 You don't necessarily think about the risks or the inherent risks associated with flying. And then I was off, and like I did, I walked the walk, I went out there. You don't start something and then you're never going to get it bloody finished. You know, there are inherent risks associated and attached with those pursuits. And in a nutshell, yeah, you know, there can be incidents or malfunctions and things can happen and you've got to deal with that. Yeah, so I've been procrastinating, mate, about. No, procrastinating isn't the right word. I've just been putting off doing the audio book and I get what I say book. I mean, I've got six books out now. And I, you know, I'm not. I'd never want someone else to read my book. And I don't think the reader would. I think they want Chris Frull to read his own memoirs, right? As such, Jamie, I've just been put this with YouTube, there's always stuff to do. So I've been put I've been putting it off. But obviously, as you can see, I've got all the equipment to sit here and do it. I know I know what software you need. I know that there's a little plug in you can get for audacity. Friends at home, audacity is a software suite. It's free. It's really good for recording audio. You download a plug in for it and it tells you if your audio quality is good enough to go on Amazon, audible, for example. And if it's not, there's like five, five compressors, you can put it through and it tweaks with the levels. And then it goes, yeah, it gives it literally like gives you a thumbs up. But because I don't really plan a diary, which I should, I come to this computer every day. There's there's I get about 500 emails a week. And I'm always trying to get at least one video out a day to keep the whole YouTube algorithm thing going. And what I'm trying to say, Jamie, is I've put it off. I'm also a wee bit daunted, I guess. Because I'm under no delusion. That sitting here doing an audio book could, well, A, it's it's not a short process. No, but B, it could end up bloody tedious. But you're saying they sit you down and go go through it with you and record it in a one on. They do it in a one on like, you know, realistically, you know, you can't go say, I mean, my book was about 90,000 words, you know, like life on a thread. The narrative and it's probably, I don't know, 20 plus chapters. And so, yeah, they start it. And I did it on let's say I did it on a Monday to Wednesday, three days full time. It was about 10 hours a day, more or less, you break for a bit of lunch granted and a couple of tea breaks here and there, but it is proper graft. I mean, and then, of course, let's say you read a chapter. When you're going through the chapter live and you're doing it with a kind of a normal voice and you're talking to the microphone and you've got to emphasize words, sentences and every now and again, you know, your throat gets a bit dry. That's normal when you're you're you're rabiting and you're talking for a long time. So the audio engineer, the technician guy behind the glass, he will kind of stop you. You'll come in on the mic and say, I've got to stop you there. You've got to rewind a couple of sentences. He said, you've got a bit of a frog in your throat there. Take a sip. So you drink some tea, you drink some water. And and then he kind of like, yeah, OK, that's good. And then you crack on again. And so occasionally you'll fluff because of sort of natural drawbacks, like I've mentioned, your voice gets a bit, you know, you lose it a little bit or it gets a bit dry or indeed, you just fluff the sentences because, you know, your brain gets a bit tired, right? So you'll read, read, read. And when you're reading out loud, especially, I mean, I wasn't used to reading out loud for three days straight. So maybe some people are like maybe audio actors, you know, if they're doing it kind of professionally for a living. But I don't read out loud regularly in life. But so when you're doing it off the cuff for three days straight, yeah, you'll fluff sentences or words here and there. And again, the technician, he'll stop you there. You kind of ping you back and we record the sentences that you need to go over. So, mate, it's proper graft. I'd say that to anybody. I mean, not to put you off. But it's a it's a rewarding process when you when you get it done. But it's a long haul. And and yeah, I mean, I was guided by this kind of audio technician guy. And they work, they're great. They're they're consummate professionals. And they work with a lot of authors and probably been doing the job for years. But I mean, I'm sat in a little studio. It was freezing cold. It was Easter last year in twenty one. And you could barely swing a cat in the studio. You know, it was me just sat in a little sound booth. With a plinth among one of them sort of comfy sort of business chairs, you know, sort of fake leather things with the plinth with the with the with the sort of digital book and I can kind of scroll through to kind of carry carry on on the process of the read. And then meanwhile, it's all being recorded, but you're you're you're going back and you're doing reruns. Yeah, yeah, it's proper graft and you've got to really want to do that term. If you do fair play to you, but it's for you, Chris, it's time consuming. Obviously, you're juggling if you're spinning a few plates there, buddy. So you've got to figure out what you can take on, mate. Yes, I'm a great believer, though, mate, if you don't start some and then you're never going to get it bloody finished here. For real, yeah, you've got to you've definitely got to set a couple of, you know, a few dates aside to to kind of make something happen in life. That's for sure. Did you, Gar, I'm going to ask you all the questions. Well, I think this is a great chat. Did you have to find your voice? Did you have to like try and adopt a voice or did they say, look, just be yourself? Yeah, I mean, mainly I was myself. I kind of just use my my own, I guess, judgment on that because at the end of the day, you know, you've got to you've got to own your own story. Right. You've got to you've got to be comfortable about it. And you've just got to realise, actually, it's my book, it's my story. I'm the author. They want to hear it from me. They're not expecting an actor here. They really want to hear it from me, ideally. So I tried to just be myself and speak in the normal kind of tone in the normal kind of everyday manner. But I've got to admit when some of the chapters did, I think, require some emphasis and a bit of gusto. And I'm not an actor. I'm not a professionally trained actor. Never never have been. Although I've done a little bit of sort of method acting, you know, a long time ago when I was more or less a very young man with with the BBC once upon a time, that's another story. And but I've never really done much in in in this sort of sense. And I figured that there was a couple of chapters that did need some emphasis. And I remember one in particular for for your understanding. And it was a chapter that sent to the round the the P company process. I did many, many years ago up in Catharic in North Yorkshire. And I was probably only about 27 years old at the time. Of course, anyone that's been through P company, it's a bit like, you know, when you did your Marines course back in the day, you know, it's just nails. You know, you've been training for months in the buildup. You know, it's mentally, psychologically giving yourself up for that process. So I talked in earnest about the process of P company in my case, which is selection for the parachute regiment. And I kind of went through the the chapter, which described the processes of P company quite succinctly and in detail. And then particularly when it got to one of the final events, which was the milling. Yeah. So the the toe to toe, toe to toe in the in the mock sort of ring, you know, you've got the milling and you're standing toe to toe with your opponent. And there's this cash bristling British Army, NCO. Who's like a referee in the middle. And he's saying, right, are you ready? Are you ready? Stand by and mill. And I'm having to put the energy into the into the into the chapter, you know, into the dialogue to to give the reader an understanding of actually what's going on and to bring the chapter to life. So there were certainly many points in the narrative of my story where I tried to bring it to life the best of my sort of judgment. And I guess my my my sort of reflections on that, looking back in terms of how it was, how it was to be there kind of in person. But I think if you don't do that and you're kind of just speaking in a monotone for, you know, twenty four chapters all the way through, you know, it's probably not worth doing an audio book, quite honestly. You've got to try and bring it to life. So you just got to use, you know, a bit of sort of your own sort of savvy sort of wisdom on that. And that I think helps. And from what they said, they said, yeah, we think you did a great job, given that you've never done this before. And I've had some pretty rip roaring feedback on on the audio sort of formats from Apple and Amazon. So I must have done something pretty reasonably. Well, in the process. So yeah, fingers fingers cross, mate, and the people are going to enjoy it. Oh, well, there's no doubt they'll enjoy it. They'll enjoy it. Guy, I got a load, I could say, about read listening to audio books as well. We'll come on to that. What about I think maybe one of the things that's making me procrastinate is when I write, I really try to put the reader in the story in every sense. So I'm talking about sight, sound, smells, how I'm feeling. And I always try to make it a bit jokey. So go bloody, I wasn't expecting that. You know, so the reader would would would be thinking the same thing in that part in the story. But one thing I do is. And some people will say, oh, you shouldn't do this, but I'm like, now you should is I use accents. So I mean, I'm eating smoke. There's an IRA guy that I met. And he's like, you've been in a military, British military. And. OK, yeah. As I'm saying it now, it's highlighting how difficult this is going to be. My approach is going to be not to try to be Mike fricking Yardwood. Everyone's going, who's Mike Yardwood? Mike Yardwood was a very famous British impersonator back in the 80s. He was incredible, really, really good. And of course, it was Rory Bremner and these types. I'm not going to try and be that, but I'm just going to put a slight. I mean, the Chinese themselves, people think I'm being patronizing when I write the way that they speak. But I want people to know what I went through. Yeah, it brings it to life, Chris, you know, so anything you can do to try and tweak things. And the accents is an interesting one because they said to me for the audio book, I said about accents. Do you want me to try and attempt the accents? And I'm pretty good at it, not too bad. And they said, no, it's probably better that you don't. They said, you know, sometimes it can be it can just it can just lead to a little bit of confusion on the other end. I didn't necessarily agree with that, but I just went with the guidance. So I try I kind of spoke in a fairly neutral