Hasard Lee – The Art of Clear Thinking (496)

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Episode transcript below:

00:00 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
On today’s episode I’m talking with Hazard Lee, a former fighter pilot, an entrepreneur and filmmaker with almost 80 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’s fastest and most expensive jets, decision making, mental toughness, debriefs the book writing process and the dream sheet.

00:26 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
In the F-16, 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 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.

00:43 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
He’s got an amazing vibe and I know you’ll love this conversation. Hi Hazard, welcome to the how Did it Happen podcast.

00:56 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Hey, thanks, it’s great to be here.

00:57 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
I’m really excited. We were talking before we went live here about a bunch of different things, particularly you as a writer, and you’ve written this great book, the Art of Clear Thinking, which, by the way, is a fantastic title. 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 Altucher which is a podcast I listen to frequently, and I’ve had fighter pilot on my show before Kujo Tessner 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 want to 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.

01:49 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Thanks for having me on this is really a pleasure.

01:52 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
So listen, everybody. I told you a little bit about Hazard in the intro, but let me tell you a little bit more about him so you can get as excited as I am. So Hazard has spent his career flying both the F-16 and F-35 jets. In 2016, he was selected as the top instructor pilot of the year for the Air Force, for the Air Force’s largest F-16 combat wing, and we’ll go through 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 exactly what those are. So in 2017, he returned from Afghanistan, where his squadron dropped the most ordnance bombs since the opening days of the war. He’s flown 82 combat missions and has four air medals. Congratulations and thank you. Hazard 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 a breakdown in an inventory thing, or was it due to some specialty that you needed for it from the particular jet?

02:51 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Yeah, so that was a really interesting experience. So that was the last mission in Afghanistan for me and we had Aviano F-16 Block 40s replacing us, so we were flying their jets and there’s a 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 support that troops in contact situation. I ended up employing all my ordnance in 10 minutes and we were fragged to cover a four-hour period and there are no other pilots available. So I got on SATCOM with headquarters. They said fly back as fast as you can. So I lit the afterburner, started flying back as fast as I could and when I got back I hopped into an F-16 Block 50. 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.

03:45 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, that had to be a hell of a day.

03:49 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Yeah, it was a busy day.

03:50 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Well, thanks for sharing that. So Hazard is also a content creator, an entrepreneur, and has one of the largest defense channels on YouTube. Since the start of 2021, he has over 79 million views on YouTube and has reached over 290 million people across social media. His first book, the Art of Clear Thinking which again awesome title debuted last week, on the 23rd of May. This is dropping, I think, the next week, Anyway, through St Martin’s Press. The book focuses on how to use fighter pilot decision making in everyday life. Focuses on how to use fighter pilot decision-making in everyday life. Hazard speaks on air combat, human performance, decision-making, mental toughness and how to debrief, you can find out more about him at his website, which is his name, hazardleecom, and, of course, his YouTube channel. That’s your name, right? Your YouTube channel is your name.

04:44 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Okay.

04:45 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And his company is HazardXcom H-A-S-A-R-D-Xcom. So, hazard, I start every podcast with the same simple question, and that is how did it happen for you?

04:57 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
So for me that goes back to when I was five. So I went to an air show back then and that was when you could hop in the cockpit of an F-16 and F-15. So I climbed up, jumped in the cockpit, put on a helmet so it looked like a bobblehead. Back then, when I was that small and I was hooked, I saw the 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 you can actually play those sports. But wanting to be a fighter pilot, there’s not a lot you can do.

05:36
I watched all the movies, memorized all the facts a small town called Los Alamos, New Mexico, and my dad was a scientist and Los Alamos is where the Manhattan Project was born, and so they purposely picked a place that was in the middle of nowhere, so the Japanese couldn’t attack it, nor the Germans, so not a lot I could do there. Until I was a teenager, I didn’t fly. But when I was a teenager I had a chance to fly in a small Cessna one 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 culmination of sports and academics. So I wasn’t a great student in school, um, but I was a pretty good athlete, but not great. But this really connected with me of having to study but also having to have good hands when you’re flying and to pay for it.

