International Speaker, Writer and High-Performance Coach.
For 20 years, Tim flew in the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force on military fighter aircraft, spending the last decade as as the Senior Flying Instructor teaching Advanced Flying Training and Tactical Weapons.
https://www.fastjetperformance.com
↓ ↓ ↓
Gold is a great way to opt-out of centrally planned currency by the elites, but it doesn’t grow/offer a yield/you can’t use it as money. Monetary Metals offers the ability to grow your total ounces by renting or loaning your gold to gold-using businesses.
Earn 2-5% annually on your gold while supporting businesses in the gold industry, or, if you’re an accredited investor, you could be eligible to earn even higher yields (double digits) in their gold bond offerings.
It’s 100% physical and 100% yours. Your metal, you’re in control. If you don’t like an opportunity, you can opt-out any time.
I know this company and have had Keith Weiner on my show several times. They’re good people and I trust them.
Opt-out of fiat currency and retake control of your money.Get on your own personal gold standard today with Monetary Metals.
Visit https://monetary-metals.com/delingpole/ to learn more or get started opening an account.
— — — —
Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole
The official website of James Delingpole: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk
x
Welcome to the Dellingpole with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but a quick word first from one of our sponsors.
A brilliant podcast.
And this, by the way, is an absolute cracker.
I really envy you for what you're about to experience.
It's just great.
A brilliant podcast deserves a brilliant sponsor and we've got one in the form of Monetary Metals, our old friends Monetary Metals.
I've had the CEO, Keith Weiner, on the podcast a couple of times to explain how he manages to enable you to own gold while yet having interest paid on it.
Well, he does it by essentially lending the gold out to the jewelry industry.
And that's how he gets how you get your interest paid.
So you have your gold gold holding and then you get paid in interest also in in gold.
It's a great a great idea.
And I recommend it.
I've got I've got some money invested in myself.
You can earn two to five percent annually on your gold supporting your while supporting businesses in the gold industry.
Or if you're an accredited an accredited investor.
You could be eligible to earn even higher yields, double digits, in their gold bond offerings.
It's 100% physical, 100% yours, you're metal, you're in control.
If you don't like an opportunity, you can opt out at any time.
So get on your own personal gold standard today with Monetary Metals.
Visit monetary-metals.com forward slash dellingpole to learn more and get started opening an account.
Tim Davis, welcome!
Welcome to the Delling Pod.
It's great to be here, thank you.
You're here by popular request.
I think people seen that thing you did with Sargon of Akkad's people the other day, and they just thought Tim is sounding really robust.
But before we go on to the sort of spicy stuff, tell me about your early career.
You're a fast jet pilot.
You run a fast jet pilot training school, is that right?
Yes, I was.
Yeah, I was for about 20 years.
Yeah, I left in about 2018.
So I carry on the instruction now through an online flying school.
And so I taught with the Royal Air Force for about 20 years.
I was a naval officer and an Air Force pilot for a full 20 years.
And then obviously, during that time, my main thing was to teach on fast jets, which I did for about a decade.
I got quite high.
This was what happens, of course, and I became the officer commanding for the standards flights, how all the pilots behave, about 80 pilots, 8-0 pilots with about 30 aircraft.
And I did that for a long time, and then eventually I left, and, of course, I ran into trying to find a job with the wrong skin color and the wrong sex, James, I'm sure.
I'm sure a lot of your viewers are well aware of that.
And eventually, I lost a security clearance that I held because of something that I put, well, because of many things that I put on YouTube, to be fair.
Not just one thing, there were many things that I was putting on YouTube.
Not just about the service, but also about the British Government and the Ministry of Defence during the diversity sort of scandal, I guess you could call it.
And so I end up starting my own flight school, and that's what I do now, pretty much.
I teach people to do what I did in the Air Force, but on a commercial flight sim online.
I'd call it a badge of honour, I have to say, losing your security clearance.
I mean, that's quite peevish, isn't it?
It's quite petulant.
They should just kick you out for saying a few wrong things.
It's not like you're a genuine security threat.
Well, it's an interesting one.
It's an interesting one, to be fair.
I am pro... Well, I say pro-ministerial defence.
I'm pro-military.
I mean, obviously, I haven't been there for 20 years.
My father was in the military.
Father's father, father's... It goes back... All of us were.
And I just see something very, I use the word criminal, but I see subversives in the senior positions, not just in the military, but within obviously the British government and the ministry.
All the ministries, of course, seem to have been infiltrated.
Now, what I was called was a subversive myself, and that kind of hit me pretty hard when you've served for so long.
And you might see, I don't know if your viewers will see it, but I've got a flag over my left shoulder there with the flag of the Union, of course.
I have the English flag in my garage as well when I'm in the gym, but I don't see myself as a subversive.
I see myself as a deeply proud Englishman.
You know, it's very interesting because when we talk to people on the street, we talk to everyday people about this, it gets quite emotional really and no one asks for what we're going through at all.
I know you've spoken about it at length and I just felt with the Royal Air Force, the last bastion, if you think about where all this stuff's going to push into, James, I felt we would bounce off the military and never did.
So I did make videos about it.
I think Debra Haynes from Sky was leaning in quite heavily on the Chief VEA staff at the time.
And I did speak to her and say, yeah, we've got to do something about this.
This is wrong.
It was wrong.
And they did apologize in the end.
But I did lose a job over it, much to the annoyance of the wife, of course, who's a good woman, but she didn't deserve what we went through and what I took her through, of course.
And so I was forced to start my own business.
But yes, I did lose that.
They did give it back, but they only gave it back when I threatened to take some legal action after about six months.
And I did actually speak to someone from the security service about three weeks ago, who said, you are classed as a radical, but there's nothing you've actually said that we have an issue with.
So I think they know, you know, they know they've got problems and so I could work back in industries again if I wanted to now but there's no, I'll be sacked again within minutes probably.
You make me think that they must have a file on me and they must call me a subversive or a radical or some such.
I would love to be my case officer.
I just think I'd be a really interesting subject to have to be an expert on.
Tim, I don't know whether you're at all familiar with my journey, although I hate to talk about journeys, but if we'd done this podcast 10 years ago, I would have been, well, frankly, massively pro-war.
I used to write books set in World War II.
I used to interview World War II veterans.
I thought war was kind of cool, and I felt meanly of myself for not having been a soldier or gone to sea, as Dr. Johnson said.
All these things, and I thought that all the wars we'd participated in were glorious and justified and honorable.
We can maybe talk about that later, but just speaking to my old self, tell me a bit about what you did as a pilot.
What are the dangers?
What are the thrills?
What's it all about?
It's long term, it's deeply damaging in fact and I don't think people realise.
I'm speaking at a Formula One team tomorrow.
I tend to bounce around pre-season a couple of the teams in the UK and I talk about failure a lot.
I see myself as a very flawed person when it comes to that and of course constantly Working on those aspects.
The thing about flying is you're you're very much a mission-orientated compartmentalizer and you actually characterize the sort of male-female interface by emotional distance.
So you don't let anyone close to you because of course you lose a lot of friends as well.
Death is a common occurrence and we talk about it.
It is that dangerous?
Yeah, so, well, it's dangerous.
I mean, crikey, you know, when was the last guy killed?
I mean, Red Arrows, of course, John Egan and Sean were killed back on the team back in 2011.
So, yeah, I mean, you'd be at work and then someone would tannoy and they'd say, we're not flying the rest of the day, gather in the briefing room and the boss would come in and he'd say, OK, guys, look, this is what's happened.
This is what we know.
And a jet would have gone down in the UK somewhere.
And of course, everyone knows everyone.
There's about 200 fast jet pilots in the In the air force and the Navy so you always knew you didn't know the names names wouldn't come out until later of course and so but it always you know people would be would be killed and of course you don't then make friendships as such too close I guess probably because of the fact that Not only are you quite transient in your existence, you're only on a squadron for two and a half, three years before you move on to another one.
There's many reasons for that, by the way.
But you also, you don't make too many close relations because, of course, they may not be there tomorrow.
And that does have impacts on the marriage and, you know, what you do when you sort of leave the military.
But the day-to-day activity, which is what you were asking about, without getting too morose, of course, was very businesslike, very organised.
My main existence was as an instructor.
The aircraft you may not You guys may not see it if you're doing audio, but behind me is a Tornado GL4.
I was on that for about five years.
I took that to Iraq twice, and I wasn't a huge fan of going.
And with hindsight, of course, now I think most of us would probably agree that it was an absolute catastrophe.
And of course, we're now seeing the ramifications of that, aren't we?
With migration, of course, that's happening around the globe, which we knew was going to happen.
I think the French were saying at the time, weren't they?
So I took that twice and then I went on to flying instruction.
The cockpit itself, it takes a long time to get there.
You need to start thinking about flying these jets when you're, you know, before your teens really.
You need to immerse yourself in it.
Most people did.
I didn't know anyone that hadn't wanted to be a pilot since an early age.
And you basically, you work pretty hard for a very long period of time on the off chance that it might actually happen.
And for me it did, only just.
And then When you are flying these jets, of course, you're only as good as your last flight.
And if you start failing things or you start not performing, then you will be removed.
You'll probably remove yourself, to be fair, because you're just going to kill yourself or kill other people.
So it does happen like that for a long period of time.
It's, when you say sensational, I don't remember any trips I came back from thinking that was awesome.
I don't remember that.
I just, it doesn't happen like you see in the kind of, there's no high-fiving when you come into the squadron.
You literally, I think I said when I was down low, you see, is I try and help those young guys understand You literally are straight into a debrief.
How can we do it better?
How can we maximise the fuel usage?
How can we employ the weapons to a better effect?
How can we minimise... I mean, you're a risk manager, is what you are.
You're managing a huge amount of risk.
And when I went into flight instruction, I was managing a huge amount of people.
And each one of those persons, of course, comes with a lot of baggage and a lot of risk, of course.
That's the thing.
Because when you watch the Top Gun movies, it makes it look very sexy and kind of, you know, cowboy-ish and edge of pants and stuff.
But you make it sound really sort of combination of dangerous and dull.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, it is.
I mean, let's be honest.
I mean, crikey.
So a lot of the stuff we do is repetitive.
I mean if it was still amazing, I'd still be there.
I remember my wife saying to me, there's no point being an astronaut if the only people you can tell are other astronauts.
And what she meant by that was, she lived on a base in the middle of nowhere, with other wives living on a base in the middle of nowhere.
Most of them couldn't work because in North Wales it was very difficult to get public sector work unless you spoke Welsh and that's where we were based most of our time.
We're in Scotland and we're in Wales.
So there was a lot of an inability to settle, of course, so you tend to be quite nomadic in your existence.
That tends to be an officer thing, where the officers move around a lot more than the men and women do, but the officers tend to move quite a bit every two and a half, three years, as you rank up, if you promote.
If you don't, you tend to go and do other jobs as well.
You don't want to stagnate in role.
Because you've got to show how diverse your employment record is for that.
I mean, God, we're still doing that.
But yeah, we're still doing it.