tongue regarding, you know, person A and B in the room. But yeah, I think you're right. I would agree that if you if you feel you're pretty good at accents, yeah, why not? Give it a give it a blast and it probably be well received. Yeah, I think I'd have a little rehearsal before I click the record. Just rehearse the line, the paragraph and then go. Yeah, what else have I been thinking about? Rehearsal is a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot you can do as well. I mean, when you can clip and paste in an audio program, that's obviously going to be a great a great help. I guess you'd you'd you'd get good at judging how long you pause when you speak. So when you clipped and cut it and pasted it back together, you'd get the. Yeah, I think for my tip would be where you see the sentences kind of structured and you see the the the grammar and the punctuation. So, you know, commas, full stops like hyphens, that kind of thing. Sometimes it can be important to just read according to the grammar. So, you know, you'll make sure that when you get to a comma, maybe there's just a slight pause, just a just a just a very touch of a pause to reflect that within the sentence. And when you get to a full stop, there's a bit more of a pause before you kind of just take a breath and then start the next sentence. And then, of course, when you get to perhaps the. You know, the end of the chapter, again, there's a bit of a pause before you can go on to the next chapter. So it's just acknowledging the grammar that is laid out in front of you. I mean, it's been written with grammar for a reason. And any, you know, any book that's been well written would have hopefully would have been proof read. And then if you read according to that. Grammatic structure, if you will, you'll find you'll do a better job of the audio when it when it, you know, in terms of the recorded dialogue as you go through, it will pay off, mate, in that respect. Yeah, I have heard that some people's process, but I've seen this written in articles is what you can do is get your page out and get a pencil and just make little notes say on a comma. Where you you tend to sort of maybe like rush through it and you've got to remind yourself, no, this is a like a little bit more of a just just to mentally remind you, this bit's coming up. And yeah, ordinarily, I'd say it like this, but it trips me up. Yeah, absolutely. Or you might want to perhaps underscore with a red pen or whatever if a certain sentence needs a bit more emphasis or you need a bit more volume in your voice, you know, when you talk through a certain sentence is stuff like that. You know, but definitely pauses. They work always really well. It's the same when you're doing speaking. So I do a fair bit of public speaking. And when you're stood in front of an audience, the use of pauses can be exceptionally good when you're trying to get your points across, you know, before you go on and and and and switch to, you know, part B of of that particular topic that you're talking about. So, you know, you can use that. It's almost like using grammar in speech just to integrate and pauses and an emphasis on the volume of your voice and stuff like that. There's little tricks, but ultimately you want to be able to communicate clearly whether you're speaking. And indeed, you know, if it's the same for, you know, trying to produce something in the audio book sense, it's the same kind of same kind of concept, really. How how's the response been? Because what you get a lot, I get it a lot. Chris, when when you're going to do the audio book and it makes makes you kind of feel like, wow, they're going to fly off the shelf. But do you do you have an idea of the ratio of paperback or paper traditional book to audio that you sell? I think, yeah, I mean, most people go for the the actual or that initially they went for the hardback. And of course, you know, that no doubt the paperback will hopefully do well because people are less sentimental probably about paperback. It's the kind of thing that they feel. They don't they're not necessarily buying it as a mantelpiece sort of figure. They can have a paperback book. They can not feel so sentimental. They can read it. They can pass it on to their mates, their friends and family, you know, or just chuck it into the local charity shop or whatever. You know, once they've read a read a paperback, it's maybe unlikely that they're going to go back again. And I think the hardback had a bit more sentimental value for most people. So maybe people are reluctant to buy it. They'll wait for the paperback in that sense because not everybody wants to collect, you know, 500 books on a big bookshelf in their home as they go through life in this day and age. You know, we live in a much more perhaps minimalist world. We buy stuff, we utilize it, we pass it on, or indeed we dispose of it. And I think you asked about ratio, I'd say probably I know I did sell, you know, several thousand copies of hardback last year and I think probably about 50% of what I did in hardback I sold in the audio sense, so audio book format and probably maybe another 50% of the hardback numbers probably were in the ebook as well. So that's like the kindle electronic version if you just want to effectively download it onto your kindle device or your iPad or indeed your phone to read it as and when you could be on the tube or the bus or, you know, trying to get from A to B, trying to get to work, that kind of stuff, you get a chance to read the electronic version or indeed you can, you know, plug your phones in and listen to the audio version. So, you know, lots of options with with books in general these days. Yeah, I find with audio books, if I'm in the car driving this is a really great place to listen to them because I'm not distracted. Well, you probably should be distracted in a car, but but I'm I'm not. I'm I'm really listening. I mean, I listened to Stephen King's on writing when I was writing my first memoir and I loved it. I'd be listening to it and going home and practicing what I'd learnt by listening. He's a great author. I've done a couple of his audio books as well. And yeah, really, they really get you going, you know, and it's a real escapism to get into one of Stephen King's books. Definitely. What I found, no, Jamie, is if if say I try to listen to one when I'm in bed at night, the fact that at some point listening to it, you're going to drift off to sleep, that process in itself kind of erases my memory from what I've just listened to. So I wake up, I wake up in the morning and think where the hell was I? I cannot remember. I mean, you can set a timer on, you know, go to sleep after 30 minutes. And that's that's the book, folks, not me. And and it will stop playing. But or if I'm in the garage doing some I've been making a knife recently and I've been listening to Craig Harrison's book about his sniper career. And I the way my mind is, my mind is on overdrive all the time. Anyway, I'm always thinking about stuff. That's why I need to meditate more. And I can suddenly stop and realise I just haven't listened to that for half an hour. It's been playing and I haven't listened to a word. Can't even remember what sometimes that happens. You just sort of switch off mentally and you kind of I don't know about you, but I'm guessing you're probably similar in character. And you kind of get a bit frustrated with yourself, almost pissed off internally. You think, hang on, I wasn't switched on there. And I wasn't quite taking that in and absorbing that that narrative properly. And you've got to take it back. I'm like that sometimes when I watch something on Netflix or whatever. And I've got to take it back because I didn't quite catch it all because mainly because my mind was drifting and perhaps I'm thinking about something else. The problem I really wanted to watch it. So I'll run it back. Maybe that's an element of me being a natural sort of perfectionist. I'm not happy if I don't absorb it in the way that I should be absorbing it. The thing is, it's two different processes listening to a book and reading one because reading one for a start, you're it's visual. So it's going into your brain visually. So you're actually imprinting those words into your subconscious. And when you get to a bit in a book, you think, hang on, I'm just I don't really remember what I read there. My mind drift, you just go back a page and go, ah, yeah, yeah, I was there. Whereas in an audio book, you're like, I'm just completely lost. Was it half an hour ago? I stopped focusing or was it 15 minutes? And then you've got to get your device and thumb through it to get back to where you were, and then you listen to it and then a 20 minute chunk. And you're like, oh, no, I listened to that, but it's it's it's a different process. Yeah, you've just got to, especially if it's something that you're into and, you know, you really want to follow it, that does take some concentration in itself and trying to keep up that kind of that cognitive sort of buoyancy, you know, mentally and trying to keep the mind lifted in order to to go through the the the narrative and absorb it all mentally. That does take some work. And so, yeah, you've got to kind of embrace it. I give you an example. I read a really interesting one a few months ago, but boy, it was heavy. I mean, to give you an idea, this guy, I kid you not, I think he took. I think he took six years to write it. So it was a massive research project. And it was it was the history, basically, it was the history of of nuclear, sort of nuclear, all things nuclear, nuclear warfare. And I'm struggling to remember the actual author's name. But it would be if I remember rightly, the the the guy that read it, because it wasn't it wasn't the author that read it. It was a gentleman called Scott Brick, I think, from memory. And it is available on on like Amazon Audio, but it was pretty much the history of nuclear and it was a tremendous history of all things kind of nuclear. You know, that nuclear sort of race, the Cold War, the sort of nuclear development when they sort of split the atom or the early kind of testing and so on and so forth. And then the latter day kind of summary of of the history and what we should really be alarmed about was was really quite shocking. And it covered Chernobyl, it covered the modern day kind of risks associated with more countries getting their their hands on nuclear and the technology and the weaponry and all the rest of it. Is it called bombscare? The history, the history and future of nuclear weapons. It wasn't that, no, but it was it was there was a there was on the cover. It was just a simple like animated picture of one man about to press the red button. So just a hand hovering over the red button, which I thought was genius because that's what it's all about, isn't it? That's the biggest risk. That's what we all scared of, you know, so. And it's kind of what drove, you know, the kind of fear behind the Cold War. And even now with what's going on, you know, it's what is kind of what is the underlying sort of fear with all of us in the West. So, you know, yeah, I'm really struggling with this one, mate, to remember what it was. But it