Inside the Thunderbirds and the Cost of Getting It Wrong | Ryan Bodenheimer | Ep. 477 Ryan Bodenheimer spent eleven years on active duty flying the F-15E, including 70 combat missions over Afghanistan and a stint building strike packages at the air operations center in Qatar. He was selected for the Thunderbirds, flew Thunderbird 2 for two show seasons, and instructed the next team. After the Air Force he flew airliners, then walked away to build Max Afterburner, now one of the largest military aviation channels on YouTube, and to write Take Command. The thread in this conversation is rules and when to break them. He kept a loaded jet at .99 Mach so he'd arrive with something to protect a SEAL, then went down to 100 feet because 500 would have gotten the guy killed. He went off dry on a cleared-hot strafe because he saw kids, and two targets got away. My helicopter instructor put it simply: know the rules and why they exist, then you can break them. We close on Iran, drones, the withdrawal, and the limits of air power. Enjoy.

He Should Die. Should We Watch It? | Negligent Discharge Friday | 10.16.26 I asked a question this week about whether the Fort Hood shooter's execution should be made public, and the emotional response to it surprised me. One video about my post opened by telling me never to defend him. I didn't. He should die, and I spent ten years of my life removing people like him from the planet. The real question is what a public execution gains and what it costs. Deterrence and closure are legitimate arguments. So are martyrdom, the countries that already do this, and what happens when footage reaches people who never went looking for it. I don't have a deep stake in either answer, and the responses on X land much closer to an even split than my own comment section would suggest. That gap is worth paying attention to. Michael and I also get into a YouTuber's RPG-7 test going wrong, flat earthers confronting the 24-hour sun in Antarctica, the reported removal of more than 130 million names from India's voter rolls, and a 94-year-old barrister arrested in the UK over a sign.

The AGI Promise Is a Cover Story | Bill Thompson | Ep. 476 Bill Thompson joined the Army at 17 and spent 22 years there, most of it on the technical and communications side of a special missions unit. He now runs Spartan Forge, an AI-driven hunting app with over 100,000 users, advises high-profile clients on communications security, and is building his own compute network to run AI without feeding anyone else's system. His core argument is that AI as it exists today is training data, matrix math, and human correction. It produces novel output, not novel thought. He argues the companies promising AGI know they cannot deliver it, and that calling for regulation lets them blame the government, guarantee investors a captive market, and shut out the open-weight models anyone can run at home. He is moving his own companies off the closed systems now. Spartan Forge: spartanforge.ai Take the Operator Code Assessment: theoperatorcode.com

Food for thought: What other countries publicly execute people? Are those the countries that we want to be in the company of? The man should die for sure, but is there a benefit to allowing him to die as the martyr he wants to be?

Traditional Q and A to round out this week: A high school senior sent five questions about American culture for a class assignment, so I answered all of them. The smartphone posture you'll see everywhere the second you look up. Political division and why your neighbor isn't your enemy. Whether Americans can still stand on their own or just push a button and wait. What the toilet paper shortage actually revealed. Being capable of violence and choosing not to use it. Independence as a core American value and what convenience has done to it. Why people born here won the lottery and forgot. A new father who cut off contact with his own dad asks whether there's any benefit to his daughter knowing that story someday. How my parents handled it with my grandfather. The difference between trauma and hardship, and why only one of them builds anything. Take the Operator Code Assessment: theoperatorcode.com

Mike LeBlanc spent 13 years in the Marine Corps as an infantry officer. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 and went on to 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. After getting out he studied his way into Harvard Business School and co-founded Cobalt Robotics, a Sequoia-backed security robot company that put close to a thousand robots into offices on four continents before it sold. He now runs Foundation, which builds full-size humanoid robots for heavy industry and for the battlefield. His book, What If Anger Is the Answer, comes out November 3. We start in Ukraine, where he has walked the front lines. Fiber-optic drones, isolated strongpoints, and a scoring system that awards points per kill. He argues most deaths on both sides now come from drones, and we work through what happens to a generation that kills through a screen. What if anger is the answer: simonandschuster.com/books/W…

