, my aircraft, it's the young guy's aircraft and everybody is there to support him.

1:00:16So the more experienced co-pilot who is relegated to a secondary role, his job now was to go heads down and try to activate the standby airspeed and things like that. So he comes really close several times throughout this mishap to understanding what's going on. He doesn't quite get there. And as soon as he starts messing with the avionics, he loses all situational awareness of what's going on until he says, he at one point says, my aircraft. So he takes control of the aircraft and starts solving the problem. And as a cardinal sin of a pilot, the young guy again pulls back on the stick without letting anybody know.

1:00:58So that's the, you know, everything else is pretty forgivable. But him pulling back on the stick, even though that other co-pilot had said my aircraft, that's kind of the unforgivable part. So they were all starting behind the power curve because they had no idea what this young guy was doing. I see. And he was pulling behind on the stick because he thought he was crashing. So he felt like he needed to raise the height of the airplane. At one point, he says, I think we're traveling at incredible speed. So he just had, he was out to lunch. He had no idea what was going on, which happens. You know, I don't want to blame the young co-pilot.

1:01:31He's inexperienced. There's some part of his training that wasn't done properly. So I talk about, you know, one of my favorite sayings is that anytime a pilot crashes, a little bit of all of us goes with them because we all had a chance to influence that decision that they made. So there is some point in his training that he didn't get. So he made a mistake and then he everybody else was behind the power curve because of it. Again, like how could they have you mentioned they had the first check which direction they're going. How would that have helped figure out the speed? Because of the physics of the aircraft.

1:02:06So as an airliner, if the engines are operating properly, it's the attitude of the jet. So you want to make sure you're not going up, not going down, not rolling left, not rolling right. So that's the primary instrument that you look at as a pilot, especially when you're in what are called IFR, instrument flying conditions, if you're in a cloud. So that's the number one thing because a jet isn't just going to rapidly drop altitude if it's flying straight and level. So he should have looked at his attitude indicator, recognized that they're going straight and level. There's no climb, no descent, no turning.

1:02:36everything's going to be fine. Even if your airspeed says you're going a thousand miles an hour, those things have errors. They make mistakes. So disregard that in your cross-check. There are secondary instruments. There's your VVI, your vertical velocity indicator. If that's at zero and your attitude is showing zero, that means you're flying straight and level. You're having an instrument malfunction. So that's one thing that we train in pilot training. You first want to analyze the situation and then take the proper action. So he did not analyze the situation, immediately jumped into pulling back on the stick, pulling the power back, doing all kinds of different things and made it significantly worse.

1:03:15Like I said, if they had done absolutely nothing, they would have flown straight and level. It would have melted. They would have been just fine like those dozen other airliners that encountered a similar situation in the previous year. What's interesting is throughout the book, you give a variety of frameworks to help make decisions in complicated situations. But also you mentioned, okay, you were trained on F-16. So when you switched to F-35s, there was some difficulties. You didn't speak F-35 at first. You had to get used to that. But some methods of decision-making are so broad, it could help you whether you're flying a jet or driving a car or dealing with a relationship situation or whatever.

1:04:00So when you switch to a new domain, let's say you were a passenger on that plane and you knew exactly what was going on. Let's say you go to the cockpit and you say, I can solve this. Would you be able to solve it even though you had never flown that type of plane before? If I was like the captain where I showed up in the middle of this thing? Yeah. Yeah, I think I would have if the guy wasn't holding back on the stick. Since he was holding the stick back, that makes things significantly more difficult because now you think the stick isn't being actuated and you're looking at all the controls, you're thinking, I don't know, is this thing in a flat spin?

1:04:35What's going on? So if it were just me stumbling on this situation, I think I'd be able to solve it. Let's say all the pilots had passed out. And so you're... Yeah, easy. And that's not because it's a different domain. That's actually because that's the domain that we thrive in as fighter pilots. So most commercial pilots, as soon as they get to 400 ,000 feet, they flip on autopilot. They don't turn it off for the rest of the trip until they're ready to land. And in some cases, it'll land on its own. So I know the airliners, they have a lot of issues with the stick and rudder skills atrophying.

1:05:09Not the case as fighter pilots. We're still making a lot of decisions out there, yanking, banking, pulling Gs. So this was a, from a fighter pilot perspective, this is our domain. This was a super easy problem to solve. All they had to do was relax back pressure, get some more airspeed on the jet. It's exactly like my out-of-control situation when I had prevented the aircraft from going out of control. Now I need to get more airflow over the wings so that I can pull up. And the other pilots, they were pretty close to being able to solve that. In fact, they realized at the last minute, I think it was about 5 ,000 feet above the ground, that he had been holding the stick back the whole time.