was on Amazon Audio. Yeah, I would say we'll dig it out, mate, we'll dig it out. Yeah, I tell you what, I tell you what I should do, right? Hang on, let me I'm going to get your book up. Yeah, cool, Life on a Thread. Yeah, I'm getting your book. I'm going to I'm going to read from it. OK. Go for it, mate. I'm going to pretend. That I'm doing your. You're the author. Yeah, I'm your is Jamie Harve. Audio actor. Export in there. Hey, I've got my first proper acting role coming up. I'll talk to you about that in a second. Let me get. Let me read this. So. And this, friends, I'm not reading this to show off my skills. I'm I'm reading this to show you how difficult this is going to be. Obviously, I haven't. I'm not as familiar with Jamie's book as I am my own. But so 19th of August, 2007. Groundhog Day, number 19. I pulled back the curtains and there was the bright blue sky. A few puffballs of white cloud, the other green tree trops, complete tree, tree trops, completely still, Simpson's weather, Simpson's weather, the aviators call it. And that's when you get day after day out there. The rain will sweep through in the afternoon. Water the plants, clear the air, then head on inland and head back and hand back the blue sky. But this is how it starts every morning late and buzzard. It is not. It's why I've chosen to get my pilot's license in Florida. Back home, you could spend a whole month in flight school waiting for the rain to lift. And I only had a month to play with, kill some time usefully. Then the serious business was to begin. At last, a chance to do my bit for Queen and Country, seven years with the military, all that technical training, all that lung bursting effort. And I had to make it into one of the best military units in the world. So, Jamie, not only am I exhausted just reading that little bit. But I'm also, as I'm reading it, it's not flowing to me. I'm just reading. I'm just trying to do a good job and I'm realising it's not flowing in my ears. I wonder what it's like for the for the listener. How did that sound? It's not bad. I mean, obviously, you don't know the narrative. So if you've read it, perhaps, you know, more recently and you were kind of more familiar with it there for from a recent sort of standpoint in your mind, you'd probably be a bit more confident. I think that if again, because it's not your it's not your kind of you're not the author, so to speak. It's hard to just go straight into it and read something like that. It's much easier when you're when you're the author and you know kind of what's coming. So probably your confidence was slightly lacking as a reader. And again, if you're not used to doing that day in day out as a professional, that is hard graph, mate. It is hard graph. So I think you did a pretty good job. But trust me, it is it is hard work. Yeah, I think you guys that do that for a living, Chris. And that's all they do Monday to Friday. You know, they get paid for it, you know. And so there's a there's a difference, buddy, when you're doing it, when you're living and breathing sort of audio in that sense. Well, I've just literally bought your audio book. I'm going to make. Well, well, listen, it's a it's a cracker, like you said, if you're driving. So for people that are like, you know, busy professionals say out there on the road, you know, you know, van drivers or delivery or maybe truckers, you can really kind of get immersed in that. And it is a good sort of about, you know, eleven, twelve hours of playback. So you can sort of take your time with it and absorb it all and hopefully get to get something out of it when you're out and about. Hey, it brings us on nicely to talk about something that I found utterly fascinating. And yet I haven't really had much chance to talk about it with a fellow pilot. And that is learning to fly. So sure. So I got my pilot's license in Florida. I've I learned to fly in Florida as well. My story is quite simple. I'm always. If there's something I want to do, Jamie, I never say that I'm never going to do it. You know, I'm not one of these people. Oh, I'll never do that. I'm like, yeah, I'll probably I really want to do it. Let's stow it away on the back burner in my mind. And because I've always done that, everything that I've ever wanted to do is pretty much come come good now. A few things that are still on the back burner would be. Skiing to the South Pole. Climbing Everest, rowing across the Atlantic, but. So. I used to look up at airplanes and think, God, I wonder what it must be like to fly one of those. And that's kind of where it started. And then I met a girl. We did our first skydive together in New Zealand. And she said, oh, I'm a pilot. I'm like, what? And I'm just all ears, then this sort of thing fascinates me. If I was to say that to my mates or mates that I've had, I should say they just be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, who's trying to get the beer? You know, just not not interested in. But for me, the fact she said she was a pilot was fascinating. And I'm like, tell me, I want to know all about it. And she was explaining the radio procedure and all this kind of stuff that she'd learned to fly in the UK. And it took three years or something. So one time I had, I was at uni. You get really long summer holidays at uni, don't you? So I did a whole load on that holiday. Actually, I did, I got my pilot license, skydiving license. Flew down to Central America to visit places I hadn't been, which I think was at El Salvador, actually. And then I met up with a friend and we flew to Cuba. Then I flew down to South America and I got all these tiny little planes to visit all the countries I hadn't been. So it was Columbia, Venezuela, Suriname, French Guiana. And yeah, what I'm trying to say is I did an awful lot on the holiday, but I digress, sorry. That's cool, it's interesting. You've done a lot of travel, that's for sure. Yeah, I am. I've done it to the point where I can sit back now and I don't have, you know, I don't... I can feel really just great about it all. But what I did, Jamie, is I went to the local shop and I bought a flying magazine. And then I just looked through the back of it thinking, right, how about I go to South Africa? I've heard it's cheaper there and they get good weather. And I just settled upon an advert that said learn to fly in three weeks. And I'm not sure if there's a price there, but the price effectively was about £2,700. And it said, call this number in England, so I called it. And a chap said, oh yeah, what it is, I work on behalf of a flight school called Trade Wins in Florida. Basically, I put business this guy's way and he lets me go and fly for free in my summers. So next thing you know, I'm flying to Miami and he came to pick me up at the airport or Orlando or somewhere it was. And yeah, that was it. That's how I started. And as you said and your book made clear then, I think it was the fact that you can do it in such a condensed period of time. So that's how I got onto it. How about you? Yeah, it was similar. It was similar for me. So I'm very much of a similar mindset in terms of I'm not one of these guys that are going to be just down the pub sort of talking the talk. I'm more of a guy that will walk the walk. So if I come up with an idea and an ambition and I really set on that, I mean, realistically, you're not going to do everything in life. But if I've got an ambition that I'm really passionate about, I want to fulfill that, I want to go and walk the walk. So I remember choosing Florida as well because of the relative proximity. I mean, it's only a flight across the Atlantic. The much better chance or window of better meteorological conditions or weather and the chance for, you know, for the sunnier days and therefore to get the process done within a relatively short timeframe. So I'd given myself probably, I don't know, it was like five, six weeks max over one summer. So that was August, around about July, August 2007. And the first thing obviously going to the States was to get my visa. And I went to the U.S. Embassy in London, persuaded them that it wasn't a massive threat because this was post 9-11. Obviously they were quite cautious about who they would admit to indeed to learn to fly in the U.S. airspace. And so once I'd been through the interviews at the Embassy, got the visa and then I was off. Like I did, I walked the walk, I went out there. And similarly, I got picked up, you know, I got taken out to the flight school or maybe it was the accommodation first night. It just went from there and it was a day-by-day kind of comprehensive process, full-time and then, you know, and I was many weeks into the course in my case. Yeah. Were you excited to go out there? Yeah, I was. It was an ambition that kind of harked back to childhood for me really. I mean, I was inspired by my late grandfather who did a bit and he often used to talk about aviation, aircraft and he was a real kind of aviation nut, frankly. I mean, he would draw them and he would be kind of working out all the mathematical kind of equations to do with, you know, sort of airspeed, maximum climb rates, sort of velocities, because he went on to become, after the war, after World War II, he went on to become a British aerospace engineer. So his thing was all about aerodynamics of aircraft in the manufacturing stage and also missiles. So he was very much looking at aerodynamics and, you know, all of the kind of, the mathematics behind all of that. And long story short, he really, I kind of caught on onto, you know, what Grandad was all about when I was a kid and that's where the inspiration perhaps came from from a young age. He also took me to a few air shows, right? So places like Duxford, you know, near Cambridge and some of the other big air shows around the country. I think it was Farnham. And it was a tremendous, you know, when I think back to my childhood memoirs, you know, like you, I'd be there looking to the skies on numerous occasions thinking, oh, wow, amazing. And perhaps one day I'd like to try that. And when I was a kid, things that stood out was like the media surrounding Concord. Yeah. And then the supersonic sort of passenger jet going across the Atlantic. And I was fascinated and I would follow stories like that because the fact that these aircraft could break the speed of sound, not just once but twice just blew my mind. And, you know, there's things like supersonic boom and I would study that and I would read into it all. So yeah, the fascination was there from a young age. And in things like you've got things like the Imperial War Museum and there's the RAF Museum as well in London. As a kid, I was absolutely mesmerized. And then I'd be walking around those museums like hand in hand with my granddad. And he'd be filling me in on the details about these aircraft quoting like perhaps, you know, airspeed and, again, climb rates and all the rest of it. So it was definitely there. And of course, fast forward when I did, you know, put my money where my mouth was and actually venture out to Florida. Yeah, I was really excited about the process and what it would entail. And then, you know, getting actually to grips with the cockpit and having instructors sort of