06:34
I was working at a fast food restaurant, so I was 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, 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 of 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.

07:14
I made it into the academy. I was at the academy I. 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 big deal. There. Everybody wants to be a pilot and you have to pass the flight physical. Even small things like a heart murmur and you’ll get even asthma, even a concussion when you’re young. You’ll get rejected.

07:40
And it’s after you’ve already signed on the dotted line. So after a sophomore year you’re committed to the Air Force for five years and your physical isn’t 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 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 introductory to flight training. It’s in Pueblo, colorado. You’re flying small, small planes diamond DA 20s, essentially like Cessnas, and about 20% of people get weeded out there. They just they want to be pilots but they just don’t have the hands or the aptitude to fly. So it’s this 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-6 Texan II. It’s an amazing plane. It’s almost like a P-51 Mustang high performance prop plane, about 1100 horsepower, and I knew I had hit my calling there because we’re flying formation, we’re doing aerobatics, doing some light, almost dogfighting type maneuvers, and it was a blast. We started out with 30 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 said all right, I want you to close your eyes. How many of you want to be fighter pilots? Raise your hand. I raised my hand. He’s like all right, open your eyes. All 30 had their hands raised and he said two of you, if you’re lucky, you will fly fighters. The rest of you will fly heavies. I want you to think about that when you’re here. Heavies are tankers and transport aircraft. I want you to think about that when you hear 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.

09:31
So flying the T-6, making it through the T-6, there were about seven of us selected to fly the T-38. It’s a supersonic jet trainer built back in the 50s. 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-38s. The rest go and fly essentially little Learjets called the T-1. And I flew that for the next six months doing a lot of the similar things that I did with the T-6, only it was at twice the speed. So that’s a huge jump to go from flying prop planes to flying fighters. And then after that a few of us were selected to go fly fighters. So I got selected for my number one choice, the F-16.

10:26
But it’s never over. As a fighter pilot you never quite make it until you’re actually in the cockpit of a jet. So after you graduate from T-38s you still have to go to one last school called IFF, introductory to Fighter Fundamentals. And so you’ve made it all the way, you’ve made it to your dream. And still this school it’s only six weeks long. They wash out about 20% of the students and it’s just the final check to make sure you have what it takes 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 Gs, nine times the force of gravity. So right now I weigh about 200 pounds, 230 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.

11:17
That’s about three G’s, so we’ll pull nine G’s. If you pull too much, you’ll you’ll pass out, cause that blood’s being pulled from your brain. So you go to the centrifuge and you get two shots at doing the centrifuge. Uh, 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, uh other types of aircraft. So, uh, 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.

11:48
So made it to F-16 training and that was an amazing experience. It was the culmination of a 20-year dream. So made it to F-16s. First takeoff was incredible. F-16s like a stripped down hot rod and you’re sitting on top of a 30,000 pound thrust engine. So first takeoff went to max 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 in airliners. And then on the backside we have afterburners. So essentially injecting fuel into it, lighting it off, and it’s a 30 foot flamethrower 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, cause that was the culmination of the dream.

12:36
So went uh and learned how to fly the F-16 in Phoenix, arizona. After that went to Korea, south Korea, and flew for two years there. After all this training, you think you’re you’re, you know you’re worth something, you’re important. When you show up to your 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 served there for a couple of 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.

13:20
I think everybody’s seen Top Gun 2, the new one, where the missiles are along the canyons. So seed suppression of enemy air defense is 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 was my job. There were only six squadrons in the world at the time that did that, so we were busy going to all these different exercises there.

13:51
I deployed to Afghanistan out of Shaw doing a lot of close air support out there and, as you mentioned, was there during a really pivotal period of time. From there I was selected to fly the F-35, which was pre-initial operation capability, pre-ioc, so it was still almost a test bed, so a lot of little bugs and issues with it. So went to the F-35 and was able to help mature that platform and help develop the new syllabus and training techniques for new F-35 pilots who will be carrying the torch. So the F-35 will be the key to our air power until at least 2050.