A last-minute Friday episode, because I forgot we didn't have one. Michael worked under pressure. We open with the Roberts Ridge series. The criticism online was valid: I should have asked Mitch and Brian whether they believe John Chapman earned the Medal of Honor, and I should have pushed on why the members of MAKO 30 supported the Navy Cross narrative and then would not sign statements for the Medal of Honor. That gap has to be addressed directly. I also explain where I actually land on the medal, why Pat Tillman is the example of what happens when you lie to protect a legacy, and why I am not a protector of the SEAL brand. The other side of the table is coming on in mid-October. From there, a report that an AI chatbot hallucinated nuclear components on a Chinese cargo ship and had aircraft scrambled before someone caught it. Michael and I argue about whether AI art is art. A judge blocks the White House from pulling press credentials, and I explain why censorship never works and what I would do as press secretary. Lincoln shut down hundreds of newspapers during the Civil War. The last U.S. troops leave Iraq, and we talk contractors, Title 10 versus Title 50, and why Afghanistan still stings. A pilot stabbed his co-pilot on a flight to Tel Aviv and the plane dropped 14,000 feet before passengers got into the cockpit.

Matt Brown spent his career inside the national security world without ever wearing a uniform. He came up through grad school and think tank work in DC, earned a TS/SCI clearance, and landed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy working the counter-WMD mission. From there he moved to the State Department. In August 2023 he walked into a Senate committee, signed his real name, and became a whistleblower on UAP. His report on a program called Immaculate Constellation was later entered into the congressional record. Today he co-runs Vanguard Enterprise, a nonprofit built to support the people who came forward after him. This conversation covers what pushed him over the edge. He says he saw transcripts showing the director of the Pentagon's UAP office was not telling senators the truth. He explains how the counter-WMD mission gave him a legitimate reason to see collection on objects around nuclear assets, and what he saw on those systems, from small orbs going in and out of water to a large triangle and a boomerang that disappeared behind its own light. We cover the reality of blowing the whistle inside the IC, the retaliation he describes, and the questions he thinks Congress should be asking now.

Patrick Montgomery served in the 75th Ranger Regiment from 2010 to 2014, deploying to Afghanistan the day after the Bin Laden raid. Six weeks into that first deployment, his brother-in-law, also a Ranger, was killed in Paktika. Patrick escorted the body home. He got out, went back to school at Mizzou, and in 2016 founded KC Cattle Company, a farm-to-table Wagyu operation that went from selling steaks out of a pickup to a national brand after Food & Wine named its hot dog the best in America. He now runs Valor Provisions, a membership marketplace connecting American farms and ranches directly to consumers, and writes children's books about historical figures. This one covers the death notification and why clarity matters more than comfort, what it does to a family when a service member does not come back, and the nephew growing up with no memory of his father. From there it turns to business. The 2019 article that dropped half a million people on a website holding 40 packs of hot dogs. The pandemic surge, the inflation crash, and the structural mistakes that cost him. Then the bigger fight: his argument that four companies control most of America's protein, that foreign ownership of our food supply is a national security problem, and that the fix comes from the bottom up. Valor Provisions: valorprovisions.us/

The Medal, the Memos, and the Mountain | Mitch Hall & Brian Bloom | Ep. 472 Brian Bloom has spent his career in front of and behind the camera as an actor, voice actor, and screenwriter. Mitch Hall served as a Navy SEAL with the Naval Special Warfare Development Group and later worked as a technical advisor and producer in film and television. For more than five years they have run the Ground Truth investigation into what happened on Roberts Ridge. In this last installment, they explain what it took to get back on top of Takur Ghar. They wrote to the Taliban, got permission, and spent a day on the summit testing sight lines and lighting. They also sat with men from the villages below who fought in the battle. From there we worked through the footage, the red-on-red question, and the documents behind the Medal of Honor upgrade. They laid out years of outreach to the Air Force and others who chose not to participate. They also addressed an upcoming feature film based on a version of events they say their findings contradict. The conversation ends on heroism, blame, and why the truth still matters after 25 years. Ground Truth Documentary: groundtruthdoc.com/