work by me and sort of monitor the progress. It was an exciting time. It really was. And you don't necessarily think about the risks or the inherent risks associated with flying. Perhaps in the similar vein, you mentioned skydiving and I've done a bit of that as well. And you don't necessarily think about the risks, but you know, there are inherent risks associated and attached with those pursuits. And in a nutshell, yeah, you know, they can be incidents or malfunctions that can happen and you've got to deal with that. Yes. So just to put this in a picture, I just read from your book, didn't I? Was it 2007? Well, the incident was 2007. You had to be for the record 19th of August 2007. Yeah. So when you went to learn to fly was 2007. I was there 2005. I was in a place called Fort Pierce and I skydived in Sebastian. Florida, obviously east coast. Yeah. Very nice weather, but you've got these massive heads of cloud in the afternoons that built and built and built and you could literally fly around. I mean, you didn't fly in these conditions. It's almost predictable, isn't it? The weather patterns, they're almost very predictable every day. And which part of Florida were you? So yeah, within the sort of general kind of Orlando region, I think I was slightly to the north, but I know that I was still just underneath the federal airspace where I was working because that was overhead. That was higher than sort of 1,200 feet. It kind of, it started to then broach into federal airspace for the Orlando. So the Orlando was the big federal airport and I was just operating a small kind of, what they call municipal airport or aerodrome. Where did you stay? Just locally, like a local sort of quiet, sort of sleepy rural village setting. And literally I lived in a sort of a large bungalow with some other students. And you know, it was a leafy kind of tree lined streets. It backed onto like a clutch little golf course in Florida. And it was all very kind of, you know, middle class kind of conservative area. Very lovely really. Just hot as hell in the summertime. You remember that kind of heat and humidity. So sticky. And literally I remember walking in every morning and I'd sort of take a bit of a shortcut over the periphery of the golf course. And you'd hear this like quack of the, the sort of the metal on golf ball when the guys were playing golf early in the morning. And then you'd hear like the moans and groans if the shot wasn't right or the jubilation, you know, and the hoops of joy if they kind of hit a good shot. And then you'd hear a few birds twitting in the trees and the sort of smell, you know, the sort of the wood and the pine in the side of the golf course. So all these things kind of stuck out in my mind. It was very much tropical. And that is Florida. But yeah, really hot and humid, which has its advantages certainly for flying. Definitely because, you know, like I said earlier, you know, better weather conditions, much more chance of getting the flying done in a more comprehensive timeframe. So there's pros and cons because when the weather, when the storm fronts come in, it will absolutely lash down. And that really does not just put a dampener on this flying, but it actually cancels it out because there's no way, some of those storm fronts, there's no way you're getting up. And so you've got to be mindful of that. You've got to check whether you've got to check radar frequently and the sort of met reports that you can check the sort of daily bulletins on a computer for, you know, at the flight school. But yeah, it was an exciting process, a lot going on, very absorbing process. But it's a very different environment out there to what it is in the UK, you know, with a very temperate and quite comfortable by comparison. And you've got to be geared up for, you know, life in the tropics as it were. Yes, we, I started off in a one, one of these typical motels you see in the American movies had a aging swim and pulled out the back. And then at some point, about a week into that, we got offered an apartment by a friend that knew the instructor. And so I think there were three of us, we lived in this little apartment on, and it had a dock at the back onto an inlet from the ocean. So every night we just drank American beer and fished off this inlet. It was, it was great. But I didn't know what to expect. I didn't have any preconceived ideas. I kind of, I pictured it must be like driving a car but in the sky. And obviously it's not even anything like it. And I never thought of failure, but when I did get there, there was an Austrian chap and he just failed his test. So it wasn't really like a nice intro. The fact that, oh, what, you can fail this? Ah, okay. And then of course, the way our minds work, that plants a seed then, doesn't it? Oh, I might fail. But it didn't get me down or anything. I just was determined not to fail. I very almost did even before getting on the runway. You know, you've got that, I don't know what it's called, but there's a line from the, out on the pan where you wait and you contact ground control and you ask for clearance and then you give you clearance to go onto the runway. There's a line, isn't there? You don't go over that line. Yeah, sort of a runway threshold. Yes. And I pulled up to it and I tell you what, my mind had blanked and I was just prepared to go straight over it. That would have been instant failure, I'm guessing. And as I did, I saw my instructor as a Swedish guy. I saw him flinch. And I just out of the corner, I saw his leg go for the, the dual brake. Cause you have, I think we had dual controls in the, in our, and as I saw it, I suddenly realized what I'd done and I beat him to it and I hit the brake and he looked at me and said, do you know what that line is? And I said, yeah, yeah. It's called the so-and-so line. He went, are you allowed to go over? I said, no, no, of course not. So we got, we got to wait here now until we get clearance. And he's like, so I completely blagged it. Good, good show. But it was funny. My instructor was called Ernie. I took him a bottle of Johnny Walker and he went, oh, it was like he'd never been given a gift before or something and he looked really awkward. And then he, he stowed it in this locker in the flight office when, yeah, my, I won't tell my wife about that. I have, I've had a bit of a problem. So obviously he was recovering from our, our alcohol addiction. But he'd take us up and I have to say, Jamie, he was the worst instructor. I think you ever could have to teach you anything. One of these people that, because he knows how to do it, he doesn't understand that you don't know this. And it was awful. We'd come in to do the landings and I had, because I've got no background in aerodynamics, I didn't realize that you land on a cushion of air. That's the, that's why birds almost tilt backwards as they, as they come into land, like a duck landing on a, on a, on a lake. You see the head go back, the wings flare, they slow in the end and it just gently touched down and they're fine. I was thinking it's like the jukes of hazard when you jump a car that you, you, you kind of point downwards and you, you just like smack into the ground at that angle. And so time and time again, we're doing these landings time and time again, I'm trying to smack in like, you know, Bo and Luke Duke and he's getting so angry with me. And in the end, we had a fricking screaming match in a cockpit and I just laid it out and boy, I don't understand what you're saying. I just don't understand Ernie. You know, you've got to explain. Anyhow, he never even explained it. I went back to the accommodation that evening. I was fricking threaders, you know, and the Austrian guy turned to me and he said, did he tell you to pull back on the stick? I'm like, what? When you come into that, you've got to ease back up. I'm like, no, he didn't tell me anything. And that was it. It was a fellow student that taught me how to land. Just by pulling back on the stick, you change the angle of your aircraft and the aerodynamics completely change and you suddenly go from smacking into the ground to hitting that lovely floaty cushion of air where you can hold the plane in that cushion of air, can't you? You give it a little bit of throttle, it stays. Exactly. Yeah, you're flaring. You're doing a good solid flare. Yeah. And you're right, Chris. The there's a very obviously with any kind of instructional process that you go through. I mean, let's take the military, for example, you know, mostly, you know, obviously, when you were you were a Marine, right? And you go through the Marines and obviously the Marines, the firearms instructors per se are brilliant. They live and breathe firearms and they really have a great methodology of drilling the soldier into handling that weapon safely, working on the ranges safely and actually becoming an accomplished shot, as it were, you know, with the with the weapon. And then you can eventually, you know, sort of pass out as a Royal Marine. And so it's vitally important that you get points across. But the point is you get without good instruction, we don't learn, you know, as subjects. And yeah, from my experience, when I went through the process of flying, I think that there were largely good instructors. But some were just average and there were a couple that weren't that great at all, definitely. And they don't explain things and they don't seem to have the knowledge of actually what it is to teach. So it does vary, I think, with instruction across the board. You know, it's probably the same for people right now that, you know, are listening in on this on this podcast. Imagine if you're learning to drive, we could be the same for a driving instructor in the car, you know, with a perhaps a teenager. A good driving instructor will really explain everything from the off and the whole, you know, reason why we've got to do this and why we're doing that and to try to nurture that process. But, you know, perhaps someone who's not so good in the car will make a bit of a hash of it and they're not explaining properly. And so the subject, the learner driver is making the same mistakes over and over again. And you wonder why they need sort of 30-40 lessons to get, do you see what I'm saying? So I think, you know, very much down to the quality of instruction, definitely, that helps an awful lot. That reminds me of something my son drove for the first time the other day. He's six and he can drive a car on his own, right? Pretty impressive. Yeah, I'm going to take a bit of credit for that, you know. I started him off on my lap. He's always driven since he's like one, you know. Every time I watch that, Chris, like, slap on the wrist for you, mate. It'll be, by the time he gets to his teens, he'll be twacking. You know what twacking is? Taking without consent. Yeah, taking without the owner's consent. It'll be a twacker by the time he's about 14 years old. As long as he doesn't hurt someone. Yeah, as long as he doesn't hurt anyone. I'm not too bothered about that. But yeah, he started at one. We'd get to the end of our road and I'd go, oh, my wrist. I've hurt my bloody wrist again. Oh, I don't know how to get the car home. I'll drive daddy. Oh, you