1:05:48And they said, no, no, no, push it forward. And he was still out to lunch with his understanding of what was going on. he pulled back on the stick and that was their last opportunity to be able to recover the jet. But yeah, absolutely. If you throw really any fighter pilot or even most pilots in that situation, especially if they have a lot of time with smaller aircraft that aren't on autopilot the whole time, that's kind of the first thing you learn is if you're stalling to push forward, get some airspeed back on the jet and then recover. So I'm wondering how much you can take from these skills of this decision-making, almost like these meta skills, and apply them to domains you're not prepared for.

1:06:31So let's say, I don't know, let's say you were having a problem with your kids. Your kids are teenagers and they're doing teenage things you don't approve of. And you have to make a decision about what to do. What percentage of your ability to make a decision do you think you lose in a different domain? That's a good question. I would say there's certainly aspects that carry over. The number one skill to making good decisions is preparation. So I think if you take somebody who's not a parent and throw them in with some teenagers, they're going to struggle despite what decision-making framework that they have.

1:07:06But I think it can make everybody a little bit better. And I think as parents, it's easy to lose your cool and to be able to make a rash decision. So I think being able to slow down, break up the decision-making cycles that you're not just reacting so that you're going on the offense and you're assessing what's going on. You're breaking down, Hey, what's, what's my goal is my goal for compliance, or am I trying to make a child that is able to thrive on their own in their twenties? I think that's a, uh, uh, important question to ask because it's going to go through different solutions. So assess what's your end goal.

1:07:43And I think for me, that's a kid that's able to survive on their own and make good decisions on their own. Break down what am I choosing? What decision am I choosing? There's multiple tools at your disposal. And then being able to execute on it, being able to control how you're thinking. It's easy for them to make their parents frustrated. So being able to control yourself. And then as parents, you make a lot of mistakes. So being able to not berate yourself, to have confidence as a parent, to continue to make decisions because just like flying as a parent, you're making thousands of decisions.

1:08:16You're going to make mistakes. Nobody's ever been a perfect parent throughout their kids' lives. So you're going to make mistakes. So you have to be able to find a way to recover. Hey, you mentioned earlier automation. And on the one hand, automation is, I would imagine this is true in the airline industry. It's true in almost every industry or in the air pilot industry. It very much increases productivity. You could probably train a lot more airline pilots knowing that 95 % of the most plane flights are on autopilot. So that gives you more pilots to choose from when you're hiring people. So on the one hand, automation is a great thing.

1:08:50But like you said, if you automate too much, then some skills might atrophy. And I'm wondering where the line is, because now we have these amazingly fast changes in AI happening right now that's gonna make a lot of jobs so much productive that it might even eliminate some jobs. But what I'm saying is, in general, automation is a really great thing. It increases the productivity of society. Like if robots were stacking all the shelves, it would make stacking shelves more productive. If cars drove you to work every day, if auto driving cars drove you to work every day, you could be more productive in the car.

1:09:26It's a great thing. So when does it become a problem? So I think the number one thing is having a graceful degradation. That's one thing that I think a lot of people don't pay enough attention to. They make this elaborate system for flying or for driving cars. And then when the computer, when the AI runs into an issue that they can't solve, they hand it back to the pilot or the person. And that's the worst time to do it. So it should have a way to gracefully degrade to get the pilot back in the loop. I live in Phoenix. It's the Wild West out here in terms of autonomous cars. We have Waymo's driving around, completely autonomous.

1:10:06Uber had their fleet out here driving around until they hit somebody and killed them, and then they got kicked out. I also drive a Tesla, and 99 % of the time, the autopilot works well. 1 % of the time, it tries to kill you. Same thing with flying. So finding a way for people to be in the loop to maintain their situational awareness, it's really easy to lose that situational awareness and then to get this terrible situation thrown at you, somewhat like the Air France 447 flying through the thunderstorm. And then all of a sudden, bells and alarms are going off. It's your jet autopilot's disappeared.

1:10:40Now, what are you going to do? So finding a way to gracefully degrade what's going on. We're in a unique time, I think, in history where pilots, people, they have a lot that AI does not offer. People think that they're going to be replaced by AI soon, maybe in certain fields, but not in general, in my opinion. I think that humans have an ability to think critically, to be able to link different frameworks and different types of understanding together. And that's going to be relevant for a long time. So I think man plus machine beats either one for the next, call it 50, 100 years. Because a lot of people often ask, fighter pilots are going to be replaced in the next 10 years, right?

