Hasard Lee – The Art of Clear Thinking (382)

Speaker Mike Malatesta: Today’s episode, I’m talking with Hasard Lee, a former fighter pilot, an entrepreneur, and filmmaker with almost eighty million YouTube views and a brand new author. We talked about his first experience with a jet when he was five and how he was sold on being a pilot that day. The physical and mental challenges of flying the air force versus fastest and most expensive jets, decision making, mental toughness, debriefs, the book writing process, and the dream sheet. Speaker Hasard Lee: In that sixteen, we have a little wind up clock just in case we have full electrical failure. Whenever there’s an emergency, we’ll tell new pilots wind the clock. It doesn’t do anything. Most of the clocks are broken. It just keeps you from pushing buttons because it’s really important to think through the problem first even if you only have a couple seconds. Speaker Mike Malatesta: He’s got an amazing vibe, and I know you’ll love this conversation. Hi, Hasard. Welcome to the How did happen podcast. Speaker Hasard Lee: May, thanks. It’s great to be here. Speaker Mike Malatesta: I’m really excited. We were talking before we went live here about a bunch of different things that got, you know, particularly you as a as a writer and you’ve written this great book, The Art of Clear Thinking, which Petaway is fantastic title. Like, it’s hard to ignore that title. So kudos to you on that. But I first heard you on another podcast. I think it was James Out, which is a podcast I listen to frequently. And I I’ve had Fighter Pilot on my show before Kuzhou Tesner, he’s a little bit before you, time wise. But I just both of you, like, just the you’ve got this just really calm, cool, you know, delivery and storytelling style that I just I don’t know. It makes me you know, it really resonates with me. And so when I heard you, I thought I really wanna get connected with you. And so thank you so much for connecting with me, sending me an advanced copy of your book, which was fantastic, and coming on the show. Speaker Hasard Lee: Thanks for having me on. This is this is really a pleasure. Speaker Mike Malatesta: So listen everybody. I told you a little bit about Hasard in the intro, but let me tell you a little bit more about him so you can get as excited as I am. So Hasard spent his career flying both the f sixteen and f thirty five jets. In two thousand sixteen, he was selected as the top instructor pilot of the year for the air force for the air force’s largest f sixteen combat wing. And we’ll go through these these f whatever so you get a sense of what these things are because I know a lot of you probably aren’t acquainted with with exactly what those are. So in two thousand seventeen, he returned from Afghanistan. Where his squadron dropped the most ordinance bombs since the opening days of the war. He’s flown eighty two combat missions and four and has four air medals. Congratulations, and thank you. Has it has the distinction of being the only fighter pilot to ever employ two different types of jets in combat on the same day. Was that due to, like, a breakdown in like, an inventory thing, or was it due to some specialty that you needed for it from the particular jet? Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. So that was a really interesting experience. So that was the last mission in Afghanistan for me and we had Aviano f sixteen block forties replacing us so we were flying their jets and there’s really bad troops in contact situation that kicked off in the Nangarhar region, so along the Pakistani border and so they scrambled us to go and and support that troops in contact situation. I ended up employing all my ordinance in in ten minutes and we’re flagged to cover a four hour period. There are no other pilots available. So I got on satcom with headquarters. They said fly back as fast as you can. So I looked afterburners, started flying back as fast as I could. And when I got back, I hopped into an f sixteen block fifty, so a new updated software took that back into combat and was able to employ. And fortunately, we didn’t lose any troops that day. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Okay. That had to be a hell of a day. Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. It was a busy day. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Well, thanks for sharing that. So Azure is also a content creator, an entrepreneur, and has one of the largest defense channels on YouTube. Since the start of twenty twenty one, he has over seventy nine million views on YouTube and has reached over two hundred ninety million people across social media. His first book, The Art of Clear Thinking, which again awesome title debuted last week on the twenty third of May, this this is dropping, I think, the next week. Anyway, through Saint Martin’s press, the book focuses on how to use fighter pilot, decision making in everyday life. Hasard speaks on air combat aren’t air combat, human performance, decision making, mental toughness, and how to debrief, and find out more about him at his website, which is his name, Hasard lee, h a s a r d l e e dot com. And of course, his YouTube channel, if that’s your name. Right? Your YouTube channel is your name? Correct. Okay. And his company is hazard x dot com, h a s a r d x dot com. So Hasard it I start every podcast with the same simple question and that is how did it happen for you? Speaker Hasard Lee: So for me, that goes back to when I was five. So I I went to an air show back then and that was when you could hop in the the cockpit of an f sixteen and f fifteen. So I I climbed up jumped in the cockpit, put on a helmet. So it looked like a bobble head back then when I was that small and I was hooked I saw a Thunderbirds fly. I knew this is what I wanted to do. That’s a little bit challenging as a kid to have this dream. If you want to be in the NFL or be a professional baseball player. There are leagues that you can go, literally can you can actually play those sports, but you know, wanting to be a fighter pilot. There’s not a lot you can do. I watch all the movies, memorize all the facts. I lived in a small town called Los Alamos, New Mexico. And my dad was a scientist and Las Alamos is where the Manhattan project Speaker Mike Malatesta: — Speaker Hasard Lee: Mhmm. — was born. And so they purposely picked a place that was in the middle of nowhere. So that the Japanese can attack it nor the German. So not a lot I could do there. Until I was a teenager, I I didn’t fly but when I was a teenager I had a chance to fly in a small cessna 01:52. It’s essentially a flying lawnmower with wings. And so I got a chance to fly and I was hooked after that. It was it was kind of a combination of sports and academics. So I I wasn’t a great student in school, but I was a pretty good athlete but not great, but this really connected with me of of having to study but also happen and have good hands when you’re flying. And to pay for it, I was working at fast food restaurant says in my young teens. So it really wasn’t a recipe for being able to get my private pilot license. But I knew that’s what I wanted to do. And so I applied to the Air Force Academy. And I got a crisp white letter back saying, unfortunately, we don’t have the room for you. Good luck with your life. And so I was pretty dejected for a couple weeks. I had all the stickers and the flags all over my room. So I thought the dream was over But a few weeks later, I got another letter in the mail saying that I was right on the cusp. If I went to another school called New Mexico Military Institute and kept my grades up, then they would let me into the school. And so that’s the path I made it into the academy. Well, I was at the academy. I played baseball for a little bit and then transitioned to being an intercollegiate boxer, which unfortunately the day before my flight physical. So the flight physical is the the big deal there. Everybody wants to be a pilot. And you have to pass the life is go