So we're doing that.
But yeah, so it's not, it's really weird.
I don't want to undersell it.
But I'm more than happy to talk about the negatives and the positives.
And at the moment, there are a lot more negatives, it seems, than when I was in.
I mean, we used to have a lot more aircraft, and a lot more people, and a lot more detachments, and we had wars.
And wars are purposeful.
And what men need are wars, and it seems like women need a lot of those as well, because a lot of women are joining the service at the moment.
But, um, I'm sorry if I do make it sound negative.
I'm trying to be realistic about it.
That's what I'm trying to be.
I want the truth, Tim.
I don't want anything to be embellished.
I mean, look, I'm sure when I was about 12, I fancied the idea of being a fighter pilot.
And I mean, in the end, in later life, I discovered that the most exciting thing a man can do is to go hunting, to go fox hunting.
And every time I went out, I wasn't sure whether I was going to come back alive or in one piece.
It was incredibly exhilarating.
You know, you've got this relationship with this wild animal, which is just, which has been trained to work with humans and, and it can do crazy things like jump over dangerous hedges and stuff.
And it was really, really exciting.
And I would recommend to everyone.
It doesn't sound to me like you quite ever got that intense buzz from Flying Fighters.
It's a very controlled environment for a reason.
I mean, emotion doesn't exist in a cockpit.
It's not something that... And the problem is we do compartmentalise emotion.
And that can have huge ramifications, especially in a marriage, of course.
You tend to put things on a little box for sympathy later, and then maybe you address them when you come out of the military.
That happens to a lot of people.
I think veterans on the street being homeless is one of the main factors.
It doesn't... Also, the outside world is very chaotic to someone from the military structure.
I mean, the first thing we did when we went onto a squadron every morning is we had a brief where the weather was talked about, and all your watches were hacked at the same time, at the same second, every single day.
That doesn't happen out here, I learned.
So the first thing I did out here was take off the accurate watch I wore and I bought a very inaccurate watch because I was turning up to briefs and no one else was there and I felt like a right idiot.
And then what you do, of course, is you turn up later and then you feel like you haven't got, you know, you're not being as good as you possibly could be.
The whole thing was very odd.
It's not that the cockpit is It's an interesting place to be.
It's purposeful, it's methodical.
There are structures in there which I think all manifest themselves into some kind of especially male ideal.
I mean, when you went hunting, there's a process about that of course.
You have to do things with the horse.
You put the bridle on the saddle you have to make sure brush it down and you have to you know there are things you do there are things you work and when you finish you you do the reverse and you go and socialize and you talk about it there's no difference and I think we need this and I think that's what we have in in sort of military process and I think when you when you leave that there is a massive empty hole.
Which you need to fill with something, and a lot of people fill it with very negative things.
I think, you know, drugs come in, or alcoholism, which is what I filled mine with, of course.
But yes, it's not that I didn't enjoy the cockpit at all.
It's not that I was in there not liking what I was doing, but it's a functional workspace.
And I spoke to a mate of mine the other day, and he said, you know what, I realized I never actually looked out at the world we were flying past when I was flying.
I never kind of saw it.
I understand what he means.
In fact, I've got a guy who lives down the road here.
He used to fly Typhoons.
And he left because he wanted to walk on the hills that he was flying over.
And he said he just looked down that whole time thinking, why am I up here when I could be down there?
It sounds exhilarating because you're not feeling the pressures when you're watching the film.
You're not wearing all the flight kit.
You're not wearing the rubber suits.
You're not being force-fed oxygen.
You haven't got the stresses on the body that are going on.
My neck is aged, of course, because I've got a neck like a giraffe, for crying out loud, and the G-forces weren't necessarily that good for me.
But I would do it again in a second.
I would absolutely do it again in a second.
And if the Air Force was a different environment now, and I would go back and I'd still teach, whether I'd get back into a jet again, I'm a little bit almost 50 this year, in fact.
I don't think it's a place for me anymore.
That neck thing sounds dodgy.
I mean, I get neck trouble, and it has all sorts of knock-on effects for your arms and stuff.
Yeah, it does.
Is this the effect of the G-forces and stuff?
Yeah, it's the effect of G-forces.
Yeah, the helmet you wear, especially if you're wearing night vision goggles or anything else, does weigh an amount.
And of course, 2G is twice, you know, your hand will weigh twice the amount if you're at 2G.
We're pulling up to 6 or 7 Gs on sorties, so wherever your neck is, especially doing combat, you tend to fix it in the cockpit and you'll feel things snapping.
I mean, I married a chiropractor, you know, I'm not a complete idiot, so I'm quite good in that respect.
And she sees a lot of people that have ejected from airplanes.
She's a bit of a specialist in that space.
But you will, you can't, this is what upsets me a little bit because some of my friends came out, I haven't really got any friends but let's pretend, some of the guys I knew, you know what I mean, they came out and they came out on medical.
And I remember saying to some guys, look you can't expect to fly jets for 20 years and not have some issues.
But it doesn't mean you come out and you claim against the taxpayer for something you knew was going to happen.
So I came out and I knew I had issues on my neck and the doctors always say to you at the leaving medical, you have a leaving medical.
It's all very gash as well.
You'd love it.
It's brilliant.
It's very old school, very English.
It's very, very British.
It's very much, um, any snags?
Um, yeah, I've got a bit of a neck problem and the doctor will say, right, well, a bit of a neck problem then.
So, um, I can't let you leave until that's sorted out.
I can get you a, I can get you a, you know, a scan or something.
Let me have a look at the nearest date.
They say the nearest date is in about, about 14 months.
How's that sound?
And of course you're not going to bloody sit around for 14 months.
You're like, no, it's a lot better now, doc.
No worries.
And then you leave, of course, and you know, you could stay, you could probably make some aspect of claim against them, but then you just be on a medical pension and feel like a bit of a fraud.
I mean, I always felt, I mean, crikey, the amount of guys I knew that died doing it.
There's no, there's never a way I was going to come out and claim for a bloody neck injury that I knew I was probably going to get anyway by flying jets with a neck like a giraffe, you know.
And when you're on, on combat missions, how, how much danger are you actually exposed to?
I mean, there's the famous John Peters and what's-her-name Nickle being shot.
Yeah.
But, but is, I mean, that presumably is exceedingly rare to get hit by enemy missiles.
I know John Peters, yeah, he lives up the road from me.
Lovely bloke, actually.
Arguably, they should never have been shot at.
That's the idea.
I mean, the planning.
I mean, they went around twice and then got themselves killed.
But, well, got themselves shot down anyway.
Luckily, they weren't killed.
The idea being, everything's done in the plan.
So, you have all the information that comes in and you take all the information.
You think, how can we prosecute the target with the maximum effect in the shortest amount of time and come back and live?
That's the end.
I mean, the whole point of warfare is to enact as much damage on the enemy as possible in the shortest amount of time because it stops people fighting.
If you take out half a tank brigade, The other half of the tank brigade is combat ineffective.
You don't have to kill them anymore.
They can't literally function.
They're not combat effective.
So that's what you try and do.
And if I end up getting shot at, something's gone horrendously wrong.
Like, I'm not supposed to be being shot at.
I'm supposed to drop bombs on target.
So if I am being shot at, well, A, you know, you have a limitation as well.
You have an order.
Like, if someone shoots at me, am I going to carry on with this thing?
Because if I'm getting shot at on the way to target, then you know I'm getting shot at on the way back.
And there's other people that are going to come in and try and kill me as well.
So I'm in a really bad place.
Say, if you do start taking fire like that, then yeah, something happened in the plan that you haven't... I mean, if you've made that kind of mistake, then you've made further mistakes down the line as well.
So everything happens before you get in the jet.
Literally everything, by the time you get in the jet, should be pretty much set in stone.
I know what the target is, I know the best line of attack, I know what I'm going to do, I've got the munitions to prosecute, I've got the... we can weaponier it like this, we've got the plan set out, and we're going to go and do that.
And then you have these points That if you run into an aspect, the what ifs.
What if this happens?
We'll do this.
What if this happens?
We'll do this.
And people get killed because there's something they haven't thought of.
The Donald Rumsfeld.
The unknown unknowns.
We know about the known knowns.
We know about the known unknowns.
We know about the unknown knowns.
But the unknown unknowns are things we haven't bloody thought about because we never knew they existed.
That's when we die.
All my friends that are being killed were in control of the aircraft when they hit the ground.
They were all in control of the aircraft when it hit the ground and they were killed.
There was something that happened to them that they hadn't thought about before.
And that kind of plays in here for a long time.
Special Forces soldiers, I know a few Special Forces dudes, will say the same thing.
Whenever someone gets killed, it's like, okay, we hadn't considered that.
Or that happened in a way that we hadn't planned it to happen.
So, how dangerous is it?
Yeah, things can go wrong.
If you plan for it, you shouldn't.
You know, I never ejected from an airplane.
Plenty of my friends did.
And whenever they did, there was something that happened that they hadn't considered.
Now, engine failures, bird strikes, those kind of things, those happen most definitely, and you can't really plan for them.
But you can still plan what you do when they do happen.
I had a friend that flew helicopters in Afghanistan and he'd always brief his team, a team of three in the helicopter, he'd always say, when we have an engine failure, what are we going to do?
And he'd challenge them all so they knew their SOPs, their standard operating procedures.
What are we going to do with the engine failure?
What are you going to do?
What are we going to do?
Where are we going to go?
And they never did have an engine failure.
Until his very last trip, he had an engine failure.
Bang!
Straight into it.
Bang!
Straight into it.
Like, they did everything.
Because every single time, he said, this trip we're going to have an engine failure.
So if you plan for failure, if you plan it, you plan it in, you will then, by default, you'll probably be a lot more successful than you would be otherwise.
So can you give me an example of the unknown unknowns that killed your friends?
Yeah, absolutely.
Of course I can.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, well, which one do you want to pick?
Let's pick a red arrow, shall we?
Let's pick...
Well, Sean Cunningham or John Eggin.
We do both of them.
We do John.
John was coming back into Bournemouth on the 20th of August 2011.
They'd done the display of the season.
The whole Reds had displayed.
He was Red 4.
And they came back in and they did this break where they were going to do a looping break.
They do a big looping break with smoke and then they fan out and they all come and land at the airfield.
It was all very impressive.
But as they came in there was a little Mark 1 Spitfire taxing out as part of the display that was Bournemouth was happening that day and the the lead of the Reds, the Reds lead said at the time he said okay well it's a Mark 1 Spitfire they overheat unless they get airborne quickly and the Spitfire guy said can you guys get on the ground because I need to get fine so they didn't do the loop and break they did a big level fan break instead.
Now the problem with doing the fan break, where the level was supposed to be done about 360 knots, but Ben was coming in unfortunately a little bit faster than that for the looping break, and he couldn't really get the speed off.
So there was a bit more speed carried into this level break than there would have been for the looping break, because the loop break needs more energy because it's a big loop.
And what happened to John, they all pull G as they go on the break, and John was just not ready for the G it seemed.