1:11:20And the answer is absolutely not. I agree with that. Although let me ask about the fighter pilot situation specifically. If I see a target on the military equivalent of Google satellite that's like real time, you know, tracking everything, can I just hit a button and some guided missile goes straight to that, you know, target? Why do I need a plane to do it? So it's like I said earlier on, it's not just this 1v1 cage match. It's hundreds of assets all going into a country. The enemy is specifically trying to target your decision making. So that's a unique thing. You have really clever enemies out there that are trying to find the weakness in what you're doing.

1:11:57So it's not just missiles out there. It's electronic warfare. They're trying to jam your radars. You're trying to jam them. There's cyber that's trying to shut you down. There's space assets. They're trying to degrade your ability to assess the problem. And you're trying to do the same thing with them. And you're trying to force them to make what we call a lethal choice. choice. So force them kind of back to the landing example, force them into a choice where they don't have a backup option. So they choose option A, that cuts off their ability to do option B. And then it's a lot easier to be able to counter those tactics.

1:12:34So when it comes to warfare, I guess an example would be like, all right, Teslas can drive decently on the highway across the city. Now, what if I gave you a million dollars to prevent that Tesla from driving across the city? I bet you'd come up with all kinds of creative solutions, painting the lines into telephone poles, trying to hack the software, trying to shine laser beams into the cameras. That's what the enemy's doing. They're just sitting around thinking about ways to mess with your ability to assess the problem and make a good decision. So warfare, that's an area that we're going to rely a lot on AI, but it's not going to replace humans, at least as fighter pilots.

1:13:14What it's probably going to look like is we're going out there with some autonomous wingmen. So why did you join the Air Force? I wanted to fly. So I, since I was five years old, I went to an air show. I saw the Thunderbirds flying. I was able to sit in the cockpit. This was back in the 80s and probably can't do that now, but I was able to sit in a cockpit, see these these machines, they're, they're, they're really, they're just incredible. They're just technology wrapped around you. F-35 has 40 plus thousand pounds of thrust. You're on the end of a roller coaster. You control the roller coaster wherever you're going on the battlefield.

1:13:52You have a tremendous ability to impact what's going on. So Afghanistan, we flew a lot of close air support missions. We're able to save a lot of U.S. service members and, and Afghan members as well. So you're able to make a big difference on the battlefield. And it's an experience that doesn't really exist. You're on the end of this roller coaster where you can do pretty much whatever you want. You can fly supersonic, you can fly 50 ,000 feet and see the curvature of the earth. It's just an incredible experience. And then also be able to couple that with being able to save service members out there.

1:14:28It's a great feeling. Have you thought about joining one of these space companies and flying into space? You know, I think we're, so I was just with a astronaut, Terry Virts. He was a space shuttle pilot and he said he was at the perfect time as an astronaut. He wouldn't really want to go back because he got a chance to fly the space shuttle and it was a manual experience. He was flying it back after he gets back from space, it hands it over to the pilot and he had a chance to fly it. Now you really don't get a chance to fly anything. You know, the SpaceX takes you up. you don't really do anything.

1:15:03It docks. So it's almost like an elevator now. I think I have a chance right now to fly fighters at the pinnacle of flying. The technology is amazing. It does incredible things. I think in a few generations, we probably will end up going autonomous, but that's way down the road. So I think I'm at the perfect time to be a fighter pilot. I think space has already become a little bit too autonomous. That being said, I'd love to hop on a ride. Now, this is a dumb question, but how come a fighter jet can't go into space? The engine and how the flight controls work. So you need wind resistance over the flight controls to be able to maneuver.

1:15:43And the air gets extremely thin at altitude. In the 60s, 70s, they had the X-series jets trying to go up and they had little thrusters on them. So that was actually a concept with the X-15. They were going to fly Mach 7 and eventually be able to get into space. I think that was, they found out that rockets were a better way of doing that, especially like with the space shuttle, if you wanted to maximize the reusability, although they had a bunch of issues with that. But for just typical fighter aircraft, if you're not making something elaborate, because maybe they will be able to make hypersonic rocket aircraft that are able to get into orbit.

1:16:23But for just typical aircraft, the engines can't go above, you know, maybe 75 ,000 feet, they'll start to stall out because there's not enough oxygen. Okay, but that's like, that's like 13. You only need to go like three or four miles higher than that, and you're in space. And so can't you throw in, okay, we're switching into space mode. So now there's thrusters on all sides of the plane that could maneuver that way. You could from a physics standpoint, these aircraft definitely aren't designed for that. I think the, you know, it depends on who you're talking to. I know Blue Origin tried to kind of lower it for their rocket.