even small things like a heart murmur and you’ll get even asthma, even cussion when you’re young, you’ll get rejected. And it’s after you’ve already signed on the dotted line. So after sophomore year, you’re committed to the Air Force for five years. And your physical is until your junior year. So anyway, the day before my flight physical I was boxing and ruptured my right eardrum and so I had to go through a whole bunch of waivers and I had to to heal my ear up. Fortunately, I was able to make it through. I got a pilot slot And then after that, I went to pilot training. So the first thing you do is you go to introduction to flight training. It’s in Pueblo, Colorado. You’ll find small small planes diamond DA twenties essentially like sesenas and about twenty percent of people get weeded out there. They just They wanna be pilots, but they just don’t have the hands or the aptitude to fly. So it’s it’s it’s narrowing process as you make your way to becoming a fighter pilot. So went there, did okay there, moved on to the next step which was flying the t six Texan two. It’s a it’s an amazing plane. It’s almost like a p fifty one must a high performance prop plane about eleven hundred horsepower and knew I had hit my calling there because we’re flying formation, we’re doing aerobatics. Doing some light, almost dog fighting type maneuvers and it was a blast. We started out with thirty students. A few of them washed out but I remember the first day of pilot training. The wing commander in charge of the whole base came in and he Hasard, alright, I want you to close your eyes how many of you wanna be fighter pilots? Raise your hand. I raised my hand. He’s Mikre, alright, open your eyes. All thirty had their hands raised. And he said, two of you if you’re lucky will fly fighters. The rest of you will fly heavies. I want you to think about that when your heavies are tankers and transport aircraft I want you to think about that while you’re here and walked out. So that was his motivational pep talk and after that we were off to the races. So flying the t six Making it through the t six, there were about seven of us selected to fly the t thirty eight. It’s a supersonic jet trainer built back in the fifties. Still, it’s the most difficult plane I’ve ever flown because they wanted to fly supersonic. They had very small engines, so they made high speed maneuvering, low speed. It’s terrible. So a lot of students over the years have unfortunately crashed in the traffic pattern. So now only the top seven students go and fly t thirty eights, the rest go and fly essentially little leer jets called the t one. And I flew that for the next six months doing a lot of the similar things that I did with the the t six only was at twice the speed. So that’s a huge jump to go from front flying prop planes to flying fighters. And then after that, a few of us were selected to go fly fly fighters. So I got selected for my number one choice, the f sixteen. But it’s never over as a fighter pilot. You never quite quite make it until you’re actually in the cockpit of a jet. So after you graduate from t thirty eights, you still have to go to one last school called IFF introductory to flight fighter fundamentals. And so even you’ve made it all the way, you made it to your dream and still this school, it’s only six weeks long they wash out about twenty percent of the students and it’s just the the final check to make sure you have what it takes to to be a fighter pilot. And then you also have to go through the centrifuge. So we’re pulling when we’re flying fighters upwards of nine g’s, nine times the force of gravity. So Right now I weigh about two hundred pounds, two hundred thirty with my gear on. When we’re pulling G’s in a fighter we can pull upwards of nine G’s. That’s about if you’ve been in a roller coaster and done a loop where their head your head goes down, that’s about three e g’s. So we’ll pull nine g’s. If you pull too much, you’ll you’ll pass out because that blood’s being pulled from your brain. So you go to the centrifuge and you get two shots at doing the centrifuge. If you go through the first one and you pass out, you get a shot the next day and if you fail that one, then you get washed out of training and you’ll go and fly some of those other other types of aircraft. So It’s this it’s this really long weeding out process where you look around one day and you realize that nobody you started off with was there. So Right. Made it to have sixteen training and that was an amazing experience. It was the culmination of a a twenty year dream. So it made it to have sixteen’s, first takeoff was incredible f sixteen’s like a stripped down hot rod and you’re sitting on top of a thirty thousand pound thrust engine. So First take off, went to max the afterburner. I could feel the five stages of afterburner light off. So we essentially have two types of engines on these jets. So kind of a typical engine that we have on an airliners. And then on the backside, we have afterburners. So essentially injecting fuel into it, lighting it off and it’s a thirty foot flame thrower out of the back. So first takeoff I could feel the the each of the stages lighting off as I accelerated, pinning me to the back of my seat, you know, just big a smile on my face because that was the culmination of the dream. So went and learned how to fly the F sixteen in Phoenix, Arizona. After that, went to Korea, South Korea and flew for two years there. After all this training, you would think you’re you’re you know you’re worth something, you’re important. When you show up here first fighter squadron, your most important job is to make sure the snack bar is full because you are a worthless new fighter pilot. So you have to really earn your stripes. It takes about three months of mission qualification training before you can actually go into combat. And so I I served there for a couple years and then went to Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina doing I would say the most important mission for fighter pilots and that’s suppression of enemy air defense. I think everybody’s seen top gun to the new one where the missiles are along the canyons. So seed suppression of enemy air defenses taking out those missile sites And that’s actually why Russia has failed to establish air superiority in Ukraine because they do not have a good seed, skill set, and background of being able to take out those Sam sites. So that’s that was my job. There were only six gardens in the world at the time that that did that. So we were busy going to all these different exercises there. I deployed to Afghanistan, out of Shaw, doing a lot of close air support out there. And as you mentioned, was there during a a really pivotal period of time. From there, I was selected to fly the f thirty five which was pre initial operation capability, pre IOC. So it’s still almost Malatesta bed. So a lot of little bugs and issues with it. So I went to the F thirty five and was able to help mature that platform and help develop the the new syllabus and training techniques for new F thirty five pilots. Who will be carrying the torch so the f thirty five will be the key to our air power until at least twenty fifty, and it’s projected to fly till twenty seventy. So I did that for several years and then in twenty twenty I I got out of active duty as one of only three people to be part time f thirty five I didn’t even know that existed but I was a part time f thirty five pilot flying a couple times a month and then I wanted to become a writer and author and had a podcast and a content creator. So it’s kind of a a long story. But essentially, when I came back from Afghanistan, I started writing some notes down about the missions I had been on that coincided with a speech I gave in the city of carefree on Memorial Day talking about loss because we did have some we had a suicide bomber sneak onto base, and we had some people killed. So I gave a speech, and there’s a woman in the crowd who was a teacher who said my students have to hear this. They don’t know a lot about the military. Right. They really need to hear about what people are doing on the other side of the world. So I started speaking with them started a podcast out of that. And those two things kind of interwove together to starting a podcast, creating content on YouTube, writing this book, which I I spent so it’s the culmination of a six year journey writing this book. Spent over five hundred days in a row, writing it, wrote every word in it. And it just debuted. So that’s that’s pretty much how it happened. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Okay. Thank you. I I got a lot of questions So First off, this suicide bomber, you tell that story in the book. So that was, like, phase one. And then phase two, you I’m just speaking to your writing skills here, the runaway tanker, the rusted tanker, you know, that became a whole Mikre, the way you crafted that part of the story was really, really well done. I’m not gonna tell everybody what it is, but it was it was really well. It was suspenseful. It was mysterious. It was scary. And I don’t know. I felt like my heart was pounding faster just way you told that part of the story. So anyway, thank you for that. Speaker Hasard Lee: That’s the best compliment you can give. Because I really enjoy writers like Malcolm Gladbull or Tul Guande, who wrote the checklist manifesto where they interweave stories. Oh, Speaker Mike Malatesta: yeah. Checklists. Speaker Hasard Lee: I think somebody was saying that if all it took was information, we’d all have six packs and be billionaires. So you can’t just read bullet points of of how to do things. I think as humans, we really learn through storytelling. So The best thing that you can do is experience something on your own. But as humans, our strength has been able to learn from other people’s successes and failures. Now I I have small kids, so sometimes sometimes they do have to touch the the hot stove to realize it’s hot. But every once in a while, they can learn from somebody else’s mistake. And that’s a tremendous advantage if you can if you can do that over a sustained period of time. So that’s what I tried to do with the book, make it about eighty percent storytelling, some from my experience flying, but others from key moments in history and business decisions so that people can learn from that experience almost as if they were there. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Yeah. And when you were you were talking about you were you were comparing to Top Gun two, and I felt like that a lot of the book too. I’ve Mikre, I watched that movie. A lot of what they did in that movie, you were actually doing, like, for real. And when they When you talk about the missile thing, I remember the story in the book was taking out the missile communication system in Iraq. Right? It was called Carrie or something like that. Is that similar to what you were talking about just then with the missiles and the the Russians not being able to figure out — Absolutely. — how to do that? Speaker Hasard Lee: Absolutely. You’re as a wild weasel pilot that’s what they call the the seed squadrons. You are going after an integrated air defense. It is Think of it as a monster, a giant monster of interconnected intelligence and missiles and planes they are not gonna just passively get rolled over. They are thinking years in advance of how do we stop a force from coming into us. Speaker Mike Malatesta: So Speaker Hasard Lee: they have really sophisticated air defense systems. Everything from early warning radars to detect you at range to fighters on the ground sitting alert. To those Sam sites. And the key is to be able to to break down their communication and that’s what we specialize as suppression epidemi air defense fighters, their communication, for instance, if they’re able to be at full capacity and to be able to use their queuing from early warning radars, then they don’t need to keep their what are called targeting radars on as long, which makes it really difficult for us to target and take those out. Speaker Mike Malatesta: So because you can see them. In other Speaker Hasard Lee: words, you But but they’re but they’re smart people. They’re sitting around thinking, how do I defeat these people? And that’s one of the stories in the book. Talking about minimizing their radiation time. They’ll turn on their radar for just a few seconds, get a few shots off, and then move their radar site. So that makes it very, very difficult as a seed fighter to be able to take them out. If their systems are fully operating, then they can do that. However, if you start taking out their eyes, taking out those early warning radar sites, taking out their headquarters facility, taking out their power sights, then it forces them to keep their their radars on for a longer period of time, which makes it easier for us take them out. So it’s this really complex problem that’s multi domain. So you’re talking space assets, cyber assets, people on the ground all working together in harmony to be able to to take out these systems. So very, very complex. Speaker Mike Malatesta: That wasn’t you alluded to the story in the book. And as I recall, That was a that was an experienced I don’t know what his rank was. I don’t know whether he was Afghan or Rocky, but he basically had had old equipment But he was he and his team were very good at being able to still be effective against tens of millions of dollars worth of aircraft flying fine. Yeah. Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. I talk about how creativity is really an asymmetric advantage. So it’s not just about the resources you have. So I think there’s a lot of parallels to the business world here Speaker Mike Malatesta: — Speaker Hasard Lee: Yep. — where If you are agile, if you are quick thinking, if you’re able to pivot when you have to, you can have a huge advantage. And so I talk in there about how this Serbian colonel was in charge of an aging Speaker Mike Malatesta: — Speaker Hasard Lee: Oh, yes. Speaker Mike Malatesta: — Speaker Hasard Lee: nineteen fifties surface air missile site and he was able to take down some of the most sophisticated stealth fighters that the US had using just really rudimentary methods and we tried to target them throughout the war and were not successful and he was able to to shoot down several of our best assets. Speaker Mike Malatesta: He’d be an interesting guy to talk to about his experiences. He would. Speaker Hasard Lee: He’s crafty. Speaker Mike Malatesta: You mentioned that after rising to the top, and it seemed like quite a pyramid. You know, people keep getting washed out, people, you know, keep getting washed out. And I imagine the range of emotions of your classmates as they go through this process and everyone’s got their hand up that they wanna fly jets and, you know, two out of thirty of the of the how many that got to the thirty. Like, all of these people are disappointed. So your classmates are disappointed, and then even when once you graduate, you can be appointed. I’m wondering what the environment is like because it’s super competitive, but also there’s a lot that I imagine you gotta have a tremendous collaboration between everyone too. How did from your experience, Mikre how do people deal with that? Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. It’s a really unique environment because you are all are working together but also against each other. So I I think I think you’re just forced to to be as much of a team as possible so you’re you’re Mikre Commander, the person in charge of you Hasard the huge weight of being able to to weight your scores at the end of the program. So if you are one of those people just keeps to yourself that doesn’t share how you’re learning, then you’re not gonna make it to being a fighter pilot no matter how talented you are. So above all, it’s it’s really important to be collaborative, to be sharing the lessons that you’re learning with your classmates. So at the end of the day, we know that only a few people are gonna get fighters, but it’s not it’s it’s not like a sports team or like boxing or something like that, they’re not your adversaries. You’re just trying to do the best you can on your own and just just where the chips fall, they fall. And at the end of the day we’re all gonna work together. And those are some amazing pilots Mikre some of them just they just made one mistake and it didn’t work out for them. Some of them had other issues, but but you you fly with them throughout your career. So we absolutely rely on the tanker pilots. We absolutely rely on the ISR intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance pilots. So it’s never one pilot is better than another. We’re working as a team and as I said these these problem sets going in and taking out an enemy’s integrated air defense extremely complex. So we really try to separate arrogance from confidence, unique confidence, but arrogance is projecting outward. And if you go in as the mission commander, and you are talking about how great the F thirty five is and how much better a pilot you were in pilot training, you’re really gonna turn off all those other assets and you need the sum to be greater than the parts. So that’s that’s what leadership is. So we work a lot on on trying to be the best leaders possible and to go back to the original question, you you really you really need to collaborate well as a team. That’s one of the most important skills as a fighter pilot. Speaker Mike Malatesta: And when you were getting out of the Air Force Academy, I think I heard you say that you chose the sixteen. So what is that process like? You get to choose where you wanna specialize and or how does that work? Speaker Hasard Lee: So you first go to pilot training and so everybody goes to to pilot training a few weeks, maybe a few months before you graduate, you put your dream sheet together. So Dreamheet starts with aircraft number one for me as the f sixteen going all the way down the list. They don’t know if you’re going to get those aircraft, they don’t know if they have it, they just are asking what, you know, in your dream, what would you pick? And then they pair that up with whatever fighters they get. So it’s really the needs of the Air Force. Sometimes there are zero fighters available. Sometimes there are a lot more. So It really just depends on the needs of the air force matched up. The the best thing when I tell new pilots, the best thing you can always do is just to do the best you can and be at the top of the list. Because you have your highest chance of of getting whatever jet you want. But, yeah, that’s that’s how it works. Speaker Mike Malatesta: And I mentioned in when we were going through the bio, maybe just a a quick rundown on the different so the jets that are mentioned in the book, f sixteen, f thirty five, f twenty two. There are probably others, but Can you just give people a layman’s understanding of what these different things are so they can sort of put themselves in your shoes for a second? Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. So f sixteen is a stripped down hot rod. It was built in the nineteen seventies when it was all about turning tightly and sustaining that turn. So it’s a very, very nimble agile dog fighter. We still fly that aircraft today. So I was flying the the newest F sixteen’s in the US inventory, but those are built back in two thousand and two. So we have a new generation of fighters now. The twenty two and the F thirty five. So those are the only two US fifth generation fighters. So they’re a lot more sophisticated than the f sixteen was even though we’ve done a lot of upgrades to it. The f sixteen is essentially it’s the cockpit’s a rat’s nest of tech So you have eighties, nineties, two thousands technology all inside this cockpit and the pilot’s eyes are scanning everywhere and it’s really difficult to to employ well. And unfortunately, we lose quite a few pilots to controlled flight into terrain. They’re just flying along at low altitude. They’re working their radar trying to fuse all this information together with their brain. And misprioritize and run into a mountain. The Gen fighters do a lot better job of fusing that information together to make it a lot more accessible to the pilots. You’re a lot more capable as a pilot. So f thirty five is the the newest one. F twenty two is what we call legacy fits in. F twenty two pilots aren’t a huge fan of that name, but they’re a fit gen fighter. They’re kind of the bridge between the older Fortune fighters of turning tightly and the new newest one of the F thirty five being more of a a flying sensor of managing systems and passing that information along. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Okay. And that what most people, at least me, most people, my generation, remember the stealth bomber sort of looked like What did it look like? A stingray or something? Were those were stone use when you were in Afghanistan? Or no, had they Speaker Hasard Lee: So there are two different types. So there’s the b two bomber. That’s a a massive bomber that that looks like the stingray. There’s another aircraft called the f 01:17. That’s what I cover in the book. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Oh, okay. Speaker Hasard Lee: And that’s a really angled looking weird airplane that was really fragile couldn’t dog follow what we did with these with the f thirty five was really fuse the f 01:17. With an f sixteen. So that’s kind of the the child out of those two. Speaker Mike Malatesta: K. Alright. And it was funny when you were describing the f sixteen in the book, I think I laughed when you were talking about the braking system because it was really easy to sort of wrap your head around the the brakes being, like, something you’d have on a a toyota corolla, I think, is what you said. It was like, when you think about the speed you’re coming in and then having to stop with those brakes, it was really kinda brought home to stripped down, like, strapping a rocket to your butt kind of thing and just Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. There’s no extra fat on it and, yeah, that’s thirty thousand pound aircraft. So it’s at about fifteen, ten times more than than a regular car and it’s going at about a hundred seventy five miles an hour. So that’s one of the principles I cover in the book is exponential and energy is exponential. So you’re going twice as fast. It’s four times energy. So you have an aircraft that is ten times the weight going four times as fast as a toyota corolla and you have to dissipate that energy. So we we oftentimes have we have a lot of people, especially when you’re coming back with with bombs, a lot of fuel, you at high density altitude Mikre in Afghanistan. They’ll light the brakes on Mikre, and it’ll it’s it’s a big deal. Speaker Mike Malatesta: One of the one of the stories you tell in the book, and you it kind of reminded me of it when you were talking about you know, the g forces and passing out, and you didn’t pass out in this example. But you as I recall, you were doing some type of vertical maneuver, and essentially the engine. Essentially, you surpassed the capability of the machine and you started to basically fall back, like, first. Is that right? Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. So that’s that’s I really wanted to cover the concept that small inputs can have large outputs. So these decisions we’re making are like the small gears in a mechanical clock So a small seemingly peripheral one can have a big impact. And so in that case, I was dog fighting against somebody and I was just This was one of my first times dogfighting in the f sixteen just learning how to how to do it. And I was doing essentially a loop into the vertical and I was five knots too slow about seven miles an hour. So just just a little bit and I decided to do it and because, you know, small inputs, I was thinking have small small consequences. So just seven miles an hour too slow. Go into the vertical and I almost make it over the top of the loop. But because I was slow, I end up freezing in space with a nose completely in the vertical full afterburner. So thirty thousand pounds of thrust really at that altitude, probably twenty thousand pounds of thrust coming out. So just hanging at some point in the sky and then I actually start traveling backwards, which is something the f sixteen isn’t designed to do and I end up putting the jet out of control and it’s it’s not a good situation. So that was the story I used to to show that point. Speaker Mike Malatesta: And then it was one of several that you used Hasard to talk about decision making under pressure. And I was amazed and I think most people will be amazed that you took us through a lot of decisions or checks that you were going through, not just in that in that in that example, but also in the example of whether we you should land at a particular airship somewhere. And it was amazing to to me how calm you have to you have to be, to be a good leader and make good decisions. Because as you were walking through them, it was you know, you’re at the speed at which you’re traveling or the holy crap as which you’re falling, you would think that most most people would. They would just freak out, and they would just like the pilot on the the Air France story told Air France four four seven, they just They freaked out, and they did everything they were supposed they did everything they weren’t supposed to do because they felt like they had to do something. As opposed to actually thinking through. Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. We have a saying you can always make the problem worse. So we in in f sixteen, we have a little it was designed in the seventies. So we have a little wind up clock just in case we have full electrical failure. It’s really not necessary, it’s just to hold over that they haven’t rid of and so whenever there’s an emergency will tell new pilots, wind the clock. Doesn’t do anything, most of the clocks are broken. It just keeps you from pushing buttons because it’s really important to to think through the problem first even if you only have a couple seconds Right? Think logically through that problem before you start action. People really have a tough time with that, especially organizations. They They want to jump to conclusions. It’s tough to measure progress when you’re in the brainstorming phase. You want to start making progress and moving and so a lot of people spend just a just a very, very short amount of time brainstorming and then start executing on it, which can be a detriment. As opposed to to coming up with a logical solution of what you should do. Speaker Mike Malatesta: That was a great you you said it and that was a great line in the book that no problem is so bad that you can’t make it worse. Yeah. If you just sit back and think about that, people say all the time, well, I can’t get worse than this. Well, yeah, probably can get worse than that. Right? Speaker Hasard Lee: Even flying, the closure rates for us miles almost every time. You you at least have a little bit of time, a little gap to come up with a good solution. Speaker Mike Malatesta: So there were so many things in the book that were just amazing, but one of the ones and I think it would be helpful if you walk people through this is just this constant, Mikre how you refuel in the air. There’s a giant fuel tanker flying around, hopefully, in a place where it can’t be hit. And you and your wingman and your whatever, you guys are well, you’re using a lot of fuel. I think you said something like when you hit the afterburner, It’s Mikre sucking, like, a swimming pool dry. And so you need a lot of fuel, and you have to get it by basically hooking up to a stick that’s coming out of this tanker. And I can you just try to make us be able to feel what that’s like? Because it’s it seems it’s it’s almost hard to believe. That it can be done. But, yeah, I know it’s done all the time. So Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. Yeah. It’s an incredible experience the first couple times you do it. So we have These tankers essentially flying gas stations. They’re filled with fuel. It’s it’s like an airliner filled with fuel and it’s a completely manual maneuver. And so you pull up behind this tanker and it’s really challenging the first couple couple times you do it because you’re taught throughout your career never hit another aircraft and now you’re intentionally touching another aircraft going. Three hundred ten knots, about three hundred fifty miles an hour. And so you will it’ll have a boom coming out the end of it and it sounds counterintuitive and it sounds weird, but you are trying to essentially fly behind it and smoothly hit your head on the end of that boom because there’s a boom operator in the aircraft and they’ll slowly swing it to your right and then you’ll pull into position. Again, this is all manual and then you’ll stop you’ll freeze that site picture so freeze where you are even though you’re both traveling three hundred fifty miles an hour and then they’ll plug into your jet and start refueling. So it’s pretty terrifying the first couple of times you do it, but but eventually it becomes routine for the most part. When we were flying missions in Afghanistan, we would refuel four or five times every mission and it gets to be routine until it doesn’t. So there are times when there’s a lot of turbulence when it’s at night low illumination. There’s weather or I talk in the book about a time. We almost ran out of fuel where it gets pretty sporty refueling and you know, you definitely don’t wanna hit the tanker and turn into a giant fireball. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Right. And as far as, like, the actual connection. Is it a is it a I mean, it’s obviously not magnetic. I don’t know how does it actually so the fuel doesn’t spill out? How does it connect? Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. There’s a seal and I believe it’s a hydraulic connection. So these tankers for the most part were designed KC 01:35, that’s the primary tanker right now. Those were designed and built in the fifties and sixties. So it’s really old technology that’s holding these up. We have a new tanker coming out, but the backbone is still these really old tankers. Speaker Mike Malatesta: And that operator, the boom operator, that’s a lot of pressure too. You gotta Speaker Hasard Lee: It is, especially with a stealth fighter. You don’t wanna ding up the top of the the coating. So they they are are great at what they do as well. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Chapter six of the book is about mental toughness and you’ve been an instructor. You talk a little bit about the change in training. You talk about the even some of the best students that come out when they’re faced with some of the situations say that you talk about in the book that are real pressure cookers, or they’re simulated. They sometimes the the the mind just can’t handle the number of decisions or the number of things that have to be gone through. And I’m just curious how because you talk about that as being something that is real challenging for a lot of people, but also, I think you you talk about how to make people stronger, be able to handle those things better. So and those apply to to it seems Mikre, obviously, they apply to business and and leadership, but it’s Mikre it’s it’s such a it’s in in in the military, it’s such a life or death thing. And, you know, most of business isn’t life or death. You can make a bad decision and recover from it. A lot of times, but but you can’t maybe in the military. So I’m curious, first of all, how you worked on mental toughness, improving mental toughness and and your experience with it. And then how you teach that to people that maybe aren’t in a life or death situation, but can always get better at making decisions. Speaker Hasard Lee: A couple aspects to it. One is being able to handle the