He just wasn't.
Everyone else felt the G. When we interviewed the team, they'd all felt the G. They felt the G forces.
They said that felt a bit more than normal because the amount of G you could pull on an aircraft is proportional to the amount of speed the aircraft is doing.
Speed and G have a relationship.
So the faster you go, the more G you can pull.
If I'm going quite slowly, I just can't get to the G. The wing won't let me do it.
The airflow sheds off.
It's a bit complicated.
I don't need to go into it here.
And so what happened is they all pulled this G, but the blood just flowed from John's head a little bit quicker than everyone else.
And his aircraft, he became unconscious and his aircraft hit the ground and was killed.
Now, no one could have forecast that.
No one could have said, when we come back into Bournemouth Airport, after doing the display, where they've experienced lots of G in the display, we're going to come back in and we're going to do a sleeping break.
And everyone's briefed it, everyone knows what's going on.
No one would have thought, what if there's a little Mark 1 Spitfire?
That's obviously air cooled and he has to get airborne quickly.
He says to us, can you just convert that to a flat break?
And we'll do a flat break.
No one had thought of that.
So that was an unknown unknown.
And that obviously killed John.
That was a really complicated one.
I did the investigation into that.
I knew John quite well.
And then Sean was seven weeks later, I believe it was 8th of November, was another Red Arrows pilot who was crewing into his jet on the flight line.
And I was supposed to fly that jet that day, but the weather was too poor.
I was just going to assess some aspects of it just to do with the voice, the accent data recorder.
But Sean took the jet instead because they were going to fly to RF Valley.
They were going to do some practice in some clear weather.
And as Sean got in, he moved the controls around.
But there was a way that no one knew it could happen.
There was a way that you could make the ejection seat safe with the pin.
The pin would normally go in the ejection seat handle to keep it on the seat so the handle could never be pulled out because the ejection seat was made safe and you do that when you park the jet so that if anyone climbed in it and knocked the ejection handle the seat would be fine because you've got a pin, an ejection seat pin that goes in.
But Sean, somehow, on the previous trip, before the weekend, this pin had been checked three times.
I put it in at a slight angle that had lifted the handle away from the seat and no one thought you could do it.
It just didn't.
And when you look at it, you think, oh, you could do it.
Yeah, no one ever thought of that.
And then as he knocked the seat, the handle was live and the seat fired.
And the second effect of that was the red arrows had over-tightened to do with Oversigning people.
A lot of poor practices in the team at the time that oversigned it.
It's all in the press.
And the parachute didn't release at the seat.
So even if he had made a mistake, which he did by not putting the seat pin in properly and the seat had fired as he was crewing in, there was still a way he could have been saved because the parachute should have 0-0.
It should have opened.
It should have floated to the ground.
It should have been fine.
And I was there watching when the huge bang happened.
I was in the building at the time.
We all ran to the window with the Reds that were on the ground and He's obviously been killed.
Well, obviously the seat came down in a no parachute.
But again, those things you can't plan for.
No one knew it was happening.
And I constantly think, how can I forecast those unknown unknowns?
Because they're so, and this is what Donald Rumsfeld said, they're so complex.
It's literally stuff we don't even, if we knew about it, it wouldn't be, we'd know about it.
It wouldn't be an unknown unknown.
It would be an unknown known or, you know, that's the problem.
It's interesting that we're quoting Donald Rumsfeld.
I know, I'm sorry about that.
You probably agree with me, he's one of the wrong-uns, one of the bad guys.
You mentioned your skepticism about the Gulf Wars and I share them very much.
I mean, what's your take now on what they're all about, really?
Well, I think we're warned, weren't we?
I mean, by the French, they were saying if you do this, you will You will have a migrant.
I mean, you can't expect to go to these countries and tell them that their way of life is not as good as your way of life, so we're going to change it.
It was all regime change.
We know this, of course.
And not expect them to think, well, okay, if your way of life is that much better, I'll come to your country instead.
Which is obviously what's happening with mass migration that we're experiencing now.
I remember we had a lawyer, obviously I don't know whether people, she came to the squadron before we went to Iraq on the first or second time, I think it was the first time, we were one of the first ones out there, and she said look there's no mandate for you guys to be there, if you were to drop munitions there's every chance you'd be in a court of law.
And we had to decide are we going to do this or not, I mean the government said you are, so there's not much of a choice that we're not going to do it.
And we went, you know, we went, one of the first squadrons.
But absolutely, I mean, the problem that you'll also probably appreciate, hopefully, and your listeners will, is when you're in the military, you're very isolated from anything else happening outside of it.
You've got a job to do that you're doing for 12 hours a day.
It's not like you're reading, you know, Christopher Hitchens' review or his complaint about the war.
You're not doing that kind of deep dive at all.
You're literally Just trying to keep the guys alive and do the best job you can and work out where the wife wants to live next, whether she wants to go to Marham or wherever, Conningsville or anywhere.
Those are the things that occupy me.
When I chat to military people now, it is obvious to me within a second how... It's not closed-mindedness.
I don't mean that.
I don't mean that because they're not.
They're deeply thoughtful people, but they haven't read anything outside of Obviously what they're doing day by day.
There's no time.
There's literally no time.
I speak to military commanders, senior military commanders, and you realise how unworldly wise they are.
It just does not exist in their sphere.
And this is why I think when we do get this kind of, this narrative coming out from these... It's like when an actor tells you about something and you think, what do you know about politics?
You're literally an actor.
I mean, it's hard being an actor.
It's hard work.
And you're trying to tell me...
Taylor Swift trying to tell me about right... I mean, you know, this... Why am I even... Who listens... Why would... It's the same thing with military commanders.
They don't know anything else other than what they're doing, other than how to run the Air Force or whatever it might be.
So, yeah, I wasn't overly pleased.
We went anyway.
And when you're there, of course, you don't complain.
You're there.
Most of the squadron were a bit sceptical, to be fair.
Of course, because remember, if we'd gone to Iraq after we'd been in Afghanistan, there was... I think it was... Wasn't it Rumsfeld saying there were no good targets in Afghanistan?
I might well have been him.
I can't remember now.
We have to go to Iraq to find the good targets and it was a huge distraction and we went and it was very interesting.
Yeah, it was very interesting.
But of course now we're dealing with the aftermath of all this, aren't we?
Can you tell me, this may strike you as an ignorant question, but what is the point of fighter aircraft in these kind of wars, when you're presumably, you've got air superiority, so you're not having air-to-air combat, you're not having dogfights or anything.
Couldn't this all be done remotely from somewhere?
And wouldn't you be better off having... I'm sure I read somewhere that what you really need is kind of those planes that fly slow and low and can sort of strafe enemy positions, you know, with mini guns or whatever, rather than jet fighters.
Yeah, A-10s.
Yeah, we haven't got any of those.
Yeah, the A-10 Thunderbolt.
Yeah, absolutely, but they're not the fastest things in the world as well.
So you do have that issue, of course.
You know, you can't really get from A to B that quickly.
I mean, it depends what the operation is.
The reason we have air superiority is because we have things in the air that are superior.
I mean, it's the definition of it, of course.
It's called a permissive environment.
So a non-permissive environment is one... I mean, I remember coming up against an Iranian aircraft on the Iraq-Iran border.
And we were doing a lot of work with reconnaissance pods, looking at the MSR's main supply routes and looking at the oil fields, making sure that there wasn't any deliberate sabotage that was happening.
And so we're just doing a lot of work there, just checking that these routes were open and there wasn't any kind of damage or any terrorism is the main thing really.
But of course, I came up against this Iranian aircraft, they didn't want me to be on the border.
I don't want to hang around and see what kind of weapons they're carrying.
So we didn't.
We kind of left.
And then some American guys came in and made sure that that aircraft was never going to come into Iraq airspace.
And of course he never was, but he wants to protect his own airspace.
And that's entirely valid.
So the reason that we don't have, I mean, this is, this is, I'm very skeptical of the Ukraine-Russian war in many, many ways.
I'm more than happy to discuss that.
But the reason we don't have F-16s over Ukraine at the moment is because the Russians have air superiority.
So the Russians have surface-to-air missile system.
They have a ground-based air defense system.
That we just find very hard to contend with, because they're superior at it.
And of course, NATO technically isn't really engaged, is it?
We are fighting a proxy war, we all know that.
Let's talk about Ukraine-Russia, because I haven't had this conversation for quite a long time with a podcast guest.
I mean, I share your scepticism.
Tell me why you're sceptical of that war.
Well, for many reasons.
So, I get called a Putin apologist quite a lot.
Now, when I was in the military, one of my main jobs was an electronic warfare instructor.
So, I was a guy that would look at the electromagnetic spectrum, which all wars are cited through this kind of means, really.
And I studied Russia a lot, because they were very, very good at it.
And we have our own ways and means, and so do the Americans, but the Russians put a lot of effort into ground-based air defence, integrated air defence systems, which would surface to air missile systems, in effect.
Which the West kind of went down the fighter route and Russia went down the surface where missile route as it were but politically I think For me, it depends really how you want to define NATO.
I see NATO as an anti-Russian pact.
There's no other way.
Why else does NATO exist?
Were we expecting, what, Bermuda to attack?
I mean, it's purely anti-Russian.
I mean, I remember Russia actually asked to join NATO and they were told they couldn't.
So, but I think Putin, if you go back to 2008, the Bucharest Summit, we can go back whenever, we can go back so far in history.
The Russian history and the Eastern European history is so Different from anything that we're really understanding of and your guests will be so intelligent here.
I'm not going to go and embarrass myself by trying to explain it all because you'll be able to unravel stuff in a way that I can't possibly.
I'm a very simple person.
I'm sure that's pretty clear from this podcast.
But when Putin at the 2008 Bucharest summit, of course, he was saying, look, don't move NATO eastwards because I see it as a huge threat.
Now, it's quite funny.
Twitter, to me, is an absolute nightmare at the moment.
But when you say that, people say, well, it's not a threat.
Yeah, but to Putin it is.
It doesn't matter what you think, whether you think NATO isn't a threat, but to Putin it is.
So you kind of have to.
Like the bully in the playground, it doesn't matter whether you think that you're not having a go at him.
If he thinks it, you're still going to get punched in the face.
And that's what Putin was saying, basically.
It matters to me.
It matters to me a great deal what you're doing.
And if you do push us west, if you do allow Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, which is what he said was a red line, of course, then unfortunately I can't allow that to happen.
And obviously the civil war going into Ukraine, which is not really that well reported at all in Western media since about 2014, wasn't it?
And the Maiden Revolution, in effect, and getting a complicit government in there.
So a government that's going to be very Western orientated.
I mean, it's as old as time itself.
It's not like the first time we're aware of this.
You can literally type in regime change or US regime change in Wikipedia.
You'll get pages of it there.
It's not something that I'm saying should shock anyone here.
But unfortunately we won't talk about that much and we're dealing with the consequences of such.
The amount of death of young people at the moment, Russians and Ukrainians, is criminal.