think you can, son? Yeah, OK. And he'd get on my lap and drive. And I used to get him to put one foot on my, you know, on top of, put his foot on top of my foot. As he got bigger, his foot would just sort of rest on top of mine. If I put him on right at the front of the seat and his other foot would rest on my accelerator at one. And I just say, right, we're going into first. And he'd do the gears. I'd say field of clutch is going down. And that's it. And the other day I was going to write, you just drive. I sat in the passenger seat. And I think he stalled the first time. The second time he was away. It's awesome. Wow. Don't forget kids at that age. We underestimate them. That's probably the best age for learning. Because their minds are just like little sponges. And they're just soaking it all up every day. So it's probably a given that you could teach kids to drive at a very young age. But obviously they don't perhaps give them credit. Someone made the decision. Nope. They've got to be 17 years of age. That was obviously some authority in Westminster or something back in the day. In America, I think it's 15, right? Yeah, it's younger there. I think it depends. Or it used to be 15. I don't know what it is now. In the UK, it's actually the youngest you can drive on the roads. It certainly used to be this. I think it was 14. If you were a farmer, you could... Okay, yeah. That makes sense. You could drive farm vehicles on the road. For his first birthday, I bought him a knife. I remember that. I remember thinking, you know, starting young, getting used to knowing what skills are. Because if you as an Inuit community, you'd chuck the kids a knife to play with. You know, and they just get used to skinning stuff and whittling wood from a really young age. So I don't know. I'm guessing about two and a half. Probably he started sharpening sticks and stuff. And by three, I'm happy to let him sort of do it without any guidance. You could do these out there in the wilderness, kind of like, you know, exploring and enjoying his childhood in the physical sense. Because I think that's kind of a minority with kids these days. Kind of glued to the firing, aren't they? And you can't even have a conversation with a lot of youngsters these days because they're not sure, you know, on the art of conversation. Perhaps there's a bit too much of that and reliance on tech for kids. But really, they should be doing what, you know, your son's doing, you know, sharpening sticks and kind of out there in the wilderness, you know. I certainly lived a youth like that. And I'm sure you did sort of back in the day. We didn't have all the tech. Yeah, and you eventually progress onto a box of matches. And that's when the real fun starts. Yes, it is funny. I got quite, I got a bit shouty yesterday because quite often, YouTube is our babysitter. I know this sounds really awful, but when you've got two people that work, you know, my work is pretty much all, my work can be 24 seven. It's it's I have to force myself to take time off to obviously, I don't have a structure is what I'm saying. My partner also works hard. And for example, this week, they're building up to go away to for holiday. So my partner doesn't want to have work over the holiday. If that makes you should be doing a lot of overtime. And it's meant that he's been sat there. And he I wanted him. I mean, I bought him a tablet when he was two, not because I'm a freaking idiot that wants Bill Gates to babysit my kid. But because I want, I don't want him to be like me, where technology is a struggle. You know, I want him to understand what code is. I want him to understand the mechanics of a computer, which wasn't explained to me until I was like 27 for crying. 27 and someone sat me down and went, right, you've got like your bios. That's like the bit in your brain that wakes you up from sleep. Okay. So then you got your memory, which is like your brain, the memory stacked cell, cell stacked in your brain. All right. Okay. And you got your power supply. That's your energy. You know, that needs fuel. So they plug it into the mains and you know, you CPU, that's your brain in the way your brain process things and allocates power to this, to that, you know, to this muscle and, and to have it explained like that. Still, that's how I understand a computer today, but to think I was 27 before I understand that. And now my son's, you know, I just wanted him to be, oh, oh, fair with technology as young as possible, because this is the world they're going into. But it has gotten a situation where, because he knows how to flick around YouTube, because it's on the big tally, isn't it? YouTube's on your, on TV these days, that he's got into watching these junky American kids. I call them kids, but they're actually like 30 year olds. And it's the worst side of humanity. We're not the absolute worst, but they go down to the departments that, you know, their, their equivalent of being Q, they take out like 10,000 pound or something. That's just abnormal, but because they're all millionaire YouTubers, that's nothing to them. They fill up their choice with just this absolute junk that once they finished making this construction, which is always shit, it's always like masking tape, black maskers around everything. And, and, and by the end of the show, it's all just going down the dump, right? It's just awful. They'll set themselves a challenge to make a thought for paintballing or some, something pants. And it's never done with any skill, any, you know, woodcraft or metalwork skill, or it's all just pants. And the fact that they're 30 year olds kind of triggers me a bit that like, oh dudes, you're just crap. Sorry. But it's more the point that it's this junky stuff. And I genuinely wish he had like Tarzan to watch like I did as a kid. And he could fantasize about living in the jungle and swimming in, you know, underwater and catching fish and fighting crocodiles and doing all proper man stuff, not building sissy bloody fortresses to do paintballing. Yeah, mate, I second that. I love Tarzan, the legend of Tarzan. Yeah. When I was a kid on Saturday mornings, I'd watch me Tarzan. And I was very insular as a child. I kind of did a lot of stuff on my own. There was a lot going on in our family when I was a kid. And I'd go out the house and I'd have my rope, my lasso and I'd unzip my tracky top and I'd bear in my manly seven year old chest of the world. And it's because I was Tarzan, you know. And I'd take myself down the river and I'd try and lasso things. And it's meant a lot, you know. As an adult camping out in the Amazon rainforest and standing on top of waterfalls and swimming in, you know, beautiful lagoons, my Tarzan dreams come true, Jamie, you know. And I feel for these kids that just watch junk, crappy little... Yeah, there's so much information out there and it's easy for kids to just be at home and absorbed. And I think a lot of parents, they switch off, you know, with the supervision. You know, they just let them get on with it because they know they're safe. You know, they're in the lounge or the snug or whatever it is or their bedroom and they're watching, like you say, they're just untold amounts of... And a lot of it's uncensored. You know, they can pretty much watch what they want. There's so much on there. You wonder what, you know, let's face it, you wonder what benefit that that's going to give any kids having complete access to the media and so much uncensored sort of television in a way through these platforms. You know, but moreover, I think it is harmful too much of that every day. It is harmful too much kind of liberty for them to expose themselves to that. They should be out and about. You know, it's important that they get a balance. I think it's an easy thing for parents to, you know, just let them crack on in the bedroom and play on the tablet or the phone sitting in front of the television. I mean, they don't have to supervise, you know? And yeah, it's a changing world in that respect because I remember as a kid, I mean, I think I'm only slightly younger than you, but I grew up in an era when I spent most of the summer holidays out on my BMX bike. And in the woods, you know, climbing trees, you know, building sort of swing bridges and rope swings and perhaps swimming in the local books and stuff like that. But generally speaking, just loving the outdoors, cruising from A to B on the BMX. And looking back, I had a really active childhood, great childhood really. And you were learning all about managing risks. You were learning about, you know, the social side of life, kind of cracking on with your group, with your peers, with your mates. And it's kind of building skills for life in a way, you know, skills for your adolescents going on to sort of young adulthood. Kids aren't getting that now. They're so sort of closeted and wrapped up. And I mean, I've got a couple of young nephews myself and I see it. You know, I see how a lot of children are and it's a very pink and fluffy sort of generation. And it's changed a lot since we were kids. You've got these man kids now and they're wandering around with their silly skinny jeans and they're fucking half way down their arse. I'm not blaming them. To me, this is all agenda. This has all been created for a reason. Can they come from the, some more sort of like the black sort of culture in America, I think. Was it prisoners or something like that? Yeah, it was a couple of things. First off, in a kind of black communities, they would have hand-me-downs as I did as a kid, as I'm sure you did. You know, you wore second hand clothes as a kid very often and when you got a hole in the elbow, your mum put a patch on it and that was not, that was not. I think I wish we could bring that back. That was one reason is that you wore your brother's jeans and that's why they were half way down your arse and that turned into a fashion trend. Another theory or posit is that in prison, it can mean different things the way you wear your things. So if you have them worn like on your left cheek of your butt, it means you swing this way. If you're wearing them this way, it means you, you know, you're up for a threesome or something. I don't know. But it's this, I don't know. I'm all for disrespecting your elders. If your elders are a bunch of knobs, because that's been my life, you know, utter hatred for fucking dickheads. Excuse my French friends. This is my inner trauma coming out. But I remember kicking a chair across the Latin class at school when my, when the teacher wouldn't let those, they were going to give us some detention all for lunchtime because we hadn't done our Latin probably. But I had a letter to go uptown because I had to do something in the town. And I remember she went, you're not going. So I went, I effing am. And I just turned around and booted my chair out. Anyway, the digress, but the thing is that that was kind of deserving disrespect. But these days, any young person disrespects an old person because they think it's because they, they, because they used to doing it on a keyboard, they didn't write anything to anyone at any time of the day in any shape, way, form, fashion that you like. And there's no repercussions