14:28
And it’s projected to fly until 2070. So I did that for several years and then in 2020, I got out of active duty. I was one of only three people to be part-time F-35 pilots. I didn’t even know that existed, but I was a part-time F-35 pilot, flying a couple times a month, and then wanted to become a writer and author and had a podcast and a content creator. So it’s kind of 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 on the 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.

15:19
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 spent so it’s the culmination of a six-year journey writing this book Spent over 500 days in a row writing it, wrote every word in it and it just debuted. So that’s pretty much how it happened.

15:47 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, thank you. I got a lot of questions here. So, first off, this suicide bomber you tell that story in the book, so that was like phase one and then phase two. I’m just speaking to your writing skills here. The runaway tanker, the rusted tanker, that became a whole. The way you crafted that part of the story was really, really well done. I’m not going to 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 the way you told that part of the story. So anyway, thank you.

16:23 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
That’s the best compliment you can give, because I really enjoy writers like Malcolm Gladwell or Atul Gawande, who wrote the Checklist Manifesto, where they interweave stories. I think, somebody was saying that if all it took was information, we’d all have six packs and be billionaires. So you?

16:39
can’t just read bullet points of how to do things. I think as humans, we really learn through storytelling. So the best thing you can do is experience something on your own, but as humans, our strength is being able to learn from other people’s successes and failures. Now, I have small kids, so sometimes, sometimes they do have to touch 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 80% 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.

17:22 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, and when you were talking about you were comparing to Top Gun 2, and I felt like that a lot of the book too. I watched that movie. A lot of what they did in that movie you were actually doing for real. And 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 Kari or something like that. Is that similar to what you were talking about just then, with the missiles and the Russians not being able to figure out how to do that?

17:56 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Absolutely. You’re as a wild weasel pilot. That’s what they call these seed squadrons. You are going after an integrated air defense. It is a think of it as a monster, a giant monster of interconnected intelligence and missiles and planes. They are not going to just passively get rolled over. They are thinking years in advance of how do we stop a force from coming into us. So 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 break down their communication and that’s what we specialize as suppression of enemy air defense fighters their communication, and that’s what we specialize as suppression of enemy 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, because you can see them.

19:05
Yeah, 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, yeah, 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 sites, then it forces them to keep their uh, their radars on for a longer period of time, which makes it easier for us to 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 take out these systems. So very, very complex.

19:57 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
That was you alluded to the story in the book and, as I recall, that was an experienced. I don’t know what his rank was, I don’t know whether he was Afghan or Iraqi, but he basically had old equipment but he and his team were very good at being able to still be effective against tens of millions of dollars worth of aircraft flying.

20:20 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
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, 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 talked in there about how this Serbian colonel was in charge of an aging 1950s surface-to-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 shoot down several of our best assets.

21:03 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
He’d be an interesting guy to talk to about you know his experiences he’s crafty.

21:08
You mentioned that. You know, 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 want to fly jets and two out of 30 of the how many that got to the 30, all of these people are disappointed. So your classmates are disappointed, and then even once you graduate, you can be disappointed. I’m wondering what the environment is like, because it’s super competitive, but also there’s all that. I imagine you’ve got to have a tremendous collaboration between everyone too. How did in from your experience like how do?

21:48 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
people deal with that. Yeah, it’s a really unique environment because you are all are working together, but also against each other. So I think I think you’re just forced to be as much of a team as possible. So your, your flight commander, the person in charge of you, has the huge weight of being able to weight your scores at the end of the program. So if you are one of those people that just keeps to yourself, that doesn’t share how you’re learning, then you’re not going to make it to being a fighter pilot, no matter how talented you are. So, above all, 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 going to 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 going to work together.

22:48
And those are some amazing pilots, like 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.