I think Johnson going over there early last year to keep that war going.
When they were looking for a peace deal as well, Zelensky was looking.
I think it's the most nonsensical conflict you could ever have.
this is what i and of course he's kept going isn't he the whole thing's going so i'm hugely skeptical i don't care for it at all i think it's the most nonsensical conflict you could ever have we're learning a lot from it of course we're learning how to fear how to fight peer-to-peer adversaries um We're getting rid of all the old weapon stocks, which was aged out really.
It means we can stimulate UK growth through defence manufacturing, which is pretty much I was in before I lost my clearance and was obviously sacked.
Strange how that happened when I was hugely critical.
I wasn't even talking about this stuff on YouTube.
I was talking about the Air Force and diversity and things like this.
So yeah, that's my view on it.
And that's probably why I'm called a Putin apologist.
But you know what?
You know what, James?
If you read books, that's all you got to do.
Just read a few things and you learn some stuff.
But if you don't do that and you rely on... Yeah, yeah.
I just get angry about it.
Tim, everything you've said is objectively true and verifiable.
Yet, I don't think I've read a word of this anywhere in the mainstream media.
It's like we might as well be reading Pravda in the Soviet era.
Yeah, I don't know why it hasn't been in there.
I mean, if you go back, The Guardian, I did read an article in The Guardian talking about the Azov Brigades in Eastern Ukraine, going back to something like 2014, 2015.
They were talking about that, like we're going to have to do something about these brigades and the, you know, the hammering the Russian speakers.
That was in The Guardian.
That's still there on The Guardian website.
You can still find Azov Brigades, Ukraine, Guardian.
You'll find stuff.
But we don't talk about it now at all.
Everything is anti-Russian and yet we don't understand Russian history at all.
We've got no concept of it whatsoever.
I think it's why Putin starts, when he was talking to Tucker Carlson recently, he starts with this historical breakdown.
He's like almost a teacher.
Right, I'm going to educate you guys because you know nothing.
This is the problem.
I'm Vladimir Putin.
I'm a very tedious guy.
I'm going to talk to you about what I see.
And everyone ridicules him for it.
And it's like, well, you do that and you're just going to lose more people, unfortunately.
It's the most disastrous conflict.
I genuinely believe.
Up until this, this is not necessarily true, but I'll say it anyway.
I honestly had some faith in our government in the UK and the civil service.
I had some faith.
I thought we don't do this sort of thing because we know where it goes.
I believe And I haven't anymore.
I literally, unless there's something I'm not seeing, like some deep deep, some underground deep state thing, I'm thinking well we do this because this is going to happen in 20 years time and therefore this is, I can't see it.
I literally think people just thought well we're going to defend against Russia on the Russian border.
I mean who would do, why would you even, maybe I've studied it too much.
No, and you're right about how We pretend that we're not actively engaged.
But, you know, my son has friends in the army.
And certain units will tell him, people in certain regiments will tell him, yeah, we're going to do some training in Poland.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
We have got troops engaged in one way or another.
We've got advisors on the ground and stuff.
And I'm very interested in your kind of your perspective at the kind of tactical level that that so we haven't got air superiority because the Russians anti-aircraft systems are so good.
Is that right?
Is that what you're saying?
Well, the other thing, of course, if you do shoot down a Western aircraft, a Western aircraft gets shot down, then how do you sell that aircraft anymore?
Because the whole point of selling it is the fact they can't get shot down.
You can't say, oh, you can defeat Russian systems and then you get one shot down.
So you'd have to sell.
Is that what wars are, really?
They're just kind of defence shows?
Not very much, no.
Oh, God, yeah.
Absolutely.
Well, you've heard them talk about N-Law and some other weapons that went out early on, how successful these things were.
You know, this is the new variant of the anti-tank weapon.
And, you know, of course it is.
People kind of go, well, look, the successes of this thing.
We killed 76 T-72 tanks with this thing here, and they're only £250,000 each, and the tank was a million.
So this is a definite investment.
Of course they bloody are.
I mean, I'm already sceptical about it.
I've come out of the service.
I've still got a lot for the guys in there and stuff.
I don't say things that can get anyone into trouble.
But of course it is.
I mean, I've got guys out in Saudi Arabia and they went out to Saudi to teach on jets on some big money.
You know, you're talking a quarter of a million pound a year.
You know, I mean, six or seven times the salary they're on in the military, or maybe five times salary.
And of course, they've all got shares of BA System when they went out there and they're loving it.
They're loving the share growth now and the dividends they're getting from them, especially if they retire.
And I'm saying those shares are still the blood of men.
That's what you've got there.
You've got defence.
I've got no defence at all.
Nothing.
Do you know what Tim?
About a year ago somebody tipped BAE and I thought about it for a moment.
And I knew it was a no-brainer and I didn't buy into it because I just thought, I'm not sure I want to profit by, as you say, boys getting slaughtered in a meat grinder in trenches.
How is that?
Well, you know, the thing is though, James, to be fair, I look back at this and When we're 70 and someone's coming to visit you in their brand new Mercedes and you're not driving one, how are you going to feel about that?
I don't want to see those kind of people.
And that's one of the issues I've got now, unfortunately.
I do know people with those stocks and those shares.
I do know people that are profiteering off this.
I mean, Smedley Butler said it, didn't he?
He said war is a racket back in the 1930s when he wrote the book.
USMC.
Was he a general?
I think it was.
But war is a racket and these guys are profiting on it.
And arguably I did as well because I went to Iraq and Afghanistan.
I was paid to fly these aeroplanes.
And you don't question it, but you don't really know either.
That's the other thing.
That's the horrendous thing is you don't really know.
But even if you did know, Would you go or not?
Because to leave a career like that, you have no choice.
I mean, literally, you've got family that are saying, well, you can't just quit.
And it's like, what are you going to do now?
It's a difficult one.
And I understand why people want to shore up the funds for the family, especially when retirement comes up.
I just don't agree with it.
It's fine.
I get it.
I get it.
I just don't agree with it.
So if people do, That's the difference.
Fine, you do.
Buy the stock, buy the shares.
But if you want to come round for a visit at the weekend and tell me how profitable you are and what great house you're in, what car you're in, when I haven't done that same thing, I don't need to speak to you.
I don't need that in my life.
I'm not saying you're a bad person.
I don't care.
It's literally you're just not the same as me.
That's all it is.
I don't want to profit out of that.
I just don't.
I'm a British man.
I believe in a certain amount of fairness and values.
Fine, people ridicule me for it.
I just don't want to profit in that.
This kind of conflict, I don't want to profit in.
It's all done just to ship our munitions out so we can buy new munitions.
And I understand it, James.
I've got nothing against it because you've got to do that sort of thing.
I just don't want personally to profit in it.
That's all.
That's how I see it.
That's it.
Yeah, yeah.
I'd love your perspective on two things.
First of all, the F-35, which we sort of... we, I say the British, we bought, didn't we?
That I've read in some places is completely over-designed.
There's too much for not enough.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
Oh, it's a difficult one, isn't it, really?
I mean, it's one of those things, the earlier you get into the programme, and the more you bought, then the cheaper they become.
It's all that kind of thing.
That was what the deal is.
Oh, it's like that.
It's like joining a club, a gentleman's club, early.
Yeah.
Well, Canada failed, didn't they?
Because they pulled out and they went back in again.
And I think, you know, it was always a bit dodgy.
It's like you should have stayed in.
I mean, absolutely, crikey.
These things become...
Prohibitively expensive, like anything.
There's a lot now happening with the lightweight fighter, going back to the traditional F-16, this kind of size aircraft, the tornado-y type stuff, which doesn't have the stealth technology as such of the F-35, but combat mass does have its own literal weight to it, doesn't it?
What we don't have with F-35s is combat mass, and if you drop one in the sea, like we did, off the carrier, of course, because someone had left an intake covering down the engine, that still is £100 million that taxpayers got to find from somewhere.
Now, in the big scheme of things, of course, it's not real money that we ship from one bank to the next, is it?
We'll print some more and no-one will notice it.
Not on our generation, of course.
It will go back to our Our kids kids and all that kind of stuff and it's fine isn't it because that's just how it's going to be in the future but it's still money and it's still a failure and it's still an aircraft where we could have got two or three different ones for the price of that one.
The thing I think we've seen with tanks in Ukraine right now like tanks were something that people in the British Army are very interested in and then someone brought little drones along that cost you know 30 quid or something and And that becomes a real big issue.
So I think there's a significant failure to look long at the development technology.
I think F35, like any project, when it comes in, it's in, isn't it?
You can't then you can add bits and pieces to it, but there's no future.
And I think no future sort of what are we going to do with this thing?
Are we going to do something with this thing?
And I think now a lot of people are looking at it and going, okay, I think even the new, the new aircraft that BAE Systems are supposed to be developing, they're saying it's manned, but it can be unmanned.
And that to me was always make the decision.
Like, you've got a cockpit that's going to be empty now, literally, sometimes.
Or you're going to put a bloke in it.
You just haven't made the decision.
You should have just gone, like, let's take that risk.
Let's develop AI and technology and just go, we're going to unmanned this thing and we're going to make 26 of them for the price of one.
So the F-35, arguably, people will say it's obsolete before it even came in.
I don't agree with that.
I think it does have a purpose.
It's just like anything.
We've got HMS Diamond as one frigate at the moment and we're going out to the Middle East, come back, We are going to go back out again.
And I think one of six type 45s.
And we don't have that kind of combat mass.
I just think it's the same with F-35.
If you had every single squadron in the Air Force that had one, then you'd be doing all right.
We've only got seven squadrons of fast jets in the Air Force now.
And when I joined the Tornado, I had seven Tornado squadrons just on that particular variant.
The ground attack variant was seven.
Then we had another, I think it was six F3 variants, which is another variant of this.
Then we had the Harrier squadrons, the Jaguar squadrons.
Had a lot of airplanes and now literally we have six squadrons.
And it only manifests itself as a problem when everybody dies.
Up until that point, it's a great idea to have one ship in the Middle East or to have two carriers, one of which is always alongside and one of which is out, or to have seven squadrons of fast jets.
It's fine, it looks great, because it doesn't get any votes, does it?
It's healthcare that gets votes, education gets votes, military never does.
Until people start dying and you end up losing all these aeroplanes in some kind of conflict somewhere, then people say, maybe we should have invested more in defence.
It's all a bit late then, unfortunately.
Yes um so how many so how many planes does that mean we've got?
120 I think something like that oh so LF35 wise I think we're going to get 60 in total I do like 30 now I think we're getting 60 in total someone did say that we're going to ramp up that or go back to the original order I can't remember what that was but it's nudging up a bit more than that but with the Typhoons we probably about 120 jets That's it.
However, some are always in a scheduled maintenance program and everything else.
In comparison to the, I think, well, we're smaller than the United States Marine Corps.
So yeah, there is an issue.
But again, are we ever expecting to do a global conflict or can we manipulate the money markets to stop that happening?
Well, that's the thing, Tim.