other than possibly the person blocking you on the social media. It's people have grown up thinking that that's normal. And also the same culture that means you can't punch people anymore. Not that I'm suggesting violence, but it, it was a good someone, someone put in the comments, the word I'm looking for, but it was a good limiter, right? If I said, you know, Jamie blah, blah, blah, there's a limit there that I can go and that you will accept where I'm not taking a piss out you, you know, there's a, there's a line that if I go over that line, you're entitled to smack me one. And then I go away and go, oh, I won't be saying that again. Yeah, I was, I was wrong, wasn't I? All that's been taken out now because of, you know, the cozy health and safety litigation society that, that, that's been created. And so you get people that fucking think they can say what they like. And it's really difficult when you've been in the forces where you still have the right, there's certain things you just don't say to people. Or if you do, you got to be prepared to go around the back and fight it out. And I think it's kind of allowed this, you just got like these Nambi Pambi young men, what we call in my, in my day Nambi Pambi, like they're basically pussies that wander around with their silly genes. And not, not, not, I'm not talking about all people. Most young people are absolutely wonderful kind. And it's nice that this element of violence has been taken out of society to a degree. But then you get this other light. You just, you just see the lack of respect. And I'm not trying to say anything. It's just waffling probably, but just this, you know, this whole, I mean, the internet's responsible a lot. Like when I was young, take my situation, you know, if I had someone saying something and they lived, worked and traveled in 85 countries across all seven continents, they'd written six best-selling books. They had one of the best podcasts on the internet come through extreme mental health trauma and addiction battles and da-da-da-da to, you know, create a dream life for themselves. I'd like to be tempted to listen to that dude. I'd kind of be like he possibly knows stuff that I don't. But the internet culture has created this. Oh, no, as long as you've got a keyboard, you fucking know as much as anyone else out there. And it's not healthy, is it? Nice. It's definitely a changing world. I would echo what you said about, I think, with an element of society, there is a distinct lack of respect. And you see it. I mean, you know, there's a, you know, you see, you know, people kind of, I mean, I'm here, I'm based here in London and you hear about it. They don't publicize it all the time, but you hear about all the kind of gang cultures and the stabbings that are going on. So what happens to like Queensbury rules with the youth falling out with each other and, you know, the altercations nowadays, why do they have to involve knives? That just seems ridiculous to me. You know, the good old fisticuffs and, you know, Queensbury rules down the park couldn't settle something. But it's got to become, you know, someone's got to get weighed in and stab someone up. And literally, I mean, on that note, the true story, literally about a kid, you're not about four or five weeks ago now. So I was going from A to B in London and specifically I'd been out swimming in Grove Park, okay, which is slightly east of central where I'm based. And I'm in Grove Park and I had to get the bus. Ultimately, I'm trying to get up to Greenwich North. I needed to go up there on a bit of business. Right. So if anyone knows Grove Park up to sort of the Greenwich area, it was actually two buses. I had to take a bus from Grove Park to Lewisham, one of the big red London buses. When I get to Lewisham, change. And then another bus would take me up to Greenwich. Now, got to Lewisham, got off the bus, and there was a bit of a wait for the next bus coming along. It was only about 15 minutes. I didn't mind that. And then I saw in this kind of like shopping parade section in between, you know, all these shops, there was a butcher's there, there was, you know, greengrocers and etc. And there was a kind of pedestrianized bit in Lewisham if anyone knows it. And there was a bit of a congregation. I thought a lot of people there, and I saw a couple of blue lights in the distance. So there's a couple of hundred meters away. So I walked over and kind of made my way through the crowd sort of gently to see what was going on. Because it was quite quiet, but a bit of a commotion. Blue lights from a couple of emergency vehicles behind it. It was just a couple of police cars. And then there was about a half dozen police officers. And there was one police officer straddling a young man. He was about 20, he was no more than about 24 years of age. And he had a shirt cut right the way through the midline. And his shirt was open like his t-shirt. And the police officer was kind of straddling in him and bouncing up and down on his chest, giving him, you know, the compressions for the kind of CPR process. And I just looked at this kid blessing laid up on his back. And his face was like white. You know, there was no color, no complexion. He was unconscious. And there was a little bit of blood kind of emanating from the kind of mid-portion of his body, splayed out on the pavement. And it was obvious to me, you know, what had happened. And indeed, I just turned to one of the, one of the local ladies or whatever. She's there with a couple of younger children. Kind of behind her. And I said, excuse me, man, but what happened? Do you know what happened? She said, I think he got stabbed. And it was an example of what I'm talking about. And this was live. This was something that I'd seen at like four o'clock in the afternoon. The light was just starting to go down because this was like, again, sort of five weeks ago, six weeks ago. The light was just starting to go down. The day was drawn to a close. But in broad daylight, effectively, at the end of a weekday working day, someone had obviously got upset with someone else. And the result was that kid got stabbed or that young man got stabbed in the High Street area of Lewisham in what's that Southeast London. And that is not only just frightening, but it's alarming. It doesn't bode well for our society going forward. And I just think you talked about a disrespect. And I echo that. But I think we've got some fundamental flaws, really. There's something really wrong with the way that society is kind of going about its business and the way that young people are kind of obviously associating themselves and dealing with one another. And that shocked the hell out of me that did, Chris. But I'm not desperately surprised because of where we're at in 2022 and all of these problems that we kind of speak of. Yeah, if I put my youth worker hat on, because I don't know if you know, my actual degrees in youth work working with young people, I'm really proud about that. I'm not proud about the degree. Degrees are not worth the... Actually, no, I did... You learn a lot of theory doing a degree, but then you've got to have a lot of life experience to realize that the theory you've got, some of it's fascinating, really valid, but a lot of it is to control society and push it in a certain way, you know. But if I put my youth worker hat on, I can explain that. So there's two things going on. First, the UK has been subjected to mass immigration for years, going back to Windrush. And it's incredibly divisive. When you take someone from a completely different culture and implant them in your own and think that sometimes it works, it can work fine. But with the situation, I think this is how it is with young black men stabbing each other, which seems to be the predominant thing. I'm sure lots of young white men stab, not lots, but white men stab each other as well. Yeah, I mean, just for the record, that guy that I just described, the victim at least, I mean, I didn't get to see the incident, but the victim was actually a white guy and, you know, black, white. I mean, it's just tragic. Where I think it comes from though, Jamie, is when I worked in Africa, you have a different setup there. So you... Not everywhere, obviously Africa's a huge continent and Egypt's very different from Mozambique where I work, but I worked in Mozambique. And I'd say that it's probably this kind of culture where slavery came from, that was then, you know, people were stolen, taken to the Caribbean to work on the plantations. Then through Windrush were transferred into the UK. Windrush is a ship, folks. And in Africa, you've got a situation where it's perfectly normal to have a father that has loads of kids with different mothers. It's part of the culture, right? And what happens is that kid grows up and you say, like, you know, where's your dad? He's like, oh, he's there. And he points to this guy, oh, okay. And the next day, he's like, oh, look, there's my dad. He points to a different guy. And what it is is the community just move in and look after all the youngsters. If your mother died, every woman in your village is your auntie, essentially. This is the culture. But when you take that culture and you implant it into the UK, it doesn't work to have a young man who doesn't know who really his father is or his father's out, you know, what we'd call an absent father because it doesn't suit our 2.5 kids model. And I know that we've got lots of divorce and that model in itself no longer fits in the UK, but the traditional nuclear family model is the other father smiling and her wifey, their happy children. Well, you imagine your young black man in this country and you don't know your father because he's probably fathered several kids, right? And that culture is fine in Africa. It works. It's normal. But here, it puts you as the kid in school that doesn't have a dad and doesn't have a role model and also means that you're severely traumatized from birth, right? You've got the trauma of like everyone else has got a freaking dad eye, haven't? And that trauma manifests as... Sorry, as you grow up, you're then growing up in a culture where you're expected to... you're judged on your material worth. So do you drive a Mercedes? Have you got the Rolex? And these young men are disenfranchised because they've had no support growing up. They're not going to get all that. They can't even study at school. The mind's not settled enough. They're traumatized. So this is where a lot of people turn to selling drugs. It's a very... It's an easy way to get from here to there which you can't do through academia because it doesn't suit you. And it doesn't suit a lot of people from all nationalities. All backgrounds, I should say. But when you grow up and you've got this internal pain, this internal anger, it's a bit like I was saying earlier, you get very protective of yourself. And when someone challenges you, it's like, how fucking dare you challenge me? You don't know what I'm going through. You don't know what I've been through in my life. And this is when the knife comes out. So yeah, you're going to disrespect me. I've actually had enough disrespect in my life because I've had to grow up without