1:16:58I think it's 60 miles for space. Is that? Okay. So it's 300 ,000 feet. So they were getting up to that altitude or pretty close to it with like the X-15 and some of those aircraft. So I guess you could count kind of those as, as rocket ships, but for the kind of typical fighter aircraft, I mean, you have to think of it from an engineering perspective. What are they trying to do? They're trying to design a stealth fighter that has great sensors to be able to go into combat into something like Ukraine, you know, that kind of conflict right now and be able to be as capable as possible. But hypersonics is the future of the Air Force investing heavily into it.

1:17:35So I think you're going to see a lot more aircraft kind of like the 60s start to manifest. And based on your knowledge and context and everything, what do you think is happening in Ukraine right now? Like we see all this like media and everybody's got their press points. But what do you think is actually happening? I think that Ukraine is decimating the Russian military. So I'm speaking about this from a civilian standpoint with open source information. But just look at how they're able to hold off Russia, granted with Western support. But I mean, it's amazing to watch. And just like we're having a little bit of issues getting connected, that's the fundamentals of warfare.

1:18:17It's not the sexy hypersonics. Russia has done a good job of fooling everybody for the last 20 years, just investing in a few stealth fighters. We have the thousandth F-35 that just rolled off the line, as opposed to other countries just have science experiments when it comes to modern fighters. They just have a few of them. So Russia has done a good job of building a few one-off things to be able to kind of trick the media into going viral with information that they have a great military, but they have not invested in the basics like logistics, like command and control, like communication. And that's why you see, you know, at the start of the war, the generals getting picked off because they were just using non-secure radios.

1:18:59So it's pretty eye-watering to see the Ukrainians, how creative they are, you know, using tractors to drag the tanks off the battlefield and then using manned portable, uh, missiles to, uh, shoot down the, the Russian aircraft. So I think it's, it's amazing what they're doing. I think it's not a big surprise because Russia was kind of a paper tiger and they had a, uh, not a great military, even though they had a super, you know, they were a superpower. A lot of that equipment just sat out for a decade without maintenance. So it's, uh, it's great to see. And, um, hopefully Ukraine can keep it up.

1:19:35I wonder how Russia backs out of this and saves space. Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of a balancing point for the West. You don't want to push too hard. You don't want to have their forces go into the country and ignite a world war or to get somebody to use a nuclear weapon. But you want to make sure that Ukraine is funded and that they're able to continue to bring the fight to Russia. Yeah. Well, uh, Hassard Lee author of the art of clear thinking a stealth fighter pilots, timeless rules for making tough decisions. This is a great book. Like I, I got a, uh, an advanced copy of the book and I started reading it and you're a really good storyteller.

1:20:18Whenever someone comes to me like, Hey, how do I write a book? I always say, forget all of your ideas first and just think of stories and then put the ideas in there. Like think of your best stories first and then wrap them around the ideas so that the ideas are in there. And you do that. I was riveted like right from the beginning with this book, like such, such great stories about a topic I knew nothing about, which was, uh, all your stories on the fighter jets and stuff. And they, and you really then wrap them around these different concepts about decision-making and clear thinking and a very useful book.

1:20:52So thanks so much for, for coming on the podcast. And, uh, So my point is afterwards, after I'd already read the book, then the publicist reached out to me, the publicist for the publishing company, I guess, reached out and said, hey, do you want to have this person on your podcast? I said, absolutely. I just read the book. So rarely do I read the book before if there's no podcast scheduled. But this time I did. It's a very good book. That's fantastic. I'm really glad you liked it. I dedicated many years to writing that book. It's probably six years into the making. Wow. I wrote 500 days in a row.

1:21:23Didn't take a single day off. It was only after the second Thanksgiving that my wife was like, on Christmas, you're going to take that day off, right? You know, it was interesting going from being a fighter pilot to being a writer. You get a lot, you know, comfortable just sitting at a desk writing. So I'd write for four hours every morning. So it was definitely something that I poured my heart and soul into. The trick, they say, you've written so many books. So, you know, I'm sure it just comes out gold for you. But the trick for newbie writers, they say, is just put something on the paper. Make a crappy first draft.

1:21:56And so that's what I did. But then I was left with a crappy first draft. So I went through nine revisions on it to try and hone it down and make it something great. I really like authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Atul Gawande who have these interwoven stories. And I think that helps people learn a lot better. I didn't want a white paper. I wanted to make it story first. And so I really appreciate that. Yeah, and it didn't get bogged down by the science or this study or that study. You had like real stories, which I think is really valuable because then people see that, oh, this works in practice.

1:22:31So once again, The Art of Clear Thinking by Hassard Lee. Thanks so much for sharing some of those stories on the podcast. And look, let us know when you write the next book or anytime you want to come back on, let us know. Will do. Thanks, James. Thanks.

1:22:51Thank you.