The Ranger Account of Takur Ghar | Josh Walker & Chris Cunningham | Ep. 471 Josh Walker spent 24 years in uniform. He started as a young team leader in 1st Ranger Battalion, left for Florida State and ROTC, then came back as a signal officer and went on to serve in 7th and 3rd Special Forces Groups, logging close to three years in Afghanistan. Chris Cunningham was working as a chef in Vermont when his brother told him not to sign anything that didn't say Ranger. He listened, and served 22 and a half years. In March 2002, both were part of the Ranger quick reaction force sent to Takur Ghar. Neither had been in a firefight. Josh's helicopter, Razor 01, was supposedly headed to a refueling point. It was shot down on the mountaintop instead. Chris's element on Razor 02 landed below and climbed for more than two hours through deep snow, under mortar fire, to reach them. They walk me through the assault on the bunkers, a Hellfire that had to prove itself before anyone trusted it, the wait for exfil, and washing a friend's blood off his rifle before the younger Rangers got back to camp. I also asked why Rangers so rarely tell these stories and about the importance of people knowing the names of those that didn't come home.

Takur Ghar and the Fog of War vs. the Facts | Mitch Hall & Brian Bloom | Ep. 470 Mitch Hall served in Naval Special Warfare, Brian Bloom came from film and games. Neither of them set out to spend six years on a single morning in March of 2002. They did anyway. Their project, Ground Truth, is built on seventy-five interviews, a trip back to the summit of Takur Ghar, the full unedited Predator and AC-130 footage, the radio traffic, the jock logs, and a forensic team that reconstructed the terrain and every camera orbit down to the inch. Part one of three this week. The episode lays out the uncontested account first. A friendly fire incident that almost ended Operation Anaconda before it started. A reconnaissance element pushed onto the tallest mountain in the valley on a compressed timeline, without the delay it requested, and told the summit was empty. A SEAL out of a helicopter under fire. A crash landing miles off target. A second attempt with no armor, no rucks, and ten minutes of fuel. Four Rangers killed on and around a ramp as the sun came up. Seven Americans dead by the end of the day. What follows is the part that has never been public. The viral video most people cite as proof is nine minutes assembled from an hour and forty-nine minutes of raw footage, out of sequence, with a closing sequence taken from four minutes after everyone agrees the fight was over. The technology credited with reopening the medal case is examined by name. So is the bunker, the two fighters said to be inside it, and the decision to pull air support with the quick reaction force on final. Two Medals of Honor came out of this mountain. So did a feud between two branches that has run for more than twenty years. Ground Truth Documentary: groundtruthdoc.com/

I asked for positive news this week. What I got was surveillance, a global humiliation, and a man duct taped to his seat at thirty thousand feet. We open with reporting that Homeland Security has been analyzing the financial data of American citizens, and that some units have used it to steer local police toward pretextual traffic stops. Banks have run keyword filters on transactions. Agencies have swept up bulk records from money transfer services. Credit reports, utility bills and location data get purchased outright from private brokers, which sidesteps the Fourth Amendment entirely. There is a term for where that ends up. Turnkey totalitarianism is a system where every pillar of mass surveillance is built and operational, waiting on one person to connect it. I could not steel man the argument that we are not already there. From there we get into age and capacity in elected office, Apple's attempt to certify that a photograph is real, and why current AI produces novel output but not novel thought. Then it lightens up. A competitive fitness scandal goes worldwide. An actor announces what he would do to people in a fight. A first class passenger gets restrained with zip ties and duct tape between Dallas and Newark. We close with 163 missing children recovered in Florida in four days.

Dan Rickert graduated from West Point and commissioned into the cavalry, running Bradleys and gun trucks through Iraq in 2008 before going to selection and finishing his nine years in uniform on a Special Forces team with 10th Group. He left the Army in 2015 and spent the next eight years at Palantir, moving from project management to international work and eventually to chief of staff on the defense side. He is now VP of Operations at Air Space Intelligence, the company the FAA selected to rebuild the software that runs the national airspace. Much of this conversation is about what people get wrong about the defense industry. He argues that competition produces a better product for the people using it, that a human has to stay in the loop on any decision that matters, and that skepticism is healthy either way. We also worked through privacy and security, and whether the two actually have to be traded against each other. From there we covered drone warfare and trench fighting in the same conflict, rebuilding an identity after the uniform comes off, and the work of modernizing air traffic control. Join the Cleared Hot Newsletter: clearedhotpodcast.com Take the Operator Code Assessment: theoperatorcode.com