pressure. So there’s a lot of pressure as the fighter pilot. They’ll sometimes be a thousand people that have touched the mission before you. So there are spies on the ground. There are intelligence operators. There are space assets, cyber assets, all working tankers launching from other continents all to enable you to get over the target on time. And you’re the last link. And so if you screw up this target may never get destroyed and if it’s a high value target and and they’re trying to evade you may never see it again. So there’s a lot of pressure, especially in today’s world where you have these joint operation centers with with everything coming out of your jet from that everybody can watch. So there’s a lot of pressure there. And so we we’ve developed over the last several years we really focus on human performance and being able to maximize the the human weapon system as well. So being able to handle the pressure is a key part of being a fighter pod. Another aspect though that I talked to is the students we have are some of the best pilots in the world. They are fantastic at what they do. They’re extremely motivated but a lot of times they’ll let the mistake that they make spiral out of control. And we’re making thousands of decisions each flight, so there’s never been a perfect sortie out there. So you’re going to make some mistakes. So they will make a lot of good decisions and they will let a bad suboptimal decision snowball out of control. And so that’s one of the stories I’m talking about in the book but it’s not even a story. It’s just something common that happens every couple days when I fly. Speaker Mike Malatesta: I think you Mikre to that I think you refer to that as eating your own mentality or something along those lines. Is that different? Speaker Hasard Lee: Well, that’s that’s a little bit different concept in that we used to be very harsh evaluators. So we didn’t teach students any mental toughness techniques. You’re either tough or you didn’t weren’t and if you weren’t, you get washed out and you want to make it through training. So that’s the eat your own mentality. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Oh. Speaker Hasard Lee: But we really switch to a more of a coaching mentality. At the end of the day, we do have to be evaluators and make sure that we’re putting out a good good pilot into the combat air force. But ultimately it’s about coaching. These these students are all some of the top students in the world, they’ve proven that they can make it through pilot training. It’s on us to make sure that we’re able to develop a great wingman that can go into combat. It’s not necessarily on them. They’re trying their best. It’s on us to adapt our style of teaching to the way that they learn. So that’s been a big mentality shift, and we’ve really seen some big benefits from that. But keeping students from mentally snowballing is an important aspect of our job where they’ll make a mistake and then they’ll spend cognitive bandwidth focused on that mistake. And at the speeds we fly a mile every three seconds, you really need your entire focus on the next decision, especially if you made a mistake. If you made a mistake, you’re now in a worse position than you were before. So you need extra ability to get yourself out. So if you’re busy kicking yourself, worrying about how you’re going to might fail this ride then that’s gonna take away from your next decision and at the speeds we fly, it’s very easy to to spiral out of control. So that’s a big aspect of my job as an instructor is to make these students more mentally resilient. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Let’s talk about the writing of the book. You said it took six years of you writing the book and as an author myself. And I think a lot of people listening are authors or would be authors. Right? So they’re always interested in understanding someone’s process. So you started the book while you’re still in the military? Speaker Hasard Lee: Essentially. I I started it when I came back from Afghanistan. We had a very, very busy deployment and I started kind of just as a way to decompress and the stories were so crazy over there. It’s combat such a weird place, everything’s so extreme that when you come back everything seems everything seems to lack color because nothing can can match the the a mix of excitement and mix of a mission. It’s just such a visceral experience and I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget those stories. So I just started writing down some of the stories I had no intention of publishing it or anything like that, but I did that for a while and I was like I think I think I kind of enjoy writing. I I have a lot of work to do to get better as a writer, but that was where the the seeds were planted. Speaker Mike Malatesta: And you mentioned Malcolm Gladwell and I’m sure there are others who sort of inspired you to become interested in writing and creating basically taking your creativity from all that you learned of being creative with a fighter jet and taking that and employing it in a different way. And I’m wondering started writing down these stories. When did you get serious about doing it? And then how did you like, was there a day where you were like, oh, I’m going to do this, and I’m gonna commit five hundred straight days to writing, and I’m gonna try to find a publisher and do all those things or what was it like? Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. So the idea was kind of percolating while I was I was just writing some of these things down. Didn’t have any plans to actually publish a book, but I thought maybe it’d be interesting to get some of these stories out. There are a lot of lessons learned that I think people could use in their everyday lives. And I had a podcast and I spoke to a man named Dan Schilling. He was in the the real Blackhawk down. He’s credited with saving Army ranger and a seal team six member. So incredible guy and he had written a book a New York Times bestseller called Alown at Don. And so after the interview, I was just talking with him and said, I’m thinking about writing a book. I think it’d be interesting. I’m I’m doing some writing right now, and he said, Oh, no. No. That’s that’s not how you do it. You need to talk to my agent. I’m gonna reach out to my agent. I’m gonna see if he will take you on and you need to write a proposal. So don’t just start writing a book that works for fiction, but you really want to write a proposal And so I I wrote a proposal, worked with the agent. The agent said it was terrible and so we started over again. And one thing I have realized about the literary world is it moves like molasses. I I was ready to go. I’d write something in a week and it would take like two months to get back to me just because it’s such a slow antiquated industry. And so ended up writing proposal and then we started chopping it around. So that’s kind of the the origins of of where the book came from. Speaker Mike Malatesta: And as you were going along in that process, you’d send something and then wait. Were you continuing to write, for example, or were you waiting for feedback or how that that had to be frustrating because you were sort of started and you wanna finished. I suppose. Right? Speaker Hasard Lee: Absolutely. It was very frustrating. There’s not much you can do. This was a alien world to me. I I didn’t know what I was doing. So the agent would would come back and say, I need You you really have to write a book to write a book. So I wrote it was about twenty five thousand words for just the proposal. It’s essentially a business case showing that people will read it and that you’ll be able to promote it and that it’s an interesting story. And so I would I would just blaze through it in in a couple days and then, you know, he’s managing a whole stable of writers. So he would get back to me about a month, month and a half later and that’s that’s that’s just the process in the publishing industry unless there’s some secret shortcut. I think maybe if you’re a big author, you have a shortcut there but for a brand new person. I mean, that’s one of the difficult things I think for anybody is I was kinda at the top of my field as a fighter pot, but if you wanna go do something else, you gotta climb down the mountain. There’s you can’t just jump mountains. You gotta climb down the mountain and slog it out as a new person. And I think most people aren’t willing to do that. But I’ve I’ve never had a problem doing that. Speaker Mike Malatesta: I think it’s hard for a lot of people to do that because they just once you reach a certain point, there’s an expectation about who you are that’s hard to give up. Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. You have to be willing to be the idiot. The person with Speaker Mike Malatesta: — Yeah. — Speaker Hasard Lee: the dumb questions that doesn’t know what they’re doing that gets critiqued and criticized and just are are lacking in whatever you’re trying to do. But I think the best people in the world, they’re constantly reinventing themselves. They’re comfortable, being uncomfortable, and that’s that’s really a skill. As a fighter pilot, you never get comfortable really doing what you’re doing because there’s always a next You’re always training, always learning something new. So that’s one thing that I really am thankful the military did. Maybe not at the time, but you are always uncomfortable in the military, and it trains you to be comfortable, being uncomfortable. Speaker Mike Malatesta: And I talked to you about let’s talk about the debrief process So you you talk a little bit about debrief in the in the book. And when I had Kuzhou on, he talked his whole his book was called debrief to win. And I find that One, one, talk about how talk about the process and how valuable it is. And then two, in the real world, outside of the military in the business world, in the entrepreneurial world, for example, how much how frequently do you see good debriefing being done? Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. So When we fly, we’ll only fly typically for a training mission about an hour an hour and a half and we’ll come back and we’ll brief for debrief for two to six hours. So we’ll dig through everything to find out what went wrong and how we can do it better. We’ll sometimes listen to the same radio call ten times just to figure out how we can say it better the next time. And so that’s really the key to our success in learning as fighter pods it’s really expensive to fly these planes. It costs the f thirty five. It costs somewhere between thirty five and fifty thousand dollars hour flight just for one, and we’ll sometimes be going out with sixteen other aircraft. So it’s very expensive. It’s important for us to be able to learn from each mission as much as we can. So debrief process is important. We also have a lot of heritage and a lot of techniques that we use throughout it. One is nameless rankless, debriefs. We’re trying to be surgeons and we’re trying to keep it completely sterile where we just learn lessons. We’re not trying to pass blame there. If anything, people are trying to accept blame for what they did wrong and how they can do it better. But rank and experience doesn’t matter if you are a young flight lead who’s in their mid twenties and you’re leading the flight, your job is to debrief the mission and I’ve seen times where a young cat and in their mid twenties is debriefing the wing commander in charge of the entire base who’s who’s been to combat, who’s who’s done everything. So that’s just our our culture is you try to learn in the debrief. Nobody is above the law. Nobody can be shielded with their with their rank or their experience. And so that’s something that I really see in the civilian world that can apply because I don’t think debriefs happen very often. So always having a dedicated time doesn’t need to be two to eight hours. I know a lot of people will be like, I don’t I don’t have that extra time. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Right? Speaker Hasard Lee: It can be as short as five minutes. After a presentation, after any sort of decision, that’s important. You can always dedicate and there needs to be a dedicated time. If there’s not it’s not scheduled, you won’t do it. So have a scheduled time could be as short as five minutes I would schedule you know fifteen thirty minutes just to figure out what are the lessons that we learn carrying forward. And if you really wanna break it down to make it simple, what are three things we did well? And what are three things that we can improve upon. And everybody go around and say three things that they can do better, three things that they did well and then try to come up with a collective three things we did well, three things we can work on. And over time, you’re gonna see that adds up a lot. One percent every day is a tremendous advantage over an organization that isn’t capturing these lessons. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Yeah. Yeah. One percent a day is thirty seven times in a year. I think it’s James Clear had that in his in his book. I think that I think in in Mikre you said, there’s it’s a rankless conversation. It’s a rankless debrief. That one, I guess, supposed Hasard to take some getting used to. But in the civilian world, in the business world, those are hard. Right? Because you can be vulnerable and all you could choose any word you want. But you know that you’re in a room with someone who, you know, has some say. So power over you. So you really have to have an adept leader to have it. I’m speculating here. I wanna get your you really have to have an adept leader to to make that work because you can ruin it, like, real quick and just it’d be very hard to get it back. And I also think a lot of you debrief. In the military, you debrief whether you have a win or a loss. Right? In the business world, I think we debrief a lot when we lose something. Something doesn’t go right, but we don’t always debrief when we when we win, which is kind of important because there’s lessons in winning just like there’s lessons in in losing. Speaker Hasard Lee: Absolutely. There you should always be debriefing whether you’re winning. Or losing. And to your point it is a unstable system. This nameless, rankless debrief. It’s very easy as soon as the first person starts to to pass blame, the whole thing crumbles. So you need a really strong leader. If you’re not the leader, of the work or leading the debrief, it’s gonna be it’s gonna be challenging to be able to force that mindset on other people it’s it’s not something that’s common. So if that’s the case, if you’re kind of a if you’re on the bottom side of things or if you’re a middle manager, then I would say just take personal accountability. You can only do so much. It’d be great if everybody was the the CEO, change things on a dime. But You just gotta work with with what you have. And so if you are not leading these teams, then just try to hold yourself to that bar, write down every day three things that you did well, three things that you can improve upon and and how you can do that for the next time. So you can only do so much Speaker Mike Malatesta: Finally, let’s just talk a little bit about your experience as an entrepreneur. So you’ve got Hasard x. You’re making beautiful videos, amazing videos. And I’m sure you’re doing other stuff too. I I how did that get started? What are you trying to accomplish with that? And and who Who’s the ideal client for you? Speaker Hasard Lee: Yeah. That’s interesting. So it really was born out of the podcast. So I started the podcast and then I I realized you have to promote the podcast. I’m sure you’re aware of that challenge. Yeah. So I started social media accounts to to be able to promote the podcast. And really dove into what are all the best practices and techniques and was able to start growing a following And that’s really what enabled me to to write the book was having the following. Mhmm. And