a fricking dad. I can't study at school or can't do it. They did a bang, have some of that. This is the conversation, I think, that's not been had. And the powers that, you know, the big money makers, they don't want you to have it. They just want you to have the confusion and for people to be blaming each other. Yeah, I agree. I think the authorities, you know, to a large extent the police, local government, you know, councillors, because obviously it's happening on their patches. I think, in essence, they're just burying their heads in the sand about this kind of epidemic sort of problem that we've got with violence in society, because it's pretty bad. I mean, like I said, Queensborough rules, that's long gone. And it's all knives now. And if that example I gave you about that young man getting stabbed in the high street in Lewisham, and it must have happened five minutes before I arrived in broad daylight, you know, in a busy sort of shopping district with a lot of footfall, you know, young ladies, young girls with even younger children, you know, with push chairs and buggies and all the rest of it, and shopping trolleys. I think it's an absolute sin that we live in a society where this is going on right under our noses. And the authorities, yeah, of course, they're rocking up in blue light services, you know, the police, the ambulances, picking up the pieces. But believe me, that's all they're doing. We're not really solving the issues. We're not getting to the heart of it. Penalties are not strong enough. And it's deeply worrying, I think, for if this escalates, right, Chris? You know, if the numbers, statistically, these kind of incidents start rising, and we know they're on the up, because every year they talk about the stats, right? And they hear about the number of fatal stabbing in, say, London in the survey of 2021. Well, it's alarming. I mean, it's like, you look at the statistics, I don't know what it is offhand, but it's like something like 100 plus every year or something. They're official figures. They're probably the ones that, and probably several, there's probably several more unofficial stats that don't even get on the list that we don't really hear about. But it's really alarming how much, you know, some fatal violence is actually going on out there in society, largely amongst the youth of today. I mean, what does that say about our society as a whole? What does that say about our leadership? I mean, like I said, I think the authorities in general are just burying them, burying their heads in the sand, quite frankly. And it's not being dealt with in the way that it truly needs to be dealt with. Yeah, exactly. And it is set to get worse. And it also, I mean, white ethnic Britons, we're set to become the minority here. If you look at the, you know, the family set up, how many children people have, we've all gone down the line of, well, we used to have three kids, but now then we had 2.4. Well, then we have, now it's quite normal to have one child and financially that all kind of like works as well with the wife going out to work and da-da-da-da. You know, the wife going out to work thing was to take the female at the traditional family role under the guise, the fake phony guise of feminism. But the intention really is to break up the nuclear family. Children have come down, so you don't have four children and we don't have three, we don't have two, you possibly just have the, a lot of people just have the one. Having children later as well is another offshoot of women going out to work. And so what that's done is meant the traditional British family, you know, our numbers are going down. But to have this mass immigration that we're experiencing is much of it illegal. And it's all, it's all by design. It's coming from cultures where, no, I have six kids, no, you're going to, like, I can come to England, I don't have to work and you like give me a house and you pay me money and like then you pay for my, you know, this is what, albeit well-meaning people don't understand Jamie, you know. And it is, it's chaos, it's chaos by design and it is set to get worse. I think so, Chris. I think affordability is really key issue here as well in terms of whether people could even afford legitimately to have a family and I mean that just purely financially, you know, to do things kind of as they should and work and have a reasonable quality of life, pay the bills, nurture and raise the kids the general affordability is being pinched more and more and more and we've just seen with the new kind of or the increased cost of living is going up rapidly, you know, food prices, sorry, petrol at the pumps, energy bills at home, families' purses are being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and you know, so it's getting harder and harder for people to legitimately choose to have children and raise a family. And so for many, the alternative is to, you know, not work and just fall by the wayside and have sort of state benefits to support them. Yeah, well, let's not forget, Jamie, they're trying to usher in this credit system, aren't they? And in China, they already have it. So they want, I mean, it's going to be put to us under the guise again of being something that's all beneficial for us all, as they all do with such kind of like security measures. But essentially, it could look great to say, well, look, there's a bottom income there that I, you know, even if I don't work, I'm ill or I just don't bloody want to work, frankly, I'm going to get this from the government every month, be paid to me digitally via some chip technology. It's frightening with this increase of poverty because price of everything's going up, people no longer can buy houses, everyone else to rent. Just creating this massive impoverished community that are going to see something like social credit and then, oh, actually, you know, that's, you know, not a bad thing. At least I can take home a thousand pound a month. And then when it becomes under the condition of, oh, yeah, but to get you a thousand pounds, you can't be a member of any affiliated groups that, for example, could be seen as questioning this narrative or going against the fact checkers. You know, and this is your, this is your, this is what we were warned about. This is what we've been warned about and this is exactly what's happening. So we maybe become more of a dictatorship, you know, that's possible concern. Well, think of it. Did you ever think in your lifetime, you'd be placed under house arrest for two years for pretty much, you know, you'd be told, Jamie, you can't travel anymore, mate, sorry. Oh, if you do this, you can, but Chris can't. No. I do find, and it's kind of ironic and odd that COVID in the media doesn't even get a mention today. Have you seen it being mentioned recently? They're barely talking about it. Is it odd? A couple of things that I noted, like just yesterday listening to the radio, I think the average house price is pushing up to 282,000. They blurted out on some fact piece yesterday in terms of the kind of analysis on the housing market. I mean, that's ridiculous. 282,000. What sort of first timers in life can generate that kind of liquid cash or not necessarily the cash, but even be able to afford a deposit on that, let alone the mortgage that satisfy the loan criteria to get a mortgage from the bank. It's just outrageous. And because of the also, I wanted to mention the increased cost of living, they reckon, they estimate that an extra 2 million people are going to be pushed into the poverty line. They're going to be pushed below that sort of poverty line, so to speak. So that's just crazy, meaning that extra 2 million people are effectively then going to be living hand to mouth because they're just not going to be able to afford anything else once they've paid sort of food, the energy bills, et cetera, et cetera. Now, that's a real concern because if you think about it, 2 million people in terms of those that are actually working in the country, remember a lot of elderly, a lot of young, a lot of perhaps sick, disabled, infirm, they can't work. Let's say, for arguments sake, there's something like 40 million workers in this country. 2 million people being pushed into the poverty line because of recent increase in the cost of living represents about 5% of our current working demographic and the people that can work and pay taxes and then obviously contribute back to the system. And it's just crazy that that number of people are getting driven into poverty because of recent inflationary rises across the UK. Because it's gone way beyond. I mean, inflation is normally about 2% a year roughly, but we're being hit by, and in some cases, I think businesses are being hit by an increase of like 120% on energy bills. It's stuff like that. A lot of businesses are going to the wall. Yeah, and where do they go? Where does that trade go? It all goes up, doesn't it? It all goes to these bloody oligarchal, mafia types. And it's not just the financial poverty. I've got to be careful what I say, Jamie, because the platforms that we put our videos on, but when you start messing with people's DNA, it don't end well, right? That's all I'm going to say, folks. I think some of you get what I'm saying. It don't end well because we're built, like we're built a specific way under another nature for a reason. So it's not just financial poverty, it's health. We're going to see a massive increase in health issues at the same time as we've got a dumbing down of education. We've got fact checkers, which mean that you're not getting the full picture. You're only getting a slice of it. So I don't care if people tell me a whole load of horseshit. I like to listen to it all, and it helps me build the jigsaw and then work out the narrative. But that's mental, you know, impoverishment, thought control. You know, you can go on. It's this junky, crappy video, social media culture that we've created. It's stifling people's journey to enlightenment. So people aren't getting what's known as self-actualization. They're not fulfilling their complete selves. They've been kept in this dumb down world. So imagine now you've got these masses that are all like dumb down. They're all the bodies of failings. The answer to that is big pharmaceutical companies. You go, right, you take this every day and you have these pills for this and we'll give you this injection for this and these pills, you know, and at the same time they can't work and they're on credit from the state. They're not allowed to think because if they think the chip that they've got in their wrist or in their card or wherever the hell they're going to put, that gets turned off and it will. Look how travel's been turned off for people that don't want to go with the recent narrative. So actually I never thought it would affect my life but the marathon of the sands, I've had to wait three years. I still don't know if I'm going to be able to, you know, paid my 5,000 pounds. Still don't know if I can run that race. What, you think they're not going to do that because they've got the microchip, bloody credit system? Of course they are. It's going to be right. You have to toe the line with this way of