This one airs on the 25th anniversary of September 11th. I'm not dedicating the whole episode to it. I don't tell people how to think or how to feel. But I do open with where I land on it now, a quarter century later, and why the reverence fading for people who didn't live it doesn't surprise me anymore. Then the questions. A 27-year-old learns through a DNA test that the man on his birth certificate isn't his father. He wants to know whether to tell the rest of the family. A guy who has run audio at his church for 21 years wants to know how to finally ask to be paid without turning it into an ultimatum. A future Naval Academy midshipman asks what a SEAL officer actually does on target, and whether the enlisted guys respect him. Also covered: why we round the edges off pain as a species, what constant exposure to war footage does to a person, and why describing your own military service as vanilla needs to stop.

Amanda Lindhout grew up in small-town Alberta and waited tables to pay for backpacking trips through Latin America, Asia, and Africa. She taught herself the job along the way and turned into a freelance foreign correspondent, filing from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan with no network behind her and no one responsible for her if it went wrong. In August 2008 she flew into Mogadishu to cover the famine. It was supposed to be a one-week trip. She was ambushed on the road outside the city and held for 460 days. Her memoir about it, A House in the Sky, became a New York Times bestseller. This conversation covers the whole arc. Why she kept choosing more dangerous places, and what she can see now that she couldn't at 27. What captivity actually looked like day to day. The escape attempt and the punishment that followed. We also spend real time on the aftermath, which she says was almost as hard as the captivity. Complex PTSD. Going back to Somalia and why. Coming off the medication. Plant medicine. And why she stopped saying she forgave them. Join the Cleared Hot Newsletter: clearedhotpodcast.com Take the Operator Code Assessment: theoperatorcode.com

Michael was tasked with finding something uplifting. He failed. This is what a slow week for good news looks like. We open on the flooding in Nepal and what you can realistically do when you live in terrain that gives you seven minutes of warning. One school got 14 minutes and everyone made it out. Then the part nobody wants to say out loud: reading the news is taking something from you. I talk about how I decide what to let in. National debt past forty trillion. Bonds selling off. Printing money and calling it something else. Blind loyalty to a party instead of judging what is actually being delivered. The Kennedy Center. Roughly 800 wounded U.S. service members in Iran in six months, the classification that kept those numbers quiet, and a reported airstrike on a wedding. The Lindsay Clancy verdict that never came. Cities cancelling Flock camera contracts, 214 jurisdictions pulling them out, officers using the data to track people they should not be tracking. None of it is a reason to quit.

Nick Jones enlisted in the Marine Corps at 18 out of Olathe, Kansas. Mortarman, then scout sniper platoon, then selection and 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, where he came up through element member to element leader. Twelve years, five deployments. On March 8, 2020, his team went into the Qarachogh Mountains in northern Iraq to clear a cave complex and lost their team leader and their team chief. He was shot going back for them and kept fighting until he was pulled off the mountain. Six surgeries and eighteen months later he medically retired as a staff sergeant with a Navy Cross and a Purple Heart. He now runs the Talons Reach Foundation. In 2019 he built a mountain warfare training package for his team in Montana. It got denied. The reason given was that they wouldn't be fighting in the mountains. Ten months later they were. He proposed on top of Lone Peak and told his wife they'd build a family in Montana in ten years. They got there in one. Five years later she broke down on the drive back from Jackson and told him she had no life there. That conversation moved everybody to Wyoming. Talons Reach Foundation: talonsreachfoundation.org/

Recorded two of these in one week because when this drops I'll be in Maine at the Origin Immersion BJJ camp. So Michael gets another pass. Nobody knows what he does with his time anyway. First question comes from a firefighter who watched a man beat a woman in a McDonald's parking lot. He called 911 from behind a block wall and did not physically intervene. He's been carrying it ever since. Good and bad is the wrong lens for that. Capability is the right one. What you can actually do under stress, not what you picture yourself doing. Range, training, tools, and why a black belt is not magic. Plugging holes matters as much as making them. Second question is one I've never been asked. A 15-year-old found out his mother has an OnlyFans page because his baseball teammates were passing it around school. Live your life however you want. The consequences didn't stop with her. A police officer who wants out and thinks nothing he does translates. It all translates. He just needs to stop telling himself otherwise.