I'm torn between... My old self is saying, this is a disgrace.
We need a much bigger outpost.
I know.
I'm the same.
And me now is thinking, well, great.
Well, that'll stop us mucking in, you know, affairs with their business.
I'm the same.
Don't get me wrong.
You know, look a long term.
Absolutely right.
I mean, there's nothing worse than having boxes of ammunition sitting there, just being on LIFX.
I mean, you may as well start a war with Russia and get rid of them all.
Which is exactly what we did, of course.
Which is what we did.
Yeah, we did, yeah.
So, I mean, you may as well throw them downrange or we can go make some deals with Ukraine and we can give them to Ukrainians and then long term we can just start the manufacture of this stuff up again, like artillery shells.
That was a bit of a shock horror, like artillery might be effective and that's what Russia might use.
So we can do all that and that's what we're doing and again, it makes complete sense.
It's just a bit abhorrent, isn't it, really, what we're all doing?
Am I correct in thinking that That huge aircraft carrier is completely shit and pointless.
It just takes one missile and it's going to die.
I'm not an expert.
It's never supposed to sail by itself, that's the whole point.
It's supposed to be surrounded by defence destroyers.
Like the Type 45s, you don't really have enough of those to put it to sea safely and it is a capital asset and if we lose it, my goodness!
That's the problem, isn't it?
I think, if we go back there, the Admiral Zembelis, I think, was the first Sea Lord of the Navy, if I'm right, who was given the option of carriers or personnel.
He said, you can have people to man these carriers or you can have carriers but they won't have anyone to man them.
And he made the decision, because of legacy I guess, to have the carriers.
And they made the carriers, but they can't man them.
They haven't got enough people to put on them.
So, um, and that's always going to be an issue.
And it's even worse now because of course the people that would man them traditionally would be the, uh, the largest demographic of the UK.
And I will say white men when it comes to join the military.
And of course you made it pretty clear.
We don't want them anymore.
Uh, so, um, especially if you're patriotic, you don't want any of those whatsoever.
So, uh, yeah, that's the problem.
And, and it's almost like I want to kind of revel in it if it wasn't so serious.
It's such a problem.
You'd want to kind of celebrate the ineptitude of those in governance, except for the fact that it is a huge problem.
It's a huge issue, not just for the country's security, but of course for these young people.
I mean, the military was truly a social mobility platform.
You could come in very young and you could skill up.
You could get some life skills and you could come from a real... I mean, I didn't come from the best background.
I'm not one of these guys who goes, I was on the street.
I wasn't at all, but my father was a police officer.
My mother was a health visitor.
They didn't have any money and they put all four kids through university.
At great expense to them.
At great expense to them.
They lived in a semi-detached house in Portsmouth and they put all four kids through university and both my brother and I went into the military and we end up being pilots somehow.
I don't know how that happened but we did because we're not the cleverest fish in the barrel.
And my sister's a consultant psychiatrist now.
She just got a consultant which is brilliant.
And my other sister's a police officer.
And she's doing really well.
She's a detective constable.
She solves all these murders and stuff like that.
She's brilliant.
Like the people you find in Hot Fudge.
She's that kind of person.
Like Salt of the Earth.
Absolute brilliant person down in Portsmouth doing all these murders and stuff.
And absolutely, I mean, this is a social mobility thing.
I mean, my father was a corporal in the Royal Marines.
And here's me.
I came out as a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force.
Fucking beneficial!
And we don't actually appreciate it at all, what we can do.
And when we stop doing that, we literally keep people down.
It's pretty sad actually, I think, that people don't realise what the military can do for some people.
It really does.
So anyway, yeah, so no one's joining.
Fine.
No!
I can see we have got a problem here because even if you don't think that our country should be engaging in pointless bankers wars, nevertheless you can recognize the valuable social function that the
That we got from our military and you had all these the army recruitment particularly sort of the Scottish regiments and the Welsh regiments tended to recruit in run-down towns where the alternative was sort of violence and a life of crime and men would have their lives given a purpose.
Yes.
Yes.
Oh god.
Do you want do you want a country with men that don't have a purpose?
I mean, is that what you want?
I can't imagine anything more more than hell than men.
You can see it.
You can look at countries now where men are walking around the streets without a purpose.
I saw a documentary on Sweden the other day with immigrants who have no money at all.
They're in there.
They're immigrants that have come over to Sweden.
They have no purpose.
They literally have no job.
They're in the streets and of course, unfortunately, there's violence and they join gangs and they go in to get money wherever they can.
You don't want a country where men don't have a purpose.
It also gives you a moral sense, also, where you know what is fair and you know what is right.
And the reason I think I push back so heavily on the diversity thing is it wasn't either of those things in the military.
It was literally saying we don't want the best people in.
We want people that have the correct skin colour at the time.
Which isn't young white men at all.
It's whatever we want now for our new diversity quota.
So it is horrendous.
I mean, you're an incredibly intelligent chap, so I'm sure you've seen it already, but I'm interested in your views on that as well.
I mean, I can't see any way forward at the moment with the way we're going with the UK.
I can't see what the end state is.
Oh, no, no, no.
We may later on plumb the depths of despair when I give you my views, but I'm quite interested in hearing where you're coming from first.
I mean, Certainly, I get the impression that the kind of people who get promoted to the top echelons of the military are politically correct, time servers, they're brown nosers, they're people who have no problem accommodating themselves with whatever political system is in play at the time, and that
These are not necessarily the right people to be running the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force, but that's what we've got, and they're responsible.
I mean, they're yes-men who accept what the Deep State and Whitehall tells them to do.
Is that fair?
Well one of the great kind of compromises or conundrums I would have said between the civil government and the military of course, is that you want a military strong enough, well you don't want it strong enough that it can challenge those in power, but you need a strong military also so you can defend those in power.
So you have this, how strong do you want your military to be?
And of course you're absolutely right, the seniors are political animals, yeah most definitely.
There's no two ways about it.
And I think the Chief of Air Staff, the one before, the one that we had now, so Mike Wigston, he was an Oriel man.
You were a Christchurch man?
Yeah.
Yes, that's right.
So he left Oriel about six years after you did, I think.
About five years, Mike Wigston.
So you probably didn't know him at all.
But then he was picked from a very early age.
He decided he was going to join the military.
And I think he was seen then, right?
You are the person that's going to be at the top of the military when this whole stuff comes in.
We didn't see him.
At all.
He took me onto this aeroplane.
He was my boss on this aeroplane here.
I really, I really like the man.
I've always said I really like the man, the Chief of Air Staff of the Air Force who's left recently.
But what he did was exceptionally damaging.
I think not just for the Air Force.
I think for what we would... I'm not a diversity fan and there's many, many reasons because I think the term is abhorrent and it's meaningless.
But he did drive in a huge amount of division into the services.
But he was put in there by Gavin Williamson because Gavin Williamson wanted someone in that was going to allow all this nonsense to come in.
So he was driven in there, and the person that probably should have been the chief, a chap called Stu Arthur, was a warfighter, was very much known in the Air Force as a no-nonsense, go-getting, pretty tough chap.
And unfortunately, Mike wasn't known as that.
But Mike, you know, he did his deal that he did, and he got the top job, and Stu left and works for BA Systems or something, I think.
I don't know where he is now.
I think it's really interesting what you say there.
I've come across this more and more.
I mean, I've become Consciousness that this might be true, which is looking back.
I reckon you're right.
I think particularly people who studied PPE at Oxford were talent spotted and recruited by the intelligence services by Places like Tavistock, the really sinister people.
And they were sort of pre-selected as change agents and then inserted in the system and fast-tracked in order that they could form their function.
And you know, I can imagine at the time, if say my Anglo-Saxon tutor who was apparently in charge of MI5 recruitment, if he'd said to me, Delingpole, we need you for a special mission.
I said, what is it, Mr Hamer?
And he said, well, we want you to get a job in blah, blah, blah.
And we'll support you all the way.
You know, you'll be very discreet about this, you know, because you're famed for your discretion.
And I might have at least listened sympathetically, because you know what you're like when you're a young man.
You're unformed.
You'd have done it.
I'd have done it.
You'd have done it.
Anyone would have done it.
We'd all have done it.
Because you're flattered, aren't you?
Somebody cares about you.
Yeah, of course you are.
Look, there's a bloody flag there.
This is for your country.
That's what they're going to say to you, isn't it?
That's what they do.
They're very clever.
Now, the thing about Mike Wigston, I remember being in a bar with him at Lossiemouth.
I must have been late 20s and he must have been in his late 30s, I suppose.
Maybe not even that, maybe mid 30s.
Yeah, maybe early 30s because he was a wing commander and I was a flight attendant, so two ranks above.
And my wife was there, and all the girls are there, because you're having a massive Friday night.
It's always a Friday night, massive BRX.
All the bosses, all the squadrons are there.
It's great fun, absolutely carnage.
It doesn't happen anymore, but it's awesome.
And I remember my wife saying to him, how come you're going from, like, flight attendant, squadron leader, to wing commander, and you've just been promoted to group captain, because you had been?
That's in the minimum amount of time that anyone would expect anyone to get, like the minimum for each one.
You'd never have that.
No one ever had that.
You wouldn't get the minimum amount of time.
You'd stagnate a year or two in each role, maybe one you might get done quickly because maybe the other boss liked you, but you wouldn't go like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
And he said, I guess there must be someone looking after me at the top.
I'm not even joking when I say that.
I can't prove it or nothing, but, you know, if my wife were here, she'd be like, yeah, that definitely was said.
But the truth is, he always knew at the time, he must be being, someone must be looking after him.
He went up the ranks, steadily up the ranks, got the jobs he needed to get, and then sort of went around the outside, didn't do all the ones that kind of exposed him to the limelight.
He was like the boss of Cyprus.
He was out of the country for a long period of time.
No one really knew who he was.
And then he appears back again, does a deal with Gavin Williams to do the report into It was inappropriate behaviour.
The Wigston Report into inappropriate behaviour.
Which he did, and I think he said, I'll do that report for you, but I want the top job.
And I think Gavin Williamson, who didn't care, of course, because he's only in there for half a dog watch himself, went, yeah, no worries, yeah, it doesn't matter to me.
He was a bought man.
And of course, when he went in there, he then decided to say, OK, well, I haven't got as many minorities as the army, because I haven't got any Gurkhas, and I haven't got as many minorities as the navy, because I don't employ as many Commonwealth people, so I haven't got as many, kind of, these people with different shades of skin colour, you know, all the diversity chicks.
I've been told to get my diversity quota up, so The way I can do that is I can stop white men joining, because obviously minorities weren't joining.
So if they're not joining, how can you boost your minority intake?
We just stop the other colour people joining.
Stop the white people.
By definition, you're going to get more minorities.
And that's when he decided to have 40% women and 20% minorities by 2030.
And I think, honestly, he was put there for a reason to do that, to drag that stuff in.
Just tell me what effect has this had on the RAF, on its operational efficiency and the standard of its pilots and so on?