thinking. Mate, it's all happening. It almost sounds like quite exciting if it wasn't so freaking mental. Yes. Back, Jamie, let's just finish off here because I've loved this. I wish all my podcasts could be like this. I guess we've just got to roll with it, Chris, though. You know, change is inevitable in this life, in this world for all of us and all we could do is embrace, you know, we're expected to trust our leaders and our politicians and government and so, you know, we're expected to, like I say, emphasis on that word. But who knows? We've got to somehow, you know, just roll with it and live the best lives that we can, the best versions of ourselves going forward if you want to try and get on. Yes. We've got to meditate more, folks. Get in touch with, I call it the universe. You call it what you like. God, there's a big picture going on here and it's only when you get quiet that the answers come to you and the universe speaks to you and then you stop listening to the David Cameron's and the Tony Blair's of this world and you realise that they're just idiots. Boris Johnson, look, I mean, look at the picture of unhealth where our country's leader is. You know, the guy's on his liquid lunch is aware that they're so morally wrong to have someone whose body is physically, toxically poisoned, leading the country, because when you're toxic, you don't vibrate at the right resonance that your human body is supposed to. So you're not in the ecosystem as you should be. You become slave to your animalistic self and you start to knock back the red wine and you do the cocaine and you want to buy fast cars because you get stuck in your ego and dada dada and that's what we've got. That's what our leaders are. That's all of them. But Jamie, I wanted to get back to the flying just to say let's finish off by talking about our first solo because that's quite something. When you instruct the girls, there you go, there's the plane. You haven't passed your test yet but you're good enough to fly it on your own and they let a bloody idiot ex-marine who's in danger on the roads have a whole aeroplane to go and fly up there with bloody 747s and parachutes coming in and skydivers flying across your path. What was your solo moment like? It was a lovely moment. It was a good day. The weather was pretty good for what I recall. Blue skies, a few puffy clouds up there but pretty stable conditions and very light winds. I can't deny that I had a little bit of nerves going on at the start of it thinking, OK, can I pull this off? Your mind thinks back to all of the positive flights you've made up until that moment and the gentle successful landings and you think, yeah, I can do this. I definitely can do this. I've had enough sort of build up and preparation. You've got to check yourself. You've got to get your mind right and then being on that threshold that we described earlier, that threshold for the start of the active runway and once you get that clearance in the headset from air traffic control, you are clear for takeoff. It's a great moment and then you remember Chris full throttle down the runway, nose on the centre line and then I'm looking for like 55 knots thereabouts and it's sort of vibrating on 55 knots and then gently pull back on that stick and then you can feel the lift, the wind under the wings themselves and the elevation, the lift from below. You describe that cushion of air and you're getting that lift from the forward momentum and the lift and you're going up, up, up. You're ascending and I was hitting about what, about a thousand feet indicated, so about 1,000 feet above the ground and then coming around in the pattern and just working around in that pattern sort of gently and then it's a, you know, and then the rush of sort of final approach eventually and coming into land and then descending, descending, descending sort of checking out timeter but more crucially checking visually because this is a VFR flight of course, so visual flight rules. So looking forwards, looking left, looking right and sort of making sure there's making sure there's no issue with sort of hazards, obstacles and sort of clean run in towards the active sort of landing point on the runway and it's a lovely feeling when you're eventually coming in and that last moment as you described earlier, you know, that all important flair and controlling the air speeds, you know, crucially and sort of accordingly and then touching down and then that realization that, yeah, first solo you've done it. You've sort of hit the deck sort of unscathed you've pulled something off that was a you know, in my case, it was a child to an ambition it was a lovely feeling, definitely a lovely feeling and I just remember so that then more or less taxing back in straight away getting back to the apron, parking up hopping out of the aircraft and sort of more or less high-fiving the instructor and a couple of other onlookers probably fellow students at the time and you feel, you know, that real sort of jubilation you feel elated about what you've just done. Yeah, and it was the start of the journey for me, you know, kind of going forwards. So yeah, lovely moment and just to sort of take you through that first solo. Yeah, I have some great memories of my time in Florida and I was very lucky actually, very blessed and fortunate some years later I did go on and won a scholarship to fly a hot-air balloon and I did that training in Italy so that was something quite different slightly different medium of flight entirely but to go solo with a balloon as well was an amazing feeling in a similar vein to light aircraft, but You'll have to come back on the show when we just talk about that, I'd be fascinated and... Flight is an amazing thing and a bad thing happened to me granted in August 2007 with a burns injury but it doesn't detract from, in my mind that, you know, flight in general is an amazing thing we take it for granted, I mean we all fly away on holiday from time to time, you know, what we have done in the past and we do take it for granted but it is an amazing sort of concept that we can get on an aircraft and get around and, yeah, I mean, long may we have that sort of luxury in life and, you know, it's something that I'm always excited about even to this day, you know, getting on a plane and jetting off somewhere in the world Did they... I've got to go in a minute because I've got to go and pick a certain young person up from school but did they cut the back of your shirt out when you flew solo for the first time? No, no. Are you familiar with it? No, I wasn't familiar with that it wasn't anything quite so dramatic probably just had a brew at the location more or less and then probably went out for a beer that night I went back to the flight school they promptly got a pair of scissors they say don't wear your best T-shirt I think I only had the ones I took travelling anyway and they cut the back of your shirt out friends don't ask me why it's just what it was I don't even know if it's tradition at just that flight school I'm guessing it's not because it's kind of a... seems quite a... I don't know would be a bit of a random thing but yeah, I'm pretty sure it's when you flew solo not when you passed your test when you flew solo you cut the back of your shirt out and when you passed your test you had to go into the cafeteria at the flight school or at the airport someone would announce, friends we've all got a new pilot in the community and everyone would give you a round of applause good stuff mate, isn't it? yeah, good memories mate so... sorry mate, go on no, no, I was just going to say it's just a real blessing to have had that life experience really looking back and unfortunately it's not something I really get to do much these days but yeah, like a beautiful life experience and it sort of it certainly makes you think about what we have in the world and what opportunities are that we've got in front of us, you know? exactly so friends at home life on a thread Jamie's book, available out there now paperback, hardback, audio get on it it's going to be the next book I listen to I'm really looking forward to it because I feel really rude mate I haven't read it yet but I'm sure you appreciate it you must mate, I think you'd really enjoy it because it's not just the flying stuff there's a whole load of stuff about my earlier life and youth and a lot about the army and my escapades coming through the process and eventually getting to UK Special Forces but you know it's I think there's a few nuggets in there for everybody I think even women would get something out of this because the way that it's been written up it's not a guns blazing sort of macho story by any standards and I hope that many people across the board would take away something from the narrative of life on a thread so yeah, please tune in if you get a chance and I can add to that Jamie when I went in a bookshop in Hong Kong as the city's second best-selling author I was at the time the girl in the bookshop went ah she said for every man that buys your book there's five women by it so that's like a dream come true for me because I didn't want to write something I'm guessing you were like an Asian girls pin up well to be honest it would have been expats expat women that were buying it I don't think the Asians are probably too interested in anything well obviously I can't one thing was nice is I had people say I had Cantonese people contact me to congratulate me on my Cantonese to say you how good it was which is, I mean it wasn't I could barely get by and I couldn't sort of understand the TV if you know what I meant but yeah that's the thing isn't it guys like us we're not out to write a macho book we're out to tell our stories and hope that people can get something from it that enhances their life and interestingly Chris I think you and I have got quite a lot in common in terms of life experience we've both got, I would suggest it's not a boast but we've both got like an extraordinary language level of life experience to speak of and people can learn a little bit from that with our stories respectively and it definitely isn't a boast from where I'm coming from but like you I've been around the world in a major sense I've travelled far and wide a lot of life lessons along the way it's not something that a lot of young people have the luxury of so much we were held back a lot during the pandemic and you say travel was massively restricted for a couple of years but you know we have genuinely rather been out and kind of you know done a few things and kind of bought the t-shirts and if our kind of stories can resonate and help a few people along the way then I'm all for that that's what it's all about most definitely and I hope our conversations today folks it's been a chat this isn't so much a pock I'm not here a lot of people call these interviews and it's I started my podcast I wanted to chat with people you know and like you would if you're in the naffy bar or something and I hope from our chat today friends that it's helped put some stuff into perspective for you and Jamie massive thank you again brother friends at home much love to you please like and subscribe and we'll see you soon cheers Chris