23:11
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 are extremely complex. So we really try to separate arrogance from confidence. You need confidence, but arrogance is is projecting outward. And if you go in as the mission commander and you are talking about how great the F-35 is and how much better a pilot you were in pilot training, you’re really going to turn off all of those other assets and you need the sum to be greater than the part. So that’s, that’s what leadership is. So we work a lot on on trying to be the best leaders possible and, uh, to go back to the original question, you really you really need to collaborate well as a team.

23:54 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
That’s one of the most important skills as a fighter pilot, and when you were getting out of the Air Force Academy, I think I heard you say that you chose the F-16. So what is that process like? You get to choose where you want to specialize and or how does that work?

24:07 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
So you first go to pilot training and so everybody goes to pilot training. A few weeks, maybe a few months, before you graduate, you put your dream sheet together. So dream sheet starts with aircraft number one. For me it was the F-16, 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?

24:30
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 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 getting whatever jet you want. But yeah, that’s how it works.

24:54 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And I mentioned when we were going through the bio. Maybe just a quick rundown on the difference. So the jets that are mentioned in the book F-16, f-35, f-22, 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?

25:14 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Yeah, so F-16 is a stripped down hot rod. It was built in the 1970s when it was all about turning tightly and sustaining that turn. So it’s a very, very nimble, agile dogfighter. We still fly that aircraft today. So I was flying the newest F-16s in the US inventory but those were built back in 2002. So we have a new generation of fighters now the F-22 and the F-35. So those are the only two US fifth generation fighters. So they’re a lot more sophisticated than the F-16 was.

25:49
Even though we’ve done a lot of upgrades to it, the F-16 is essentially it’s the cockpit’s a rat’s nest of technology. So you have 80s, 90s, 2000s technology all inside this cockpit and the pilot’s eyes are scanning everywhere and it’s really difficult 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. Fitchin fighters do a lot better job of fusing that information together to make it a lot more accessible to the pilots, who are a lot more capable as a pilot. So F-35 is the newest one. F-22 is what we call a legacy Fitchin F-22 pilots aren’t a huge fan of that name, but they’re a Fitchin fighter. They’re kind of the bridge between the older 4th Gen fighters of turning tightly and the newest one of the F-35, being more of a flying sensor of managing systems and passing that information along.

26:51 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, and that what most people, at least me, most people in my generation remember the stealth bomber. It sort of looked like what? Did it look like A stingray or something? Were those, those were still in use when you were in Afghanistan or no? Had they, those were still in use when you were in Afghanistan or no?

27:08 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
So there are two different types. So there’s the B-2 bomber. That’s a massive bomber that looks like the Stingray. There’s another aircraft called the F-117. That’s what I cover in the book and that’s a really angled-looking weird airplane. That was really fragile. It couldn’t dogfight. What we did with the F-35 was really fuse the F-117 with an F-16. So that’s kind of the child out of those two.

27:35 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, all right, and it was funny when you were describing the F-16 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, uh, something you’d have on a toyota corolla I think is what you said like when you think about the speed you’re coming in and then having to stop with those brakes, it was really kind of brought home the strip down like strapping a rocket to your butt kind of thing and just yeah, there’s no extra fat on it.

28:08 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
And uh, yeah, this 30,000 pound aircraft so it’s at about 15, 10 times more than a than a regular car and it’s going at about 175 miles an hour. So that’s one of the principles I cover in the book is uh exponential and energy is exponential. Uh, so you’re going twice as fast, it’s four times energy. So you have a, an aircraft that is 10 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 high density, altitude, like in Afghanistan, they’ll light the brakes on fire and it’s a big deal.

28:53 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
One of the stories you tell in the book and it kind of reminded me of it when you were talking about 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?

29:20 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Yeah, so 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 dogfighting against somebody and I was just this was one of my first times dogfighting in the F-16, 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.

29:52
And I decided to do it and cause, you know, small inputs I was thinking to 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 30,000 pounds of thrust really at that altitude, probably 20,000 pounds of thrust coming out, so just hanging at some point, uh, in the sky, and then I actually start traveling backwards, which is something the F-16 isn’t designed to do, and I end up putting the jet out of control and it’s not a good situation. So that was the story. I used to show that point.