Oh, I've got an email I could show you from a chap that wrote to me yesterday saying I was going to join, I'm now going to go do my chemistry degree instead.
He just doesn't think that he's going to get a fair shot at it.
And I say a lot of these coming in now are not from young white guys like I was, they're from minorities.
This is the thing, I don't think we really fully appreciate that in the UK, but I get a lot of letters from minorities and women.
And I don't get as many from young white dudes anymore because I think young white dudes are either just going to give it a shot or not.
I don't think they really need advice.
So the minorities and young women write to me and they're very much set in like, I want to do this, but I'm really worried that if I do join, I'm going to get promoted because of my skin color or because I'm a girl and not because of my abilities.
So everything that Sort of feminism came in for, you know, I'm not a huge feminism fan, I wouldn't say I was a feminist at all.
There's many, I know people out there going, I'm a feminist, fine, be a feminist, I'm not a feminist.
It's satanic.
Oh yeah, exactly.
Well, there we go.
So I was, you know, let's go hard on it, shall we?
Let's call it what it is.
But I think it did a huge amount of damage and a huge amount of damage, I really do.
Same as the Equality Act 2010.
I don't think we ever fully appreciate what that's done.
But the problem is these young people aren't going in now because they don't believe it's going to be fair.
And they want it to be fair, because they believe it should be fair.
It's the British military!
Crikey, you can't get fairer than that.
Everything's done on merit.
You can't fly these jets if you're not very good.
And I've talked about this before, of course.
It just doesn't happen.
You just die or just get chopped.
I mean, we just sack you, you know what I mean?
You can't.
We go and fly something else.
So these young people are like, well, if I get in, Because I've got this skin colour.
I might get halfway through that training and then I might get sacked anyway because I'm not good enough.
At least I'll need to know that I'm getting in on merit so I've got a shot.
So it's done so much damage.
This is why I campaigned against it.
I said, you don't realise what you're doing.
You just have no idea.
You think, and this is, I'll tell you what I met the other day in fact.
I met the personal staff officer, let's just say, of a very senior minister, so we say, who was involved in this.
I don't want to give you the name because you'll know straight away who it is.
Bang, that's it.
And I said, when this diversity thing was happening with these ministers, how much thought did he really give it?
And this guy was like, no, literally none.
It was a 10-minute conversations.
You have more diversity in the military.
And he was like, any issues with that?
No, not at all.
No, we just need more because we've only got like, I think the Air Force got 16% women.
16%?
That's horrific!
Half the country's bloody women.
What's going on?
What about minorities?
Well, we've only got, I think, about 2% minorities.
Well, I'm going to say the country's 18%.
Well, put them in!
Put them in!
And it was that.
It was literally that.
That's how stupid it was.
And the damage it did, and it continues to do, this is what I was shouting about.
It's like, you do not realise the implications for generations to come if you do this.
And they did it anyway, of course, because, well, yes, they did it anyway.
So what has the effect been?
I mean, is the quality of the pilots dropping?
Well, but if you lower standard, by definition, that will have to happen if you want the same number.
It's like if you expect diversity in your organization, then you will have to sacrifice meritocracy.
There's no two ways about it.
You will absolutely have to sacrifice meritocracy if you want diversity, because the pool you're picking from now is lower.
You think it's bigger, but it's not.
You're just saying, I don't want the best now because I've got everyone else.
And what the Air Force did is just lower that pass mark so it could pick into a pool.
It could use positive action.
Legally, unfortunately, it didn't fully understand the term, even though I explained it to them in uncertain terms, what the difference between positive action and positive discrimination was.
So, unfortunately, we've got people in.
People will fail flying training, so you'll then have to retrain them.
So, of course, you've got a huge cost issue now, whereas if you took the right people in the first place, Then you wouldn't, they'd just get straight through.
So you've got this problem where you're going to have to train people, they're going to get halfway through, fail, you've got to put them on another aircraft, train them up, or they're going to leave the service.
The other thing as well, I try and explain to people, and I come back to the point of what effect does it really have, because housing now is the next issue.
Where we've gone all this equity, we've gone full communism pretty much, we've said that housing, and it always was this way, housing should be given to those who need it the most.
I understand that.
So if you've got a guy who's just joined the military and he's got four kids and a wife.
I don't know how he manages that, but fair play to you.
He should have a bigger house, let's say, than say someone like myself who has no children.
So my wife and I, we have no children and I'd be allocated this house of a certain size.
This young chap wouldn't be.
He's still got the same number of bedrooms, but it would be on a married patch.
It wouldn't be.
It's not like we get mansions, you know what I mean?
I've got nothing with that, by the way.
But initially, of course, There's this rank issue as well where it's not only the privilege of rank, of course, and I don't want to talk about that because I never really cared what house I was in and everything else.
But it always existed anyway, they always did.
And now what they want to do is they want to mix all these ranks, mix all the housing, houses don't move.
And so you've got this other issue now where equity, everyone should get the same.
It's not a quality of opportunity, it's a quality of outcome, of course.
Everyone should get the same.
So people are leaving because of that.
That's in the press at the moment.
There's something in the Defence Committee tomorrow where they're talking about it, and Sky did a thing on it today.
A lot of people are saying, hang on, because you've got to think about it.
It's quite an interesting one.
I know we're talking about housing, but in general, there's a lot of things that this has brought in, hence why you shouldn't have done it, that unfortunately a lot of people... Say I was a pilot, right?
So I was a pilot for 20 years.
I've still got a wife at home.
She gets a vote.
Her vote is massive because I'm coming home every day and she's not happy what I'm doing.
I'm not going to stay.
Literally I'm going to do what she tells me because I want her to be happy.
If she's telling me we've got to leave, we're not in a great house and also I'm missing out on buying a house because I don't know where I'm going to live.
So I didn't buy a house until I was literally leaving the service because I didn't know where I was going to be.
I mean, I'm moving between Dartmouth and Cranwell and Lossiemouth and Valley.
I mean, North, all different points of the compass.
Where am I going to buy a house if I buy a house?
This is what the Air Force doesn't, or the military doesn't realise.
I've got to sell it.
Stamp duty is horrific for me.
I've got to go and buy another one.
I'm only there for two and a half years.
It doesn't work.
And now you're going to make it so that people are different houses and because you've got four kids, you can have a bigger house and because you haven't got any kids, you can... It sounds on paper like a great idea and it was never thought through.
And unfortunately, I think they tried to just please everyone and by pleasing Everyone, you're pleasing no one.
So now you're going to get this middle tier of officers whose wives are saying, and I say wives because the majority are men.
I'm sick of saying because they could be men.
No, they're not.
They're not.
They're just literally not.
We're giving women cash to join, literally, and they're not joining because war is horrible and it's brutal.
And most men don't want to do it, let alone women want to go and do it.
So it just doesn't, it doesn't fit women's life in the way it kind of fits some men's and it's all complex to a purpose.
So either way, what you get then is you get these people thinking, I've got to buy a house and the wife says, I've got to buy a house and you've put me in some small house now and we've got to leave.
And so you're going to get this middle tier leaving.
So when I speak to people in the military, they're like, it's completely different to what it was when you were in.
You can't really even say the things we used to have psychological safety, which people massively misinterpret, of course, psychological safety, where you can literally supposed to bring your own self to work, which is the biggest tragedy you could ever do, of course.
But you should be able to say, I feel this is dangerous or I feel that this is going to lead to.
But you can't you get shut down now.
And I think once you start stopping people speaking, then you stop them thinking, because of course we think through speech like we're doing now.
You're changing my opinion on certain things and I might be changing yours as well.
If we weren't allowed to say certain things, which is what's happening in the military now, then we're not allowed to think.
So now we stop that and then people literally saying, well, I'll go and do something else.
So it's having an effect.
I think we've got two people leaving the military for every, no, it's three people leaving the military for every one joining.
That's not sustainable.
By anyone's book it's not sustainable and I've talked about it a lot and I get called all sorts of names so I'm kind of...
Trying to move out of that kind of sphere now and tend to my garden a bit.
Just what's the mechanism they use to stop people saying stuff?
Well, you'll be called a racist, transphobe, homophobe, whatever it might be.
And that's very clear.
And I think from the younger generations as well, they're quite happy to latch onto that.
Because, of course, when I was young, I was a bit of a lefty as well.
We all start lefty, don't we?
Then we realise we own something and then we grow up literally and we end up a bit more conservative, a bit more right of centre.
Although technically in the UK, of course, we're probably a bit left.
Although what is left, no one knows.
So I think you can get, I think what my guys are saying now is they can be accusations leveled at them like in a second.
Whereas before you would talk it out, that talking doesn't exist anymore because people can be offended.
We're in a military, but people could be offended by something not even that you've done.
I remember something the other guy was saying that he walked out to a jet.
Now, we have lots of clothing on when we go to jet.
We have these things to keep us alive.
And he had his zips undone on his life vest.
And someone was offended he wasn't taking flights.
His flight safety, as he approached the cockpit, he was going to do it up.
It's so hot sometimes.
I used to walk out all my zips undone.
As I got to my airplane, I'm doing my life jacket up.
I'm doing the zips on the back of my legs up.
I'm attaching my things as I get in the cockpit.
It's fine.
You can do that.
Everyone does that because it's just so heavy, the kit and everything else.
But someone saw this guy walking out and he didn't think he was taking flight safety seriously.
So he put a complaint in about him.
That doesn't affect that guy.
The guy doesn't know anything about it.
The guy who put the complaint in knows zero about what that pilot, who's trained for seven years, should be doing.
So then the guy not only had to do the zips up, everyone had to do zips up before they went out of the crew, and you're like, oh, this is going to be hot and sweaty and horrible and miserable.
They had to put these yellow reflective vests on top of themselves in case they were run over by cars.
There's airplanes flying around.
There's airplanes taxiing around.
And they've got to walk out to the jets now with these Dayglo No, like, I can't even fit it over the top of my flight kit.
You know, I've got flares in here and I've got this thing now on me.
So there's that kind of thing where you just need a grown-up to say, stop, that's the pilot, he's trained for seven years, knows more about what he's doing than everyone else.
Yes, we need to look at it from an objective external viewpoint and we have a standards officer like myself that would make that decision.
But we're not having Mr. Bloggs, who's a 21-year-old who's been in for half a dog watch, putting a complaint in about someone he doesn't know anything about.
That's more accepted than it ever would have been in my time.
So those things are happening, unfortunately.
So basically the kind of officers, senior officers, who are needed to say no to this stuff are all so politicised and on board with the whole woke thing that they don't, they just let it, let them get away with it.
I don't know whether it's that, James.
I think it's a bit more simple than that.
I think they realise, well, so if they come out of the military, what are they going to do?
Probably go into a defence firm?
What's that defence firm's policy?
Are they going to want to bring that guy in?
I mean, you know, most of these guys leaving are going to be in their mid-40s.
Why would you bring a mid-40s guy in?
Especially if he's a white dude.
Doesn't help your diversity, does it?
Doesn't help you get the ESG investment from BlackRock or Fidelity.