really enjoyed being able to share some of these lessons that I’ve learned in aviation with people out there and to showcase some of the stuff that we did. So there’s not a lot of cameras that are allowed on these military bases and it’s more of an antiquated system. It’s not because things are classified. It’s just because there’s a lot of bureaucracy involved in it. So I was willing to take that on and so I would get approval to bring on cameras onto the base and bring on video crews to be able to film stuff and to help out public affairs and make engaging new content for them and realized that I I enjoy leading these teams. I started growing my own team to be able to do that and realized that we had excess capacity. So we were making some videos where I would go with the coast guard, jump in the freezing ocean, I would fly with the first civilian f sixteen’s. I would I did another thing with the defense innovation unit and Nellus Air Force Base where they had us doing physiological monitoring fighter pods. So I was doing all these different projects and realized that we had I had made, you know, with my team, we had made some great progress and we could make some great content out there. And so I wanted to be able to to grow a business out of there and started working with different companies, defense companies, worked with Google worked with a bunch of different companies to make engaging exciting content which is in a little bit of a stagnant field. So the Nike’s, the the under armors, the apples, they all do a great job of course, but there’s a lot of companies that struggle with making engaging content and that’s something that that I’ve been doing for the last six years or so. So just wanted to exercise that muscle especially since we had excess capacity to do it. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Well, welcome. We need more of that. So thank you for doing that. The name of the podcast you mentioned it several times the podcast. But what is the name of the podcast if people can go listen? Speaker Hasard Lee: The professionals playbook. Speaker Mike Malatesta: The professionals playbook. Another great name. So as we finish up here, Hasard, is there something that I haven’t asked you about or something you’d like to leave with with the audience that I should have asked you about or a lesson or Speaker Hasard Lee: I would say the the kind kind of the central theme of the book is that decision making is becoming more important than ever. It’s really a key to leadership now. I think a lot of people when they think of leadership, they think of management. And that’s still important, but management was really born out of the industrial revolution being able to control hundreds of thousands hundreds or thousands of people in the factory, but but leadership is transitioning into decision making. We decisions are that we’re making or becoming more important than ever. When I’m flying a fighter, I am thousands of times more capable than I could be on my own. This suit of technology is allowing me to be far more capable on the battlefield than I could be on my own. But it’s not unique to just flying fighters. We all are using technology to augment our decisions. So the phone you have in your pocket, that can do the job of dozens of people from just a few decades ago, your computer, your car. They all are increasingly leveraging the decisions that we’re making. There are there are predictions out of Silicon Valley that the next billion dollar company will be run by three or fewer people. Yeah. And that’s because of AI. AI is a tremendous lever for the decisions that we’re making. So as we move forward, the key to being able to succeed is being able to harness this technology and that comes down to making good decisions. As a quick example, as humans, we only burn about ninety watts of electricity. But the average westerner uses twelve thousand watts of electricity and that powers the technology that leverages our decisions. So this is a critical skill and it’s only becoming more important. So I think this is something that people need in their toolkit if they want to be good leaders in the future. Speaker Mike Malatesta: And you say it in the book, and I think it’s worth putting down here that, as I see this all the time, no decision is a decision. And as a leader, at least in my experience, if your team is expecting a decision from you and you don’t make a decision, that’s a decision. And the likelihood you know, once people expect a decision and they don’t get it, that’s slippery. That can become a slippery slope. So So making a decision is very important. Making the right one is even better, but making a decision is really important. Speaker Hasard Lee: That can be just as important. Just getting through the decisions. We have so many to Mikre, we have so many notifications, so many emails and meeting invites that you just got a blade through it. So there are some important decisions that you really have to sit down and break apart and analyze, but a lot of it is just getting some of those other decisions off your plate so you can focus on the few key ones that are important. And I talked to different things called power laws, law of diminishing return. Where a lot of times if you keep analyzing a decision, the amount of information, useful information that you’re cleaning from it shrinks. So just make the decision that’ll reset the diminishing curve and you’ll have more information to make follow on decisions. So that’s that’s most decisions we make. Most are not critical decisions that you can’t reverse. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Right. Make an eighty percent decision, and then the next decision is gonna be closer to a hundred percent because you’re gonna learn off of having made the eighty percent decision. Speaker Hasard Lee: Right. And that last twenty percent takes ten times as long. And you may never get to the point where you have a hundred percent understanding, you probably won’t ever get to the point where you have a hundred percent understanding of the problem in front of you. So Most of it. Get to some level doesn’t need to be eighty percent. For some decisions, a fifty percent level understanding is good enough. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Right. Speaker Hasard Lee: Move it off your plate. Some are really critical and you need a a ninety percent level. So it’s about being able to assess the problem in front of you. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Well, Hasard Lee, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for protecting us. Thank you for protecting our freedom. Thank you for writing this book. The art of clear thinking. The podcast, the content, impacting so many people on YouTube, creating a really great brand around you you and and what you’re doing. Buy the book. Leave a five star review, which I’m gonna do right after this podcast. Anything else, any place you wanna direct people outside of for the book or Speaker Hasard Lee: The book’s been doing really well, so it’s a best seller for Barns and Noble. It’s number one best seller on Amazon right now. The audiobook is really unique and special. Recorded parts of it while flying. So in the cockpit of a jet so it’s the first time that people first time folks at Audible have said that’s been done. So — Oh. Speaker Mike Malatesta: — Speaker Hasard Lee: we recorded the the the intros to every chapter in the plane So it’s it’s pretty unique, pretty special. I read it. But I’m just happy that the book is getting out there It’s graduation season. A lot of people are buying it for new graduates. Speaker Mike Malatesta: Nice. Speaker Hasard Lee: And surprisingly, a lot of people are buying it for Father’s Day because Being a father, it’s like being a fighter pod, minimal sleep, a lot of chaos, a lot incomplete information and a lot of important decisions to Mikre. So I’m I’m just that’s been a pleasant surprise, but just happy to see that the word’s getting out there.