30:34 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And then it was one of several that you used Hazard 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, 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 following it. 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 447. They just 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.

31:36 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Yeah, we have a saying you can always make the problem worse. So in the F-16, we have a little. It was designed in the 70s, so we have a little wind clock, uh, just in case we have full electrical failure. It’s really not necessary, it’s just a holdover that they haven’t gotten rid of, and so whenever there’s an emergency, we’ll tell new pilots wind the clock doesn’t do anything. Most of the clocks are broken. It just keeps you from pushing buttons.

32:03
Because it’s really important to to think through the problem first. Even if you only have a couple seconds, 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 making progress and moving, and so a lot of people spend just a very, very short amount of time brainstorming and then start executing on it, which can be a detriment as opposed to coming up with a logical solution of what you should do.

32:37 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
That was a great 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. 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 this, right?

32:53 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Even flying the closure rates for us. Almost every time you at least have a little bit of time, a little gap to come up with a good solution.

33:02 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
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 concept like 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 like sucking 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 can you just try to make us be able to feel what that’s like, Because it’s almost hard to believe that it can be done, but yet I know it’s done all the time.

33:48 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
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 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 times you do it, because you’re taught throughout your career never hit another aircraft. And now you’re intentionally touching another aircraft, going 310 knots, about 350 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.

34:43
And then you’ll stop, you’ll freeze that site picture so freeze where you are, even though you’re both traveling 350 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, uh. Or I talk in the book about a time we almost ran out of fuel, where it gets pretty sporty refueling and uh, you know, you, uh, you definitely don’t want to hit the tanker and turn into a giant fireball.

35:26 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Right, and as far as like the actual connection, 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?

35:39 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Yeah, there’s a seal and I believe it’s a hydraulic connection. So these tankers for the most part were designed KC-135s. That’s the primary tanker right now. Those were designed and built in the 50s and 60s, 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.

35:59 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And that operator, the boom operator. That’s a lot of pressure too.

36:03 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
It is especially with a stealth fighter. You don’t want to ding up the top of the coating. So they are great at what they do as well.

36:11 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
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, about the change in training. You talk about 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 that are simulated.

36:33
Sometimes 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 talk about how to make people stronger, be able to handle those things better, and leadership. But in the military it’s such a life or death thing and most of business isn’t life or death. You can make a bad decision and recover from it a lot of times, 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 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.

37:28 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
There’s a couple aspects to it. One is being able to handle the pressure. So there’s a lot of pressure. As a fighter pilot, there’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 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.

38:06
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’ve really focused on human performance and being able to maximize the human weapon system as well. So being able to handle the pressure is a key part of being a fighter pilot.

38:31
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 talked about in the book. But it’s not even a story, it’s just something common that happens every couple of days when I fly.

39:06 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
I think you refer to that as eating your own mentality or something along those lines.

39:18 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Is that different? Well, 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 wouldn’t make it through training. So that’s the eat your own mentality.

39:33
But, we really switched 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.

40:10
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 going to take away from your next decision and at the speeds we fly, it’s very easy 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.

40:51 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
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.

41:08 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Essentially, 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 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 have a lot of work to do to get better as a writer, but that was where the seeds were planted.

42:01 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
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 being creative with a fighter jet and taking that and employing it in a different way. And I’m wondering you 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 going to commit 500 straight days to writing and I’m going to try to find a publisher and do all those things? Or what was it like?

42:37 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Yeah, so the idea was kind of percolating while I was just writing some of these things down. So the idea was kind of percolating while 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 real Blackhawk Down. He’s credited with saving an Army Ranger and a SEAL Team 6 member so incredible guy. And he had written a book, a New York Times bestseller, called Alone at Dawn.

43:10
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 doing some writing right now. And he said oh no, no, that’s not how you do it 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 going to reach out to my agent, I’m going to see if he will take you on and you need to write a proposal.