It's not going to happen for you, is it?
If you're not doing that.
Oh, how cynical we are.
But it's bloody true.
So the truth is they're in and they say, well, I'm 45 now.
I've only got to do 10 years and I'll get my full pension, like full pension.
I don't have to do anything anymore.
So you get to the point, the tipping point.
I left at 43.
I just thought I'm still alive.
It's a massive bonus.
I'll get out now.
I've done 20 years.
Thinking that I was going to take off and the world was going to be great and everything and we went straight into George Floyd and COVID and everything else and it all changed a little bit.
It's a bit strange that.
My wife's a bit bitter that we didn't get to travel and stuff, you know, everything, but it's different.
So I think people, I don't think it's just the woke stuff because the guys in, like me, would never have accepted it.
But when you've got guys coming in beneath you and that's all they've ever known,
It's not really their fault either, because we, I think, I'm not blaming teachers or parents at all, but you know how youngsters are, now we've got this overly, this progressive narrative that's been pushed out of the American universities of course, and I don't think it's their fault really, I just think people are just treading lightly, whereas they should be saying, like I do, no, we're not doing that, the end, that's it.
I've got to ask you Tim, I see you do public speaking and stuff.
Do you...
I mean, do you have to kind of watch yourself?
Because I know how woke a lot of the people who employ public speakers are.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, no, I don't get as much public speaking as I did, and a lot of people that employ me don't... I try and make a contract, like, as soon as you say you want me, you're going to pay, because I know what's going to happen when you cancel, alright?
You know what I mean?
And I do get some cancellations, because what happens is very often they say, yeah, come and talk to us about failure or success or alcoholism or whatever it might be, and then they start doing some research and then they're like...
There's no way you're coming in here!
There's no way you're coming in!
The truth about it is I don't think I'm saying anything... I know it's going to turn and there's going to be no value out of what I'm doing now.
I'm doing it purely because I'm a British man and I know that the red of that flag is the spilt blood of people before us.
That hope that we should stand up and say something for the good of this country.
That's all I'm saying.
I get ridiculed every day and I'm sure you do as well and I'm happy with that because I'm not saying I want to be on the right side of history.
I'm saying I am.
Literally British.
I am that side of history.
There's no other side of history that's going to happen in this country.
And we can all sound a bit inflammatory if you want, but it's the truth.
And if men like us don't stand up for it, then who does?
Like zero.
If the politicians don't.
This is why I say, look, it's not me that's the subversive here.
Literally, I didn't come out of the Air Force and change.
I came out of the Air Force, I was the same person.
Literally, I was a big fan of it.
I was still looking at maybe going back in again as reserve service.
I was going to fly.
I was still flying part-time for a tiny weeny bit when I came out.
I was a big fan, still a big fan.
I was just Damaged like physically and mentally and I was just drawn out the wife wanted to move somewhere else and it was all good You know, I still got massive love for the service and for the people in But it's the government and the ministry and the military These have been subverted and I think people are kind of understanding now that oh, yeah, that might actually be true now I think maybe we've got people in the top of these services that really don't have the best interest of the country at heart Genuinely, so when I guess so when I go into some companies, I mean I'm speaking with a company tomorrow.
I I don't think fully.
They've had a look at my Twitter recently, but that's fine because they're a good bunch of people and they're hardworking and they're solid and they don't care for this stuff either.
It's not in their lane at all.
They're purely focused on success and I'm, you know, this one, I go down and speak to them for free anyway because I love them.
I love what they're doing and I think it's fantastic.
It's just, I want to get some messages out.
But you're right, you can't stand there and say that what you're doing with diversity is wrong.
It might work for them.
I know that if you just chop this out, you cannot say that you want to be the best.
Every company wants to be the best.
I want to be the best company.
I'm in a competitive market.
But I don't believe in meritocracy.
What is going on?
We know it's nonsensical, but we're taught to believe the opposite right now.
War is peace.
You know what I mean?
So yeah, I'm not silencing myself.
My wife says every day, if you didn't say that, you didn't compete against that, you didn't write that, you didn't do this, you didn't go on James's podcast, for example.
She didn't say that, by the way, but she probably will in the morning.
In that respect, you might get more work.
But who would I be?
You know, how would I go to sleep at night?
Would I be that guy that didn't stand up for the country?
I mean, I've got nothing else.
I'm an Englishman.
I've got nothing else.
I can't go anywhere else.
I haven't got any dual nationality.
I keep saying this to people.
Look, the sea around the island isn't to stop people coming in.
It's to stop them leaving when they realise how much they've fucked up.
This is what Englishmen do.
It's like, there's no escape now.
You've got to think about it before you come here because you're not leaving, mate.
What, have you got a boat again?
No, you burnt those boats and you threw your passports away and now you're stuck here.
So either you comply and you do what we want you to do as British nationals or you're stuck.
We're just going to have to just throw you all off into the sea and watch you float away.
So no, probably not the best idea, but it works for me anyway.
And so you, you tell me about your, about your, your training.
Program.
You'll, you'll...
The flight school.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it's really a thinly disguised place where men can come, and women actually, we've got a few women in there, and I can set them some pretty significant tasks.
They can find a purpose for themselves, they can work it all out together, and they can actually feel a value, like they've done something substantive.
I think that's quite important.
So we do use commercial off-the-shelf video game.
I do work with the manufacturers that to sort of enhance their products a little bit as well, to make them as closely resemble the aircraft I flew and taught on in the military.
And people come in.
It's quite transient.
I just charge the same as a gym membership for a local council gym down the road, which is like £37 a month.
I'm like, that's what you're paying.
If that goes up, I'll charge you more.
If it comes down, I'll charge you less.
That's what people do.
They come in.
And then we have lessons every day, about a two-hour lesson.
I give them a 30-minute brief, then we all go flying.
They wear these virtual reality stuff.
I make it as realistic as possible.
I make it as challenging as possible.
I really kind of stress test them.
We go from that comfort stretch to panic.
We keep them at the top of that stretch for those two hours or sometimes twice a day and on the weekend as well.
We have a lot of content come in there.
We talk about personal responsibility.
We talk about fitness.
We talk about training in a physical sense.
We talk about mental health as well.
We talk about Looking after the family, the community, all these kind of things.
And I've been doing that now since I pretty much left mainstream employment.
Yeah.
And I can't really see myself going back into that stuff anymore.
But it works.
These are people who have a view to having a career in flying fast jets or not?
No, not at all, no.
So the youngest I've got is 12, the oldest I've got is 70, no 83 I think, the oldest guy now.
So these are people that are interested, a lot of airline guys in fact, they're interested in the way the military taught flying.
So I keep it exactly the same.
So they're interested in that.
But no, enthusiasts, yeah all sorts really, crikey.
I have maybe one or two join every couple of weeks.
If somebody who'd been through your training, and they were on a jet, you know, a passenger jet, and the pilot and the co-pilot both died, and somebody said, can anyone else fly this thing?
Would they be able to land the aircraft?
Well, if they hadn't been at the minibar, they probably would, yeah.
I mean, absolutely.
I mean, it's not, I don't teach airline stuff, I teach jet stuff.
It's mainly complex systems, it's workflows, it's procedure, and so we look at airmanship, captaincy, responsibility.
So, yeah, they'll be able to get, they'll be able to sort that out.
I don't think it's that complicated.
Really?
But that's not, obviously, we teach all these kind of aircraft up here, the ones that are swing wing and fast and nippy.
But yes, I mean, they get deeply into it.
I talk about it, I say it's like a university.
Use it as much or as little as you want.
I mean, they're there now, I can see them all flying around.
They work pretty much autonomously and then they come back for lessons in the evening or in the morning.
All over the world, in fact.
We've got quite a few people from Australia at the moment, Middle East.
We've got some... Oh, they can do it remotely?
Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
Oh, the whole thing's remote.
Yeah, seriously.
Oh, that's brilliant.
Sorry, I didn't realise that.
No, so I've got a set up next door with about, you know, it's like an evil lair of monitors, you know what I mean?
Like 26 monitors.
And then I'm on a headset with a microphone.
I can see exactly what they're doing.
I've got multiple screens so I can see everywhere, tactical views.
And they're all dialing in from...
All over Europe, Scandinavia as well, quite excessively.
We've got America, Canada, they just dial in at less than time and then we have a big brief, they all go flying.
And then, yeah, during the day they come on and they practice as much as they can.
Now, this is going to be a test of... I can't imagine you're as far down the rabbit hole as me.
Have you got a view on chemtrails?
Yeah, I mean, my brother's in a pilot for a major airline out in the Middle East.
He flies a big Boeing aircraft and I would have thought if chemtrails are real, that's what I'm saying, that he would have told me by now, you know what I'm saying?
Because that's what he does, he flies... But it wouldn't necessarily be him.
Okay.
The planes that are doing this stuff, you know how You can track flights.
You can see all that on your internet.
These flights that are actually doing the chemtrailing are unmarked.
I've heard this stuff before and I'm really interested in it because it's like water, isn't it?
Putting fluoride in water.
People have a lot of issues with that.
What's the issue with the chemtrails?
What is the spray that's coming down on us?
It's got stuff like aluminium in it.
It's weather modification and it's called geoengineering.
Yeah, I've heard of it.
And it's been carried out since at least the 90s.
I think the early indicator of what can go wrong was that village in Cornwall that was flooded in the 1950s.
Sure.
Where the RAF were flying secret weather modification programs over that area.
You think that was that was what 80 years ago.
So it's a long or almost 80 years ago.
They've had a long time to perfect this stuff.
Some countries are open about it like UAE.
I think I'm admit to doing weather modification.
You know that they admit that their their climate is artificial essentially because they can control when it rains or not.
I think that in the Western Nations were much less.
I was only floating it as like a fly fisherman casting, because frankly I really want to do a couple of serious chemtrail podcasts.
I think it's so obviously a thing, but if you haven't sort of had personal experience of it, it's not really worth it.
No, it's fine.
And all you've got to do is find a pilot involved in it.
And if you find that, you know, I think everyone would listen to it, wouldn't they?
But I can't.
And, you know, we flew with all sorts of pilots in the Air Force, multi-engine pilots, helicopter pilots.
We knew them all because you train with them all.
We just go different directions at some point.
But I never knew anyone in the Air Force that was seeding, like cloud seeding or anything.
Yeah.
You seed clouds to promote rainfall and I fully understand that but I never knew, I never knew it was a capability in the Air Force and if I had, if someone had been doing it, they'd be talking about it in the bar, everyone would get smashed up.
You know you land all over different bases and you'd be able to chat to people.
My brother was a Hercules pilot for 15 years, he went and flew the Canadians as well.
I mean if anyone was going to be seeding clouds, And talking about it in a bar, it'd be my brother, you know what I mean?
And I'd never heard him talk about it at all.
Not to say it doesn't happen, and we know it does happen, because of course we know that cloud seeding is a thing, and you've said yourself about the UAE, and we understand that, and we understand why that happens.
We also understand snow blows on hills for skiing, and we all understand that.