43:28
So don’t just start writing a book that works for fiction. But you really want to write a proposal and so 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 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 origins of of where the book came from.

44:05 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
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 want to finish, I suppose, right.

44:18 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Absolutely. It was very frustrating. There’s not much you can do. This was an alien world to me. I didn’t know what I was doing. So the agent would come back say I need you really have to write a book to write a book? So I wrote.

44:32
It was about 25,000 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 a couple of 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 kind of at the top of my field as a fighter pilot, but if you want to go do something else, you got to climb down the mountain. You can’t just jump mountains. You got to climb down the mountain and slog it out as a new person. And I think most people aren’t willing to do that.

45:25 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
I’ve never had a problem doing that. 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, yeah.

45:36 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
You have to be willing to be the idiot, the person with the dumb questions that doesn’t know what they’re doing, that gets critiqued and criticized and just 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 level. 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 were always uncomfortable in the military and it trained you to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

46:15 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And I talked to you about. Let’s talk about the debrief process. So you talk a little bit about debrief in the book and when, I had Kujo on, he talked his whole. His book was called Debrief to Win and I find that 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?

46:42 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
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 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 10 times just to figure out how we can say it better the next time, and so that’s really the key to our success and learning as fighter pilots. It’s really expensive to fly these planes. It costs the up 35,. It costs somewhere between 35 and $50,000 an hour to fly just for one, and we’ll sometimes be going out with 16 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 the debrief process is important. We also have a lot of heritage and a lot of uh techniques that we use throughout it.

47:34
One is nameless, rankless debriefs. We’re trying to be surgeons and we’re trying to keep it, uh, completely sterile, where we just learn lessons. 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-20s and you’re leading the flight, your job is to debrief the mission, and I’ve seen times where a young captain in their mid twenties is debriefing the wing commander in charge of the entire base. Who’s who’s uh 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 A debriefs happen very often.

48:31
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 have that extra time. 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, 15, 30 minutes just to figure out what are the lessons that we learn. Carrying forward, and if you really want to break it down and 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 going to see that adds up a lot. 1% every day is a tremendous advantage over an organization that isn’t capturing these lessons.

49:27 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah yeah. 1% a day is 37 times in a year. I think that’s. James Clear had that in his book, I think, in, like you said, it’s a rankless conversation.

49:40
It’s a rankless debrief. That one, I suppose, has 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 that. You could choose any word you want, but you know that you’re in a room with someone who has some say-so power over you, so you really have to have an adept leader to have it. I’m speculating here, I want to get your, but you really have to have an adept leader 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 win, which is kind of important because there’s lessons in winning, just like there’s lessons in losing.

50:33 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Absolutely. You should always be debriefing, whether you’re winning or losing and to your point it is a unstable system 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 pass blame, the whole thing crumbles. So you need a really strong leader.

50:52
If you’re not the leader of the work or leading the debrief, it’s going to be. It’s going to 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 CEO, change things on a dime, but you just got to work 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 how you can do that for the next time. So you can only do so much.

51:36 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Finally, let’s just talk a little bit about your experience as an entrepreneur. So you’ve got HazardX, you’re making beautiful videos, amazing videos, and I’m sure you’re doing other stuff too. How did that get started? What are you trying to accomplish with that, and who’s the ideal client for you?

51:58 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Yeah, that’s interesting. So it really was born out of the podcast. So I started the podcast and then I really was born out of the podcast. So I started the podcast and then I realized you have to promote the podcast. I’m sure you’re aware of that challenge.

52:08
So I started social media accounts 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 write the book, was having the following 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 realize that 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-16s I would.

53:11
I did another thing with the Defense Innovation Unit and Nellis Air Force Base, where they had us doing physiological monitoring for fighter pilots. So I was doing all these different projects and realized that we had I had had made you know with my team we had made some great progress and we can 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 Nikes, the Under Armour’s, 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 last six years or so. So just wanted to exercise that muscle, especially since we had excess capacity to do it.

54:04 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, 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?

54:15 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
The Professionals Playbook.

54:17 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
The Professionals Playbook another great name. So, as we finish up here, hazard, is there something that I haven’t asked you about, or something you’d like to leave with the audience that I should have asked you about, or a lesson I?

54:31 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
would say the 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. So 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 or thousands of people in the factory. But leadership is transitioning into decision-making.

55:00
Decisions that we’re making are 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.

55:33
There are predictions out of Silicon Valley that the next billion dollar company will be run by three or fewer people, 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 90 watts of electricity, but the average Westerner uses 12,000 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.

56:18 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And you say it in the book and I think it’s worth putting down here that because 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 making a decision is very important. Making the right one is even better, but making a decision is really important.

56:52 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
That can be just as important just getting through the decisions. We have so many to make. We have so many notifications, so many emails and meeting invites that you just got to blaze 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 gleaning 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 most decisions we make. Most are not critical decisions that you can’t reverse.

57:41 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Right, make an 80% decision and then the next decision is going to be closer to 100%, because you’re going to learn off of having made the 80% decision.

57:48 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Right, and that last 20% takes 10 times as long. And you may never get to the point where you have 100% understanding. You probably won’t ever get to the point where you have 100% understanding of the problem in front of you. So most of it, get to some level doesn’t need to be 80%. For some decisions, a 50% level understanding is good enough. Move it off your plate. Some are really critical and you need a 90% level, so it’s about being able to assess the problem in front of you.

58:16 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Well Hazard Leap. 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 and what you’re doing. Buy the book, leave a five-star review, which I’m going to do right after this podcast. Anything else, any place you want to direct people outside of for the book or Amazon. The book’s been doing really well.

58:46 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
So it’s a bestseller for Barnes Noble. It’s number one bestseller on Amazon right now. The audio book 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 the folks at audible have said that’s been done. So we recorded the, the, the intros to every chapter, in the plane. So it’s it’s pretty unique, pretty special. I read it, um, but I’m just happy that the book is getting out there. It’s graduation season. A lot of people are buying it, uh, for new graduates, um, and uh, surprisingly, a lot of people were buying it for father’s day, because being a father it’s like being a fighter pilot minimal sleep, uh, a lot of chaos, a lot of incomplete information and a lot of important decisions to make. So I’m just, uh, that’s been a pleasant surprise, but just happy to see that the word’s getting out there.

59:41 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And a lot of people counting on you too.

59:43 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
Correct For sure.

59:44 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
All right, well, awesome, I did get the audible as well. So I can’t wait to listen to you in the jet introducing the chapters and hearing you read it, because, as I mentioned at the very beginning, there’s just a certain cadence and calmness and interesting vibe around you, so I just I look forward to it.

01:00:02 – Hasard Lee (Guest)
And for everyone listening.

01:00:04 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Thank you for joining us for this episode. Until we meet next time, please maximize the greatness that’s within you and make your future your property, something that you are very, very proud to own. Hey everybody, thanks for listening to the show and before you go, I just have three requests for you. One if you like what I’m doing, please consider subscribing or following the podcast on whatever podcast platform you prefer. If you’re really into it, leave me a review, write something nice about me, give me five stars or whatever you feel is most appropriate.

01:00:35
Number two I’ve got a book. It’s called Ownership how Getting Selfish Got Me Unstuck. It’s an Amazon bestseller and I’d love for you to read it or listen to it on Audible or wherever else Barnes, noble, amazon you can get it everywhere If you’re looking for inspiration that will help you unlock your greatness and potential, order or download it today so that you can have your very own copy, and if you get it, please let me know what you think. Number three my newsletter. I do a newsletter every Thursday and I talk about things that are interesting to me and or I give more information about the podcast and the podcast guests that I’ve had and the experiences that I’ve had with them.

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You can sign up for the podcast today at my website, which is my name MikeMalatestacom. You do that right now. Put in your email address and you’ll get the very next issue. The newsletter is short, thoughtful and designed to inspire, activate and maximize the greatness in you.