So, I know it's a thing, it's how much of it is a thing, and is that thing purposely detrimental to, say, human existence, or are we trying to give everyone cancer or something?
And that's the thing, I don't know too much more about that.
Yeah.
And so in terms of your sort of when you were your your doubts about, for example, the Iraq wars, you mentioned the the migration problems, which are which I agree are an issue.
But how aware of are you of the bigger picture, which is that all wars are essentially bankers wars.
They're essentially It's part of their disaster capitalism model.
You've mentioned the arms industry, you've mentioned BAF, the British Aerospace share price, but have you looked into this aspect of it?
The neocons who were responsible, for example, for the Iraq wars, who pushed for it on the basis of the Dodger dossier and stuff?
Yeah, I'm trying to remember the general that talked about the seven wars, wasn't it, in America?
When he said he discovered from the Department of Defence and they said, oh yeah, Iran's next and this one's next.
He's like, don't tell me.
Yeah, yeah.
I can't remember.
Wesley Clark.
Was it Wesley Clark?
Lovely man, lovely man.
But yeah, that kind of thing.
He's like, we've got this thing.
Well, of course we've got this thing, haven't we?
Because the problem with America, it seems to be, well, here's me speaking completely out of turn.
Not knowing much about it, I'm thinking along the lines of, it seems to be propped up by sort of foreign contracts.
It seems like a bankrupt country.
I remember a friend of mine who's over there, he just bought a Ferrari and this guy's a builder.
And I'm like, dude, how are you, you're a builder, right?
How you got a Ferrari?
He goes, oh right, because he's got this contract, he's 20.
Everyone seems to have this money supply in the States somehow.
And I don't know why.
Everyone seems to be living paycheck to paycheck.
Fine, I get it.
But they all seem to have A lot more accessible cash than the rest of us.
And if you have an economy like that, it's propped up on something, isn't it?
Someone there is doing something, then how are they propping it up?
And it seems to be sort of foreign, whether it's investment, I mean, it seems to be... I mean, BlackRock's got the contract for rebuilding Ukraine, isn't it?
To disseminate out to... Find it out.
Yeah, strange that, isn't it?
Who would have thought that might happen?
Get straight in there, wasn't it?
They didn't even wait, did they?
It's like, is that first round gone yet?
No, wait, wait, wait.
Gone.
Let it go.
Bang.
There we go.
Yeah, right.
Anyway, contracts.
Let's rebuild Ukraine.
I mean, it's in their interest for Ukraine to be destroyed.
Else, what are they going to rebuild?
And how are they going to take profit of it?
So we know it's the truth.
We know what happens.
I don't think it's being cynical about it.
Whether it's an intentional thing...
It does seem that we need the forever war.
And when Biden came out of Afghanistan, everyone went, hang on a second, no one asked that.
Oh, you're out already, fine.
That's a big problem for us now.
The reason that Trump, of course, was, was, well, hated for many reasons was, of course, he didn't start any wars, did he?
That's one of the problems with the American president.
He never, not like Obama, I don't know how many Obama wars Obama started, two or three I think it was, but he, Trump didn't, of course.
And you can't run the United States if it's not, I mean, what's the point of the United States military existing?
if it's not at war it costs a ferocious amount of money it's it's incredible the amount of people involved in the u.s military when you see it at war it is horrific like it that the amount that goes into it is just exceptional i was based with the u.s army in in uh afghanistan in kabul so i'm well aware but it is you literally need it to be doing something you cannot have it sat there just hemorrhaging cash so you need to be doing something so of course i've no i don't think anyone would say that these wars aren't in some way
i hadn't thought about that that when you've got a huge huge standing military you you've got you've got to use it That's why Russia doesn't have one.
That's why Russia with the Wagner Group under Pugosin, of course.
There's a good book actually called Putin's Wars, which is very interesting about all this stuff.
It shows that Putin's wars tend to be quite reactionary because he's like, again, I've got to do this now.
And then he goes in to quash some rebellions and things like this with the former Russian people.
Whether we like that or not, it doesn't matter because we're not him.
We don't understand it.
But the truth is, he found that keeping a military of that size was just detrimental, so he used Wagner Group instead.
And Wagner Group are all over the globe and they have, lots of people with Russia have contracts where you can have their military contract, you can do other stuff with it, but when I need you, I need you and you will have to come to me.
So, that's what he tends to, he tends to do.
Yeah, he can't have a standing army.
That's why, one of the reasons that air tanker now is, Is both a civvy military tanker, but also a civvy airline or used for civvy transport Is because of the fact it's it was too expensive to have just tankers So I'm just changing my thing there.
Yeah, um Well that world sounds yet again like Putin for all his faults has got He's a sensible guy.
Um I've got to ask you should we have women fighter pilots?
It's a really weird one this because I get this from young women sometimes.
I know they're young and so it doesn't matter.
I've got nieces and nephews that are that kind of age and I just wish they could meet some of these women sometimes and they'd realise what it takes to be a fighter pilot, especially as a woman.
I think it's one of those universal things and I got people it's funny people will argue me online you don't know what you're talking about it's like well only one of us bloody trained women to fly jets mate but crack on with your analysis you know what I mean the truth is there wasn't any difference the only difference is if women are on their period the the g-pants just cripple them the period pains the g-pants go across the abdomen under g it breaks women so a lot of women go on to birth control they go on to the pill And then of course, that could have other ramifications as well, but then the woman's sat on birth control, fine.
And it's a brutal existence, and it's just hard on the body.
But it's fine, because there's a lot of women flying jets.
There's not as many as there probably would be, but why would women want to do that?
Why would men want to do it when you're based in the middle of nowhere with a very insecure thing?
Yeah, I have no issue.
I've never had an issue with women flying jets.
They can get a bit snappy sometimes because they think they've got to perform like the dudes, and they probably do.
I mean, you probably have to.
I mean, I don't see how you can not be an aggressive fighter pilot.
You can try and convince me otherwise, but most fighter pilots are pretty aggressive.
I think I've been...
I think I've demonstrated that on your podcast today, but the truth is you're there to kill people.
You're not there to stroke their hair when they feel tired.
You have to bring a weapon system to a battlefield in a very expeditious manner.
You have to kill as many people as possible, else you just lose wars and people die.
So women have to do that as well.
It's no different.
If you want to be a fighter pilot, you've got to go and kill lots of people.
You can't rock up there and say you're not interested in that today.
So the type of women that do that are very, very different.
from most women you'll meet every day.
They're not the same.
They're just genuinely not.
So if you put these young women who talk about maybe becoming fighter, but you put them in rooms with female fighter pilots, it's a very interesting thing.
They don't recognize the sort of how they are in a decade's time.
Are they mostly lesbians?
What?
Have lesbians been on this?
No, no.
I mean, are women fighter pilots?
Is there a correlation between lesbianism and female fighter pilots or not really?
No, I haven't seen any.
I'm trying to think now.
We had some gay men on the squadrons.
That was an issue.
Also, the stories were horrible, though, about nightclubs.
I'll never forget that.
So, yeah, gay nightclubs are very different to straight nightclubs, it seems.
Who knew?
But women?
No, I don't think I knew any that were I don't think that's the case.
I've met quite a lot of women all across the military and I haven't seen it like that.
They're not the short-haired, wearing... A lot of them are very effeminate.
what you're saying there like i think are women going into the military are they more yeah i don't think that's the case i've met quite a lot of women all across the military and i haven't seen it like that they're not they're not the short-haired wearing a lot of them very effeminate i mean they really are it's um it doesn't seem to be that at all i don't know Maybe that's a good thing about the military that it's kind of open and it's representative of that and women don't feel like they've got to join and be this macho character because it's not the truth at all.
I mean men aren't like that either.
It's your day job.
I mean I'm animated now because I feel very strongly about the way the military is being pushed by some very insincere individuals in the power positions and that goes across government and the ministry as well.
I don't feel that these people are are properly british i don't feel they have the british interests at heart i think everyone knows that now i mean it's all over the media isn't it so it's fine but people join the military because they genuinely are interested in highly technical competencies they're interested in protecting their nation it's something they wanted to do since their very early age i mean most people i flew with were below the age of 10 when they first thought about flying aeroplanes just how they were but no the women weren't any different um seriously they really weren't um tim i'm just talking about
I've just realised that I've promised my wife that I'm going to walk the dog before the sun goes down.
Do it!
Seriously, run!
And I'm thinking we've had a good chat.
I've really enjoyed this.
Will you tell viewers and listeners where they can find your stuff, learn more about you, go to your training school?
Yeah, not recruit me for their businesses to give them a talk, I would have thought.
Yeah, not do that.
Not do that.
No, you wouldn't want to do that, would you?
Yeah, okay, so it's FastJetPerformance, so FastJetPerformance.com and the school itself, you can find details under there, everything's under there.
I mean, I'm on Twitter, but again, I kind of play on Twitter, I wouldn't find me on that too much, which is Tim Davies underscore UK, I think it is.
And I've got a YouTube channel, again, FastJetPerformance on YouTube, where I try and kind of explore these kind of things, these, just try and look at the standards that we should all hold up really, and I think we're, I think a lot of people aren't really doing that at the moment, that's all.
By the way, I've got to tell you, I'm talking about speaking, public speaking.
So I've got this public speaker agent who has never, ever, ever managed it.
I mean, I've been on his books for, I think, four years now.
He's never, ever managed to get me a gig.
Seriously?
Sometimes he goes, I've almost got you somewhere, someone who might be interested.
Brilliant.
But the moment they do their research, Yeah, exactly.
And isn't it awful?
There will come a time in a couple of years where they're like, oh yeah, no, definitely.
We've seen it now with senior officers that have left the military.
They leave the military like, no, I was really against this.
I was really against this diversity thing from the beginning.
I could see what was happening from the beginning.
Did you bollocks.
Everyone knows that's absolute bollocks.
You know which way it's falling now.
You absolutely know which way it's going to go and you don't want to be held accountable for it.
That's all it is.
These are vastly insecure men.
I don't want to speak to companies like that.
I don't want to associate with people like that.
I'm happy to live in my little house here with my business and my wife and my little pets downstairs.
And I just want to just, you know, bury me in that flag.
That's all I ask.
Because that's who I am.
And I'll take the financial penalty for that.
But you'll never, you'll never say that I went to that side, the other side.
I stayed British throughout my entire life.
And that's what we should be doing.
We should be Englishmen.
We should stay as British.
The end.
That's it.
I think that's a lovely thing to say.
I'm with you, Tim.
It only remains for me to say thank you to my beloved viewers and listeners.
If you want to get early access to my podcasts, I released them about a week earlier, I think, to subscribers.
Support me.
You can support me on Locals, Substack, Patreon, Subscribestar.
If you don't want to get advanced, if you want to give me a one-off tip, you can buy me a coffee.
And please support all my wonderful sponsors, you know, Neutral Health 365, we do those wonderful vitamin pills.
The two gold companies, Monetary Metals and the Pure Gold Company.
Because they support me so you should support them.
